The real story is truer than fiction, Marj once thought. But where is the truth in an imaginary love story that grows from a correspondence between two old women, separated by the distance between New South Wales and Quebec?
This much is true: Kate, the woman in Australia, writes a letter to Marj, the woman in Canada. She has read Marj’s autobiography and has felt the writer as a kindred spirit; she has seen Marj in a semi-documentary film about eight women who, stranded in the wilderness, exchange their life stories (seven of them are over sixty-five) and become friends. Marj tells one of the women that she is a lesbian; this candid announcement has brought tears to Kate’s eyes. She writes a fan letter, she feels that she and Marj are already friends. She mails a blue airletter full of Australian sunshine, with Ayer’s Rock burning red in the desert in the upper left-hand corner. The name and address in blue ink run lightly along, lean forward, hold back in the six printed letters of CANADA. Marj, who dabbles in graphology, stares at the blue letter and sees a woman whose exuberance is tempered by a lifetime of discipline. The contents of the letter have sent Marj’s spirits soaring in the June air. It is from an invisible woman named Kate, both impersonal and warmly personal. Kate praises the film, which has come to Australia, and Marj’s autobiography, with the authority of someone used to analyzing and judging; she keeps herself out of it but is immediately alive in Marj’s mind. Kate has thought hard about the words of her letter and how they must contain the right amount of praise, not fulsome but studied; she writes from her experience as a teacher responsible for the opening of minds, who has handled the dynamite of judgement with tactful care.
Kate waits with a certain impatience, turning to a sense of being rebuffed as the weeks and months roll by with no answer from Canada. Seven months. She cons herself into thinking: So she doesn’t answer; that’s cool. And suppresses the voice saying, Marj is thinking: Just another fan letter,—I won’t answer right away. And rises to a crescendo: Who does she think she is? Kate sees the slightly bent, tall body of Marj, hears her diffident speech, drawling a bit. After the seventh month has gone by, Kate consigns Marj to a dark corner of her mind where Marj’s silence lives as a small rejection.
Summer slips into autumn and into the winter of a new year. Kate’s letter has sifted downward in a pile of unanswered mail and Marj discovers it, rereads it, feels guilty, answers, sends her new book.
The real story, the love between two old women, can begin now with a rush, powered by the seventh-month wait. Each of the women, Kate in her late sixties, Marj in her mid-seventies, thrives in the warm medium of their letters and is rejuvenated. Their phantom bodies grow close to one another, touch precisely with imagined hands. Soon they know the awful daring of imagined mouths joining lightly, then with passion that sends tremors coursing down the two bodies, some 15,000 miles apart. They are separated by a continent, by the Pacific Ocean and the International Date Line, an imaginary line, in obedience to which real people turn their watches forward or backward and re-tune their bodies, temporarily upside down. They lose or gain a day because of a nonexistent line in space. If one of them outraces the sun, the next day is the day she left; somewhere, in Australia or in Canada, that day has been lived or is going to be lived. “It’s your yesterday,” Kate, the first to telephone, will say, and Marj will answer, “It’s your tomorrow.”
Each in her separate life listens to music and breaks into a spontaneous dance; in one of her correct premonitions, Marj sees Kate put on a tape and dance to it. Kate with her mind’s eye sees the lively but disjointed efforts of Marj and smiles indulgently. Visions are released by the letters, as close to the truth (the truth of love, all-noticing, all-remembering) as human beings can get, with no ill-effects or hangovers. As Marj rereads the letters, she is struck by the perfection of their falling-in-love, the high-soaring duet they sing, in which their old voices sound like young voices and each tries to outdo the other by demonstrating her purity of heart, each in an innocent rivalry which holds difference in suspension, biding its time. Kate is the first to notice the cloud just below the surface, recognizes a familiar trouble, differing views about the demands of true love. To Kate, true love demands readiness to sacrifice in its name: self, the very thing that Marj has cultivated, a letting love take second place. It is her creative self, closely guarded; Kate knows this from Marj’s books, in which the writer falls in love and temporarily yields up her soul, only to snatch it back. And here is Marj writing, six months before they meet, ” ‘Being in love’ with you means that I yield up to you without regret my solitary autonomy, that we hold each other in trust and literally. . . .” It occurs to Kate that this is a load of codswallop (an Australian word for nonsense) and that Marj isn’t going to yield up a thing. But she wants to believe and she loves Marj’s naive eloquence; she herself dreams of a marriage of true minds in which each yields and blends into a single mind, greater than the sum of its parts, and a single consenting body. She puts on her tape of Cabaret and belts out her signature song. “Maybe this time I’ll be lucky,” she sings. “Maybe this time he’ll stay,” and holds out her arms in yearning. Hasn’t she herself yielded up her decision never to fall in love again, hasn’t she put aside her knowledge that, after ten years, she is still spooked by the loss of her younger lover, is suspicious of love and its inevitable disappointments? But she lets joy possess her and rides the crest of the big wave which rolls in so triumphantly, and tries not to think of the flotsam almost hidden in Marj’s hyperbole.
Loud! Loud! Loud!
Loud I call to you, my love!
The pace of their letters quickens until each is writing the other every day. At first they have waited for answers; now the letters crisscross in the vast space, the half a world between them. Identical thoughts cross; they quote the same poets, they love the same composers, they have read the same books. Now they are dwelling in the Shangri-La of their much younger selves when they greedily soaked up the father-culture and were possessed by the voices of its great love poets. In no time at all, it seems, they are talking about love. “Have I gone over the top, I wonder?” writes Kate, and Marj answers, “There is no top.” It only takes Kate’s photograph and her first telephone call, her musical voice and purring laugh, to release a dammed-up flood in each of them, rolling over time and space. “You draw out of me green leaves and flowers,” says Marj. They speak with the tongues of women and angels, their new speech, and with the old vocabulary of love. “It seems to be coming from somewhere deep inside, some dark warm cavern from which no sound has issued for a very long time,” says Kate. She trembles when she sees a letter from Marj in the mailbox; is that a sign that she is in love? Kate addresses the question, am I in love? (for Marj has come out with it,—”I’ve fallen in love with you,” on the telephone) just as she addresses every important and difficult question; she seeks evidence and logical explanation. She trembles, and is it love to tremble? She tries to hang on to the rational, sceptical part of her mind, she reminds herself and Marj that they are “two elderly women,” perhaps a subject of ridicule?, and braces herself against the torrent of Marj’s response. ” ‘Two elderly women’ in whom reside the great lovers in their prime,” Marj answers. Marj loves the sound of her own voice, thinks Kate; she has read Marj’s books and knows her unreliability. She throws herself into love and slithers out of it. Take it easy, says Kate to herself, reaching out for a handhold. “I’ve been telling myself for years that I’m not capable of something quite as exciting and zestful as falling in love ... and I’m sticking to this safe belief, that I’m past it! But I’m certainly capable of LOVE.”
Kate loves the woman who has had the “huge courage” to come out publicly as a lesbian, she says, and she loves Marj’s “scary honesty about the oppressive obsession that is (or isn’t?) love.” Honesty. Marj thinks about it; in her books, she tells Kate, there is always “a precious remnant of dishonesty.” To herself she says that the precious remnant is what the writer leaves out that would tip the scales; the measure of it is the measure of her cowardice. “What one feels it’s safe to be honest about,” she explains to Kate. “The dishonesty lies in what I’m ashamed of, that might compromise the reader’s liking for me.” Each believes that nothing can compromise their liking for each other. “I’ve been thinking about security,” says Marj, “feeling secure in your care, what that means. It means everything. It’s the deep meaning of love. . . . It’s our arms around each other even when they’re not.”
“I yield up to you without regret my solitary autonomy . . . we hold each other in trust and literally.” “That says it all,” Kate writes. Marj, four months after her first letter to Kate, has soared over the top that has no top and believes every word she says. She is sure that she has never in her life felt so joyfully incautious. “This morning May 21,” Kate writes, “she has said she’d put her arms around me and kiss me on the MOUTH. There’s a wicked little part of me that wants to chuckle at our mutual ‘properness,’ our mutual avoidance of the three-letter word . . . But we’re already there,” she says and quotes Marj again: “Profound tenderness,” “a sharing of all our identities,” “tes mains dans mes mains.” “There’ll be a wonderful physical closeness” says Kate. “We’re not going to disappoint each other, because by the time we meet (if not already) we’ll know each other and have appropriate expectations. I’m not in need of ‘Wild Nights’”—(she quotes Emily Dickinson)—for Marj has been suddenly cautious in her letters: “no tearing of our pleasure with rough strife,” she counsels. “Age will save me from desire in its usual sense,” she speaks of her “love-angsts.” So Kate sends tender reassurance and with it, the certainty for Marj of the warmth of Kate’s knowledgeable body. “We speak the same language of love in all its manifestations,” Kate says. “We’ve sort-of made love already . . . and orgasms are not compulsory.” Reading this, Marj laughs out loud.
“Tu es bien dans ta peau,” Marj writes. She has read signs in Kate’s relaxed handwriting which fills each page from edge to edge, and in her voice, mezzo-soprano, tenderly sensual yet unalarming—to Marj who is easily alarmed. Her reading of signs tells her that Kate has been at home in her body since the day she was born and that she knows as well the power of her radiant eyes. She has never felt the misery of a body that doesn’t know what to do with itself. “We were a touchy family,” Kate will tell Marj. “Touchy-feely.” Their parents did not instill in their children a sense of bodily shame; rather, a sense of ease, unlike Marj’s parents, who were not bien dans leur peau and thought it improper for anyone else to be. Now Marj yields to Kate, body and soul, she says: “I of little faith am full of faith in us. I embrace you with prolonged tenderness, this all in the passionate fullness of time.” Marj is “a passionate Puritan,” says Kate. They begin to describe their bodies. Kate says that she is “over-endowed in the boob department;” she adds that this “may reduce the arousal quotient.” She says that Marj has a “boyish” body. Marj answers that her body is “under-endowed in most departments. Some would call me flat-chested.” She says that Kate seems to have an inexhaustible power to arouse.
