Page 8 of P.S. It’s Always Been You
A collection of love letters can be quite a coup for an auction house. One of our competitors recently auctioned off some from President John F. Kennedy; another sold epistles written aboard the Titanic; yet another peddled a gorgeous, plaintive note from a rock star, the paper bursting with emotion-laden lines like Say you’ll be mine, say you love me madly all through the long and lonely nights, and put me out of this abject misery, this all-consuming pain. The missing is too much. It’s making it hard to write, to think, to eat. Come to me again, and I will give up everything for you.
Here at Highsmith, ours are from an actor whose star burned brightest in the eighties with Goobers! It was one of those films that defined a generation, a tale of outcast kids banding together, so it’s too bad that his iconic turn in that flick was eclipsed by his role in a sex tape several years later. With a hooker. Who became the mother of his third child.
He didn’t write her a love letter though.
The high point of the collection is this masterpiece, written to the first woman he eloped with. Pre-hooker hookup, if you’re keeping tabs.
* * *
I love you. I fucking love you. I love you like peanut butter loves jelly, and cameras love lights, and men love women. I love you madly, so madly it’s making me CRAZY. I want you to be mine. I’d give up all my earnings from Goobers! just to have you back. I messed up big time, but I LOVE YOU. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
* * *
I mean, really.
He couldn’t even come up with another way to say “Forgive me.” How about at least a “Please forgive me for cheating on you, since I’m a lowly schmuck”?
But on the bright side, we have a potential buyer and the interest of a local reporter, both of whom are getting a viewing before the auction later this week.
I guide them to the glass case on display. “As you can see here, we have a collection of authentic love letters from Corey Kruger to Lily Wilder, his first wife, written in 1988. She is the mother of his first child.”
“I thought she was the mother of Albany, his third child?” The question comes from the potential buyer, Felicity, a long-nosed, dark-haired woman in distressed jeans and snakeskin boots with an Instagram feed’s worth of makeup on her face.
I plaster on a smile. “No, Albany Kruger is his firstborn. Buffalo his second. Butte the third, Des Moines the fourth.”
“And Phoenix and Dallas are the fifth and sixth,” Felicity answers like a contestant on a game show. Shaking her head, she smiles, seemingly bemused with her forgetfulness. “I can’t believe I messed up Albany. But seriously, how cool was Corey for naming his kids after the places where they were conceived?”
“The coolest,” I say, longing once more for the days when I worked at the Met, curating American art. But unfortunately, turns out my direct boss there was running a forgery ring, and his underlings were let go in a purge of everyone within spitting distance of him.
Including this underling.
The fact that I’d been researching great forgeries of the last century didn’t help me earn the benefit of the doubt. So much for a book giving me more credibility in my field.
I’m still radioactive by association, it seems.
The woman stares at the letter, reading it like she’s enrapt by the words, mouthing each line then bringing her hand to her chest. “He really did love Albany’s mama.”
“Yes, he certainly believed he did,” I say diplomatically.
The reporter, a weathered woman named Zara who wears a long braid down her back, clears her throat. “You don’t think he meant it, then?”
I meet her inquisitive gaze. “Don’t we all say things with honesty in the moment, even if they don’t bear out over time?” I have to believe that we do. It’s how I make sense of the wreckage of my love life. In the last decade, I’ve fallen in love, fallen out of love, been engaged, been unengaged, been single and loving it, single and hating it, and single and who the hell cares.
And I’ve been left brokenhearted by a man who flew to the other side of the world.
“Exactly. And Kruger’s words didn’t really prove true,” Zara says with a scoff.
“But he’s settled down now. With his new wife. And they seem so, so, so happy,” Felicity points out. “Clearly he must have learned from his mistakes.”
“Perhaps his affections for so many women helped eventually lead him to make better choices,” I offer, since apparently my job is now to defend washed-up celebs. “After all, Corey is sober, and he’s a spokesperson for a mattress company. So there’s that.”
“I love his mattresses,” Felicity says, as if she’s talking about his muscles or his sense of humor.
