Jocelin: Letters from the Past
[2004-11-13]
My dearest friend, the letter begins, in a bold black scrawl festooned with blots. I wish you could be here...
It goes on for two pages, full of inanities and profanities, gay and gleeful and affectionate. After the first line there is no hint of sentiment until the scribbled signature: In haste -- ever your fond --
The ink is smudged with long handling. The creases have worn nearly to slits in both pages, scored neatly and at angles to the original careless folds. In places the edges of the paper have gone soft and fuzzy, but the dog-ears have all been smoothed out. In fact it seems the recipient has far more regard for the letter than its writer ever did.
This is the only love letter that Jocelin has ever had; and it only merits the phrase in that it is a letter from a lover, or it was, at the time. There is affection in it, but no tenderness, nothing, in itself, to explain the care with which he has cherished it all this time. He keeps it tucked inside its envelope, pressed between the few books that are his, through a succession of shoddy lodgings, leaky-roofed garrets, spare rooms smelling of mildew and old clothes. When it first arrived he read it over avidly, blind to its literary failings, drinking in love from every misspelled word.
Later it slipped out of sight, out of mind, when Pascal came home from that first, brief absence. They made love that first night with all the frenzy of eighteen-year-old lust denied (and for years afterward it did not occur to Jocelin to wonder whether, in those three weeks, Pascal had been quite as achingly chaste as he had himself). In the morning the pillow was wet, the letter forgotten, the sheets tangled hopelessly around them as if to keep them from escaping each other.
Later still it acquired an extra blot or two, and a network of faint creases from spending nights under the pillow. When he left that place he shut it away in the bottom of a box, into darkness where it could not accuse him.