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Jekyll and Hyde
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Jekyll and Hyde I have been sorting through too many photographs. I unearth snapshots from the horse-packing trip the kids and I took in Wyoming with my sister Ellen, the year after I left Stu. David is a pudgy twelve-year-old; Eli a cute, short, nine. Two years later, we visited the Thompsons, who were living in Japan. David and Eli stand under a black umbrella in the Hiroshima Peace Park, beside mounds of origami cranes. David has stretched out; he towers over Eli, who still seems very young. A ski trip with Maggie Thompson and her kids in northern Wisconsin; another, the next year, in Utah. Eli has lost his little-boy cuteness: he sights down a cue to line up a pool shot, and he looks very cool. The house changes. David and Eli stand in the backyard, beside the old, falling-down porch. Long timbers prop the porch roof during the construction project. David graduates: my father and Charlotte, AA, my sisters, David and Eli, eat dinner on the new, big porch. David disappears from the photos; shows up again in Bolivia. At nineteen thousand feet, David, Eli, and David’s high-school girlfriend stand outside the crude stone entrance to a mine. I find Eli’s concert pictures: he stands stiff, a middle-schooler in a white shirt and tie, holding his trombone; he sits in the back row of the Youth Symphony, playing at East Towne Mall; he’s with the Highland Brass Trio, wearing his tux, playing a graduation concert in a university recital hall. The pictures telescope a decade, shrink it into the few moments it has been. I send e-mail to Rachel, my friend for more than three 208 n decades: I have lost too much in the past year, the boys, Helen, my youth. She e-mails back: I think we get to deal with loss from now on, even more than before. n Tuesday night, July 15, 1986 Stu came home from Helen’s about six-fifteen this morning. At seven I smelled coffee brewing. When I went downstairs after taking a shower and getting dressed, Stu asked,“Do you want breakfast?” and whipped up a couple of scrambled eggs. He was really in an extraordinarily accommodating mood. I said I was confused. He said that he wanted to talk this evening. I went to work and began to feel the tension mount.The anxiety. What was Stu going to drop on me today? I worked for six hours straight on a grant proposal, with time out for a long phone conversation with Helen, who said she’d read the long letter listing the conditions under which I’d agree to stay with Stu. She’d decided I didn’t love him.“You might as well admit it and stop confusing him.” Well, she wasn’t quite as hard on me as that, but she did say I had been giving Stu two messages:a message to stay and a message that was very uncompromising and made things very difficult for him. She described my letter as “harsh.” Talking with Helen was when the anxiety started to mount. She said that she hadn’t seen Stu this morning, but she was quite sure that last night he had been resigned to the fact that I was going to leave. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t freaking out. With great good fortune this occurred on aTuesday, and so I went to see Paul Bergeson at three. He’s such a fantastic guy. I talked about why I was confused and about finding evidence yesterday that David had taken a match to an ottoman in the lake room. And then I finally asked him if he would read the letter I’d written to Stu and give me his reaction. And his reaction was that it was a very clear, very cogent document. “A very political document,” he said. He used the king analogy again and Jekyll and Hyde 209 [3.236.145.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:39 GMT) said he thought the letter was an attempt to redress grievances.He found my demands for economic equality reasonable. But, “You’re asking the king for equality,” he pointed out. I told him—as I had told Helen—that I think I have two kinds of responses to Stu because I am responding to two different people, or two different parts of one...