Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man

8

Dear Larry—

I promised Fran I wouldn’t write to you. But she went down to the market to shop for dinner and there are a couple of things I wanted to say.

I’m glad you’re taking this well. I don’t suppose I have to tell you that we certainly didn’t plan for everything to happen at once this way. I mean your losing your job the same day you lost Fran. Although if you think about it, Larry, you lost Fran a long time before the 12^th of June. And I’m not talking about when she and I first fell in love, either. Your marriage went sour, Larry, and after that it was just a question of time before someone stepped in. You know that yourself.

Believe me, I didn’t want to be the one. I resisted it for a long time, as a matter of fact. But there was always this very strong current of attraction existing between Frances and myself, not merely a physical thing but emotional as well. If you’ll forgive me for pointing it out, Fran and I were always closer in this respect than were she and you. Even long before there was anything between us in any sense. It was just the way we responded to one another, a matter of human rapport.

Then one day we just sort of looked at each other and something happened. It’s that kind of situation where the words in the stupid pop tunes all seem to not only make sense but to have a private and personal message just for the two of us. As your friend — and I still consider myself your friend, and hope you consider me that way too, well — as your friend I can wish you nothing more than that you yourself find this kind of love someday with somebody, perhaps somebody you’ve always known, perhaps someone you have not even met yet.

Larry, as far as the fifteen hundred is concerned, Frances feels that it’s her fair share of what the two of you owned in common. In other words, not to cloud this up with any legal bullshit, she says you can keep all the furniture and kitchen utensils and odds and ends, and in return she’ll keep the money she took out of the checking account. If you want to be technical, it came to a little less than fifteen hundred. Frances has the exact figure, which I think ran somewhere in the neighborhood of $1475 or $1480.

The point is that on the one hand you don’t have to worry about me sending Frances back to you, since no power on earth could make me give up what the two of us have together, but I guess you can’t count on me sending the $1500 either, I mean the $1475, because in the first place I don’t have it and in the second Fran says it’s rightfully hers, and I have to go along with her on that.

Another thing I have to mention is the letter you sent me, which I got in Cuernavaca. Of course I showed it to Fran, although I can’t honestly say it was something I wanted to show her. But in the kind of relationship the two of us have, well, we just don’t keep secrets from one another, not even in small matters and certainly not in big ones, and so I showed it to her.

She found it a little unsettling, and speaking frankly, old buddy, so did I. My first reaction, actually, was that I was glad you were taking everything almost too well. But on second reading, or what you might call reading between the lines, I found myself changing my mind. For one thing I sensed a very definite undercurrent of hostility throughout the letter, and without going into a lot of Freudian bullshit I would be less worried if the hostility were right out there in the open than the way it is in your letter, sort of hiding behind the bushes and lurking.

And that whole fantasy about the teenage girls. To tell you the truth, I did think it was amusing and imaginative on your part to invent that routine, but Frances made me realize that it was also pretty sick, and I do mean sick. According to her, you always had a tendency to live a fantasy life that was more real to you than your real life. I would not go that far, although I always felt you may have had your feet planted a little less firmly on the ground than some of the rest of us. I always just figured that this was part of being a poet, the sensitivity bit.

But Fran says that it’s almost as if you actually believe the bit with the girls from the convent school. I didn’t think that was possible but on rereading the section, I have to agree with her. If that’s the case, or whatever’s the case, maybe you’re wasting your talents as a poet, fella. Maybe you ought to write dirty books or something.

Just kidding, as I’m sure you know.

But what I’m getting at, Larry, in my usual roundabout way, is that I hope you won’t write any letters of that sort to us again. I don’t mean that we are not interested in you and don’t want to know how things are going with you, because we are and we do.

That letter, though, was very upsetting to Fran, and to me too. The remarks you made about your private life with Fran and other things like that are not the sort of thing that belong in a letter, and if the purpose was to drive a wedge between the two of us, although I don’t honestly think you had that idea in mind, to give you the benefit of the doubt, well, if that was your purpose I have to tell you it pretty much fell flat on its face.

I’m a pretty straightforward guy, as you well know, and I prefer to take your whole letter and everything else pretty much at face value as an honest attempt to let me know, and Fran in the bargain, that you’re not holding a grudge. So I’ll think of the letter that way whether that’s what you had in mind or not.

Anyway, please, no more letters like that. And if you do write, don’t refer to this letter, as I don’t intend to tell Fran I wrote to you.