13

SINCE IT WAS NEAR MY HOTEL, I HAD THE HABIT OF STOPPING BY THE CENTRAL Post Office each morning on the way to work. Sally Porringer would leave letters for me there. Her notes, as one could anticipate, were functional—“Oh, Harry, I miss you so much, I’m just aching for you. Let’s figure out something for Saturday,” is a fair sample.

It was nice, however, that someone was aching for me. In the month after the last letter from Kittredge, I made love to Sally in a cold fury. It was unfair, but I held Sally responsible for the loss, and copulated in hate, which may have had the obverse effect of melting some icy moraine in her, for she kept telling me I was wonderful. Sexual vanity with its iron-tipped fingers kept clawing me forward, therefore, into more performance, even as I kept asking myself why I couldn’t act like other Americans and just find women and forget them. Porringer, for example, was always ready to regale Gatsby and me about his nights in Montevideo brothels. If Sherman, with a wife, two children, and all of the duties of a Deputy COS, could still disport “like the happiest hog on the hind tit,” as he put it himself—somber, blue-cheeked, paranoid Porringer—why could I not enjoy it? The irony is that I was even beginning to feel a bit of loyalty to Sally. The paradox of sex is that it always negotiates some kind of contract with love—no matter what, love and sex will never be entirely without relations. If I had added to my clandestine jamborees with Sally all the anger I felt at exercising my brains right out of my head with the wrong girl, and so felt more and more separated from the only woman I could adore like a goddess—strong words, but I was suffering my loss—all this anger had to live nonetheless with my sexual greed. Loss had left me a displaced person in the land of love.

So love slipped over, if only by a little, into my feelings, and I did not despise Sally quite so much, and had compassion for the awful loneliness of her life in a land where the only people who understood her at all were maniacal old lady bridge players, a young, grim, and much detached lover, and a husband who understood her so well he did not comprehend her at all. “Does he think it makes me feel good,” she complained once, “for him to announce to company, ‘Oh, Sally’s a good old girl,’ as if I was his 4-H Blue Ribbon in the prize sow contest? I hate Sherman sometimes. He’s so needful and inconsiderate,” and she began to weep. I, holding her, felt the first beginnings of compassion move out from me and into her. I still looked upon her with a great measure of contempt, but there were limits to how long I could keep my best feelings—that inner chalice of tender compassion—reserved entirely for Kittredge Gardiner Montague when I ached within from every bruise she had bestowed.

Besides, it was too painful to think of her. Was she mad? There was not a night when I did not curse myself for failing to get leave to go back to America. Yet it was hopeless. Harlot was never less than his word. Besides, he could be right. It might be one’s duty to suck up the slack.

Nonetheless, I still felt treacherous toward Kittredge whenever Sally and I put in our raunchy hours. Sex with Sally grew more appealing despite myself. I would lie in her arms afterward wondering if Kittredge were on the mend, or had I, across six thousand miles, just sent another thundering blow to the head?

Suck up the slack, yes. I felt like a strip miner through all of May and June. The mild winter of Montevideo might as well have been spent in an Eastern coal pit. I was alone in Uruguay with no letters to write. So I took on work as Harlot had advised. I saw Chevi Fuertes twice a week, and AV/ALANCHE once, AV/OUCH-1 and 2 at Travel Control and Passport Control were on my route, and AV/ERAGE, the homosexual journalist on the society beat, was also given to me now that Gatsby had been put onto Porringer’s old trade union contacts. And there were always the Bosqueverdes (who spent their winter photographing the passage of live souls in and out of the Soviet Embassy gate). They were mine. And Howard Hunt gave me Gordy Morewood as well, and I had to deal with his unrelenting demands for cash. On certain mornings, every face was an irritant. Sometimes when Porringer and Kearns and Gatsby were all together in our big office room with its four desks, I knew again how faceless were everyday faces. And how intimate! Every misgrown nostril hair!

Hunt became my friend during that Uruguayan winter, which was the summer of 1957 in North America. Two months after I spoke across six thousand miles to Harlot up at the Keep in Maine, I was wending my way out to Carrasco twice a week for dinner with Dorothy and Howard. If the high regard I used to hold for Harlot was now buried like provisions kept for one’s return from a long journey, the habit of such respect, its shadow, so to speak, became transferred to Hunt. While he had a nasty temper, and was as easy to dislike at one moment as to like at the next, he was still my leader. I was discovering all over again that our capacity for love, when all else fails, attaches easily to such formal investments as flag and office.

In the midst of all this, on an average cold morning, following my habit of stopping at the Central Post Office on the way to work, I pulled my hand out of the box one day with a letter from Kittredge. She had written to me directly rather than by way of the pouch.

The Stable
June 30, 1957

Dear Harry,

Got this address from your mother. I believe open mail will be all right. This is really to tell you that I am now all right. In fact, in a limited sense, I’m thriving. To my modest sorrow, the baby is off my breast and onto formula, but, on balance, it works. We have a daily nurse-housekeeper, and I am back on the job, indeed, no one over at the shop knows I was ill. Hugh managed that with great dispatch. Allen may be witting but certainly no one else. Hugh just brazened it through with a Kittredge-and-I-haven’t-had-a-vacation-since-marriage sort of stance that only he could get away with. Of course, he did work at the Keep, and damn hard while I was sorting out the little mad things for myself. Don’t repeat this, but the real trouble was not you, nor the brooch, nor the baby, nor Hugh, all of whom I was beginning to see as encircling fiends, but, in fact, was due to the most injudicious experimenting with a fabulous if horribly tricky drug for altering consciousness called LSD. Certain of our people have been trying it the last five or six years with the most fascinating but inconclusive results, and I was vain enough to decide to experiment on myself and try to trace LSD’s impact on Alpha and Omega. Needless to say, Alpha and Omega got into a frightful hoedown.

So, this letter is apology to you. I recollect just enough of my deep dive to be certain it was unforgivable. I’ve wanted to tell you for some time but didn’t quite dare to use our old set-up on the pouch. He’s forbidden me to write to you and he’s correct up to a point. I think I was indulging a species of double life. Chaste, but nonetheless double. I vowed to Hugh I would not correspond with you again unless I told him first. Of course, I crossed my fingers as I said it, so the vow is discounted by this letter. Anyway, as you see, I wanted to take the chance.

It is really to tell you, as I have already said, that I am all right. In truth, I love Hugh now more than ever. He was fabulous to me up in Maine, strong but so concerned. I realized how much he loves me and the baby, and I hadn’t really known that before. Hadn’t truly taken it in. The spring of his love must come from a source one thousand feet deep. I think without him I might have sunk into much more loss of time and frantic mindlessness.

This is also to tell you that I miss you and your letters. I’m patient. I will wait another three or four months to prove to Hugh that relapses are not in my makeup, not at all. I’m back, but still I want to demonstrate it to him, and by fall—your spring—I am going to tell him that I wish to write to you again, and if he doesn’t permit it—well, we’ll see. Be patient.

Think of me as your cousin, your kissing cousin, with whom you cannot have congress. Whoopee! Hélas. I will always love you on a most special note, but it feels warm and comfy right now, I confess, to think of you as far-off.

Amitiés,
Kittredge

P.S. Hugh never saw any of your letters. I confessed to him that we had been corresponding, but only as college sweethearts who were not about to do anything about it. That much he could tolerate because he had seen the evidence when you would visit. So, my confession confirmed his acumen. I did not dare to tell him how candid we were about other matters. That he would never comprehend and never forgive.

I lied again when I told him that the letters were destroyed by me on the night I took the LSD. Even in the midst of my madness, you see, I knew enough to lie.