The Love Letter I Ghostwrote for My Rival
He paid me to win her, and every word cost me double.
Tomas paid me forty dollars to write the letter that took Mariel away from me, and I counted the money before I said yes. I want to start there, with the counting, because everything that came after gets softened in the retelling and the counting does not soften. Two twenties on a dorm room desk, and me, nineteen years old, nodding like a man agreeing to carry his own coffin.
Here is what Tomas knew: that I could write, that I was broke, and that Mariel from his organic chemistry section liked letters, real ones, paper ones, because she'd said so at a party while he stood next to her holding a cup and nodding. Here is what Tomas did not know: that I had been half in love with Mariel since September, when she argued with a visiting poet during the Q&A and won, and that the notebook in my desk drawer contained eleven drafts of a letter I had never had the spine to send.
So when he said, you're good with words, help me out, I'll pay you, I had a clean exit available. I could have said no... I could have said, actually, funny thing. Instead I heard myself say, what do you want it to sound like, and he said the sentence I have been turning over for twenty years: I don't care what it sounds like. I just want it to work.
I told myself a story that night, the kind of story cowards keep in stock. I told myself I was being practical. Mariel didn't know I existed in the romantic sense, Tomas was tall and rowed things and laughed easily, the outcome was already decided, and I was just billing for the inevitable. Forty dollars was groceries. Longing, I had in surplus.
I wrote the first letter in one sitting, and I am ashamed of how little it hurt, because I didn't write it as Tomas. I wrote it as me with his name at the bottom. I put in the visiting poet, the argument she won, the way she'd said the word wrong on purpose to make her point land harder. I put in the thing I'd noticed in the library, that she read with a pencil but almost never used it, like a fisherman who mostly lets them go. Fifty minutes, one draft, no crossings-out. The eleven drafts in my drawer had failed because I was trying to sound impressive. Signing another man's name freed me to just sound true.
It worked. Of course it worked.
You can disguise your handwriting. You cannot disguise your wanting.
She wrote back. Tomas brought me her reply like a retriever, delighted, uncomprehending, and asked me what it meant that she'd quoted Rilke at him. I sat on my bed reading her handwriting, this letter meant for the man I was pretending to be, and I felt the specific vertigo of receiving mail addressed to your own soul at somebody else's house.
What it means, I told him, is you write back tonight. And he grinned and got out his wallet.
The Correspondence
It went on for one entire semester. Eleven letters. I know it was eleven because I kept carbon copies, actual carbon paper stolen from the department office, which tells you everything about what I understood and refused to understand. You don't keep copies of a business transaction.
You keep copies of your life.
The logistics were grubby in the way all secrets are grubby. Tomas would report their dates to me like a scout, and I'd mine the reports for detail. She ordered soup and didn't finish it. She has a brother she doesn't mention twice. She laughed at the movie in the wrong places, which, when he said it, made me put my pen down for a second, because I knew exactly what those wrong places were.
They were the right places... They were where I would have laughed.
The letters got better and the dates, by his account, stayed fine. Fine... He was happy with fine.
And somewhere in there the transaction inverted without either of us noticing: he stopped paying me and I kept writing.
If you had asked, I'd have said we were friends now, it felt weird to charge. The truth is you cannot invoice someone for your own love letters. There is no line item for that.
The eleventh letter was the one that ended it. She had written, in her tenth, one line that was clearly a test, though Tomas couldn't see the tripwire: sometimes your letters feel like they were written by someone watching us from a third chair. And instead of retreating, I did the thing I'd been doing all semester, only further. I answered honestly from inside the lie. I wrote that everyone in love is watching from a third chair, hoping to be invited to their own life. I wrote it and I knew it was the best sentence I'd ever made and I knew whose sentence it was, and I signed his name anyway, and that, right there, is the exact size and shape of my regret.
Not the scheme. The signature.
The Third Chair
They broke up in April, quietly, no scandal. She told him, he reported to me with genuine bafflement, that she felt like she'd been dating a translation. He didn't understand the word choice... I understood it so completely I had to sit down.
I never told her.
That's the part people expect the story to fix, and I have to disappoint them every time. There was no rain-soaked confession, no letter twelve. I saw her at graduation across a sea of folding chairs, and she smiled at me the way you smile at someone from your year whose name you'd need a second to retrieve, and I smiled back, a man she had corresponded with all winter, a man she had never met.
For years I carried it as a story about deception, and I filed the loneliness of it under bad luck. It took me until my thirties, and a lot of reading in the general vicinity of loneliness, to file it correctly. Tomas didn't take Mariel from me. Tomas asked a coward to speak, and the coward would only do it wearing a mask, and the mask is what she fell for and the mask is what she left. Every word I wrote her was true. The signature was the only lie, and it was the only part she was actually given to keep.
Two things happened later that I set here side by side without comment, because they belong together. The first: I heard from a mutual friend, fifteen years on, that Mariel keeps old letters in a fireproof box, and that she once said the best ones were from a college boyfriend, and that she'd figured out long ago he never wrote them, and that she kept them anyway, because whoever did write them had meant them. The second: last spring I finally posted the twelfth letter, the never-sent one, unsigned but under my own account this time, on a community wall for poets, where strangers put their unsendable things. I don't know if she has ever seen it... I've stopped needing her to. It turns out the person who most needed forgiving was reachable at my own address the whole time.
The carbon copies are still in a folder in my desk, ghost-gray, the ink of a nineteen-year-old pressing too hard. Every few years I take them out and read the boy who wrote them, so in love and so sure that love was something you could deliver to another man's door, like flowers, like a verdict. Forty dollars. I counted it. Some debts you spend the rest of your life writing your way out of, one true signature at a time.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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