Charles William and I will leave Atlanta at four o’clock on Friday afternoon. He wants to leave sooner but I have to see my adviser at three. Thanks for all the letters last week. My roommate is in love with you. If we let him off the bed for more than five minutes he gets your letters and reads them. He is a birdwatcher and used to keep bees but I played football with him at Darlington so I have to keep him around. See you Friday night.

Love,
Malcolm

P.S. He wants to write a note.

Rhoda, oh, Rhoda, why are you wasting yourself on Monk Martin when I am here. I am five feet eight inches tall and will read Yeats to you while you languish in pools of aquamarine water. I will bring you oranges and tangerines and take you away from all this. He won’t introduce me, but he is letting me write this note because he ran out of things to say. People call me Kayo but my name is Phinias Kernodle. Errington likes me more than he likes Monk. I don’t hang him from the light fixture during the night.

Dear Malcolm,

It will never be Friday. It will never never never never never be Friday. Let’s say it finally gets to be Friday. And you leave Atlanta and start driving here. Then you will have a car crash and die a fiery death or I will fall into a hole and end up in China. You’ll be in Tuscaloosa and I’ll be in China. But there is no way we could be together in the same place. That would be too good to be true. I love you. Me.

Rhoda

Chapter

12

After an eternity of hours it was Friday afternoon and I could really begin to wait for him to come. It seemed a dream that I had taken off my clothes and made love to him. In another way it seemed like the only real thing that had ever happened to me except for sometimes when I was reading poetry or sometimes when I wrote it. Maybe, at last, after all these years, since I was fourteen years old, maybe I was really going to be in love again. In love with a flesh-and-blood person who loved me back and wasn’t going to die. “Do not project unmet developmental needs onto the current love object via the vehicle of romanticism.” There was an idea I could have used but it would be many years before I would hear that and many years before I knew what it meant. For now, I was a nineteen-year-old cauldron of unmet needs and ecstasies and hopes and fears and desires.

At five o’clock I went over to the KD house to wait for him to come.