Letter To My Rival

Dear J.,

I'm afraid you have many advantages over me my friend. And, yes, we should be considered as friends, as we share a bond that is very deep and very intimate and liable to be very long lasting: we love the same woman; we dream of her smile and her slender and graceful body; we feel the same thrill when we please her, in any way, big or small; we share the same sense of anguish when we disappoint her or, worse yet, fear we may lose her. Oh, yes, J., we are connected very closely; we practically breath the same air -- the air that she moves in.

But, as I say, you have advantages over me. You may be younger than I am; you live very near to her (you may even live with her now!); I believe you have seen my beloved virtually every day this year -- you may have even gone on a trip with her to Paris -- while I have not seen her since early January, and its August 27th today. I presume your economic status is far better than mine. You are unlikely to be divorced, as I am, with children from another woman. All these things, and others I'm sure, would tend to make you more attractive to a woman than I could ever be.

But most importantly, you have been extremely clever. It appears to me that you have used my beloved's family to support your efforts to make her your own. That, of course, was something I was convinced I couldn't do, and with good reason. So you were inspired to take that route, especially when she had a low opinion of you to begin with.

I couldn't understand it at Christmas time, why she disliked you so much. I have to laugh now, as I tried then to moderate her dislike for you. I told her, "well, my dear, you can't blame him for being in love with, as you are very beautiful and many men will be in love with you all your life." But she wouldn't answer directly to me on that point, just maintained a very apparent suspicion of you. As if you had tried something underhanded, been thwarted, but nonetheless were stigmatized henceforth with the label of being untrustworthy.

My beloved does not set her grudges aside easily (this is, in fact, a flaw she has), and so I am surprised now to find you claiming her affections with her acquiescence, if not her enthusiam. You have combined, I am sure, with her family and its imperatives for my beloved. If all is fair in love in war, then it was a fair stratagem, and I salute you.

But, you see, I am like the Viet Mingh: the battle is on my territory.

My beloved loves me. There was no particular reason why she should. It certainly was not to her advantage, our relationship raising incipient issues of conflict with her family, and also the many other disadvantages that I bring to any woman; you will excuse me if I do not mention them all again; suffice it to say that clearly I am not handsome, or wise, or particularly clever. I am certainly not rich.

What I do have is the overwhelming desire for love -- both to give it and receive it. I am sure, and this may seem like a rather crude psychological proposition to you (and no doubt it reflects the conventions and truisms of our age which may well seem strange to others in the future), but I am sure that my yearning for authentic and unadulterated romantic love relates to the love my mother had for me. I was the oldest and rather adorable child born to a naturally adoring and kind mother, who was still young and beautiful herself as she carried me in her arms as a babe.

Thinking on this now, I suppose that all my life has been a strange and jumbled combination of the confidence of one assured that he is loved arising from many long years in the affections of his mother, with the frantic and at time insecure seeking of one who wishes to recreate that feeling of utter bliss of the warmth of pure love.

No doubt we all feel something of this sort. Love, and its complications, are not my sole preoccupation. Yet I know of no one who seeks love as I do, who risks so much for it, and who will, after any defeat, still perservere for its sake.

I do not need to describe to you all the wonderful aspects of my beloved, in temperament, disposition, and in physical beauty. I do not claim she is perfect - you may claim it was so and I would not dispute it -- but I do not need perfection. It was fate that we met one year ago tonight. You are too late. The planets will not regain that unique formation for 10,000 years or more.

I have always yearned for a love as pure as light. And now I have found it with my beloved. I know she has lied. I know that part of the reason she has lied is to keep the possibility alive that her and I will meet and embrace in love. She is desperate too. See what you are up against J.?

I will never give up what I have discovered in my beloved. Never.

The blissful state that my beloved creates in me does not depend on very much; it is of little moment, for example, that she might be wed to you or to any other man. Surely such a thing is not what I prefer to have happen; only a fool would desire his love to sleep in the bed of another. But while you may have the city and town of my beloved's body, and her conventional life, you will never rout me from the tangled country side of her affections. There, she and I will always meet under the cool shading branches of freedom. And do not be mistaken into thinking that I am only addressing metaphysical cravings, that I am speaking only a kind of spiritual mumbo jumbo. No, not at all.

So, J., it may be you, or it may be some other who takes the place of husband of my beloved. It makes no difference to me who it is. Better, in many ways, if it is a scoundrel, so that my adultery can be done without scruple or conscience.

I am with you J. When you kiss her, she thinks, for a fleeting second, of me. You and I are brothers indeed. Now and for many years to come.

your friend,