Unlike some women you’ve met in the past, I won’t be propositioning you.
That was the last sentence in the first email I received from her, almost seven years ago. She was telling the truth. I was the one who propositioned her.
If you ever do turn your life around and realize that I am what you want, feel free to let me know. I will love you until my dying breath.
That was the last sentence in the last email I received from her, some four and a half years later. I think she was lying, even if she didn’t know it at the time. I hope she was, anyway.
It was a relationship that we kept secret — from friends, from relatives, from almost everyone. At the beginning, there were reasons for our discretion. She was well-respected in her church, her community, her profession. I was married. She was, without being too specific, in the law enforcement business. I was a bad guy in at least three senses of the word. She was a devout evangelical Christian. I was something between an atheist and a Jesuit. It was not meant to be.
Yet it was. We had ecstatic nights together, long trips, clandestine meetings everywhere from a casino in Atlantic City to the top-floor office at Mid-Ohio. We bent schedules and moved appointments and created dead space so we could touch. As John Updike once wrote of the adulterers in Couples, we became athletes of the clock. I don’t know how it looked to other people. I doubt we were as careful, as quiet, as smart as we thought we were.
She wrote tens of thousands of words to and for me, often by hand, in her rounded, undisciplined script. She had an artist’s touch with a fountain pen and I could recognize her handwriting at a distance, the deep curves and finishing flourishes absolutely consistent with her taste for vintage clothing that rarely hesitated at the border between style and costume.
I threw her notes and letters away, at first, when our passion was at its most intense and I daydreamed a future in which I woke up every morning next to her stellar body and big childlike eyes. Then, when I betrayed her again and again before moving another woman into my house and thus forcing her into the unpleasant, confining role of “side girl”, I began to cherish the things she wrote to me. I scattered them around the house, in hardcover books and guitar cases and Porsche gloveboxes. I didn’t read what they said. I knew what they said: stay with me, choose me, I love you. I didn’t want to be reminded of that. But neither could I let them go.
Never was I faithful to her, never did I choose her above all others as she asked. I told myself I was protecting her, that the minute we publicly dated her career would stumble to a halt. The truth was that I was protecting myself at her expense. As far as I know, she remained faithful to me the whole time we were together. Occasionally she would conceive a crush on a co-worker or fellow churchgoer. I would berate and torment her about it, telling her that I was abandoning her to that person and that she was worthless to me. Then, when she had apologized a thousand times for having done nothing, I would favor her with whatever attention I could spare.
She held fast against the storm and lull of my temper, the wax and wane of my passion. She listened to me pouring my heart out over other women, pretended not to know what I’d been up to. Sent me thoughtful, unique gifts that I stashed in drawers and closets. Bought matching T-shirts for me and John. At one point, she sent me a check to cover the cost of a car that I’d just bought. “It can be our car,” she wrote, in that voluptuous cursive of hers, “and some day we’ll drive it together.” I tore up the check and used the car to take another woman to dinner. There, at least, I could draw the line. I could draw it at my pride. What a fucking accomplishment.
A few years ago, she told me that she had bought a fountain pen from Kaweco. “It’s the pen of our people,” she laughed. Kaweco was German, as was she. As was I. The pen of our people. I bought the same one, a polished Kaweco AL Sport. It was angular, difficult in the hand. Not perfectly lovely, the same way she was not perfectly beautiful, but constructed in a manner that was beyond reproach, as she was. I traveled with my Kaweco, used it to write sharp notes to clients and co-workers. Once, when I was about to sign a birthday card for another woman, I found myself unable to form the letters with it. I had to put it down and find a cheap ballpoint. Somehow I could cheat on this woman without guilt or remorse or shame but I couldn’t write the word “Love” with that pen unless it was to her.
The Kaweco was in the center console of my Town Car in January of 2014. It came home to me a month later, in a plastic bag full of odds and ends that a friend of mine had rescued from the wreck. It was corroded shut from thirty days’ worth of exposure to the winter. I used brake cleaner to get it to twist apart, at which point the seals shattered and it bled blue on my hands. A few months later, when I could walk, I drove the three hundred miles to that woman’s house and picked up everything of mine that she had possessed. Those things, as well, were in a bag, cold to the touch.
Last month, Massdrop sent me a notification that they were doing a release of the Kaweco Liliput Fireblue. Each one is made from raw steel then tempered with a unique finish. Looking at the photographs of the little pen, I felt an odd kinship. What am I if not tempered by a hundred fires, burned permanently blue by my own mistakes and misfortunes? And what did I do to that woman? What parts of her heart are scorched? Shortly before I picked up my things from her, she wrote:
… I don’t know where I will go or what I will do, but I have to start over completely. I have to remove everything from my life that reminds me of you and what I have lost. It is my only chance of survival. I wish I could burn you from my memory.
And if she could, what color, what remnant would there be of that tempering process?
Today I cracked open the box that held my new Kaweco Fireblue and I prepared to write with it. The pen of our people. The fine stainless-steel tip, rhodium-plated and blah blah blah for durability and exclusivity and so on and so forth. Hovered over the page. It was time to write something. Nothing came. My hand seemed frozen. I leaned back. Took a breath. Bent again over the blank paper. I settled for my own name. She’d written it a thousand times. It seemed like the only thing I could write. The only thing I had confidence in. And in that moment, I realized that I had loved her more than I knew. But I also realized that in the end, we only had one thing in common: we were both thoroughly, deeply interested in what was most convenient, most wonderful, and best for me.