Wednesday
18 Dec 85
Dear Lise,
Another early morning letter I may or may not send. I
wake many mornings, early, full of twisting turning thoughts
about you and I and how we’ve come to be where we are.
Not a day has passed so far where I haven’t looked at my
watch and thought, ‘Lise is at work, Lise is at home, it’s
Monday or Tuesday; Lise will be with Anthony’. I am always
thinking of where you are.
As some of the hurt and dust have settled I’ve begun to
realize what has been significant to me out of all this. I
think the most significant thing to me is how little I was
aware that there was even a potential things could go wrong.
In the past I’ve always felt I had a strong ability to ‘know’
where people’s emotions and feelings about me were at. And the
closer I got to the people the better I was aware of this;
partly because greater closeness implies greater danger and
partly because greater understanding comes from being closer.
I’ve never gotten as close to anyone as you emotionally and
sexually and I’ve never felt such certainty of the fundamental
strength and rightness of being there. And I’ve never been so
wrong in my judgment. This shakes me, Lise. It really
worries me that I could invest myself so deeply without feeling
danger and then wake up to find I’ve been so far out of touch
with reality.
The other themes in my thoughts are less important.
They’re more like side issues; the feelings of loss and
jealousy, the anger that all this happens only after I had gone
so far as to queer my relationship with Rose, the hole in my
life and feelings where you were emotionally, the loss of your
physical person, sexually, … these are, as you say, ‘normal
reactions that show you’re human’.
No, it’s my lack of perception about how things were
between us that deeply bothers me. It’s like a riddle I keep
trying, without success, to solve. I’ve never encountered
anyone who had even a third of the feeling I felt you had for
me who could have just turned away for someone or something
else. When my thoughts dwell on this it makes me dizzy at how
they go in circles. I remember you telling me “I’m in love
with you and I’m not in love with Anthony, in fact I don’t even
love the man”. I remember the feelings in Mexico. I’ve never
felt anything so good before. I remember my feelings. Our
feelings, I thought, on that Friday I came to see you at lunch
and you showed me how you’d put my pictures out for Anthony to
see and how I ate you so softly as you lay back on the bed. I
remember you saying, “I just want new words to say how I feel
about you”, and then I remember you telling me, at the
Capriccio, on Wednesday night that you’d slept with Anthony
Sunday.
The feelings and the memories rattle around in my head and
I keep adding them up and I don’t understand. It makes me
crazy that I can’t understand. that I could’ve understood you
so little. That I had so little chance to do or say anything
to change or repair things once they began.
And it make me crazy that I still, somehow, believe you
felt the same feelings I did and that this could happen. It
just won’t add up for me.
I had always thought you were driven by your emotional
feelings and that your materialistic/rational side was
secondary. Your comments about Francios and how she used those
she loved for material gain encouraged this belief. But now,
now I really wonder, Lise. Psychologists say that often what
we don’t like in others is just what we unconsciously don’t like
in ourselves. Is this why you mocked Francios? Is your
materialistic side really stronger than your emotional? Were
you able to sacrifice love for a better material offer? This
thought makes some sense to me. But, even if it’s true, it
leaves me open to the realization that there was so much in you
that I thought I understood and I was wrong about. Perhaps
some clues were there. You talked a lot about money but I
never thought much about it. You seemed generous when you had
it. After you met Anthony you told me how excited Francios was
about him and meeting his friends; a new ‘opportunity’ for
contacts; people who might really save her from all this
poverty and compromise. But then, too, you said on another
day, “his friends are all crazy artists and intellectuals; the
kinds of people we like”. I suppose I was just a warm dildo to
get you through a dry period until you met such an
‘opportunity’.
I know you, Lise. I know some of you, I should say. I
know you pride and I saw you anger when I dared to call you a
flake when you were standing on my face. As if your motives
were not the highest. From this I can reason that the comments
I’ve just made about Francios and materialism are going to piss
you off.
I’m reminded that during those 2 or 3 weeks when you got
involved with Anthony and I got run over and finally had to
pull away for my own survival. I remember we talked often with
me pressing you so I could understand. “Yes, I love you. No,
I don’t love him and I don’t understand why. No, don’t call me
a flake. I’m not using you. That really pisses me off that
you would even imagine it…” And, finally, at the end of each
conversation was an, “I don’t know why this is happening but it
just is and I’m sorry I’m hurting you”.
If you were driven first by love then I still don’t
believe it could have happened. And if you were driven by some
deep and suppressed materialism then I understand but I’m
deeply disappointed at my failure to understand, through the
magic of your womaness, what you really were about. And if you
deeply believe that neither of these is right then consider this
letter a plea for yet another discussion or explanation of what
happened. I would still like to believe that our love was as I
felt it. That I wasn’t wrong, or misled, or blind. But
everytime I try to see the events and our love together, I
think, “One has to be wrong”.
I think of you and Anthony and it bothers me. Partly
because of jealousy and partly because of what I think you may
be doing to him. The man did not resist you as I did. He fell
straight into love with you without waiting for you to go
along, step by step. With me you went along. Even went first,
sometimes. Until, in the end, I was convinced we were both
deeply in love. With Anthony he’s jumped in up to his neck and
you’ve told me you’re holding back to see, ‘which way the winds
blow’. What are you going to do with him, Lise? I remember
another favorite saying of yours that, perhaps, should have
alerted me to something. You used to say that you were getting
old; only a few more years would you be able to exert your
attraction on men. It all seems like a cynical game to me. A
hop scotch jump from one man to the next better one until
finally your age makes you tell someone you’re tired of playing
around. Now you just want to ‘settle down and grow old
together’.
And, yes, I know you’ve lost along the way. That Bruce
dropped you. I wonder, did he see deeper into you than I? And
Phil…. Was it always so one sided as it sounded? Always him
the bastard. the alcoholic, the cruel one. What were you doing?
I think we both knew that these feelings, this letter must
come. That sooner or later my love for you would have to
buckle under the pressure of wondering how you could’ve dumped
me as you did.
If you read this and say, ‘Fuck him’, then, OK, that tells
us something. If you read it and you’re deeply offended and
feel I’ve misjudged you, then say so. Write back and (once
again) share things from your point of view.
In spite of the negativism in this letter, and my deep
doubts about your motives when you loved me, I am still in love
with you. It sounds stupid, but I am. I remember in one of
your letters you said that knowing me had made you more cynical
and calculating. I laugh. Look at me here writing you this
letter. Still in love with you. Still longing, impossibly,
that things could be as they were. Still thinking that, yes,
there were problems like her boys but I’ve gone through a lot
bigger problems for a lot less love. Still wondering if you
were real or just some materialistic feminine fatal. Still
remembering Mexico, Palm Springs and a hundred nights of better
and better physical and emotional loving. Still remembering my
feelings just before Anthony arrived, that I was going to have
you in my life forever and, even if I couldn’t say how it was
going to work, anything that felt that good had to work.
Still wondering in the early morning hours how I can find
myself here writing this just a month later with you probably
asleep next to Anthony at this moment.
Love,
— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —