Windy, clammy, and cool.

 Windy, clammy, and cool. 

Uncle Albert came over Sunday morning to watch the Arsenal match. It was something of a disappointment. His Gunners had played beautiful football against Leicester City on Monday, and now they couldn’t manage better than a draw against Crystal Palace. Mesut Özil had disappeared again. One day he’s one of the best footballers in the world; the next he’s barely visible.

     Taking him home - in the new car - I told Uncle A I’d said something to Dr. Feight about the letters from Moira. [See here and here.] Why I told him I don’t know. How he found about the letters to begin with - I don’t know that either. He said at the time that Roz had told him, but I doubt that. I doubted it then, and I still do, though how else he could have found out I don’t know. I can’t see him nosing around my desk.

     And I don’t think I told him, though here is the trouble with all of this: I’m always telling people things they really have no business knowing, and why I do this - another thing I don’t know. It has something to do, I think, with a misguided sense of what it means to be honest, that the truth isn’t true unless it’s whole. The truth is the whole truth, down to the last jot and tittle of it.

     So, while I had no intention of telling Uncle Albert that I had finally talked to Dr. Feight about Moira’s letters, while, in fact, I’d been telling myself that I wasn’t going to say anything to him about it, because it was none of his business - let him stew if he wanted to know and why was he poking around in my sadness about my sister anyway? - now I found myself telling him. I was hearing myself say,

     

Crosby, Stills, and Nash

“I told Dr. Feight about Moira’s letters.” Not to say it would have left the truth half-said, our conversation from July half-finished. From July! I’m yelling at myself to just “shut the fuck up” - loudly and that obscenely, but I’m not shutting the fuck up, I’m babbling away: “I told Dr. Feight about the letters.”

     “What did he say?” Uncle Albert said.

     “Nothing,” I said. “He didn’t say anything. He just wanted to know where the letters came from.”

     “What did you tell him? That you wrote them? Right?”

     “No. That’s not what he meant. I told him ‘Spain’ and ‘Morocco.’”

Of course, that wasn’t the whole truth, but it was a gray morning, at the same time windy and clammy, and cold.

11.01.18