“Still,” I asked Sue by telephone, “won’t it be quite a transition from the American Midwest to Australia?”
In a friendly, steady voice she told how she had overcome her hesitations. When Sue toured the local museums now, she saw graffiti on statues, and she said the neighborhoods were slipping. I thought of my grandmother’s old place in Kansas City years ago, how it had been block-busted by sleazes who frightened the whites away and resold the houses at handsome profits to Afro-Americans. Hotrods had roared up and down Chestnut Street; Grandma had been the last white holdout. The memory still enraged me. Although I hadn’t been to Kansas City in years, I believed Sue.
“My brother and sister are quite a bit older than I am,” she went on, ”and they both have children of their own, and I’m not crazy about the idea of leaving them to know their aunt through phone calls and video tapes. But I have no intention of staying in the Midwest just for my family’s sake.
“It’s my life and what I want to do requires more than the Midwest has to offer. I can fit in well wherever I go. And I’ve gotten a few books on Oz. From what I’ve read, I’ll like Australia just as long as I don’t have to wear one of those damn hats and worship Paul Hogan. I have Greg to worship. They may drive on the wrong side of the road and drink beer with lunch, but it’s not like I’ll have to learn a whole new language.” Besides, she loved the idea of the children growing up with an accent as delightful as the one she heard from Greg.
I asked Greg if his virtual romance with Sue had changed him. “It’s relieved a lot of the pressure that exists between myself and women, because it’s no longer that I’m looking for something more than friendship—I have a relationship which satisfies those needs and so don’t need anything from those friendships. What is most interesting is that change that I haven’t picked up but that other women must have. In the two-and-a-half years I’ve been at the university, I’ve been ‘hit on’ a grand total of zero times that I can remember. In the twenty days or so that I’ve been engaged, I’ve been hit on three times. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out exactly what is making women see me as attractive. And they weren’t friends or acquaintances either—completely unknown to me. Weird.”
So how much had Greg changed Sue? “A lot,” she e-mailed back. Sue said: “Being with Greg has taught me, if anything else, that my life doesn’t have any boundaries, be they physical or emotional or geographic.” This was more than lover’s mush; I noticed her use of “With Greg,” as if they were in the same room.
Asked for love letters—no pressure, let me emphasize—the two obliged with thousands of words just from their August 1994 writings alone. Mostly the letters were from Sue whose feelings were more conveniently preserved in digital form than were the letters from Greg. He wasn’t holding back: He was the one who had contacted me about their romance. What followed from Sue was more affecting than anything I’d read in a novel, for it was real, and I learned about it in the same way that Greg did, through a series of pixels on a computer screen. Reading this one message would help explain why she was willing to leave Kansas City; why she felt that, regardless of a father with heart trouble, she had felt free to move on; perhaps even why she was willing to share her life so openly with me through this book, for a chronicle was an affirmation of sorts.
New to me but old to Greg, the revelation did not come immediately. Sue’s August letters started out mainly with the routine, the glue of long-range relationships, the confirmation that she wanted Greg to know her life and likes. There was talk of food (“I love you more than I love munching on peanut butter and crackers”), diets (“I splurged on Chinese and probably regained the three pounds I lost”), art (at the Nelson museum she favored the impressionists), friends’ babies (“Barbara went to the doctor this morning to check and see how the baby was doing—she was about ten weeks along, and she had a miscarriage”), school (Sue was attending community college and could not resist sharing a few unabashedly corny jokes about her anatomy course), places to go on vacation (“Hey,” she said, in a discussion of Mount Rushmore, “do you Aussies get weird and chisel the faces of dead leaders onto mountainsides, or is that a distinctly American thing to do?”), and jobs (“this working full time and college at night is starting to wear me down a bit, but for the time being it’s what I want to do”).
Like almost any woman she planned. The word was that Greg should wrap some paper around his fingers and snip it off at the right place and send the results on to her so she’d know the size of his ring. And should it be silver or gold? They discussed pajamas. “I always thought it would be cool to share a pair of PJs with someone,” Sue wrote. “I’d wear the tops, you’d get the bottom. Okay, so I’m cheesy, but I guess it’s the American upbringing :). Shrug.” In her mind Sue saw the “really cool chapel in Rapid City, South Dakota, where my grandparents on dad’s side renewed their vows for their fiftieth wedding anniversary.”[anniversary.”] “I wanna get married in it,” she wrote Greg. “There’s a place where you can light a candle for a loved one and say a prayer to keep them safe. Well, I lit a candle for Barbara, and then I lit one for us. It felt weird to be in a church for a good reason. Seems that all the last ones have been for funerals.”
Another close friend had died some time back, and she reflected on the connection between that and a period of heavy activity on the bulletin board circuit. “When I logged on, I could just be some faceless person—no one had to know that my best friend was in the hospital room semicomatose because he had developed full-blown AIDS. There were so many people in my life that just up and left because Ralph* got sick; it was almost as if I had AIDS just by association. So I got online and became everyone’s favorite sweetheart.”