White Space by Robin Lippincott

             “You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.”

                                    —Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

This is a letter to a dead man:

Dear G,

Back then, all those years ago when we were young and in some semblance of a relationship (my first), or were at the very least best friends, you inscribed this in a book you gave me, Picasso’s collection of poems, Hunk of Skin, the poet Diane Wakoski: 

For a man who loves me more than he should, intemperance being something a poet cannot afford

I wasn’t familiar with the Wakoski poem, or how to find it; I didn’t even know the title, and there was no internet back then. But current research has been enlightening. What Wakoski actually wrote, dedicating her poem entitled “Love Letter Postmarked Beethoven,” was this:

for the man I love more than I should, intemperance being something a poet cannot afford

Of course, your inscription makes perfect sense to me now, since you gave me the book after I had told you that I was in love with you. Further confusing matters, however, after the inscription and before signing your name, you wrote: “Love of my life.” But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

We were a pair for three or four years back then, but really for much longer. There was much Sturm und Drang (we were young), and once (just once) we had sex, probably only because we were drunk at the time.

After several decades of silence between us, I found you online, sent an email, and you responded: “You have been a huge—immeasurable—piece of my life.” As we were now living within a two-hour drive of one another, I had thought, hoped, that we would see each other again. 

But then you died, much younger than is right.

It doesn’t seem right to include a photograph of you here, out of deference to your wife, since the only recent picture of you available to me is on the funeral home’s website. But what I can do is try to describe you: Lanky. Leonine, with a mane of long, curly—and what most people call red but is really, or at least in your case was, much closer to orange—hair and beard. And you had the pale, easily flushed skin typical of the fair-haired, too.

The grief I feel now, perhaps appropriately, is intemperate. 

What to do? How to live?

Dear G.

We first met through an organization of young Christians, or rather through mutual friends who were in said organization, since neither of us were Christian; both of us struggled with faith, with having it. Providing ballast for our lack of certitude, we quoted E. M. Forster, who said, I do not believe in Belief.

I was also struggling with being gay, had not yet come out; the climate then was not exactly conducive, especially in the Deep South, where more than once you had witnessed my being verbally harassed, and where Anita Bryant’s anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign dominated the airwaves. Many states still had laws against homosexuality then, and the federal government continued to discriminate against homosexuals in employment and security clearances. You were not homosexual, you said, and perhaps this was true, but we loved each other, were in an intense platonic relationship—until we weren’t. 

What did we share? Everything, or so it seems to me now, looking back. I knew no one else there, then—Central Florida in the mid-1970s—who had the same out-of-the-mainstream tastes and passions: in literature, including a love of/admiration for so many of the same writers (although you liked Anaïs Nin and I, decidedly, did not); music—jazz, folk (especially singer-songwriters), blues, classical; also, film, art, dance, feminism, leftist politics, and on and on. We drank wine—Riojas, rosés, Rieslings, and stayed up past midnight talking, or reading aloud to each other, often by candlelight, or watching classic black-and-white films on late night TV. We ate strawberries with cream, stuffed grape leaves, and Calimyrna figs, drank our Café Bustelo black and strong, and once, with your British father, in those delicate, eggshell blue days after he had tried to kill himself, he prepared a breakfast of kippers with toast and orange marmalade for the three of us and we sat outside in the sun. I remember sensing that he was eyeing me, that my feelings for you were obvious to him, that he disapproved, and that I didn’t want to upset him. Alone together and wearing caftans (yours bought, mine, made of muslin, hand-sewn by my sister), we smoked grass or hand-rolled cigarettes and strolled the humid late night/early morning streets of your urban neighborhood, Spanish moss dripping from the trees, glittering in the streetlights, talking, always talking….

But it was one exquisite spring night when I was living in Tallahassee and you were visiting—a white-petaled dogwood tree glowing out my bedroom window, the fragrance of lilac blossoms wafting in, after we had seen the film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice—that I told you I was in love with you. (Also in the theater that night was the flirtatious stranger who would rape me six months later, and who I would proceed to date, off and on, for the next two years: such was my self-esteem at the time). You didn’t respond well to my declaration of love, told me you weren’t homosexual. Then you shut down, went silent. I was devastated. 

(It must have been the night before that we drove to the lighthouse in St. Marks and scrambled around on the rocks, inhaling the salty air and the scent of wild oleander as the wind blew and the waves crashed and the light periodically swept around, enveloping and illuminating us but much more often leaving us in pitch darkness, a darkness that was like the sense of unknown I felt about our love and that prompted my declaration the following night).

Much later, and I think this was actually the last time we saw each other—ever, you admitted that until the moment when I professed my love, it had seemed to you, too, that we were heading toward a sexual relationship. But my naming it had scared you off. Thus began the first of our fallings out.

Once during that time of semi-estrangement, I drove for four hours in the middle of the night only to find you not at home in your apartment when I arrived. Nor were you home when I tried again the following night.

Before long, you moved away, though not far, and so we still saw each other occasionally, and talked on the phone. During one call you casually mentioned wanting to introduce me to your fiancée, a wedding that never happened. We also wrote letters; you told me you were working with or for the United Farm Workers. Then I moved away (far, because I’d lost all hope that we would ever be together, and because my self-esteem had improved), but we continued to correspond for several years—until we didn’t. I can’t say exactly why we stopped writing letters to each other, although it may have been and probably was because of my new partner’s jealousy of the obvious deep bond between us. All told, our relationship, or some semblance of it, lasted approximately ten years. But the ensuing decades of silence between us are also very much a part of the story, like the white space in a novel, short story, or painting: transitional. In film, the technique is often a fade-out. 

(Despite my epigraph, the direct address and syntax of which are what led me into this letter and thus feel inextricable from it, ours is actually not the only real story to happen in my life. Another very real story is that of the man with whom I have been happily living for the past seven years; the man with whom I was first involved, briefly, in 1986, and then lost touch with for the next three decades.)

In the film version of E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End, the transition (death) of Mrs. Wilcox (played by that most poetic of actors, Vanessa Redgrave) is signaled by Richard Robbins’ simple piano and woodwind composition, “Spring Landscape,” as the camera hovers over and moves across fields of flowers, gradually flowing on to external scenes of the late Mrs. Wilcox’s titular homestead. (I’m remembering now how, when you met Gloria Steinem and told her of your/our love of D. H. Lawrence and his (admittedly debatable) reverence for women, she mentioned Forster outdoing Lawrence via the matriarchy he portrays at the conclusion of Howards End). 

Dear G, 

What do I do now that our relationship will be forever unresolved, since we never got to experience what, if anything, was on the other side of those decades of silence between us, that white space?

One thing I can do is write this letter to you. I wish I could find the letters that you wrote to me back then; I kept them for a long time. But I’ve moved so often over the years that I’m afraid they’re long gone.

I will always have your recent email: “You have been a huge—immeasurable—piece of my life.”

And I also still have three books you gave me: Picasso’s aforementioned volume of poetry, a collection of Doris Lessing’s essays, A Small Personal Voice, and Kate Millett’s autobiographical tome, Flying, which we loved, and in which we encountered these lines by Sappho, which would become, at least for me, something of a mantra: 

As for me—listen well—my delight is the exquisite; yes, for me glitter and sunlight and love are one society.

Dear G, it does describe our time together back then, doesn’t it?

˜

Robin Lippincott is the author of Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell and five other books. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in “The Paris Review,” “American Short Fiction,” “Fence,” and many other journals. He teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing.

6 November 2025