Cyber-love Affair (cont'd)
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On Friday, my daughter Alice invites a friend for dinner. She isn't home yet, so I start dinner. Thaw some chicken, put up some gravy, and am just puttering around the kitchen when the phone rings. I figure that it's my daughter saying how she'll be late and could I start something cooking? Smart Dad, I think. But it's not her; it's Her. The voice a little more raspy than I thought and I freeze up. But she starts talking, fast. "Listen," she says. "We've got to decide that this is going to be just a terrible conversation. We're both too nervous to say anything intelligent anyway, so let's just forget about making sense. Now that's out of the way, I'm Marci." We speak for a long time. I like the sound of her voice and I like what she says and how she says it. She tells me that she wants to send me her photograph and I agree to that. At first I am reluctant--what if, what if, I think. What if I don't like the way she looks? I don't want our bodies to get in the way of this attraction I am feeling for her. I feel high school-giddy with her. I write back and tell her that I feel invited into her life. She writes and tells me how she feels:
I am very moved. I go to check the mailbox each day, but her photo doesn't arrive. Thinking about some of the women in my life, I remembered them visually, going through the stock of mental photographs I keep. Then I write them down. Write down the pictures of my memories and send them to her. The young women who ran to keep their secret appointments with me. I write about the long, blond hair streaming behind them, the blue of their eyes and the joyful health of their bodies. Then I say, maybe even still a bit surprised, that none of this ever yielded up happiness to me, that all this outward youth and beauty never kept its promise in my life. I write down my pictures and send them to her. In reply I receive a cry of pain and hurt. "How could you send me your vision of your ideal?" she screams. "What am I supposed to do with that? Perhaps you should just look elsewhere." Suddenly I feel that I have lost her. Lost her? What a strange thought. This person is just a dream, a series of dots on my computer screen, a disembodied voice along a copper cable. I have never seen her, touched her, or even seen an expression on her face. How can I feel so pained by her? But I am pained. I feel abandoned suddenly and I want her to come back. I want to take her in my arms and say, no, no stay for a while. Please don't go, I have so much more to say to you, to share with you. I write back immediately and tell her what I feel, wanting to explain that I had tried to escape from the web of beauty that captures men in its thrall. I tell her that I had already welcomed her into my heart without ever having seen her and that I do not want her to leave me. I apologize if I had said something to hurt her. She writes back that she understands what I am trying to say and had reacted so strongly to my note because she, too, has allowed me into her heart and feels pain that someone could come between us, even if she is only a memory. I write that we have just had our first fight and we are both still here. Then:
And she:
I feel a thrill, since I had also felt the erotic chill of caressing her as she lay down to sleep. But I am also frightened. How could I possibly be feeling this way? I am so happy that she accepts my apology. I'm not just happy, I am thrilled. I am thrilled in the way that you are thrilled on your first date, thrilled by your first kiss, thrilled by the first stirrings of love. But this is crazy. I am 53-years-old and the idea of being swept away by someone I have met only through their thoughts seems insane. But it is also true and against all common sense that I am falling, falling deeply into this woman, this spirit. I decide that if we were going to really have a relationship with each other, it has to be one of complete honesty and integrity. Otherwise it will be impossible. So I write to her of my misgivings, that I am afraid that I am creating a fantasy that exists only in my own neediness, that I feared that I would awake and that none of this would be real.
She writes back:
The next day I receive her photograph. I tear open the red, white, and blue priority mail envelope and find--another envelope. This one has a card inside, embossed with her name, and she has written Simon, meet Marci. "Writer with Cat," her address below, and a black-and-white photograph. Her handwriting is small and precise. Her photo shows a pretty young woman petting a cat, a pen in one hand and a clipboard lying nearby. She has blonde, shoulder-length hair and small hands. The angle of her wrists as she strokes the cat seems almost erotic. She is looking down so you cannot not see her eyes but she wears a delighted smile and looks delicate and elegant and delicious.
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