It contained nine photo albums and nine ribboned bundles of letters—all of them from Trader. This is their history, illustrated and annotated. And of course ordered. Ordered especially or ordered anyway? With a premeditated suicide there is generally some kind of half-assed attempt “to put things in order”: To attempt completion. To try for completion. But I didn’t get that vibe here, and figured that the Trader “shrine” had been up and running since year one. I hauled it all out and got myself down there on the rug. Starting at the beginning: His first letter, or note, is dated June 1988:
And so it proceeds (“That was quite a set of tennis!”), with little memos about lectures and lunches. Soon the album is taking up the story: There they are on the court, individually and then together. Then complication. Then complication falling away. Then sex. Then love. Then vacations: Jennifer in a ski suit, Jennifer on the beach. Man, what a bod: At twenty, she looked like a model in an ad for those cereals that taste great but also make you shit right. Bronzed Trader at her side. Then graduation. Then cohabitation. And still the handwritten letters keep coming, the words keep coming, the words a woman wants to hear. No dashed-off faxes from Trader. Faxes, which fade in six months, like contemporary love. No scrawled reminders propped against the toaster, such as I get from Tobe. And used to get from Deniss, from Jon, from Shawn, from Duwain. GET SOME TOILET PAPER FOR CHRIST SAKE. That wouldn’t do for Jennifer. She got a fucking poem every other day.
Complication? Complication fell away, and did not recur. But complication there certainly was. Its theme: Mental instability. Not hers. Not his. Other peoples. And I have to say that I was very, very surprised to see my own name featuring here...
I prepared myself for what they’re now calling a “segue.” But a lot of this stuff I already knew. The dumped boyfriend. The freaked-out flatmate. The trouble begins at the outset, when Trader starts getting serious. There’s this jock, name of Hume, who has to be eased out of the picture. Big Man on Campus can’t take the strain. So what he does is present Jennifer with the spectacle of his collapse. Et cetera. Then the other problem, unconnected to this or to anything else in the outside world: A roommate of Jennifer’s, a girl called Phyllida, wakes up one morning with black smoke coming out of her ears. Suddenly this nerdy little chick is either gaping at the bathroom wall or out there howling at the moon. Jennifer can’t cope with being around her, and bolts, back to the Rockwell home. And who does she find there, stinking up her brother’s bedroom and babbling at the pillows, but Detective Mike Hoolihan. “Jesus Christ,” Trader quotes her as saying, “I’m surrounded.”
Here’s a frustration with a one-way correspondence. The narrative doesn’t “unfold”: What you get is just a jumping status quo. Astonishing developments simply and smugly become How Things Are. Still, Trader spends a lot of ink on Jennifer around now, coaxing her out of the notion that nobody and nothing can be trusted. Sanity, or at least logic, returns. You can finish the stories:
The boyfriend, Hume, drops out for a time, and does some drugs. But he’s readmitted, and comes through civilized. He and Jennifer even manage an okay lunch.
Thickly sedated, Phyllida gets to graduate. Some collateral family member takes her in. References to her are frequent for a while. Then trail away.
And Mike Hoolihan recovers. It is approvingly noted that even someone with a background such as hers can eventually patch things together, with the right kind of understanding and support.
While Trader and Jennifer, of course, watch these heavy clouds pass over and cruise on up into their clear blue sky.
Now the bureaus and the filing cabinets and the endless, endless shite of citizenship, of existence. Bills and wills, deeds, leases, taxes—oh, man, the water torture of staying alive.
