Alarming, mysterious piece of mail from London arrived today

Outsider Art Wife, Pru?

I don't often go to campus on Mondays, but I had to pop over early this morning to pick up my dog-eared copy of Heart of Darkness for class tomorrow. Why am I always teaching that damn book?  I vowed to stop teaching it in 2001 when one of my students suggested that Kurtz's ideas about "foreign policy" remained "legitimate and instructive" in our own era of complex globalism.  [Jeopardy factoid: it was Kurtz who said, of the Congolese, "exterminate all  the brutes."]


But why am I even writing this?  Teaching Heart of Darkness is not the real horror at hand. It's just me stalling, using my time-tested strategy of wise-assed evasion and deferral.

Because in truth--as in, really, I mean it this time--right now, I'm freaked about what I found in my campus mailbox.

It's an ecru, high rag-content envelop, no indication of sender, and addressed to me, typed on what appears to have been an old, beat up typewriter. It's like the kind of important "clue" that would appear in a pre-CSI era mystery crime tv show. It bore English stamps, London postmark. Contained within was a brochure for the Outsider Art Fair being held this upcoming weekend in NYC. One of the participating galleries was circled in red marker. That's all but enough to add up to a freak out.


Reasons:


London is where my son's biological father lives. Jamie's biological father: the one whose existence I've lied about for 19 years, the one whom I fictionalized into an anonymous sperm donor. See: http://tinyurl.com/6596vjk for  backstory on Jamie's dad, the man I refer to as the Pater Unfamilias [PU], the married man who gave me my son but made me author of the  Big Lie that Haunts My Life[as opposed to the many smaller ones that merely give me acid reflux on occasion].

After opening the envelop, I went and shut myself in my office for about an hour; I didn't feel calm  enough to drive home. I googled the gallery: It's an American gallery, eclectic bordering on incoherent, with a penchant for way-off-the-grid outsider art. Some really ugly shit, if you ask me. Nothing was clicking, and certainly nothing was connecting to Jamie's father, a dealer in 19th century, mostly British, mostly prints and frequently Pre-Raphaelite, art.

I googled deeper, then deeper, and when I felt I'd googled half way to China, I found it. The connection. Or a connection, anyway. The PU's wife, Pru [not her real name but pairs well with PU], sits on the board of a gallery that is collaborating with the circled gallery in the Outsider Art Fair. 


Could Jamie's dad have sent it? The last I heard he was paralyzed from his stroke [see backstory link]. 
Could Pru have sent it? The last I heard she didn't know I existed.


in either case: why?


It's crazy because I can't afford the money or the time but  I'm going to make the very long drive down to NYC Friday, spend a night in a hotel, and go to the Outsider Art Fair.  It's crazy because I have to go down the following weekend and it'll all be exhausting and I"ll slide behind in my classes and trying to revise the script. And I'll have to cancel out of the Friday Women's Center round table on "Single Moms: Choices and Challenges," which is not so crazy because I've been dreading and resenting it, resenting it because every time the phrase "single mother" is uttered, everyone looks my way. 


And it's crazy because it's something a crazy person would do--the kind of person who creates crazy stuff that gets discovered and called "outsider art" after which it sells for a lot of money.


But I just booked a room on Orbitz, because I can't not go to the Fair, if you follow my double negatives.