Oldest Story Ever

[Sorry I joined the class so late, and therefore (kind of), that this is so late!]


The woman places the letter back in the envelope and slips the tongue beneath the flap.  She flips the envelope so now the front is face-up and looks at the surface, where written in the left corner is her lover's name and the address of his temporary home while he is away.  The penmanship is tight and angular as if written with a non-instinctive pen-grip.  In the middle of the envelope her lover wrote her name, first and last, and though he spelt it correctly, Olivia notices that one of the i's is dotted and that one of them is not.

In the letter her lover speaks very highly of Dublin.  His lecture series at the university is well-attended and the people ask about more than the weather; Guinness is bottled like water and the apartment where he lives has plumbing almost as good as theirs at home.  He does not use that word, home, but Olivia knows what he means.  At least she would like to think that by now she knows what he means, could translate the skin from his language because it is, what else, familiar.  She revisits each sentence to find the single precise meaning out of the varied, the six words of her language that loosely match one of his.  Sometimes she feels like the American poet who translated Milosz without speaking Polish, who decided one time that the English equivalent of the sound of a hedgehog on a hardwood floor would be "skittering."  Her lover says "our place," but Olivia renders this, home.

Her lover writes to tell her a joke.  Friends often compliment his sense of humor and it is a reason, perhaps, to love him, though it is not the reason Olivia chooses to love him.  He is not very handsome and people assume that his humor is what keeps her, but it is not, though she has told no one.  She lets people think that she loves him for his humor, and then for other things, because it is natural and easy, like most things we abet are natural and easy; honesty, bread, voice, companionship.

The joke is about a young Dubliner who returns home to tell his mother good news.  He has fallen in love.  He is getting married.  He says, "Just for fun, Ma, I'm going to bring home three women and you will try to guess which one I will marry."

The mother agrees and the next day, he returns with three beautiful women.  They sit in the drawing room and talk for a while, until the boy asks, "Okay Ma, which one will I marry?"  The mother, who does not hesitate, points to the girl on the very right.  "That's incredible, Ma," says the boy, "how did ye know?"

The mother laughs and answers: "I don't like her."

Olivia has read this joke over at least eight times.  She knows what her lover is saying, but she wonders what he is saying.  And then, if he is saying that.  She will reread the joke and the entirety of the letter, will remove it from the envelope and place it back and remove it again, each time a little more cautiously and with a little more care for preservation, until she falls asleep in the last place and position her body acquainted itself, with the same will and unwanted freedoms of people who look after themselves.  Briefly she wonders if he placed as much attention in writing the letter as she did in reading it, if he paused as much, wanted to change his mind.  She wonders how their efforts translate.  What parts of language, which modifiers and silences, detect imbalance?  She remembers, for a reason she can sense but not place in speech, what her mother warned one time with a different lover in a different country, humorlessly, of the vast and terrible power of the one less in love.