Free Losing It by Alan Cumyn Page B

oblique correspondence. Helen had survived a difficult marriage already, was in poor health, and did not necessarily feel up to any sort of new romantic attachment. She was also part of the Transcendentalist movement, of whose members, like Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Longfellow, Poe was so contemptuous. Her friends were his enemies, andno one seemed to have accumulated enemies quite like Poe. But, I am digressing.”
    He was indeed falling off track. Sienna’s legs were now tightly wound together, and as she rocked, so slightly, she seemed to be, discreetly, massaging her right nipple. Every so often she closed her eyes for longer than necessary and ran her tongue lightly over her bottom lip.
    “The letter I have come to talk about –
ghnihhr
,” Bob said, and cleared his throat, then took time to sip more water and stare blankly at his notes. Sienna stopped rocking. Perhaps her fingers were just lightly resting on her bosom. It was hard to tell through the haze. “The letter I have come to talk about, of course, is the Whitman letter dated January 2, 1849, long believed to be lost, which I, through good fortune, managed to find -” Bob almost said twelve years ago – “in a box of mis-filed Rufus Griswold papers in the archives of the Boston Public Library. Griswold, of course, was Poe’s literary executor and, as has been amply shown, a rival and sometime enemy. You will recall -”
    At that moment Bob could not recall anything much because Sienna separated then recrossed her legs, leaned forward a little and squeezed her leg muscles together, then released them and closed her eyes. Her breathing, though nearly silent, became deeper.
    “You will recall,” Bob said, trying to concentrate, “Poe’s first meeting with Helen at her house in Providence. Both Poe and Helen were nervous. Her hand trembled when he grasped it; her voice faltered. She had a domineering mother who strongly objected to Poe’s advances. And what mother wouldn’t? He was notorious by then for his drunkenness, his temper and vindictiveness, his constant lack of money. And yet they talked, Poe and Helen, of past grievances and disappointments, of writersand poets, literature and learning. Then on a long walk in the Swan Point cemetery he declared his love – ‘now – for the first and only time -’ possibly kissed her, and proposed marriage, after having known her in person for only two days.”
    There was a titter in the audience, a nodding of heads from the more experienced scholars. This was an old story, Poe drowning and desperate. But for the first time while telling it, Bob himself felt something of the same throbbing incoherence. The words were leaving his mouth but he didn’t seem sure, beforehand, what he was going to say. And then for periods of time he wasn’t sure what he
was
saying. Sienna was looking at him, her eyes were demanding something of him, he didn’t know what. She seemed to be beaming a message of longing and need and invitation. Bob looked everywhere else in the room, at the cinder-block walls painted grey, at the rows of auditorium seats, the screen to the side – What about my slides? he thought. He had brought slides of the Whitman letter.
    But he wasn’t talking about the Whitman letter. Try as he might to approach the subject, the wind of his rhetoric pulled him further off topic. He was telling the story of Poe and Helen’s conditional engagement, how Helen’s mother had forced him to sign away any right to property or money from the marriage, how Poe had agreed never to taste wine or spirits again, then broke that condition almost immediately. How Poe continued to court Annie even while swearing his love for Helen, how he seemed to desperately want out of the marriage even while doing his damnedest to secure it for himself. Then Bob got caught on a long and convoluted tangent regarding Poe’s later rantings about the cosmological world, his Eureka lectures on the origins and fate of the