Dangerous Women

(That I would believe your declarations of love? That I would “take you at your word”?)

My darling, you have my heart. Always, forever. Your promise!

These days, Dr. K-, my skin is no longer “flawless.” It has become the frank, flawed skin of a middle-aged woman who makes no effort to disguise her age. My hair, once shimmering strawberry-blond, is now faded, dry and brittle as broom sage; I keep it trimmed short, like a man’s, with a scissors, scarcely glancing into a mirror as I snip! snip-snip! away. My face, though reasonably attractive, I suppose, is, in fact, a blur to most observers, including especially middle-aged American men; you’ve glanced at me, and through me, dear Dr. K-, upon more than one recent occasion, no more recognizing your “Angel” than you would have recognized a plate heaped with food you’d devoured twenty-three years ago with a zestful appetite or an old, long-exhausted and dismissed sexual fantasy of adolescence.

For the record: I was the woman in a plain, khaki-colored trench coat and matching hat who waited patiently at the university bookstore as a line of admirers of yours moved slowly forward, for Dr. K-to sign copies of The Ethical Life: 21st Century Challenges. (A slender theological treatise, not a mega-bestseller of course but a quite respectable bestseller, most popular in university and upscale suburban communities.) I knew your “brilliant” book would disappoint yet I purchased it and eagerly read to discover (yet another time) the puzzling fact: you, Dr. K-, the man, are not the individual who appears in your books; the books are clever pretenses, artificial structures you’ve created to inhabit temporarily, as a crippled, deformed individual might inhabit a structure of surpassing beauty, gazing out its windows, taking pride in posing as its owner, but only temporarily.

Yes? Isn’t this the clue to the renowned “Dr. K-”?

For the record: several Sundays ago, you and I passed closely by each other in the State Museum of Natural History; you were gripping the hand of your five-year-old granddaughter (“Lisle,” I believe?-lovely name) and took no more notice of me than you’d have taken of any stranger passing you on the steep marble steps, descending from the Hall of Dinosaurs on the gloomy fourth floor as you were ascending; you’d stooped to smilingly speak to Lisle, and it was at that moment I noted the silly, touching ploy of you hair-combing (over the spreading bald spot), I saw Lisle’s sweet, startled face (for the child, unlike her myopic granddaddy, had seen me and “knew” me in a flash); I felt a thrill of triumph: for how easily I might have killed you then, I might have pushed you down those hard marble steps, my hands firm on your now rather rounded shoulders, the force of my rage overcoming any resistance you, a puffy, slack-bellied two-hundred-pound man of late middle age, might have mustered; immediately you’d have been thrown off balance, falling backward, with an expression of incredulous terror, and still gripping your granddaughter’s hand you’d have dragged the i

Why not try, why not try to collect what he owes me.

Of course, Dr. K-, I didn’t! Not that Sunday afternoon.

Dear Dr. K-! Are you surprised to learn that your lost love with the “spun gold” hair and the “soft-as-silk breasts” managed to recover from your cruelty, and by the age of twenty-nine had begun to do well in her career, in another part of the country?

Never would I be renowned in my field as you, Dr. K-, in yours, that goes without saying, but through diligence and industry, through self-deprivation and cu

I won’t be more specific, Dr. K-, but I will hint: my field is akin to yours though not scholarly or “intellectual.” My salary is far less than yours, of course. I have no public identity, no reputation and no great wish for such. I’m in a field of service, I’ve long known how to serve. Where the fantasies of others, primarily men, are involved, I’ve grown quite adept at serving.

Yes, Dr. K-, it’s possible that I’ve even served you. Indirectly, I mean. For instance: I might work in, or even oversee a medical laboratory to which your physician sends blood samples, biopsy tissue samples, etcetera, and one day he sends our laboratory a specimen extracted from the body of the renowned Dr. K-. Whose life may depend upon the accuracy and good faith of our laboratory findings.

Just one example, Dr. K-, among many!

No, dear Dr. K-, this letter is no threat. How, stating my position so openly, and therefore i

Are you shocked to learn that a woman can be a “professional”-can have a career that’s fairly rewarding-yet still dream of justice after twenty-three years? Are you shocked to learn that a woman might be married, or might have been married, yet remain haunted still by her cruel, deceitful first love, who ravaged not only her virginity but her faith in humankind?

You’d like to imagine your cast-off “Angel” as a lonely embittered spinster, yes? Hiding away in the dark, spi

(Dr. K-! How lucky you are, to have a little granddaughter like Lisle! So delicate, so pretty, so… angelic. I have not had a daughter, I confess. I will not have a granddaughter. If things were otherwise between us, “Jody,” we might share Lisle.)

“Jody”-what a thrill it was for me, at the age of nineteen, to call you by that name! Where others addressed you formally, as Dr. K-. That it was secret, illicit, taboo-like calling one’s own father by a lover’s name-was part of the thrill, of course.

“Jody,” I hope your first, anxious wife E--never discovered certain bits of incriminating evidence in your trouser pockets, wallet, briefcase where, daringly, I secreted them. Love notes, childlike in expression. Love love love my Jody. My BIG JODY.

You’re not BIG JODY very often now, are you, Dr. K-?

“Jody” has faded with the years, I’ve learned. With the thick wiry gypsy-black hair, those shrewd clear eyes and proud posture and the capacity of your stubby penis to rejuvenate, reinvent itself with impressive frequency. (At the start of our affair, at least.) For any nineteen-year-old girl-student to call you “Jody” now would be obscene, laughable.

Now you most love being called “Granddaddy!”-in Lisle’s voice.

Yet in my dreams sometimes I hear my own shameless whisper, Jody please don’t stop loving me, please forgive me, I want only to die, I deserve to die if you don’t love me as in the warm bath blood-tendrils seeped from my clumsily lacerated forearms; but it was Dr. K-, not “Jody,” who spoke brusquely on the phone informing me This is not the time. Good-bye.

(You must have made inquiries, Dr. K-. You must have learned that I was found there in the bloody bathwater, unconscious, nearing death, by a concerned woman friend who’d tried to call me. You must have known, but prudently kept your distance, Dr. K-! These many years.)