“Big improvement,” I said.
“It was, actually. She’s suffered fewer obsessive episodes. There was, however, one lingering problem.”
“What’s that?”
“She did not like the photos,” he said. “Understand, the quality of the photographs was not a problem for me — I thought some of them were quite lovely — but Amelia hated them. None of those photos, in her mind, captured their subjects. Of course, I suggested many times that such ‘capture’ was impossible.”
“What happened? I still see her out there taking photos.”
“A twist.” He raised his finger. “She started taking photographs without any film in the camera.”
“No film?”
He nodded. “By snapping the photo but not actually committing the moment to record, she was acknowledging that she could never fully ‘capture’ the object, and yet was able to feel like she had.”
“There’s no film in that camera?”
He grinned. “It reminded me of you, you know.”
I said nothing.
“Maximilian’s quotation marks. That the stage is like a pair of quotation marks — everything you do inside them isn’t something you’re actually doing, but something you could be doing. Like taking photos with an empty camera, no?”
“You’re up to something here. I can feel it.”
“I know you distrust me. You will for a long time. But have I ever withheld anything from you?”
I was trembling.
“Tell me. It’s important for me to know. How did it feel to write that letter?”
I was looking off to the side, my hands cupped in front of me. “Crucial. Terrifying. I was trying to explain myself. Like you said, Doctor. Writing and betrayal. Writing and betrayal.”
• • •
I was returning to my room from one of these sessions when I nearly slipped on the note. It was folded primly in half, addressed to me: Giovanni. I held it, terrified. I brought it down with me to dinner, unopened, and, after eating, pondered it, folded, for a good half hour in order to savor the moment of knowing it had arrived but not yet knowing how it would disappoint me.
Again it featured those absurdly straight letters.
You’re a hell of a lot more charming on paper than you are stalking around with God-knows-what blasting in your head. Don’t think I don’t recognize you either, even with that bush of a beard. (To your beard I have this to say: Scram!) I covered one of your gigs for City Paper. Just now I shut my eyes and saw the shots from that night. I mean it: on the inside of my eyelids, little dancing movies. There’s one of you with a vein, size of a slug, popping out of your forehead. One of you wiping this fake tear from your eye. Digging real hard with your knuckle, like you were trying to fish out a silver dollar.
I swear I’ve got a museum in my head.
I like you in letters. In the letter you sound like a little boy wanting permission from the world. You’ve come a long way from that, huh? Perving around with hungover eyes? Write me letters, that’s fine. Nothing in person, though. I mean it. I can’t stand a man to throw his thoughts on me like that.
Amelia Stern
PS I’m sorry about your mother.
I read the note ten, twenty, thirty times. As I held it, my room took on a doomed and blanched quality, and a great panic fell on my head.
The next day I showed the letter to Doctor Orphels. I could barely sit still. “It’s the voice,” I said, “the voice inside of her.”
“You sound almost religious,” he said.
“I want it for myself.”
“Want what?”
“That voice! That can’t be spoken.”
“But you have your own, Giovanni.”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“But look at what she said about your letter. She seems to think you did.” He said, “You won’t tell me what you wrote?”
“Honestly, I was in such a state. It was after our session, when I told you about her note to me, and you told me that I ought to explain myself. Those words had never sounded stranger: Explain yourself—I took a long walk at night and all of a sudden I remembered things. That’s when I ran back to my room and wrote her.” I said, “Why do I suspect you’ve arranged this all?”
“Tell me about the envy, Giovanni.”
“When I was imitating you,” I said. “What I envied was the telling — your telling your story. Not just telling it but that it was complete, that it made sense. You explained yourself.”
“Write yours then.”
“What?”
“Your story, Giovanni. Write it to her.”
• • •
Without the benefit of frenzy, the second letter took longer. My fist wouldn’t release the right words, but I took solace in knowing when a phrase was right and when it wasn’t. Soon I found myself writing, “Sympathetic to the bone,” and “Mama’s eyes could do things no one else’s could.” She wrote me back a few days later. Then I told her of the doctor’s suggestion. I didn’t think I could do it, I wrote, unless she, too, provided me with her own letters. The next day there was a note under my door: “Whatever the doctor thinks.”
• • •
Since then I’ve received hundreds of notes from Amelia. Each morning they appear under my door like the most important newspaper in the world.
Here’s one:
Men always take it upon themselves to pity me, but don’t for a minute fucking do it, no. My father’s a rich man, Giovanni, the publisher of newspapers. I had maids, a big fat yellow lab, the advantages. Anything for Amelia, that’s Dad’s philosophy. Here’s an image: He used to spread the Sunday issue out on the floor of my bedroom, and the two of us would roll around on it like mutts.
Her eye is as good as Mama’s. Her notes like clues in a treasure hunt. A crack in a tile, a certain chef’s frown:
Look at the bark on the first tree in the fourth row of the apple orchard. There’s a kind of gray patch on it I really like. The color of an elephant.
Or,
I love the doctor’s teeth. The way he just leaves them out. Does it make him more or less trustworthy?
Sometimes she describes old photographs. Like one of a candidate for state assembly:
He had thinning hair. You know how that looks — like a man failing to keep a secret. I climbed up a fucking tree to get it. To get the spots where the scalp showed, pale as a halibut under his wheat-tipped combover.
Or photographs she snapped with the empty camera:
I took a photo today I wish, I wish, I wish I had a copy of. Of a nurse (young, female) and a patient (the one with the gray goatee?) sitting on one of the benches on the south lawn, right at sunset. Both of them with their hands in their laps, hands not clasped, just floating in their laps, both with their shoulders sort of slumped, both with their heads tilted toward the sunset. The same exact pose. You know the way a dog tilts its head up at his owner — that’s how the two of them looked at the sun.
Her notes are a physical presence for me, a human company, and without their touch I couldn’t have produced this account.
Doctor Orphels saw to it that I was provided with a typewriter. Every night I left a fragment of my life under Amelia’s door, until, writing longer and harder, I would leave a whole sheaf of papers by her door every couple of weeks, describing the spring boardwalk in Sea View, for instance, or the pigeons outside the Stone-Wild Museum. Then I became more serious and asked for the pages I had given her back so I could revise what I had written, add what was missing, and deliver it when complete. She agreed, leaving the pages by my door, and I have been earnestly working since.