The first may be a dream or a real event. Does she have herpes? I had gonorrhea once but never syphilis. I have been lucky. Surely the second paragraph is a dream. The boulder may be the one in the harbor which does jut out, but does not, to me, look like a man in profile. I am unfamiliar with the Who; the name is amusing. Is Helen’s mother famous? I think not. Unless she is using her maiden name. Practically speaking — and this problem has more than once vexed Stan Green — it is much harder to trace women if they assume their husbands’ names. Divorce is a further complication.
Next, there is a news item and a picture of another group — whom I have heard of — The Jackson Five. Gwen interviewed them before they made a trip to Ghana with other black American musicians. I believe it was Ghana.
You want evidence I want ecstasy.
Beneath this is a photograph of five men in white laboratory coats. One holds a device of some type, the others are studying it intently.
I did poison him. I can tell cause he’s looking at me now. Phoned N in the city and told him and he said he never knew I was like this and I explained that certain things are for me alone and I know they’re probably just in my mind which isn’t mine in a way and I don’t act on everything anyway. Always feel like a hypocrite. S is really funny, really out there. He read to me and told me these weird stories about his family, crazy, I don’t believe everything but it doesn’t matter — I thought mine were nuts but his are the worst, it’s amazing the guy is still alive, and he also told me a fable — he’s into Aesop — about the jackdaw and the eagle. The jackdaw wants to be an eagle and tries to do what the eagle does but can’t. The jackdaw gets his claws stuck in a sheep’s fur and he can’t fly and then a shepherd captures him and cuts his wings off. S says it’s about how you realize who you are only after you aren’t that thing anymore. He crashed on my floor.
Might I be the person whom she imagines she has poisoned, but why? That cannot be the case. And surely I was right about her and Stephen having become friends and his staying, or crashing, with her. Who is “N”? I once studied cryptography, hoping to serve as a cryptographer in the war. I wanted to work in Intelligence and decode messages, but I was not accepted. I did very much want to go, though war and violence terrify me. Still I would not lie about my sexual proclivity. That would have been insulting, and why go off to war, perhaps to die, to fight for what one holds dear and true when one’s person is unacceptable? That I could not and would not do.
Isn’t that great
Isn’t great great
that isn’t great
what’s great
great isn’t what it used to be
great isn’t so great
what’s great?
Tell the story. She told the story. It put a gun to her head. Can you tell the story is being told? No, she put the gun to its head and it blew her brains out. And can you tell the story is the end. The END. To Be Continued
This is followed by a list:
Do laundry
buy glue
meet S
phone W
toilet paper
tampax
That was all. There are a few blank pages, but I had come to her last entry. I turned the book over. I had read the diary through once and desired to read it again, even more slowly, now that I knew what was there and knew what to expect. Rereading allows one the opportunity to free oneself from one’s initial anxieties and fears. I wanted to pore over and study each page as if each were a palimpsest; I was seeking something beneath Helen’s words and the hastily thrown together captions and pictures.
Helen’s artlessness can be deceptive. Her crudeness and vulnerability make an impression. She is often harsh; I knew her to be blunt. I was unaware of the fact that she hoped to be a filmmaker. Perhaps she once mentioned it. I am now assured that her sister did not kill herself; although I cannot be positive. But why would John have indicated that she probably did? Perhaps, like John, Helen’s sister tried and failed. Still, I do not know.
I look about the room furtively, even despondently. I experience no immediate relief. I thought I would. Curiously, my guilt about having stolen Helen’s diary returns. But I push worry aside to consider the meaning inherent in it, what is essential in it and to her. There is such a mixture here; she moves toward and then away from clarity. She is angrier than I supposed her to be. Her eclectic sources — many of which are cunning, others, merely silly — are launched and land as if all were the same; all are set and settled on the same plane. It is interesting, I think, as well as enervating and confusing. Obviously Helen is confused; she is a confused young person, young woman. She exhausts my resources. I feel frustrated. Helen seems to make few or no discriminations between things. To what end does she apply herself and her thoughts? I ask myself.
I am tired, tired even in my bones. Weariness has descended upon me as if it were a drug I had swallowed. It invades every part of me. I struggle out of the chair and walk to the door. Nectaria has left my dinner outside, in the hall, on a tray. Though covered, the food will be cold by now. I didn’t hear her knock, and she must not have wanted to disturb me. I was hungry, but now I am too tired even to eat. I nibble at everything so as not to insult Nectaria.
I am also disheartened. Like Helen I kept a diary when I was young. It was nothing like Helen’s. I tried faithfully to record the events of the day, to describe what I was reading and thinking, and to scrutinize and explicate my reactions and so on. She does little or none of this. But further I am disappointed. Certainly I did not find in the south the real Helen, certainly not her person, but having found her diary, perhaps I have found out too much and too little. For I have both more of a sense of her and less. I hoped, glimpsing her secret yearnings, I would encounter her true self. Yet she eludes me. Of course, I remind myself, Helen was not in any way attempting to create art, to invent, to make order out of the chaos of her young life. Still, and in any case, what I have discovered is not what I was looking for.
And Helen is not what I thought she would be. That is the short and the truth of it. Upon what basis can I judge her writing, these fragments that are not meant for other eyes? Read this and die, indeed!
I hold the purloined book in my hands. Sometimes I find her person unappealing. In her diary she seems not at all like my Smitty, the Helen I conversed with and spent time with. Perhaps not time enough. But is there ever enough time? No, there is never enough time, and I have wasted time, chasing after her. I feel embarrassed and old. I despair of my foolishness. “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.…”
I undress and change into a pair of freshly laundered flannel pajamas. This act in itself consoles me; the soft cotton material next to my skin reassures me. The smell of clean flannel is as sweet as the fragrance of the sweetest and ripest peach. Actually I prefer nectarines. Absentmindedly I realize that Yannis has not yet come in. But I am too distracted to bother much about his absence. He wouldn’t have expected me in any case, since I had said in my note to him that I might be gone a week. He is probably with his mother.
I lie down on the bed and pull the covers up to my neck. Like a child I place my arms beneath the quilt. As if waiting for something, I lie still as a stone in the darkness. I will discuss this episode with Gwen tomorrow. I will figure a way to tell her I have the diary. She will offer a view different from my own, surely, and it will illuminate my position. How events turn one about and construe effects so different from what one expects from time to time! What did I wish to find? For surely if I truly wanted to, wouldn’t I have been able to find it, once I had set my mind to it? I close my eyes and also, as best I can, shut my mind to these disorderly and disruptive questions. To sleep, “to sleep, perchance to dream.” Alas, poor Horace!