chloeveltman.com

Envelope Me In Your Arms, Stamp Me With Your Kiss, And Send Me To Heaven

Last Tuesday, I mailed myself across the country in a large reinforced plywood box labeled “Fragile” and “This Way Up.” I’m not a very heavy person. I’d been dieting for quite a while in preparation. It wasn’t just a question of keeping shipping costs down: I’d planned to be the Very Best Me for George, so that when the outsize parcel with the San Luis Obispo postmark arrived on his stoop on the Lower East Side, he would not only get the surprise of his life, but it would be a thin one.

I’d been reading a nutrition book called “Better Body for Your Blood Type”. Type O’s (that’s me) are supposed to avoid wheat and dairy. It stunts our physical and mental growth. We’re meant to eat kelp and quinoa and drink warm, slightly salty water. I tried it out for a couple of weeks, breaking myself in slowly by washing my hair with sea kelp conditioner and drinking lukewarm coffee. But before I could truly test the efficacy of the diet, I came down with a nasty virus and spent the next three weeks in bed, vomiting and craving Greek yogurt (it was the only thing I could stomach). By the time I got out of bed, I had lost fifteen pounds. Good enough.

George is nuts about musical theater. That’s why he sold his real estate business and left ‘Bispo for New York a year ago. He said if he had to sit through another fifth rate production of The Pirates of Penzance at San Luis Stageworks, he would stop paying for ad space in the playbills. Stageworks relied heavily on advertisers like George’s real estate business for its existence. After George left town, his threat became a reality. The woman who bought the business from him, who wears real fur coats and whom we call Clown Mouth because she has sore red patches around her lips from constantly licking them, doesn’t care for theater. Clown Mouth canceled the program sponsorship and gave the money to animal rescue instead, in exchange for the handing out of dog biscuits in the shape of her company’s logo to impounded hounds. As a result of her actions, a couple of months ago, San Luis Stageworks shut down. Which was, in a way, a relief – each time I came across a poster advertising one of the company's shows, I kept thinking of Georgie, burying his face into my armpit every time one of the actors hit a bum note.

The night before he left town, George and I went out to dinner. I had done my best to be a grown up about his impending departure over the weeks, trying my hardest – like a diligent toddler with a coloring book and a fresh set of felt-tipped pens – not to go over the lines. Georgie tucked into his lentil bake with enthusiasm, babbling away about a new production of The Yeomen of the Guard he would be seeing in New York. Apparently, his arrival in town would coincide with the visit of one of the top British Gilbert & Sullivan companies on a six-month world tour.

“The only other place they’re going other than New York is Washington DC,” said George, wolfing down a forkful of soggy lentils. “Sometimes, Iolanthe, I don’t understand what kept me in this ridiculous boon-dock for so long.”

“It’s that bad, is it?”

“Come on. We all know San Luis O-Piss-Po is not a theater town,” said George, chuckling with his shoulders like a cartoon character that says “yukka-yukka-yukka.” I hate that. I suppose my face must have registered some reaction other than empathy.

“Don’t get all pissy on me, Iolanthe.” George clamped his eyelids together slowly like a cat, hoping no doubt, that by the time he opened them, I would have been magically replaced by a dish of cream. I studied his face for a few seconds, drawing deep, long Buddha Breaths, a technique for composing the mind that I once learnt at a Hallucinogenics for Vegans workshop. A premature-gray curl fell across George’s cheek. With his eyes shut, the feline angles of his face made him look like he’d been chiseled out of marble. He looked hard, artificial.

“I'll write often," said George, smiling peacefully now. He reached out gently to pat my hand. But with his eyes still shut, George accidentally struck the asymmetric clay candlestick in the middle of our table, causing the cotton tablecloth to catch alight. George opened his eyes abruptly and hopped out of his seat. For a fraction of a second we watched the small blue flames finger the fabric, sending a slender band of smoke spiraling upwards towards the ceiling. Just then, the kid with the felt-tipped pens inside me gave up trying to color pretty pictures and started scribbling maniacally.

“If I didn’t happen to share the same name as some floozy Gilbert and Sullivan character, you wouldn’t even be interested in me, would you George?” I didn’t expect an answer. Grabbing my jacket and narrowly avoiding a waiter who was stalking towards the table with a fire hydrant, I sped out into the evening air. The restaurant smoke alarm wailed my angry farewell.

Georgie suffers from technophobia. Even when he lived in ‘Bispo, he insisted on communicating with me solely by mail. He didn’t even have a phone at home; his secretary handled most of his work calls. We lived only five blocks from each other so dates were arranged by dropping postcards into each other’s mailboxes. I have quite a collection of his postcards, mostly depicting Hearst Castle at different times of the day, or a giant crab wearing yellow, plastic sunglasses and waving a beach towel in one of its pincers.

At first I thought this method of courting rather childish – I didn’t understand why, if we were practically neighbors, we couldn’t just drop in on each other. But George insisted on the postcards and after a bit I got into it. I found the whole routine rather dramatic; it reminded me of that bit in Shakespeare, (I keep thinking it's in Romeo and Juliet but it's not; it's in A Midsummer Night's Dream,) where the lovers exchange kisses through a chink in a wall. Eventually it got to me though. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t pick up the phone to call him, but that the postcards were so flimsy and cheap – the dollar-for-ten kind you buy in the tourist stores on the beach. Even my grandmother, who lives in a home in Santa Barbara and suffers from acute glaucoma, sends better quality cards.

George left at the end of the summer and I decided to take some time off of work to work on myself. When I returned from a two-week meditation retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains, I decided - as coached by Sensei Jayananda Berkowitz - to remove Georgie from my life as one lifts a strand of dog hair from the couch and places it in the trash, and open myself up to other possibilities.

One day after a pre-natal yoga class, I met Denver. (I’ve been going to pre-natal yoga for years – there’s something so therapeutic about being around expectant, young mothers and their partners.) Denver, who was the assistant wine-maker at one of the vineyards near Santa Barbara, kept giving me gifts. A fancy bottle-opener, tickets to a talk by a famous wine critic, lead crystal sherry glasses – his presents always had something to do with wine. Once, he brought me a bottle of dessert wine with a hand-made label. The label had a beautifully detailed pencil drawing of a woman walking down a street on it. When I looked more closely, I saw that the woman on the label was me. The words “Iolanthe's Idyll” were inscribed in gold leaf around the drawing.

“I didn’t know you were an artist, Denver,” I said, spinning the empty bottle around on the kitchen table after we’d drunk the contents. Denver had done a good job. I looked young for 33. He’d got my shoulder-length, straight hair and square jaw-line just right; plus I didn’t have a double chin (I don’t have one in real life but somehow, in pictures, I often do.) There was something strange about the label, though. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was bothering me.

“I don’t remember sitting for this portrait,” I said.

“Well you’re not sitting are you, doll face. If I’m not very much mistaken, I got you when you were walking down the street after work one day.”

“You got me?”

“With this,” said Denver, waving the end of his tie in my face. Concealed in the knot of the tie, an accessory of conservative navy silk that he always wore to work, was a tiny shutter that opened and closed. Denver winked. I watched the shutter do the same.

“You’re so photogenic, Iolanthe,” said Denver. He winked a second time and off went the shutter. “Oops. There I go again. I can’t help myself.”

He leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. Shortly afterwards, while we were in bed and I was hanging onto that tie, I made a mental note to ask Denver where he bought it. In spite of the teachings of Sensei Berkowitz, I thought it might make a great Christmas gift for George.

The fact that George did write from New York made me happy. But because I only had a mailing address for him – he said he didn’t know if his apartment had a phone line and even if it did, he didn’t know the number, didn’t own a phone – I was forced to write. This really put a strain on our relationship. Like the time I received a postcard from George telling me to keep an eye out for a package. I was so excited about the arrival of the parcel from New York that I called in sick at work and stayed in to be sure to catch the mail guy. When the package arrived in its small, cubed box, I shook it close to my ear. The object inside made a soft thud against the cardboard. Leafing frantically through its in-built department store catalogue, my mind conjured up the possibilities: a book of Elizabethan love poetry, inscribed "To I. Forever, G"; the rounded velvet contours of a box containing a bracelet or a ring; a picture frame displaying a photograph of the two of us, exploring the Old Mission in ‘Bispo or enjoying a weeping, heavily-accessorized cocktail in the pink bar at The Madonna Inn. I tore open the package and inside I found a pair of swimming goggles. My spare pair of swimming goggles. Not a gift, but the return of a once-borrowed and now unwanted item. There wasn't even a note attached.

The Buddha Breath wasn’t going to be of much use now. I thought about getting a massage at the new Japanese tea spa downtown and shopping myself into a state of tranquility. I considered going to see Charmian, my energy healer. But what I ended up doing was calling Denver. This was absolutely the right thing to do. I ended up spending the entire week over at Denver’s house.

It was a good week, all in all. We did an entire album of headshots with his tie. He also bought a new set of acrylics and made me sit for a portrait. That took the entire weekend. By the time I went back to my place, Denver had sketched me onto the canvas and covered the entire thing in a pale green wash. I thought I looked seasick. He said something about building up layers of eggplant tempura or something to reveal my inner beauty. I still haven’t seen the finished results. I don’t suppose I ever will now.

When I got back to the office after the week at Denver’s, I received another delivery from New York. It was a bunch of pink roses. This time there was a card attached. "Dear Iolanthe," it said in Georgie's neat, left-slanting hand.

"I received eleven letters from you last week. It’s one of the greatest pleasures of my week, getting mail from you, but you did seem kind of upset. I'm sorry I forgot to give the goggles back to you before I left. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Please forgive me. G."

Though the note was completely beside the point, I was violently relieved.

On my way home, I ran into Clown Mouth in the take-out line at the Waldo Jeffers Philly Cheese Steak franchise that had recently opened on the old site of San Luis Stageworks. I was carrying George’s bouquet and card.

“What delightful blooms. Who’s the chevalier?” said Clown Mouth. The sore patches around her lips throbbed and glistened with saliva.

“Just George.”

We started talking about George, right there in the line, continuing the conversation out on the street, cardboard takeout cartons stuffed into brown paper bags. It had been a long time since I’d discussed anything personal with anybody. Clown Mouth listened attentively, stroking the broad lapels of her fur coat with long, bony fingers. I wouldn’t normally have thought of confiding in Clown Mouth, but it was good to get the swimming goggles and the cheap postcards out into the open.

“It’s stupid, but I miss him,” I finally admitted. I was beginning to feel guilty about talking for so long and imagined that by now, the melted cheese on my curried chicken hoagie would have congealed into rubbery putty. It probably looked like the stuff makeup artists use in Hollywood to give actors bigger noses or stick-out chins.

“For goodness’ sake, my dear, why don’t you stop moping and get on a bloody plane and go and visit him in New York?” said Clown Mouth, mechanically moving her tongue over her lips from left to right and right to left, like a windscreen wiper in a downpour.

“As if I don’t constantly dream of doing just that,” I said. “Every time a postcard depicting The Empire State Building or a yellow taxi-cab arrives in my mail-box, I have to physically stop myself from jumping on the first flight to New York and picketing George’s stoop,”

“Physically? What do you mean?” asked Clown Mouth.

“Well, I stuff myself with as much junk food as I can eat. The thought of him seeing me ten pounds heavier has so far been enough to persuade me not to go through with it.”

Clown Mouth pulled her lower lip over her upper and held it there, lost in thought.

“What kind of junk food?” she asked, eventually.

“Chicken-fried steak and caramel custard donuts mostly. Not forgetting curried chicken hoagies, every now and then,” I said. I rustled the brown takeout bag. Translucent patches were blossoming on its surface.

“That’s absurd,” said Clown Mouth. “I’ve every confidence he would receive you with open arms and a glad heart.”

“The only thing George receives with an open heart and glad arms is mail,” I said, flatly.

“That’s defeatist of you.”

“I know it is, I just don’t think I’d be very welcome in New York.”

“Tosh.”

“Tosh?”

“Crap.”

“It’s not crap. Things are very up in the air for him right now.”

“Well invite him to visit you here then.”

“I’ve tried that. He says he’ll come one day, but he’s very vague about when.”

“Just call him and tell him you’re coming.”

“He doesn’t have a phone.”

“He lives in Manhattan and doesn’t have a phone? You know what? On second thoughts, just forget about him. He’s being juvenile.”

“I can’t.”

“So tie a pink ribbon around that pretty little head of yours, slap a “Fragile” sign on your ass, and bribe the postman.”

Buttoning up her coat with determined little flicks of her wrists and thrusting her brown paper takeout bag into a bulging leather purse, Clown Mouth announced that she had no more advice to offer on the matter, that she was late for an acupuncture appointment, and that she hoped I would shrug off my “veil of defeatism” soon. Embarrassed, I buried my nose into my paper bag. I sniffed the contents. The cheese was starting to take on a plastic sheen. By the time I looked up, Clown Mouth had rounded the corner out of sight. Her heavy, floral perfume mingled for a while with the smell of frying onions belching out the front of Waldo’s.

The next day I wrote to George, telling him I was coming to New York. I made up some pretext about a business trip, adding that I’d be in town over my birthday and would relish an opportunity to meet. I didn’t hear back from him for a while. So I wrote again, fearing my postcard had gotten lost in the mail. Eventually George wrote back – it felt like weeks later – expressing concerns over the fact that the best Gilbert & Sullivan shows would be over by the time I turned up. I wrote saying that I didn’t care, so long as we could be together for my birthday. In the end, Georgie wrote saying it wouldn’t work out because he was in between apartments and didn’t feel comfortable having me over while he was couch hopping. I wrote saying we could stay in a hotel. He wrote back saying he’d only had bad experiences in New York hotels and would rather leave it at that, if it was all the same to me. It wasn’t. When I received this final postcard I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I called in sick at work, rented a car and drove about an hour out of town to a spa. After a peach blossom facial, full body hot stone massage, and several cups of green tea, I felt considerably better.

For a while, there were so many men in my life that I ceased to care about George's letters; stopped sitting in front of the mailbox like a house-bound cat watching one of those aquarium videos recommended for house-bound pets by animal psychiatrists. I saw quite a bit of Denver as well as a couple of guys from yoga, Aki and Leaf. Then there was Parsifal. Pars was retired but didn’t look it. He had stopped going to a regular job a decade ago, back in his mid-forties, having made a wad of cash in the discount picture frame business down in LA. He owned a houseboat and collected abstract paintings and sculptures by local artists. He called them “emerging”. When his wife was out of town on business, he would invite me over for dinner.

One evening while showing me his collection of Woody Guthrie albums after a meal of sherry-basted quail, Pars announced that he was going to leave his wife. I wasn’t very shocked. Despite carrying a sepia photograph of his wife around in his wallet, he’d say this kind of thing to me every now and again.

“Why?” I asked, getting into the spirit of the game. It’s always fun to be wanted.

“Because she’s not you.”

An unexpected breeze nudged the side of the houseboat, sending the copper kettle on the old-fashioned stove tinging against the row of expensive French knives suspended like tubular bells from the low rosewood ceiling. I wished more than anything that George could see me now, standing there amongst the paintings of voluptuous-lipped women, (Pre-Stalactites, Pars called them) basking in the attention of a man on the verge of turning his back on his 22-year-old marriage.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve never met anyone like you, Iolanthe.”

“Is that so, Parsifal?” I said, easing myself up onto the counter-top next to where Pars was feeding a blue Tupperware container the gloopy, brown contents of a small heavy-based pan.

“Desperately so.”

“We’ve been here before though.” I wrapped my legs around Pars’ waist, relieving him of the Tupperware.

“I know. But it’s the truth.” Pars’ eyes were watery, beseeching. He didn’t seem to realize he was holding one of the expensive French kitchen knives by its blade. I kissed him on the ear.

Just then, Pars’ attorney wife, Paulette, called. This often happened when I was on Pars’ houseboat. It was as if she knew what was going on. I knew he would be on the phone for a while, so I made myself a whiskey sour and went out on deck. Shadowy clouds drifted by a fat, orange moon. I pulled George’s latest postcard from the back pocket of my jeans and sat sipping my drink, reading by moonlight and rocking backwards and forwards in Pars’ rocking-chair with the peeling, green paintjob. The postcard had a picture of a naked, fat man tattooed from head to toe on it. The man was holding a sign in front of his groin that read “East Village NYC.”

Finally settling in to my new digs after what feels like months of squatting on friends’ floors. You should come and visit. Saw a top production of The Mikado two nights ago at The Amato Opera, a few blocks from where I live. Disappointing sets, but some fine performances. Three drag queens from one of the local bars were co-opted to do a special encore of “Three Little Maids” at the end. Sensational.

“If the clouds pass across the moon before I finish my drink, then I’ll got to New York,” I said to myself. I sipped slowly, savoring the stinging sweetness of the whiskey.

The next day I wrote to George, telling him I’d decided to take him up on his invitation. A few days later I got a letter from Georgie saying he’d come out west instead. That was fine by me. I was so excited I took the afternoon off work and went shopping for new clothes. I made reservations at L’Industriel, the well-reviewed new French bistro in town. Then I went to the art museum, to try to figure out what to do about the other dates I’d lined up over the coming weeks with Denver, Pars and the yoga guys, Aki and Leaf. Admiring a luridly decorated teepee in the Native American gallery, I decided that honesty would be the best way forward: I would simply tell them I was in love with someone else and planning to spend the rest of my life with him.

But in the end, Georgie changed his mind about coming. I got a postcard in the mail just a couple of days before his plane was due to land.

Don’t think I’d be much company this weekend. You're better off without me.

Parsifal came to the rescue. If it weren’t for the fact that Pars is the only man I know who wears patent white leather deck shoes with a suit, I wouldn’t have guessed who was hiding behind the fat bouquet of orange gladioli, thrust in my face as I left the office at noon that Friday to practice my Buddha Breaths in peace and get a sandwich.

“Hello, Iolanthe,” said Pars’ salty voice from behind the quivering stems.

Later on that day, Parsifal came and fetched me from work in his Porsche. By the time we were eating dessert, I started feeling like there was more to life than George. By the time we were back on Pars’ deck, drinking champagne and listening to the sound of tinkling masts and flapping sails, George was just a small boat bobbing far out at sea.

When I first considered mailing myself to George, I created a file on my laptop full of Internet news clippings about previous self-mail stories. One of my personal favorites was the tale of the Illinois housewife, Maureen Reilly, who’d couriered herself to her husband’s office in an attempt to catch him in a clinch with his secretary in the summer of 2002. In a state of overexcitement prior to sending herself off, she had written the wrong zip code on the address label. Four days later, having exhausted her supply of food and water, she broke out of her container to find out why she was still feeling the vibrations of the road underneath her, instead of the warm smoothness of her husband’s mahogany desk. Later, having alerted the truck driver, it turned out she was at a gas station just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Another good one was about Luis Renaldo, a 16-year-old gang member from East L.A. on probation from Juvenile Hall for shoplifting, who was stuffed in a wooden crate by fellow gang members and sent to the leader of a rival gang in a sort of bizarre initiation rite. The idea was for Renaldo to burst out of the crate upon arrival and pop the gang leader in between the eyes with a handgun. But the metal detector outside the front gate of Renaldo’s high school went off as his friends were bundling the crate out to the post office during recess. Apparently, the day Renaldo was caught was the first day in a month that he had been seen in school.

Renaldo and Reilly were lucky. Oftentimes, people die in transit. I have a subfolder for these folks on my hard drive. You have to be pretty determined to do this kind of thing. Some people confuse determination with stupidity, like the used car salesman from Florida – I forget his name – that froze to death in a cargo hold in midwinter Missouri. The paramedics found him dressed in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, looking like he’d been pressed out of sheet steel at an auto factory. Others are just plain unlucky. I’d rather not go into them. Poor unfortunates. They make me sad.

The media never report success stories. For a while, reading the contents of the catalogue of disasters on my computer made me reconsider the project. But then I realized that happy endings never make the headlines. These last few days, whilst kicking up leaves in the East River Park waiting for George to come back from work, I’ve been thinking about others out there like me – the ones who made it to their destinations intact, without appearing in the Oddly Enough section of the newswires, snapped by the paparazzi in a state of unconsciousness or embarrassment. When I’ve settled down here a bit – it all feels so new— and George starts talking to me again, I might see if I can locate one or two of them.

San Francisco, CA

May, 2005