I’ll of course keep in touch with him and try to see him when I can.” “Give Brons your nothing,” she wrote back. “Keep in touch with your nothing, you great bullshit artist. Besides, although I’ve rarely bad-mouthed you to him, he said ‘If he’s against you, Mommy, then he’s against me, and I never want to talk to him again.’ I told him that his relationship with you is his business and apart from me, but he doesn’t see it that way. So I’m sorry but he doesn’t want to be bothered anymore with my passing on your feeble greetings and bogus love. For a little unurban kid, he’s hip to your schemes.” He got a letter from her two years later (he’d written Brons a few letters during this time but got no answer) saying an old letter of his popped up from behind a file cabinet she was giving to Goodwill because she’s redoing her house outside and in (“I’ve come into some family money and this savvy stockbroker fellow I know pretty well invested it for me and I made a killing”) and she read it and thought of the days they were close and how good he was for Brons at such a vulnerable age and for so many years and she harbors no ill will to him anymore and just wanted to know how he was, and the correspondence resumed and Brons wrote and called that he wanted to see him, so he flew out, stayed in her guest room for a night and in her bedroom the rest of the week. Or a few years after that he remembered one of the many things he’d left behind in her house — a drawing several centuries old he had when he met her and hung on her wall but had never given her and now wanted — and included in the letter more than enough money to send it special delivery and apologized for the inconvenience this would cause her and swore he’d never ask for anything else of his again and she wrote back “Why not fly out to pick it up personally plus the rest of your little art treasures — none of them fit in with anything I own anymore — and see Brons along the way? He’s dying to see you but is too shy to ask and can’t face the hurt if you refuse. As for me, I’m comfortably with someone now (if I can be juvenile for a second: the coolest, cutest dude I’ve ever flipped over, and he’s nine years younger than me), so I’ll make and receive no demands. In other words, if you think I’m encouraging you to come because I’m lusting after you, you’d be nuts. This is all for Brons.” So he’d fly out and the new guy had gone backpacking in the Sierras for two weeks and he’d sleep with her after the first night. “Why not?” she’d say each time he came out. “We were always great together in bed and I’d only get horny in a few days knowing you’re in the next room beating your meat.” Or she’d call after a year and say “I was thinking of the three of us in Portugal and Spain, hitchhiking along back roads — people there had never seen such a gorgeous towheaded boy before, it seemed, the way they kept mussing his hair. And I wondered what you’ve been up to, working at, reading and yes, even though she disliked me — I liked her, by the way, or admired her — how your mom was holding up too. .” Anyway, always resumptions in their correspondence, overtures to fly out from both of them, he’d scrape up the dough to go, for a few years, annual visits in June and the same arrangements at her house every time. Till she wrote that last letter, his to hers, their postcards, then it all stopped.
