True Julie Stories (part 3 of 5)
The last I’d spoken to Julie was in a phone conversation a few months after her slow-motion car crash. She’d been increasingly irritated with me ever since, and projected such quantities of anger and sadness that I felt I had no choice but to wipe the cowardly smirk off my face and bow out. She’d said “Why do you always have to talk like that? Like something sexual might happen between us, but nothing more? Do you know what kind of effect you have on me? Do you know how many CDs I’ve bought just because you mentioned them? I don’t even like half of them!” My cheeks froze and hung in a smile, and I never called her again.
Three or four years passed before we came in touch again. It happened a couple of weeks before I’d left for Los Angeles that I came across her writing on the internet. I had once posted my short stories on an Israeli literature portal that eventually ballooned into an ugly beast, an inviting canvas for sixteen-year-olds who meddled in angst post-modernism by writing stories that invariably rotated around suicide and an inconsequential, sarcastic conversation with a less-than-overwhelming god character. I’d stripped my profile of all writing and had forgotten about it. As I was about to leave my home in Israel for the first time as an adult I had a strange need to put my things in order; leave nothing behind that I wasn’t proud of. I entered the site for one last sweep to confirm it didn’t accidentally contain any of my writing. I found that in my absence I had been listed as a favorite author of a handful of friends and one woman I’d never heard of, by the name of Gila.
I entered her profile. It read “Gila was born in 1980. Gila is not her real name. Not at all.” My suspicion was validated by reading her stories; they bore a striking resemblance to my own and yet were written in that archaic school-teacher Hebrew that Julie had always prided herself upon. Everything that was right about her stories was equally wrong. I couldn’t resist an anonymous comment, and I couldn’t resist intentionally jeopardizing my anonymity. I received an email from her no more than an hour later, which marked the beginning of a densely worded correspondence.
I hurriedly lied to her in my second letter and wrote that I was already abroad, chasing my dreams in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to hear her voice over the phone again, but didn’t mind the addictive quality of making her my new diary. Two weeks later the lie turned to truth; Oren and I had had a rough landing straight into my grandmother’s dank house on Fairfax, where we both huddled into ourselves. I looked forward to Julie’s letters; writing to her had become a daily reminder of who I was.
Our correspondence quickly breached more personal grounds than anything we’d ever allowed ourselves in our past, especially on her part. I’d opened with a lie and continued with carefully measured out portions of the truth. She embraced the bearing of every intimate detail of herself, which at the time meant constant lamenting over her belated virginity. At the age of twenty two, she was beginning to feel like a freak.
Oren and I spent our time in search of jobs and an apartment. We could do very little from the confines of my grandmother’s house, and would punctuate our days with a walk to the nearest public library, that offered free internet service in half-hour slots. It was on any one of those old computers that I read Julie’s letters, until we found the library roped off one day and read that it was going to be under construction for the next six weeks.
I could not afford being cut off from the world or from Julie for six weeks. I decided to spend some money I did not yet have and buy myself my first laptop.
I brought it back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Saturday in mid April and hooked it up to the internet using her telephone line. My grandmother, generations removed from ever understanding how crucial the internet lifeline was to us, hovered around me with a frown heavier than usual. She stood right behind me and stared at my screen along with me as I read Julie’s latest email. It opened with the words “There’s no better way of saying it. I fucked a man.” Fortunately, my grandmother, fluent in Polish, Yiddish and English, couldn’t read one word of Hebrew.
Over the course of years I’d kept returning to Julie in moments of horny weakness. I’d put in time and shame and now, half an earth away, I was reaping my unexpected reward. I’d earned this letter.
Three or four years passed before we came in touch again. It happened a couple of weeks before I’d left for Los Angeles that I came across her writing on the internet. I had once posted my short stories on an Israeli literature portal that eventually ballooned into an ugly beast, an inviting canvas for sixteen-year-olds who meddled in angst post-modernism by writing stories that invariably rotated around suicide and an inconsequential, sarcastic conversation with a less-than-overwhelming god character. I’d stripped my profile of all writing and had forgotten about it. As I was about to leave my home in Israel for the first time as an adult I had a strange need to put my things in order; leave nothing behind that I wasn’t proud of. I entered the site for one last sweep to confirm it didn’t accidentally contain any of my writing. I found that in my absence I had been listed as a favorite author of a handful of friends and one woman I’d never heard of, by the name of Gila.
I entered her profile. It read “Gila was born in 1980. Gila is not her real name. Not at all.” My suspicion was validated by reading her stories; they bore a striking resemblance to my own and yet were written in that archaic school-teacher Hebrew that Julie had always prided herself upon. Everything that was right about her stories was equally wrong. I couldn’t resist an anonymous comment, and I couldn’t resist intentionally jeopardizing my anonymity. I received an email from her no more than an hour later, which marked the beginning of a densely worded correspondence.
I hurriedly lied to her in my second letter and wrote that I was already abroad, chasing my dreams in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to hear her voice over the phone again, but didn’t mind the addictive quality of making her my new diary. Two weeks later the lie turned to truth; Oren and I had had a rough landing straight into my grandmother’s dank house on Fairfax, where we both huddled into ourselves. I looked forward to Julie’s letters; writing to her had become a daily reminder of who I was.
Our correspondence quickly breached more personal grounds than anything we’d ever allowed ourselves in our past, especially on her part. I’d opened with a lie and continued with carefully measured out portions of the truth. She embraced the bearing of every intimate detail of herself, which at the time meant constant lamenting over her belated virginity. At the age of twenty two, she was beginning to feel like a freak.
Oren and I spent our time in search of jobs and an apartment. We could do very little from the confines of my grandmother’s house, and would punctuate our days with a walk to the nearest public library, that offered free internet service in half-hour slots. It was on any one of those old computers that I read Julie’s letters, until we found the library roped off one day and read that it was going to be under construction for the next six weeks.
I could not afford being cut off from the world or from Julie for six weeks. I decided to spend some money I did not yet have and buy myself my first laptop.
I brought it back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Saturday in mid April and hooked it up to the internet using her telephone line. My grandmother, generations removed from ever understanding how crucial the internet lifeline was to us, hovered around me with a frown heavier than usual. She stood right behind me and stared at my screen along with me as I read Julie’s latest email. It opened with the words “There’s no better way of saying it. I fucked a man.” Fortunately, my grandmother, fluent in Polish, Yiddish and English, couldn’t read one word of Hebrew.
Over the course of years I’d kept returning to Julie in moments of horny weakness. I’d put in time and shame and now, half an earth away, I was reaping my unexpected reward. I’d earned this letter.
posted by True @ 7:37 PM
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