When the phone rang at 8:30 last Thursday night, Del hesitated before answering. She was tired; she didn’t want to talk to anyone. Her mother is nearly 92 and Del would definitely speak to her, but the caller ID on her TV screen didn’t flash Mom. It showed Matt’s name.

Del and Matt go back five decades. She’ll always care about him. But he’s boring and intense and awkward, and their lives took different paths 45 years ago. Del rarely enjoys their phone conversations. They’re infrequent and therefore too long. Sometimes she doesn’t answer, waits to listen to the message, and then sends a text that she’ll call back in a few days.

But Matt lives hours away and usually doesn’t call unless it’s her birthday. Del picked up.

She didn’t regret answering. After the opening pleasantries, Matt told her he was in town for a Catholic conference, staying close to her place, and asked if she had the next afternoon free. Apparently he’d listed this conference as one of his summer plans when they spoke two months earlier. Del had forgotten but Matt never realized that; he was too busy apologizing for not calling earlier. Anyway, he could be at her place around 1 p.m. They could lunch and visit for a few hours.

Del always likes to see Matt. In theory at least. And she had nothing on for Friday afternoon. Her whole day was free.

Kind of. There were no appointments on her calendar and no tasks she needed to complete. But after Matt’s call, she devoted most of Friday morning to the footlocker.

It isn’t a real footlocker. When Del’s father entered the Army Air Corps during WWII, he was too poor to buy one. He built a footlocker-sized trunk, installed cleats and a removable box-shelf in the top of it, added hinges and hasp, and painted the thing military green. He kept it post-war, and eventually offered it to his first-born, Del, when she left home for college. It was the perfect size for a side table, the perfect place to stash items she didn’t often need. It still had some shipping labels on it (“Territory of Hawaii”), and her father’s name and serial number stenciled in black on the dark green.

In the beginning, Del stashed college papers and blue books from her exams in it. Sometimes a kilo of weed for a group of friends. Over time, it became the recipient of all correspondence.

Del takes after her dad. She’s not into possessions, but she’s careful with the few she acquires. Seldom does she dispose of anything. So it doesn’t surprise her friends (although it does bother the stylish ones) that the footlocker is still in her room.

In the last year, she has begun to remove items from the footlocker and give them back. She has piles of correspondence from a few old friends, among them Matt. She’s stored them so long that she doesn’t feel right throwing them away. But she’s not going to read them again, and her kids will never be interested. As far as she’s concerned, the notes, letters, and telegrams are windows into her friends’ pasts, sometimes amounting to juvenilia. She wants to return them to the authors.

So far, the letter writers are reluctant to receive. Del tried first with her college roommate. On three different occasions she offered Annie the dozen or so letters (mostly from the summers after their first two years at Cal). She was surprised at the strong initial refusal. After that came some delaying “Yeah, yeah, I’ll take them, but not now.” Finally Annie accepted them, and later admitted she put them in a file drawer.

Del thought she understood. She kept diaries when she was a young teen, and hesitated years before recently reading them. She thought they’d be embarrassing, but it turned out they were sweet. She liked the kid. She found herself rooting for the writer.

Next Del offered old correspondence to her best high school friend. There were notes from algebra class, years of letters from Atlanta, where Emily lived and suffered through her first marriage, and then a decade of occasional letters as Emily moved north, accomplished graduate school, found and married the love of her life. Emily is a tenured professor at a university now, and she looked a little freaked the last time she visited, when Del told her to expect a carton of old letters sometime soon.

So last Friday, Del removed the remote controls and other items that occupy the top of the footlocker. She opened the lid and pulled out the top shelf. There was the cigar box that contained early correspondence from Matt. Below it were piles of later letters, and beside it were stacks and bundles from Emily. She fetched a sturdy shoe box and threw Emily papers into it while she winnowed for all of Matt’s words.

She found some surprises. She remembered the envelope with the lock of his young red hair. She knew she’d locate that first (hurtful) telegram as well as the final desperate one. But she was surprised to discover a small box containing a leatherette envelope with a thin gold band inside. It fit her finger. She encountered a note from Matt’s mother, inviting her to visit, dated a year before she killed herself. Del has no memory of reading that note before.

By the time Matt arrived, she was done rereading letters. She was sitting on the bench outside her door, enjoying the garden and Great Expectations. But she was processing Matt’s old words. And feeling a bit combative.

That’s how Matt and Del started, way back when. They were peripheral acquaintances at first. He was one of half a dozen guys who were a year ahead of Del’s little group of dormitory friends. The young women moved in, the young men crashed the first get-acquainted party at the dorm, sex/romance sparked between a pair of dominant characters, and the groups found a way to mesh.

Del and Matt didn’t get along. They seemed to disagree whenever possible. But a few weeks later, left together one afternoon when others dispersed to classes and the library, walking the same way toward similar errands, something changed. Something clicked. Irritation morphed into a condition still frictional but conveying pleasure. They became a couple.

Del was attracted to Matt’s writing. The young man was mostly Irish in heritage, and as far as Del was concerned, he had the gift. She admired his poetry. She envisioned them, two struggling writers, starving together in an attic somewhere. Actually, they lived in Berkeley; Del’s fantasy placed them in an old brown shingle with dark nooks and corners, creating great art amid the fog and unseasonable seasons of the east bay area. She also liked Matt’s forearms. Although she’d always preferred guys with dark hair, she admired his bright red waves around pale but unfreckled skin.

Matt liked Del too, but it took him longer to conclude he was in love. He had never had a girlfriend before. He was more of a boy’s boy than a young man: rambunctious and mischievous and perverse. He had three younger sisters, but no experience talking deeply with a girl. He and Del talked incessantly. So while he felt the urges and acted on them, first holding her hand, proceeding to kisses, from there to foreplay, and eventually (two months later, just after Del turned 18, claiming afterward that he waited because Del talked so much he worried he might get busted for statutory rape) doing the deed, they were always better at talking than fucking.

Matt wanted to be a writer, but he had male models for his art. Del was on her own. Matt most admired WB Yeats then; there were countless times he referred to the poet’s unrequited love for Maud Gonne and his ultimate marriage to serviceable Georgie. Del understood Matt wanted her to be his muse, his Maud, and she knew she didn’t meet the mark. There was no question Matt loved her – he told her that – but he also let her know that his ideal of female beauty was Marilyn Monroe (about as far from Del’s look as possible), that his attraction to Del required that she watch her weight, and that he found her laugh annoying.

But they were a couple. They practically lived together. Del exhibited wife-like patience with Matt’s interminable chess and pool games (still a boy’s boy), as well as with his periodic political obsessions (he talked regularly of aiming a bazooka at the ROTC building, and he was convinced the Tet Offensive was an apocalyptic event). For his part, Matt exhibited more tenderness toward Del than toward any other person.

They were together throughout their college years. When she was one Poli Sci course short of her BA, about to tackle that in a summer session, Matt interrupted them. He told her he still loved her, but he wanted to have at least one other relationship before he settled down. He wanted to avoid always wondering, afterwards.

Del was devastated. To this day she credits pounds of sunflower seeds and Slaughterhouse Five, for helping her through that first week. Then she called Hank.

They had been close friends, almost with benefits, in high school. And during their sophomore year at Cal, when Matt was taking a quarter off and living with his folks on the other side of the country, they’d become lovers. That was permitted (everyone was attempting “non-possessive love,” then); Del experienced several young men when Matt was away, but without love.

To Hank, Del was perfect. He’d been carrying a cookie fortune in his wallet, about a dark haired woman, since shortly after they’d met. He’d been disappointed when Del found Matt, and he’d certainly not been celibate, but he was always ready to be with Del, to whatever level she permitted, when she called.

The friends enjoyed a month-long affair. Then Matt called. He’d reconsidered. He wanted to get back together. He’d decided he was committed to Del.

Del temporized. She refused to pull the rug out from under Hank. He’d been there for her when she was down. He was fun. And he was much better at sex. With Hank, there was no inhibition. There were no critiques. With full disclosure, she kept seeing both. But as far as she was concerned (and told each), she was in love with Matt and just enjoying Hank.

That situation couldn’t be maintained. But it didn’t have to be. Del made plans with two girlfriends; they soon flew to Europe in a charter jet. After a week in London the three women went to Israel and stayed for four months. They meant to continue their travels but ran out of money, and could only support themselves by living on a kibbutz.

Meanwhile, Matt’s mother killed herself. She was an alcoholic who had struggled with chronic depression. Her father and sister had committed suicide before her. The tragedy devastated the family but struck Matt the hardest. As the oldest child, he’d had plenty of exposure to his parents’ fights and near-separations. But as he told Del afterward, that tension hadn’t disturbed his basic life-perspective that he came from an intact, relatively happy home. His mother’s end put an end to that viewpoint.

Of more immediacy, of something approaching terror, was Matt’s fear that he was destined to follow the path of his mother and her father. He took after them in looks and disposition. He started thinking he’d share their fate.

He stopped drinking (he’d never used alcohol to excess but he wasn’t taking chances). He saw a shrink. He started going to church. He flipped out.

Del had been in Israel a month and a half when the tragedy occurred. The first news was delivered to her in a telegram at the kibbutz, telling her to ignore all pleas and proposals and await further words. Then the letter she was supposed to ignore arrived.

It wasn’t so much about his mother’s death as it was about Matt’s ailing heart. It opened with a paragraph complaining that Del’s last letter didn’t contain “I love you.” Matt wrote that he was so hurt he was unable to eat the day after receiving it. And then came the news from his family. The letter went on to convey a desperate plea that Del agree to marry Matt, but mostly he beseeched her to run out immediately, acquire a special delivery stamp, and send assurance of her love and commitment to him.

Del’s reactions were mixed of course. Her heart ached for Matt’s pain. She yearned to comfort him. And yet she felt a little guilty relief that she was thousands of miles away. She noticed affectation in his language. His pleas seemed oratorical more than sincere. She admitted that she would have given just about anything to hear such declarations from Matt half a year earlier, but they were hitting her like literature and not like life, then.

Even so… Matt retracted his desperate proposal but replaced it with foreseeable marital intentions. Del decided she was going to have to choose between the men. She spent some hours pacing the circular entranceway to the kibbutz that week, listing the advantages and drawbacks to each. She concluded that her heart and mind belonged to Matt (even if other parts didn’t). She maintained a breezy correspondence with Hank, but she told Matt she was for him.

By the time Del returned to the states and traveled to be with Matt and his family, Matt was in the midst of trying various psychotropic prescriptions, becoming obsessed with Catholicism, and most of his way into rewriting his and Del’s romance so that Del was the love of his life, the muse of the creative writing he would no longer compose, and the wife of his heart.

She spent four weeks with him, in his father’s house, amid his weepy sisters, patient and tender all day every day, patient and coaxing on those nights when he was determined to have sex. In retrospect, it was the heaviest month of her life.

Returning home, she felt so light her feet didn’t touch the ground. She saw Hank. Repeatedly she reported to her friends that she loved Matt but didn’t want to be around him. And she certainly wasn’t in love with Hank, but she needed to see him often. She didn’t love him but she loved their time together. It took many repetitions before she heard herself.

She broke up with Matt. She told him there might be a future for them, but she wasn’t ready to marry him, let alone abandon Hank, then. She assured him she was far from intending to marry anyone.

And then changed her mind. The more time she spent with Hank, the clearer it became to her that she and Matt were done with their romance. She wanted to live with Hank. He wanted them to marry. She agreed, but with the understanding that it was just a way to cohabitate without distressing their four parents.

Fast-forward 45 years. Matt is alive and employed but alone. He never moved on. He didn’t marry. He hasn’t had sex since that last visit from Del. He still doesn’t drink. He is a staunch observant Catholic. He teaches philosophy at a junior college in eastern California. When he speaks about capital-R Reason as applied to Catholic doctrine (as was the case over that lunch last Friday), Del’s brain spins with surreal incomprehension.

But she’ll admit she was feeling a little contentious over that lunch. She had just spent the morning amid Matt’s letters. She didn’t have the time or interest to reread them all, but she had perused the correspondence from 1967 to 1972: the years of their affair and breakup. She was fresh-struck with how egotistical and even cruel Matt had been, how immature.

She restrained herself by turning the scope around. She admitted that she’d wanted to be in love with an artist. She wanted to be a muse. She aimed to be sexually experienced, maybe influential even, but she reserved her love fantasies for a couple struggling together after truth, able to trust one another.

After lunch, they returned to Del’s place. It was a short walk, necessarily short because Matt has knee pain now, and moves slowly. As he prepared to leave for the late session at his conference, Del pushed his letters toward him.

“No thanks,” he said. Their eyes met. “I’ll get them next time.”

Del didn’t understand. “But your car’s right outside.” She looked toward his bad knee, raked her examination upward, past his now-wide hips in pleated trousers, his round belly pushing his shirt forward, his sun-aged skin and pink hair, and cocked her head to one side.

“I’ll get them next time,” he repeated.

What could Del do? She hugged Matt goodbye, opened the footlocker again, and placed his stuff in the box shelf, where she’d be able to get it all quicker, next time. But first, she said out loud, “Okay. Fair game for stories.” And she pulled a few items out to transcribe.

Here:

Two months after they began, and about two weeks before they’d have sex, Matt went to the east coast for winter break. On Christmas he sent Del a telegram. She was delighted – a telegram! – until she read it:

WHEN I HAVE SAT AND HEARD FOR DAYS YOUR REPERTOIRE OF FOND CLICHES, AND TOLD MYSELF YOUR LOVELY HEAD HOLDS NOTHING MORE THAN SOFT, SWEET BREAD, YOUR SKIN MAY BE YOUR SAVING GRACE: SO PLEASE REFRAIN FROM SHOVING FACE

Del’s first reaction on this reread is to wonder why she persisted with this asshole. But then she remembers: her biggest fear at that time was that she’d die a virgin; she didn’t want her first time to be cheap or tawdry; she liked the symmetry of their mutual virginity.

But this one really encapsulates it. They were together almost four years, broke up, and then resumed with modification. A few months after that, shortly after Matt’s mother’s suicide and when he was trying hard to win her back, Matt wrote:

You say that you were offended by the sentence in which I urged you to stop smoking and went on to hope that you would one day match my ideal of you. I was afraid that it would, and had second thoughts about it after I wrote it; it seemed presumptuous to me afterwards, but it was already on its way. What I expect (or hope) from you in the way of fulfilling my ideal is indeed modest, and for the simple reason that you haven’t far to go. You are pretty, you are very smart and you are aggressive, the latter which I never considered a really good quality until recently, when I discovered that quiet people who aren’t dull need aggressive people to bring out the best in them. (I hope you don’t feel as though I’m looking in your mouth to see what shape your teeth are in.) There are only three further things I ask of you: that you stop smoking for good; that you stay “fine”, that is, keep your weight down; and that you be better natured. You aren’t ill-natured, but on occasion your disposition has been distinctly nasty. Are these requests just? I hope so. Is my very making them presumptuous and sure to be resented? I hope not. I can’t deny that I love you more the nearer you approach my ideal, and however unconditional your love may be or you may wish it to be, I am sure you must feel the same way.

Del still plans to dispose of Matt’s letters. She’ll hold them for a while, but she has his address; she can box them up and mail them to him any time. She knows that, if she were Matt, she’d want to perceive the mythology of the last four decades. But she doesn’t know what Matt wants.