The Nix(101)

And you are despondent about the neutral and cold tone of the letter until you reach the end, where she’s signed it:


Love you,

Bethany



She does not sign it “With love” or “All my love” or any of the things one can say without really meaning them. Bethany writes “Love you,” and these two words sustain you for a whole year. Because why would she say “Love you” unless she really loves you? Why wouldn’t she use one of those sign-offs everyone else uses? All best. Be well. Yours sincerely.

No, she says “Love you.”

But of course there is the problem of the letter itself, which is so impersonal and safe and harmless and devoid of romance or love. How to explain this dissonance?

You decide that her parents are reading the letters.

They are monitoring her communication with you. Because even though you were never formally implicated in any of it, you were best friends with Bethany’s brother during a time when Bishop was doing some pretty f*cked-up shit to the headmaster of his school. And so her parents probably do not approve of you, nor of their daughter’s love for you. Thus, the only place she can sneak that message past the censors is in the valediction, where she writes, crucially, “Love you.”

When you write back, you assume the letter will be inspected. So you tell Bethany about the bland details of your life while also trying to hint at your enormous love for her. You imagine she can sense your love at the edges of the letter, hovering ghostlike over the words, barely beyond her parents’ comprehension. And of course at the end of the letter you sign it “Love you too” just to show her that you got the message—the real message—of her letter. And this is how the two of you communicate, like spies during wartime, sending a single meaningful fact obscured in a cloud of banality.

Then you wait a year for another letter.

And in the meantime you count the days until you both graduate high school and go to college and, no longer under her parents’ scrutiny, she will be free to express her real, true, deep feelings. And during this time you entertain fantasies of attending the same college she does and becoming campus sweethearts and how awesome it would be to attend parties with Bethany on your arm, how much instant credibility you’d have being the guy dating the violin prodigy, the beautiful violin prodigy (no, gorgeous, actually, stunning, and you know this because she occasionally sends a new picture of herself and her brother in the annual letter, where on the back of the picture she writes “Miss you! B&B” and you put the photo on your nightstand and during the first week with the new photo you barely sleep because you wake up hourly having these weird nightmares where the photo is blowing away or disintegrating or someone is sneaking into your bedroom to steal the photo or something). And you seriously believe you’ll be attending the same college all the way up until Bethany gets into Juilliard, and you tell your father you want to go to Juilliard, and your father raises an eyebrow and says “Yeah, okay” in a really dismissive manner that you don’t understand until you find a brochure for Juilliard at your high-school guidance office and discover that Juilliard is pretty much only for people in music, theater, and dance. Plus tuition is like ten times your father’s stated budget.

So, shit.

You revise the plan and tell your father you are not going to Juilliard but instead somewhere in New York City.

“Maybe Columbia,” you say, because that campus looked very close to Juilliard on the map of New York you found in the high-school library. “Or NYU?”

Henry, who at that moment is testing the consistency of a new-concept “quiche” frozen dinner by swishing the eggy liquid batter around in his mouth and making notes on a fifteen-step flowchart, stops for a moment, swallows, looks at you, and says, “Too dangerous.”

“Oh come on.”

“New York City is the murder capital of the world. No way.”

“It’s not dangerous. Or if it is, at least the campus isn’t dangerous. I’ll stay on campus.”

“Listen. How do I say this? You live on Oakdale Lane. There isn’t a single Oakdale Lane in New York City. It is nothing at all like this. You will be eaten alive.”

“There are lanes in New York,” you say. “I’ll be fine.”

“You’re not catching my symbolism. See? This is exactly my point. There are people from the Street. And, other side of the spectrum? There are people like us, from Lanes.”

“Stop it, Dad.”

“Besides,” he says, returning to his quiche, “it’s way too expensive. We can afford public, in-state. That’s it.”

Which is where you end up, and where you discover this thing called e-mail, which all the students use now, and in your next letter from Bethany she gives you her e-mail address and you send her an e-mail and after that the paper letters stop forever. The upside here is that you and Bethany can write each other much more often, even weekly now. E-mail is so immediate. This seems great until about a month in, when you realize the downside is the lack of any physical object, any actual thing that Bethany has touched, which in your teenage years often soothed you, holding the thick paper she used, covered with her neat cursive—Bethany was a thousand miles away but this thing could fill in for her. You could close your eyes and hold the letter and almost feel her touches on the paper, her fingers running across each page, her tongue licking the envelope. It was an act of imagination and faith, a Christlike transubstantiation, this thing becoming, for a moment, in your mind, a body. Her body. Which is why after the e-mails start and you write each other all the time, you feel more lonely than ever. Her physical embodiment has disappeared.