Robert and I, unable to break our bonds, continued to see one another. Even as my relationship with Howie waxed and waned, he implored me to return. He wanted us to get back together as if nothing had happened. He was ready to forgive me, yet I wasn’t repentant. I wasn’t willing to go backward, especially since Robert still seemed to be harboring an inner turmoil that he refused to voice.
In early September, Robert appeared out of the blue at Scribner’s. Dressed in a long oxblood leather trench coat, belted at the waist, he looked both handsome and lost. He had returned to Pratt and applied for a student loan, buying the coat and a ticket to San Francisco with some of the money. He said he wanted to talk to me. We went outside and stood on the corner of Forty-eighth and Fifth Avenue.
“Please come back,” he said, “or I’m leaving for San Francisco.”
I couldn’t imagine why he would go there. His explanation was disjointed, vague. Liberty Street, there was someone who knew the ropes, a place on Castro. He grabbed my hand.
“Come with me. There’s freedom there. I have to find out who I am.”
The only thing I knew about San Francisco was the great earthquake and Haight-Ashbury.
“I’m already free,” I said.
He stared at me with a desperate intensity. “If you don’t come, I’ll be with a guy. I’ll turn homosexual,” he threatened.
I just looked at him, not understanding at all. There was nothing in our relationship that had prepared me for such a revelation. All of the signs that he had obliquely imparted I had interpreted as the evolution of his art. Not of his self. I was less than compassionate, a fact I came to regret. His eyes looked as if he had been working all night on speed. Wordlessly he handed me an envelope. I watched him walk away and disappear into the crowd. The first thing that struck me was that he had written his letter on Scribner’s stationery. His handwriting, usually so deliberate, was fraught with contradiction; it went from neat and precise to a childlike scrawl. But even before I read the words, the thing that deeply moved me was the simple heading:
“Patti — What I think — Robert.”
I had asked, even begged him so many times before I left to tell me what he was thinking about, what was on his mind. He had no words for me. I realized, looking at these sheets of paper, that he had gone deep within himself on my account and had attempted to express the inexpressible. Imagining the anguish that drew him to write this letter brought me to tears.
— Just Kids (Patti Smith), Loc. 866–85
Oh, it reminds me so much of our own drama, with me leaving to San Lvivis’ko, and never handling her the envelope with what I think. And now is too late. It’s too late long ago now.