letter is that it’s put paid to my grandiose literary aspirations. Maymonth, by John Edward Kenton, sucked that fabled hairy bird.
Does one need to begin a diary with background information? This was not a question which crossed my mind when I was eleven — at least not that I recall. And in spite of the great shitload of English courses I’ve taken in my time, I don’t recall ever attending one which covered the Protocol of Journals. Footnotes, synopses, outlines, the proper placement of modifiers, the correct form of the business letter — these were all things in which I took instruction. But on how to start a diary I am as blank as I am, say, on how to continue your life after its light just went out.
Here is my decision, after a full thirty seconds of weighty consideration: a little background information wouldn’t hurt. My name, as mentioned above, is John Edward Kenton; I am twenty-six years of age; I attended Brown University, where I majored in English, served as President of the Milton Society, and was exceedingly full of myself; I believed that everything in my life would eventually turn out just fine; I have since learned better. My father is dead, my mother alive and well and living in Sanford, Maine. I have three sisters. Two are married; the third is living at home and will finish her senior year at Sanford High this June.
I live in a two-room Soho apartment which I thought quite pleasant until the last few days; now it seems drab. I work for a seedy book company which publishes paperback originals, most of them about giant bugs and Viet Nam veterans out to reform the world with automatic weapons. Three days ago I found out my girl has left me for another man. Some response to this seemed to be required, so I tried to quit my job. No sense trying to go into my mental state either then or now. It was none too calm to begin with, due to an outbreak of what I can only call Crazy Fever at work. I may elaborate on that business at some later date, but for the time being the importance of Detweiller and Hecksler seems to have receded far into the background.
If you have ever been abruptly left by someone you did and do love deeply, you’ll know the sort of fugue I have been experiencing. If you haven’t, you can’t. Simple as that. I keep wanting to say I feel the way I did when my father died, but I don’t. Part of me (the part that, writer or not, constantly wants to make metaphors) would like to make it into a bereavement, and I believe Roger was partly right when he made that comparison at the mostly liquid dinner we had the night of my resignation, but there are other elements, too. It is a separation — as if someone told you that you could no longer have your favorite food, or use a drug to which you had become addicted. And there’s something worse. However you define the thing, I find that my own sense of self-esteem and self-worth have somehow gotten mixed up in it, and it hurts. It hurts a lot. And it seems to hurt all the time. I always used to be able to escape mental pain and psychic distress in my sleep, but that’s no good this time. It hurts there, too.
Ruth’s letter (question: how many Dear John letters have actually been sent to Johns? Should we form a club, like the Jim Smith Society?) came on the eleventh — it was waiting in my mailbox like a time-bomb when I got home. I scribbled my resignation on a memo form the next morning and sent it down to Roger Wade’s office via Riddley, who is our janitor cum mail-clerk at Zenith House. Roger came down to my office as if he had rockets on his heels. In spite of the pain I’m feeling and the daze I seem to be living in I was absurdly touched. After a short, intense conversation (to my shame I broke down and wept, and although I managed to refrain from telling him specifically what the problem was/is, I think he guessed) I agreed to defer my resignation, at least until that evening, when Roger suggested we get together and talk the situation over. “A couple of drinks and a medium- rare steak may help to put the situation in perspective,” was the way he put it, but I think it actually turned out to be more like a dozen drinks…each, maybe. I lost count. And it was to be Four Fathers again, naturally. At least a place for which I have no associations with Ruth.
After agreeing to Roger’s dinner suggestion, I went home, slept for the rest of the day, and woke up feeling thick and dazed and headachey — that feeling of mild hangover I am left with whenever I get too much sleep I don’t really need. It was 5:30, almost dark, and in the unlovely light of a late winter dusk I couldn’t imagine why in God’s name I had allowed Roger to talk me into the compromise measure of making my resignation provisional for even twelve hours. I felt like an ear of corn on which someone has performed a fabulous magic trick. Taken the corn and the cob and left the green shield of leaves and the fine yellow-white poll of tassel intact.
I am aware — God knows I have read enough to be — of how Byronic-Keatsian-Sorrows-of-Young-Werther that sounds, but one of the diary joys I discovered at eleven and may be rediscovering now is that you write with no audience — real or imagined — in mind. You can say whatever you fucking well want.
I took a very long shower, mostly just standing dazedly under the spray with a bar of soap in one hand, and then I dried off and dressed and sat in front of the TV until quarter of seven or so, when it was time to go off and meet Roger. I took Ruth’s letter off my desk and stuffed it into my pocket just before I left, deciding that Roger ought to know just what had derailed me. Was I looking for sympathy? A tender ear, as the poet says? I don’t know. But mostly I think I wanted him to be sure — really, really sure — that I wasn’t just a rat deserting a sinking ship. Because I really like Roger, and I’m sorry for the jam he’s in.
I could describe him — and if he were a character in one of my fictions I suppose I would do so lovingly, in too much detail — but since this diary is for me alone and I know perfectly well what Roger looks like, having trod the metaphoric grapes just down the hall from him for the last seventeen months, there is really no need to. I find that fact unaccountably liberating. The only salient points about Roger are that he is forty-five, looks eight to ten years older, smokes too much, is three-times divorced…and that I like him very much.
When we were settled at a table in the back of Fathers with drinks in front of us, he asked me what was wrong besides the obvious unfortunacies of this evil year. I took Ruth’s letter out of my pocket and tossed it wordlessly across the table to him. While he read it I finished my drink and ordered another. When the waiter came with it Roger finished his own drink at a gulp, ordered another, and laid Ruth’s letter beside his plate. His eyes were still going over it.
“’Before long his tears were mingled with mine’?” he said in a low just-talking-to-myself voice. “’Each word has been like a lash across my heart’? Jesus, I wonder if she’s ever considered writing bodice-rippers. There just might be something there.”
“Cut it out, Roger. That isn’t funny.”
“No, I suppose not,” he said, and looked at me with an expression of sympathy that was at the same time deeply comforting and deeply embarrassing. “I doubt if much of anything seems very funny to you now.”
“Not even slightly,” I agreed.
“I know how much you love her.”
“You couldn’t.”
“Yeah, I could. It’s on your face, John.”
We drank without saying anything for a little while. The maitre d’ came bearing menus and Roger waved him away with barely a look.
“I have been married three times and divorced three times,” he said. “It didn’t get better, or easier. It actually seemed to get worse, like bumping the same sore place time after time. The J. Geils Band was right. Love stinks.” His new drink came and he sipped it. I half-expected him to say Women! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em! but he didn’t.
“Women,” I said, beginning to feel like a figment of my own imagination. “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.”
“Oh yes you can,” he said, and although his eyes were on me he was quite clearly looking somewhere else. “You can live without ‘em quite easily. But life without a woman, even if she’s a shrew and a nag, sours a man. It turns an essential part of his soul into a pimple.”
“Roger—“ He held up one hand. “You may not believe it, but we’re almost done talking about this,” he said. “We may get drunk and maudlin and run our gums on the subject, but we’ll only be talking about how we’ve got a skinful, which is the only subject drunks ever talk about, really. I just want to tell you that I’m sincerely sorry Ruth has left you, and I am sorry for your pain. I’d share it if I could.”
“Thanks, Roger,” I said, my voice a little hoarse. For a second there were three or four Rogers sitting across the table from me and I had to wipe my eyes. “Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome.” He took a sip of his drink. “For the moment let us leave what I’m helpless to reverse or alleviate and talk about your future. John, I want you to stay with Zenith House, at least until June. Maybe until the end of the year, but at least until June.”
“I can’t,” I said. “If I stayed I’d just be another millstone around your neck, and I think you’ve got enough of those already.”
