The letter (Jan. 10, 1984)

Jan. 10,1984

I never actually saw the letter Jimmy claimed he got from Ginger; I only heard about it through Frank, the usual Garley Gang gossip who claimed to have had a glimpse at it, and from that understood just why Jimmy got so upset.

Jimmy never spoke of it; he did not knowledge the letter’s existence and would not even respond when I asked if what Frank told me was true, me repeating what Frank said the letter said.

Even in jotting the contents of the letter here, I’m not sure if it is accurate, or real, it is only a recollection of something Frank glimpsed, and I write it here in an effort to make sense of why Jimmy is back living with me in Passaic, after supposedly being so happy living up in Towaco in the attic of Ginger’s mother’s house.

“I don't mean to break the news to you like this,” the letter supposedly said. “But I lack courage to tell you this to your face. I've always been a coward around you. That's part of the problem. If I was stronger in the past, I wouldn't have to hurt you now. I've always mistaken our relationship for something it never was, and you for something you could never be.”

The letter made reference to when Jimmy first met Ginger at a picnic in 1970 when Jimmy stole her from Alf, who had brought her to the picnic in the first place.

“You didn't steal me so much as my convincing you to do it,” the letter said. “Had you not been around, someone else would have served my purpose.”

Ginger, according to Frank’s recollection, said the trouble between Jimmy and Ginger started when they moved in together after, as the letter put it, “After we presumed, we'd fallen in love.”

“I couldn't justify our living together in what my mother would have called ‘sin.’ I spent most of the time in a panic, worrying whether my mother would find out. I couldn't understand how our pure love could co-exist with deceit. Which is why you found my note on the dresser, confessing all to my mother.  I didn't mean to hurt you then either or myself.”

Ginger went to California to try and heal, wrongly assuming distance would allow Jimmy to forget her.

“I never imagined you would come west to get me or thought I would be so thrilled” she wrote. “Anyone who came 3,000 miles to my rescue, must love me. So, I fell in love with you again. I even moved back in with you, despite my mother's protests.  I thought things would work out between us and was so disappointed when they did not. I should have known better. We were always so different.”

The letter claim Jimmy didn’t believe in anything.

“Permanence is a chain you rattle and shake at me, then find some way to escape,” she said. “Your idea of a relationship is living on the cuff, thinking about and doing things on the spur of the moment. No plan. No commitment.”

Ginger said she wanted to build something and had dreams of some great future, of marriage and children.

“But every time I looked at you, I saw nothing out of which I could shape a husband, old the fragments of a child who'd refused to grow up,” she said. “When I moved out of our Pine Street apartment in Montclair, I refused to look back. I just wanted to put distance between, distance you couldn't navigate in your attempt to rescue me. I went out and met new people. I started a new job. I came and went pretending you never existed    so you might never again lure me back with your offers of love.”

She said she knew leaving the second time hurt Jimmy more even than the first time.

“Rumors of your pain reached me through mutual friends. Sometimes, I heard so much of you I wanted to shut myself away. For a third time, I returned to you, drawn not by love, but pity over your pain. I thought it would be easier living with you than with rumors of your hurt,” she wrote.

This time they moved into her mother’s house, making no secret of the bed we shared.

“Here, I discovered my addiction to you. The infection went so deep I had to rid myself of you or die as an individual, succumbing finally to your whims, your sense of time, and your purposelessness,” she wrote “But I learned from my previous two attempts that distance and change of habit did not work, though I thought doing both at once might. So, without a word I ran away, leaving instructions with my mother to say nothing of where I’d gone.”

She said she enrolled in school to become a chiropractor and started whole new friendships that had nothing to do with Jimmy or anybody in the Garley Gang.

“I went to places I knew you would not go and saw people I knew you would never see. I met other men, and eventually, one I intended to marry, one who could dream like I dreamed, and I could envision being the father of my children,” she said. “ And yet, while I had moved on, you remained, one more fixture in my mother’s house, living under my mother’s roof, caring for her garden and her repairs as if she had hired you, as if she was your mother not mine.”

This appalled her future husband. He did not understand how Jimmy could live there without Ginger’s permission, and he feared that she kept Jimmy around with some idea of a future reunion.

“I could not admit even a residual affection, or all was lost,” she wrote. “Not just with my future husband, but inside myself. So I write this letter, asking you to leave, to move out of that house and out of my life, to prove to him that I have no future plans with you, to prove to myself that once and for all I have overcome my addiction to you.”