Dear Northern European, 25, of blue eyes, blond hair, very attractive, and intelligent:

I was very much taken with your ad in The Houston Press, March 19-25. Since I like tennis {squash too}, arts {literary, film, photographic}, travel {South Seas}, books {poetry, fiction, non-fiction}, I decided to send the requested photo. Of what you did not specify, so I chose one of my favorites, a picture of several elephants in India charging a depot of rum casks, which only the day before they had raided with impunity. This time armed guards await their charge. Since I have not sent a photograph of myself you cannot help but think I do not pass muster on the “very handsome” requirement, but if I were to assure you, with or without photographic proof, that I am in fact quite not handsome, you might not help but think that I was vain, and that would lead to a misunderstanding before we even had the occasion to meet. To be frank, I don’t have a picture of myself that I would send through the mail, but because I found your ad so appealing, I thought I’d write anyway, and in the meanwhile have a picture taken and send it soon.

My livelihood is nuclear physics {college}, my avocation writing {a book forthcoming, Black Holes, articles in Scientific American, Journal of Physics, etc.} and I think it would be great good fun if you would acknowledge this letter with a photo of your own—not of yourself, unless you’d like—but of a favorite building perhaps, a Polaroid of your tennis racket, a postcard from a museum, or a picture of a place you’ve traveled to and loved and want to return to someday.

Awaiting your reply ...

Dear Northern European, of blue eyes, blond, intelligent, and very attractive:

Here is the photograph you requested. Of what part of my person you did not specify, but I assume you wanted a photograph of my face—not my elbow, or backside—so here are two slightly out-of-focus, photobooth snapshots, which at the Galleria Mall drop out of the machine in a dandy, though moist, strip, next to the skating rink, west side, ground floor. Two bucks for four poses. What you now possess are the most passable of two attempts. In the others I’m smiling outright but I thought I looked a bit ridiculous (smiling at whom?), so I apologize in advance if these, well, look too serious. I have a splendid sense of humor, more than enough to laugh at myself just now when I realized, not for the first time since I decided to answer your ad, that I am writing to a woman I have never met, wanting one moment to explain that though my hairline is cropped in these shopping mall snapshots no I am not bald and the next wanting to convey my magnanimity and genius and good sense with a clever turn of phrase, talking to this stranger through an ad in a free arts and entertainment rag and a post office box across a distance that could be two blocks or forty miles, all with an anticipation that she will read this and be amused and intrigued that I, among others, responded. I imagine you too sifting through these letters alone or with friends, at turns amazed, confused, interested, frightened, as often as not sent into fits of hysterical laughter … Who does this guy think he is … look at this one.

I am a “WM,” as you can see, 43 years old, and very much divorced.

Please write.

Sincerely ...

Dear blue-eyed Northern European:

The postal service is not, as far as I know, on strike, and not receiving a response, but expecting one nonetheless, I decided to write again. I saw your ad again in this week’s Houston Press (third consecutive week) and wonder why you take so long to answer your letters. Have you been ill? If so, I hope you are feeling better now. A dreadful bug has been going around—high fever, vomiting, swollen joints, diarrhea—and yesterday close to half my students (58) were absent from my introductory lecture on nuclear fusion. Did you know the sun is a giant reactor? Enclosed is a picture of the atomic mushroom, the first detonation of a thermonuclear bomb, “The Mike,” on November 1, 1952, at Eniwetok in the Marshal Islands, using nuclear fission, of course. I’d like to travel there someday and seek out the crater it left, half a mile deep and two miles wide.

May I recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb?

Sincerely ...

Dear blue-eyed blond Northern European:

Are you chaste? Are you fair? Is your name Astarte? Are you a Dane? Is your name Diana? Shall I celebrate the moon goddess feast with cider, a roasted goat spitted on hazel branches and apples hanging from a bough?

Dear blond blue-eyes of the North:

I had a dream last night. You wore pelts and leather thongs and carried a javelin carved from blackened oak. The world had ended in blistering winds; darkness fell over the land; we lived in a cave, hoarding fruit and water, and made love in the deep night beneath a moon shrouded in ash. In the northern cold a sword of fire opened the sky and we watched the whorl of the Milky Way.

Dear Northern European:

Your ad appeared again his week. How goes it? I suspect you have not yet gotten back from the developers the picture(s) you plan on sending. With the collapse of communism we have only deranged sentries at nuclear silos to fear. Have you seen Dr. Strangelove? An improbable scenario, but the film had a profound effect on me, an impressionable teen of the ripening Sixties. Do you know the real reason Truman dropped Fat Man on Hiroshima? The scientists on the Manhattan project who developed the atomic bomb wanted to see how much havoc their beautiful invention would wreak. Enclosed is a photograph of the Nagasaki hypocenter. Do you like rum? I do, lately, ice-cold, up.

Dear Northern European, of blue eyes, blond, and most attractive:

Doubtless you are surprised to receive this letter at your home address. How did I get it? Student hackers, the Internet. No one is safe anymore. You are indeed very attractive, and blond, with turquoise, aquamarine, breathtaking South Sea blue eyes (I stood next to you in produce while you weighed in your hand various heads of lettuce, and caught you looking at me in the reflecting mirrors above the vegetables, with a shade of annoyance, I thought; I stood too close?), though I cannot yet vouch for your intelligence; given your listlessness as a pen pal, one wonders if, like many of my students, you are able even to read. I have taken my own photographs of you, in fact. Do you mind?

Sincerely ...

Dear European:

With the bomb we brought the sun to the earth. We all steal fire, do we not? We imagine we’re safe—we have to, don’t we?—but do you know there is madness on this land? The cold war is long over but soon we will have warm wars and then very hot wars. Eventually even the sun will explode, devouring the planets it gave birth to.


Dear Northern European, of blue eyes, blond, intelligent, and very attractive:

Today in my office I was visited by a Harris County Sheriff, who informed me that an injunction against my person had been placed by the white goddess. I am not allowed to come within fifty feet of your most attractive blondness, under threat of confiscation of computer files and hard drives. No matter. Your name is Irene, Er-e-nay in north Europa, but here in Texas, Ah-rene.

Dear Ahrene:

I am the sound of the sea. I am a battle-waging spear. Who makes clear the ruggedness of the mountains. Who but myself knows where the sun sets? Who foretells the ages of stone? I am a griffin on a cliff, a fire of the sun. I am a wild oar in water, a winnowing fan ashore. On whom do the willows sigh? Hazel, yew, holly, eucalyptus. Willow wand, apple tree. I am a wide flood on a plain, a wind on the deep waters, the threatening noise of the sea. Who but I knows the secret of the unhewn oak?

Dear Irene:

As a child I was verbally abused, mostly by afternoon television. Poor Mother was an addict. As the World Turns. Guiding Light. Queen for a Day. Thank God she died before the invention of talk shows. However, I did not. Do you know how difficult it is for me to accept rejection? I had a calculus professor in college whose wife divorced him; soon he took to wearing a hardhat in class and out, day and night; the sky was falling. Many reactions to rejection are possible: sorrow; a cruise with Rush Limbaugh or John Bradshaw, depending on one’s temperament; masturbation; travel; binge drinking; prayer; hospitalization. What will I opt for? Wearing a hardhat feels a bit extreme.

Enclosed are some choice telephotos of you riding your roller blades in Memorial Park. I trust the gentleman who accompanied you is not an unhappy acquaintance made through the same ad to which I responded so sincerely? I thought not.

Dear Barbarian of the Northland:

Enclosed are some photographs of your beau entering and exiting an adult book store. He is either a pervert or driven to despair by your coy refusals. Perhaps you sent him on an errand into that wilderness to rent a pornographic movie, or purchase a g-string and feather boa for your new employ. In Houston there are scores of men’s clubs where young women are handsomely compensated by businessmen for a naked terpsichore. I went to one, once. For weeks afterward every time I saw a young woman, I wanted to ask her, Are you a topless dancer? Thousands upon thousands in Houston, the first syllables uttered from the moon. College girls. Middle-class. Clean, nice girls who need money for school or a BMW. Young women everywhere in Houston, the Eagle has landed, many of them topless dancers, who work as “showgirls” in what are known as titty bars, or titty joints. One day we’ll colonize Neptune, Io, Venus, Pluto, each with women, some of them lap dancers. Which ones are, which ones are not? Do breast implants weigh much? Thousands of jell packs under thousands of lights making tens of thousands for thousands of girls in Houston. Are you a topless dancer? Where do you work? I’d like to buy a lap dance. Can you explain your boyfriend entering and exiting an adult book store? Twenty-five is not yet over the hill for table dancing. Not by a long shot.

Dear N.E.:

I write today—I wrote yesterday—knowing you would not receive the first epistle by the time I penned the second.

Given the erotomania of America—politicians, preachers, no one is exempt—do you think it’s possible that a bomb pack, a Minuteman, an ICBM, might spontaneously explode from the subtle vibrations of satellite signals? MTV alone might start a firestorm.

In my garage I am building a gift for you, a sacrifice. Rum drunk for two weeks. Classes cancelled. I call it Irene. She the daughter of Themis, a Titaness who by some accounts gave birth to Prometheus. Themis, mother of the Horae, who shower the earth with life-giving rain. Thallo, flower-bearer; Carpo, bearer of fruit. Eunomia, goddess of order. Dice, goddess of justice. And Irene, Goddess of Peace. One of Aphrodite’s minions, who adorns her hair with passion flowers, water lilies, snapdragons. Sisters to the Fates, the inevitable fates. Irene: goddess of peace. Peacekeeper.