1.

PART ONE

(Letters, emails, texts, phone calls between father and son)

Dad,

It all began with my ad on Craig’s List:

Men Seeking Women…32 yo struggling writer, past being promising and still penurious, wants to meet a woman able to deal. Offsets: I am extremely, movie-star handsome, have a stupendously worked out physique, possess a charming mild manner and a smart, well-read, intelligent mind, and, ultimately, a big dick.

Out of the pile of responses (totaling two) I met Hillie. That is a nickname short for Swanhilda which Wikipedia will inform you is the name of the dumb blonde in the  ballet Copellia, the eponymous heroine who is a life-size, mechanical doll that Swanhilda discovers has caught the wandering eyes of her equally unsmart boyfriend. My (real life) Hillie is a brunette, never ran at me in pointe shoes, and is very sharp and very educated. A lawyer. A great catch if I were ever to bend to fishing.

We’ve been dating for three months.

Here’s my problem: I really like this girl. And, worse for her, she seems to really like me. But I’m thinking I should break it off. Why? She’s too young. Not that twenty-six is robbing-the-cradle young. Not that I’m her first big romance. But she’s young in a difference sense. I suppose this may come from reading too many French novels, or seeing too many French movies, but here’s the issue: Hillie has not yet had her relationship with an unstable, ineluctably romantic artist, a guy financially disaster-ridden but unoccupied by time, a guy who not only tolerates but loves the arts, a guy possibly too sensuous for his own—for my own—good. In other words, a guy eventually unable to measure up, unprepared for the long-term, for children and mortgages, a guy too selfishly driven by an unyielding muse to buckle down and get a job. In effect: your son. Me, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.

If you get my drift.

But how do I break this off? Or do I? Should I?

The problem is mine as well. It’s not only her potential, probable disaster but mine too. I should be with a somewhat older woman, one who has had her taste of the scrambling, un-sure-footed world I inhabit, the existence I would subject her to, living not by the cuff of my pants but by the ragged cloth of my underwear. I need a woman who has survived that particular kind of relationship and comes back to it, eyes wide open, heart beating to her own self-sustained rhythm, able to see me naked and nice without being lured and eventually deceived by the romance of my artist’s whole life attire.  A need a woman already wounded by the beat, the bohemian, the bloomsburyist. And can stand up and take me on.

Hillie is not yet that woman. And this worries me. I feel doomed for her. And I feel the cold tide creeping up on me. The moment when she will say Fuck This and walk finally off. I don’t have enough time left in my life for another one of my failed romances. Been there and done that—how many times, Dad? And you know it’s not because I’m stubbornly, craftily, narcissistically job averse and committed to this life of art, penury, and bad credit. I am cut this way. I could blame you for that—you know just how I mean—but that would be a false dodge. I am the still a failing artist. And that absorbs my life. So it’s Hillie’s dilemma that she can’t quite open her eyes. And it’s mine for having to wait until hers pop open.

Let me run a few scenarios by you. That way you can help me choose. And if I choose wrongly, if the whole thing blows up—a nervous breakdown by either party, ditto a suicide or suicide attempt, a closure of creativity, of absolute writer’s block, a termination into endless stalking by either party or possibly both, a get-her-to-a-convent foreswearing of men for all time, ditto maybe for women, the onset of bipolar disorder—then the blame would fall on you for having suggested the terribly wrong way. I believe you could handle that. I’ve seen you go through two divorces. And a dreadful midlife crisis relationship with a man. So you are set. --- Yr son Gabe

---

—Dad?

—Yes, Son. What’s up? Are you OK?

—I’m fine. This is one of my mendicant calls. I need you to shoot me some tender.

—Tender?

—Yes. I’m about to lose my internet service. I can’t function without it.

—Yes, of course. But tender?

—Tender is, as the French say, the mot juste. Don’t you love that noun form of the word? Tender connotes caring, gentleness, tending to something or someone. Like a garden. To tend a garden, both to take care of it and to be slavishly devoted to its care. Here. I’m sending along a little poem I wrote. Unsubmissable of course.

—Get it published. That will bring in some tender.

—Not tender tender but an anonymous computer-generated bank-extruded check that will arrive, if it arrives at all, too late to save my internet connection. Not tended, you see.

—I don’t.

—Like cut flowers ripped from the garden, placed naked and violated in a vase, flowers stripped from their mulch and soil and roots. Slumped in a cold commercial vase like those glass containers you get from 1-800-FLOWERS. Publishing, though it gets the work out there, is the same kind of violation. This is no longer the world of John Keats. Poems then were published to be cherished on precious paper. Not deposited in a magazine shelved like a cadaver wedged into its grave.

—How much tender?

—Three hundred. Dollars. Thanks Dad!

This novel is in the writing stage. Questions and suggestions are invited. Contact me HERE.