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the dark night of memory.
    Is it really too late, Anita? I realize you may already have found happiness in some new relationship—the news I have of you is tardy and stale—or perhaps you are immersed in your work and too busy to spare an idle thought for an old flame, if that is what I am. Tear up this letter then, toss it into the wastebasket with the Kleenex and candy wrappers. Or don’t. Listen to your heart. I
had
to write. I told myself that it’s never wrong to clasp at straws, and having clasped, swim on. Whatever happens, upon what strange shore I am finally tossed, I’ll be glad that I have written. It is as if the little bird I held in my hand had spread its small wings and flown, even though it was dead.
    Affectionately,
    Andrew
    ¶
    What is it about me that makes me want to make a fool of myself? I suppose at bottom it’s just a perverse form of vanity, the cut-up in class who makes himself into an idiotic spectacle in order not to vanish altogether. But still, I am not pretending, and the mortification I feel in these situations is perfectly genuine. I write a letter, blushing with shame at every sentence, right to the tips of my ears, and send it off; and walking back to the house from the mailbox I catch myself muttering, “That’ll show ’em.”
    ¶
    Dear Captain Barrows,
    I share your dismay at the state of American writing. It is quite true that everywhere one looks one sees cynicism and mockery and that we have lost sight of the great humanist tradition, whatever that was. In addition, as you say, most people use shoddy grammar, which does not reflect well on their parents and teachers, whoever they were. I am, however, not personally able to do anything about this.
    Sincerely,
    Andrew Whittaker
    ¶
    Dear Mr. Kohlblink,
    As I have said twice before, all submissions must be typed.
    ¶
    Dear Jolie,
    I wrote just a few days ago, I think it was, and already there are new things to say. I have been trying to play things down in my letters, to wear a brave face, as they say, over the other one, the ghastly drawn one that leers at me in the bathroom every morning, but you may have divined that I have been fairly pushed to the wall lately, backed into a corner. People would like me just to roll over and play dead, or maybe even
be
dead in the case of some of them. I feel exposed, hedged about, and vulnerable. Yet at the same time I am bristling with confidence. I am not going to take this lying down. I am taking steps. The first will be to establish a draconian regime of perfect parsimony when it comes to personal expenditures. With that in view I have had all phone service discontinued. If you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to call, that’s the reason. The next step will be to move out of here and into that little Polk Street efficiency, which no one seems to want anyway, while putting this place up for rent. To do that, to go from an eight-room house to a one-room flat, I am going to have to jettison a mountain of stuff, a lot of it yours. So if there are things here you’re still attached to, you need to send me the list right away. The instant I said to myself, Andy, you need to move out of this house, I felt a huge weight lift from me. The expression has it that the burden is on the shoulders, but lately I’ve been feeling it more as a tremendous pressure in my head. I’m using a toothpick to hold my cigarettes so I can smoke them right down to my lips. I figure this will mean four fewer cigarettes in a day, saving a pack every five days, six packs a month, and so on. Same thing with carrots. I mean, you don’t have to cut that little green bit off the end.
    Digging through the stuff in the basement, I’ve run into a lot of spiders, as you can well imagine. I have carried a wooden spoon down from the kitchen, and I use it to push the webs out of the way. I endeavor to do this without hurting the spiders, and usually they scuttle off unharmed, but sometimes things go wrong. If only they were not