Can a Pen Pal Save Your Life?

The Promise of Hotels by Bill Cotter

Helen Chaissen was on United 228 to Newark when she learned of the death of her old pen pal, the writer Gabriel Ulloa.

She had boarded in Dallas thinking she had an aisle seat, and was not happy when she realized she had somehow been assigned a middle seat instead. Wedged between a man wearing an Ohio State football jersey engrossed in a newspaper, and a young woman holding a large but placid infant, Helen found that her only chance at spatial liberty was to put down her tray table, prop up her elbows, and rest her head in her hands. Forty-five minutes into the flight she found a certain balance, and thought she could, maybe, endure the remaining two hours and four minutes in only minor discomfort. She hoped she wouldn’t snore if she fell asleep.

When they reached cruising altitude and the cabin began to grow cold, the Buckeye folded up his New York Times and handed it to Helen. She took it without a word. She read Krugman, an article on prison escape, and some book review by an author she’d never heard of. She completed the unfinished crossword in her head. She scanned the unknowable tables of stock prices, and even read about all the Yankees on injured reserve.

The paper was just about spent. Helen flipped past the obits, but a name caught her attention, and she turned back.

Gabriel Ulloa, Memoirist and Essayist on Depression, Dies at 44.

Her breath caught, and she read on.

Mr. Ulloa, a writer whose subject matter was mental illness and the havoc it wrought in his life and in the lives of friends he had made in the numerous psychiatric hospitals he had been committed to since the age of 14, has died of an apparent suicide at his home in Manhattan. He was 44.

His death was confirmed by his partner, Ursula Majaniev.

Mr. Ulloa, who initially wrote about his struggle with major depressive disorder in his memoir, The Bearing Wall, in 2006, subsequently published essays in leading magazines and journals.

Mr. Ulloa wrote that his depression was the direct result of years of systematic abuse at the hands of his older brother, which only ended when the brother died in an accidental drowning when Mr. Ulloa was 13. He was first hospitalized at 14 at Hartford’s Institute for Living. At 16 he was hospitalized at McLean, in Belmont, Massachusetts, for 17 months, where he underwent electroconvulsive therapy, one of the only treatments he claims actually helped his depression, though the cost, in terms of severe memory loss and cognitive impairment, was high. In his mid-twenties Mr. Ulloa married the writer Ava Bass, and enjoyed a period of relative psychological calm. Ms. Bass’s suicide in 2008 plunged Mr. Ulloa into a renewed depression from which he never recovered.

According to Ms. Majaniev, Mr. Ulloa had attempted suicide three months earlier and was hospitalized for six weeks. She stated that he seemed in good spirits in the days before his death.

The obituary went on—details about Gabriel’s writing life, surviving family members, and where to send donations.

Helen sat back in her seat. She closed her eyes.

---

Nine years ago, in 2007, Helen had sent Gabriel an intelligent, funny fan letter about The Bearing Wall, confessing she’d also been at McLean, though for manic depression, and noting that they’d had the same doctor, a proto-Freudian coconut named Jonah Gaspard, whose office was papered in Dubuffet posters and who seemed interested only in one’s sexual dreams and masturbation practices. Gabriel wrote back, and the two maintained a snail-mail correspondence, largely free of innuendo and flirtation; in fact Helen shared her letters with her boyfriend at the time, Roger, and Gabriel had shared Helen’s letters with his wife, Ava.

As Ava’s depression started to get out of hand, Gabriel began to confide more and more in Helen, always by mail. Helen started keeping these letters secret from her boyfriend. Gabriel wrote to Helen that Ava couldn’t seem to get off the couch in their living room, that she wasn’t eating.

Ava won’t talk, Helen, except to read me articles on the internet about artists or writers who committed suicide, Gabriel wrote, in scrawly green ballpoint on a long sheet of lined yellow legal paper.  She describes their circumstances and their methods in terms of appraisal, as though kicking tires. I can’t trust her to take her medication, and she won’t talk to her therapist, sitting in clenched, enraged silence for 50 minutes twice a week. She’s losing weight. She won’t wash or brush her teeth for days or weeks at a time. She can’t even take joy in the affections of Thiago, you know our peculiar little tuxedo cat I sent you pictures of? What a terror   

Here Gabriel’s green ballpoint dies out, and a thick, inky blue felt-tip takes over. 

and he so enlivens the place. But she doesn’t see him. The only times Ava exerts herself is to cry, which she does several times a day—hard, choking displays of pure wet need: she looks at me as though starved; famished for a sustenance she cannot name. Then she’ll fall asleep for hours, even half a day, sometimes more, finally waking disoriented in a humid knot of blankets on the couch in the living room. She eats Gummi Bears and drinks lemon-lime Gatorade. I guess it’s good she consumes anything at all.

I’m sorry about this, Helen. I’m sorry about this report.

Gabriel signed his letter, as he always did:

Yrs &c.,

G. U.

---

When Gabriel found himself in Dallas on New Year’s Day, 2008, he called Helen from his hotel room. He wanted to know if she wouldn’t mind meeting in the lobby so they could talk. It was 10:30 at night. Helen told Roger she was going out to karaoke with her friends.

Had she not told that lie, things might have been different.

“Helen,” said Gabriel, rising from a fake Eames chair in the thrum of the crowded lobby, a beer in one hand. “Is that you? It looks like you. At least it’s how I imagined you. Damn. I’m happy to make your in-the-flesh acquaintance, at long last.”

Helen ignored his outstretched hand and gave him a long hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I need a drink,” she said, looking around for a waitress. Gabriel looked around too.

Helen took the opportunity to study Gabriel. She’d seen his photos online of course. Dark eyes, broad nose, full, almost feminine lips, black hair cut short and parted on the left. He was taller than she had anticipated, more muscular; she had expected a degree of withering, a cant of decay in a man who’d been through what he had. He had suffered at the hands of his brother. Gabriel may have murdered him. No one drowns in the bathtub without a lot of help.

“How is Ava?”

“Oh Christ,” said Gabriel, sitting back down in the leather chair, exhaling with finality. “Bad. I feel like maybe I shouldn’t have left her alone. I never do. Usually, anyway. Ah! Bloody hell. She refuses to use the phone, text, even email. I do what I can to make sure she’s not trying to kill herself. A friend, in the apartment building across the street, we’re both on the fifth floor? He watches her with binoculars, like freaking Rear Window, and texts me with reports on her movements.”

I do what I can to make sure she’s not trying to kill herself.

He reflexively checked his phone, then put it away, all in four seconds. 

“God, Gabriel.”

Helen leaned forward in her chair, conscious of her bare knees, the old scar on the left one, a skateboarding injury, a gouge shaped like the sardonic Amazon smile.

“There is nothing, I swear nothing, in that apartment she can hurt herself with, and she never goes out. When I left I took a souvenir pocketknife I got at Epcot when I was a kid, a big bottle of generic Advil, and a jumbo box of trash bags. I left everything on the floor of a cab on the way to JFK.”

“So give yourself a break,” she said, falling into the same rhythm of familiarity she used in her letters. “What’re you in Dallas for, anyway?”

“Conference. ‘Mental Illness and the Arts.’ Giving a talk, Dallas Museum of Art, part of a series.”

The waitress brought beers. “What’s it about?”

“Writing and depression,” said Gabriel. “How it’s difficult to write when one is depressed, and almost impossible to describe depression with the clumsy blocks of language available in the English tongue, blah blah. I’m using a number of historical examples—the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, William Styron, you know, the noonday-demon pantheon of white Anglo-Saxon et cetera. Plus myself, aargh, such a solipsist. Whatever. But Ava, too. Ava is a particularly acute example, because she is the only one of those, besides me, who is still alive, and the only one who is currently depressed and unable to write.”

Gabriel stared at Helen. He looked as though he were waiting to be stabbed. “Does she know you’re going to talk about her?”

“She’s insensate. I don’t even think she knows I’m not home. She might not know I exist at all, or that I ever did.”

Helen thought about Roger, home alone, thinking up caustic, witty, and original observations on the infelicities of Man, God, sex, and the Dallas Cowboys, reducing them to 140 characters, and posting them in hopes of 1) awing and 2) adding to his precious 12,157 followers; this endeavor Helen knew he would occasionally place in abeyance to surf pornography—he confessed as much to her, though he would not tell her the nature of what he viewed, the frequency he “used” (his term) porn, the expenditure of passion, the magnitude of lust, the degree of satiation, anything. They had been together three and a half years, and the fun had gone out of sex after about two months. Their now infrequent couplings were characterized by haste and almost vicious kissing, always in the dark, always in the early morning, just as their alarms were going off. All Helen could think about when Roger’s iPhone’s seagull-themed alarm sounded was the bath she was going to take when it was all over. She thought briefly about why she was with him at all. He was easy, and it could be so much worse.

“Shouldn’t Ava be in a hospital?”

“Money. Insurance. No one has any. You know? And I don’t want her in Bellevue or some county place. I think that would truly fuck her up.”

“ECT?”

“Same story, money. I’m paying for her shrink and her meds, at cost, and it’s all I can do. I’ve borrowed money from my sister, thank God for Stella. But she only has so much, and she’s got her own shit. At least the shrink does house calls, for what it’s worth. Only in New York.”

The crowd in the lobby had begun to thin, and Helen had a sense of how cavernous it was. A kind of agoraphobic panic started to climb her esophagus, accompanied by the crushing certainty that this—whatever this happened to be—was in the process of ending, and that she would never see Gabriel again.

“Look,” she said, the gambit forming in her head. “Gabriel. I know we don’t know each other all that well, but I have a good job. What if I. . .”

Courage always tasted like aluminum, a light metallic tingle way back at the base of Helen’s tongue.

“. . .what if there was money?” she said, the words spilling out fast. “Say I gave you money for a course of electroconvulsive therapy for Ava. Not a loan. I have the cash.” 

She did have it, from her aunt Carolyn, who died alone in a Beaumont nursing home, her will penciled on a wall, leaving everything to Helen—her tiger figurines, two steaks in the freezer, and the suitcase under her bed filled with five-dollar bills. It was not as much money as it looked like. 

“Why don’t you let me, Gabriel. It works, as you know.”

The waitress brought their third round of beers and informed them that the lobby bar would be closing in ten minutes.

“Jesus, Helen. I don’t know. I just don’t know what to say. Should we go somewhere?”

“This is Dallas, not New York. The whole city’s closing for the night. So,” she continued, “maybe we should go to your room?”

In the moment before he responded, anything was possible. When Helen was seven she jumped off a ledge into a quarry full of pellucid blue water. Before she hit, when she was alone in the air, her heart felt like a ball of frost in her chest—that feeling returned to her now, in the lobby of the hotel.

They found an elevator. Helen was on a lot of medication, and two beers plus a few sips of a third had made her wobbly. The spasm of agoraphobic panic and resulting flex of courage had rendered her hyper-aware—she could feel her pupils dilated to a comical breadth. She squinted in the low light. She was glad to be alone in the elevator with Gabriel, the warmth and closeness of walnut and brass and the columns of amber buttons; the pale pressure of subtle acceleration.

“Are you okay?” said Gabriel, gently reaching out to hold her by the elbow.

Helen nodded, and leaned into him more than she needed to. Gabriel opened the door to Room 1236. A bottle of champagne sat in a metal bucket of melting ice.

“I forgot about that,” he said. “Somebody sent it up.”

Helen wondered whether this was true. She studied him as he stared down at the sweating bottle, but he betrayed nothing.

Gabriel sat on one bed, she on its twin. They faced each other, their knees a few inches apart. Her old scar throbbed. They placed their beers on the side table separating the beds.

“Your offer. . .I can’t accept.”

“Of course you can,” said Helen, as certain as she had ever been about anything. “Someone’s life is at stake here, Gabriel. You must put your personal values, your ideas about debt and loans and obligation and pride, put them all aside, accept the money, and get her help. Look, I won’t miss it, it won’t matter to me.”

“I still—”

“What do you think it will cost, a course of six treatments, about $15,000?” 

“Helen—”

Helen opened her purse. She got out her checkbook. With the same hesitant care that she had always used to pen her letters to Gabriel—drawing the letterforms so they would be clear and never misunderstood—Helen wrote out a check for $15,000, dated it, then signed it, the leaning, childish cursive of her full name filling the whole of the signature line. She sat down next to Gabriel, tore the check from the book, and placed it in his hands.

“If you’re absolutely sure.” 

She nodded, no longer sure.

“To be paid back,” he said. “With interest.”

She closed her eyes. Zeroes floated in the darkness behind her lids. Too many. She felt lightheaded. She opened her eyes. Negative images of the zeroes remained for a moment, then vanished. 

“The beer’s gone,” she said.

“Well then,” said Gabriel, ”let’s open the champagne.”

Helen was seeing double now. She felt goofy, wonderful, terrified. She smiled at Gabriel. He smiled back. She saw herself in him. She didn’t really have an extra fifteen thousand dollars.

Gabriel handed Helen a plastic champagne flute. The pale liquid rose fast, bubbling over the rims, down the sides and over her hand. She laughed, and Gabriel’s smile widened.

“Do you like football?”

Her heart sank a bit at the question. Helen hated the game. Roger lived for it. 

“Honestly, no.”

“I mean futbol. Soccer.”

Soccer made her think of collapsing stadiums and death by trampling. Hooligans and vomit and missing teeth.

“Well, I don’t really know.”

“Right now, Liverpool is playing Chelsea.”

Gabriel turned on the TV. He made a dramatic show of puffing up pillows for himself and Helen, and propped them up against the headboard on the bed he was sitting on. Then Gabriel leaned back on one side and messed distractedly with the remote. Helen lay gently next to him, as the TV before them glowed green with the grass of the pitch.

Helen’s body began to ache in a way that made her think of solar flares. Neither of them moved. It lasted for ninety minutes.

When the game was over, Gabriel clicked the TV off and they lay in silence, drinking the last of the warm champagne, Helen’s head almost on his shoulder, close enough that she imagined she could hear the sound of blood rushing through his veins.

“You probably shouldn’t drive,” he whispered, as though there was someone else in the room who he was afraid of waking. “Should you call Roger?”

“I lied to him. I told him I was out with my friends Patricia and Janelle, singing karaoke.”

“I see. What happens if you perseverate the lie?” 

Helen called Roger, waking him.

“I got drunk, baby. I’m going to sleep on Patricia’s couch.”

“Did you drive?” said Roger, his voice burred with suspicion.

“No. Yeah, I’ll get the car in the morning.”

“Do not get arrested. That’s all I need, for my girlfriend to get a dewey.” 

“I’m not driving, shit!”

“Good.”

“Good night.” Quietly, she added, “I love you.” 

“Yeah, love you.”

Helen put her phone in her purse and her purse on the floor. She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her bra without removing her blouse. She stood, started to unzip her skirt, stopped. In the dark of the hotel room Gabriel Ulloa lay on the bed, his legs crossed. He did not move. She could not tell if he was looking at her. The only light in the room came from a bright red LED clock on the side table: 2:41.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“I’m angry with you for tempting me away from my damaged wife. In fact I hate you for it. But you’re just drunk, I understand that. Me too. And this is all my fault, really. I see that. Soccer. Jesus fucking Christ.”

Helen sat on the floor. Gabriel turned on a light and went into the bathroom. Helen climbed under the covers of the other bed, fully clothed. This was the end of it. It was over and all was lost, but at least there was no pain.

She listened to the shower run, then turned the light out.

In the morning he was gone. A knock at the door.

“Housekeeping,” said a voice.

---

At least he cashed her check.

Helen learned of Ava’s death five months later from, of all people, Roger. Ava had published her suicide note to Facebook, and in it, had said she would miss sex when she was gone, and hoped the afterlife was an erotic one. The note went viral, and eventually Roger happened upon it.

Ava had published her suicide note to Facebook, and in it, had said she would miss sex when she was gone, and hoped the afterlife was an erotic one.

“Weren’t you friends with this chick’s husband?” said Roger, turning his laptop around and pushing it across the kitchen counter early one morning before work.

“Oh God.”

Helen went in the bedroom and dialed Gabriel. 

“You calling about your money?”

“Jesus, Gabriel, no, I’m calling about Ava.”

“You want to know how she did it? That seems to be all anyone’s interested in.” 

“I just want to know if there’s anything you need, anything I can do?”

“I don’t need anything.” 

“Gabriel, I—

“I finally confessed to Ava about what happened in Dallas, between you and me.” 

“Nothing happened,” said Helen, fierce; quiet. “Fuck, Gabriel.”

“Ava was dead two days later. She used a roll of packing tape to seal off her nose and mouth, suffocated. While I was out getting Indian. Saag paneer. I thought she was doing better, going to eat a proper meal instead of pure sugar. I got home and her head was mummified. She was still alive, she fought me weakly for a while. I accidentally cut her face trying to remove the tape with scissors and a knife. When I finally got it off she was gone.”

“I—I don’t know what—”

“It’s best if you don’t call again.”

---

In 2012 Helen received a cashier’s check from Gabriel for $17,500. There was no note attached. She sent him a long letter, which was returned unopened. Daveed, Helen’s boyfriend at the time, intercepted the letter.

“Who’s Gabriel Ulloa?” 

“Long story.”

“I’m sure curious.”

Daveed sat on the end of the couch, ready to go pick up the takeout he’d ordered from the shawarma place on the corner. In one hand he held an umbrella he’d pinched from a hotel in Memphis long ago. Rain strafed at the windows of their apartment. They listened to the hushy roar of it. Then Helen sat down next to Daveed, and told him everything.

“Why don’t you go up and see him?” 

“He hates me, clearly.”

“Maybe not. And besides, anger is not the same as hatred.” 

“I’ve googled him, he has a girlfriend.”

“Meaning. . .” said Daveed, tapping the metal tip of the umbrella on the old wooden

floorboards.

“Meaning. . . I doubt I’d be welcome.”

The rain stopped. Sudden, as though the sky had finally emptied. 

“Maybe the girlfriend sent the letter back.” Helen considered this. “At least call him.”

---

“Gabriel?”

“Helen?”

“Wanted to thank you for the check. You didn’t have to do that. But it came at a good time.”

“Good to hear your voice.”

Helen thought about Daveed, his jealousy glimmering in the low light of their apartment. Helen thought about Ava, and the force it must require to peel adhesive tape off of human skin.

“I sent you a letter.” 

“You did?” 

“It was returned.”

“Oh,” said Gabriel. “My partner. Ursula. I bet she saw a woman’s name handwritten on the return address and sent it back. She’s a bit like that.”

“Is she good to you?”

“Listen, I haven’t been well. Three hospitalizations, lots of meds, nothing working, even ECT not having much effect. They’ve dialed it down from the old days. You know? I sleep nineteen hours a day, the other five hours I weep and plot ways to kill myself so that it won’t upset my parents and sister and whoever finds me. It’s exhausting. I manage to do a little writing, but my themes are ordinary, arguments thin, sentences anemic, all just meatless skeletons, and everyone is rightly refusing to publish the crap. But to answer your question, yeah, Ursula’s good to me. She makes sure I eat and take my pills and she drives me to appointments. She reads to me, my only pleasure, short stories, Nadine Gordimer, W. G. Sebald, Steven Millhauser. Screech’s Montaigne. Ursula’s a fine editor as well, and I trust her with my work. She’s overprotective, though. She’s out at the moment, or she would not have let me answer the phone. So we’re lucky we’re getting to talk, Helen. Tell me about you.”

Gabriel took a deep breath after his monologue, uttered in seconds. 

“Nothing to tell. Stable. Dating a good guy for a change.” 

“Not a Roger.” 

“Not.”

“Ursula’s home, I should go.”

That was the last communication Helen ever had with Gabriel Ulloa. Two more letters sent were both returned, presumably the work of Ursula Majaniev.

---

Helen waited at the carousel until her old black suitcase tumbled down the belt and wedged itself between a Louis Vuitton trunk and huge military duffel bag. Helen, stumbling along with the carousel, could not dislodge her old American Tourister. The man in the Ohio State football jersey, who’d given her his New York Times, grabbed it for her, and gently placed it on the pocked linoleum. Without thanking him, Helen fled baggage claim, found a taxicab, and within an hour was checked into her hotel on 53rd.

Helen drank water out of the sink, ate both the granola bars she’d brought along, and watched the ash gray of the city through a small, south-facing window. She showered. The scent of the hotel shampoo made her cry, hard, and later she fell asleep on a threadbare loveseat trying to remember what it was about the essence of pomegranate that brought her to such wailing despair.

She woke, dressed. Down on the street the drizzle was turning to rain. She bought an umbrella in a bodega and headed toward Gramercy. Helen always associated the borough of Manhattan with death: she’d tried to commit suicide here once, and had known three people other than Gabriel who’d succeeded. She’d known two people who were murdered, half a dozen who’d died by other means. It always made her think of Jim Carroll, his song “The People Who Died.” She had written to him once, but he did not write back.

The gray, the damp, the stink of the walk pressed the spirit of death against her cheek like the flat of a sword.

Helen pushed the intercom button next to #504 Ulloa/Majaniev, where he’d always lived.

“Yes?”

“Hi, I’m Helen Chaissen? I was a friend of Gabriel’s? May I speak with you for a moment?”

No response. After a moment Helen buzzed again. Nothing. She was about to leave when a young woman dressed in a long black coat emerged from the building.

“Shall we get a coffee and talk?”

In silence Ursula led them a block east to a diner called Colonel’s. They sat across from each other in a tall, private booth. A waiter brought mugs of coffee, even though they hadn’t ordered them. Helen added cream and sugar to hers, felt Ursula staring at her. Finally she looked up.

“Helen, you said?” 

“Yeah.”

“And you’re here. . .”

“I’m in town for work for a couple days. Listen, I was not a close friend, just a fan. We corresponded. I just happened to read about Gabriel in the paper on the plane up, not three hours ago. I’m sorry to blindside you. You’re probably overwhelmed. Overwrought. Over-everything.”

“It’s all right. I’m not, actually. I’m glad to see you.”

Ursula Majaniev smiled. In the umber light of Colonel’s, a gold tooth, way back in the buccal recesses, glimmered like a dying star.

“Suicide is a kind of repellant, and keeps people away,” Ursula said. “Very few people have approached me, and it makes me angry. It’s one of the only times in my life I’ve felt truly enraged, like I could put my fist through sheet metal, or kill someone with a screwdriver.”

Ursula smiled again. Gold.

“I have to ask you something, Ursula. I wrote to Gabriel a few times, and you returned my letters. Why?”

Ursula stopped smiling. She lifted her coffee to her lips, drank, put the mug down, without ever taking her eyes off the woman seated across from her.

“I would never have returned letters, never did. On the contrary, it was my duty to open and read letters to Gabriel, fan letters, notes from friends, doctors, editors, lawyers, lovers, if he wanted me to. If any were returned, he did it himself. Can I ask, are you the hotel girl, from Dallas?”

Helen blushed.

“That’s me. The hotel girl.” 

Ursula smiled again, coruscating.

“He wrote about you, about that night, about his ultimate confession to Ava of what he’d fantasized about you in that hotel room. He wrote about Ava’s death by suffocation. Esquire was going to publish the piece, but he killed it. I think he was worried you would recognize yourself as the girl, even though he didn’t use your name. He called the moment ‘by far the most potently erotic moment of my life, and as well the arc between a childhood of unwanted mouths and an adulthood of enfeebling depression.’”

“Jesus Christ, nothing happened!”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “I know. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Everyone is dead, but for you and me.”

Helen stared into her coffee. It was strong, thick stuff, the sort that cream had little effect on, and she wanted to shrink down, climb over the hot ceramic lip and disappear into the sweet swirling mud of it, suck it into her tiny lungs, a few seconds of blind, pressing panic, then death, and utter freedom from this moment, from Ursula’s words, Gabriel’s words, the lo-fi spooling-off of a devastating confession of nothing, made all the more sonic and piercing by Ursula having known the text of it by heart and delivering it not like a poem or a speech, but like a stillbirth: with calm, patience, and the confidence that comes in knowing that the failure was not hers.