Letter to Bill

Dear Bill,

Since you died a few days ago, Tom and I have brooded around the apartment about losing you. It is unconscionable that you are not among us. Surely, it is a fiction. In a day or so, Christine will call us and say that Bill wants to meet at Freshies for lobster rolls. His treat. He wants to read us some Billy Collins' poetry.  

Then comes the jolt: there will be no repeating of Freshies, or Billy Collins. No more drives up the canyon. No more shared birthdays. No more board games. No more books from the D.I. shared at Christmas time. No more well told stories about your blind date with the girl who was queen of the Golden Green Ball. You accompanied her in the grand march down the stairway of the Rainbow Rendezvoux , one hand grasping her waist. “How did you get to be queen?” you asked her.

“I made three years’ hundred-percent attendance at church,” she said.

No more stories about midnight struggles with the vacuum cleaner in the dark after you’d gone to see Psycho.

I, personally, most enjoyed the James Mustich Jr. period. You gave me a copy of 1000 Books You Must Read Before you Die. Our competition was never voiced, but we both began reading voraciously and ticking off the boxes as we read. I never would have read Flat Line: a Romance of Many Dimensions, a novel in which the main characters are lines, squares and triangles. We read Dostoyevski’s The Idiot at the same time, amused with the long rants and ravings of Prince Myshkin’s odd friends.

So Bill, did you finish all 1000 books and does it matter?  I didn’t. Eventually, I felt oppressed with someone else’s list of books I should read. Mustich did encourage me to read Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (in translation by John E. Woods) which replaced the Brother Karamazov as my favorite novel of all time.  You know what a big deal that is!

You tried to get me to read Robert Musil’s book, but I never did. I think you were going to write your dissertation on something like The Intersection of Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. 

Really, Bill! No wonder you switched to Harvard Business School.

Now that you’re gone, I’ve decided to read it. I ordered both volumes today and I’m going to read all of it in honor of the dissertation you didn’t write.  In honor of you, my friend.

Love,

Louise