She had come into his life in October of 1949, a long-legged, full-breasted eighteen-year-old Vassar girl whose reputation as a Snow Queen had preceded her via the Yale grapevine. It was this about her that had attracted him most, perhaps, her reputed inaccessibility, an aloof manner his mother would have called “stuck-up,” the knowledge that any of the boys who’d dated her (the Yalies, at least) hadn’t got to first base. Jamie had just turned twenty-three that July, and he considered himself a man of the world. He had been discharged from the United States Army in June of 1946, and had bummed around all summer long, going to the beach on good days and the movies on bad ones, and finally entering Yale in the fall. In 1949, when he first spotted Connie at the Vassar mixer, he was a graduating senior and although his roommate — a boy named Maury Atkins — had told him to stay away from Constance Hard-On, also known in the trade as C. T. Harding, Jamie felt he himself might just possibly be the man to crack her icy façade.
“I warned you,” Maury said, and shook his head in sympathy as he watched Jamie cross the floor to where Connie was sitting and talking to a girlfriend. Rock-and-roll had still not exploded on the scene; the song the record player was oozing as Jamie crossed the floor was a sweet little number titled “Mona Lisa”; the man singing it was a relatively new recording star named Nat “King” Cole. Fashion that year had just about outgrown the folly of the New Look; it was now possible to see whether a girl had good legs, or in fact any legs at all. As Jamie approached the couch where Connie was sitting with her friend and amiably chatting, he was pleased to notice that she had splendid legs indeed and what one might have termed exuberant boobs protruding perkily in the swooping neck of the green dress she was wearing. Green dress, green shoes, and green eyes, too; she acknowledged his approach with a jungle-glade glance and then turned her attention and her chatter back to her girlfriend, a good-looking brunette who seemed utterly bored with the entire universe.
“Hi,” Jamie said, “would you care to dance?”
“I’d adore it,” Connie said at once, surprising him, and getting to her feet and moving into his arms. He thought surely Maury Atkins had been wrong. She seemed warm and receptive as he asked her all the questions students ask of each other the world over: How do you like Yale, Harvard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Oxford, University of Michigan, Le Sorbonne, C.C.N.Y., the Citadel, all or none of the above; are you a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior or grad student; how do you like your roommate; what is your major, what is your minor, does your mother come from Ireland, and who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?
He listened to her, enchanted as she supplied the answers to all his questions, fascinated by the lilt of her voice, and its cadence, and the somewhat breathy rush of it, surely not her own voice but something acquired here at Vassar, and remembering the old line attributed to Dorothy Parker: “If you laid every Vassar girl end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
“I adore Vassar,” Connie said. “I’m in my freshman year, I room with a girl who lives on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, I’m majoring in speech and dramatics and minoring in psychology, and I, uh, don’t really enjoy dancing this close.” He backed away from her at once and told her he himself was a graduating senior at Yale (“Well, sure, Yale,” she said, and he realized how dumb he’d just been; there were only Yalies at the mixer) and that he was majoring in political science and minoring in history, but that he had recently and pretty much by accident become interested in photography and had joined—
“By accident?” she said. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I found a camera.”
“Found a camera?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Where? What kind of camera?”
“On the Commons. In New Haven. On a bench in the park there.”
“Well... well, whose camera is it? I mean, is it an expensive camera?”
“Yeah, pretty much. I checked it out, it’s worth about three hundred bucks. It’s a Leica. Do you know anything about cameras?”
“Nothing.”
“Neither did I, until I joined the Photography Club. I figured if I owned a good camera...”
“Well, it’s not really your camera.”
“Yes, I think it is. Now it is. I put an ad in the paper, you see, the New Haven Register, and I asked whoever’d lost a camera to give me a call, and nobody did.”
“Did you describe it?”
“No, of course not. Then anyone in the world could’ve claimed it.”
“Well, that’s right. Mmm. Yeah.”
“I even developed the roll of film that was in it, figuring there’d be pictures of people, you know, somebody recognizable, but the whole roll was of buildings. Not the whole roll because he’d only taken six or seven pictures, but all of buildings.”
“Maybe he was an architect.”
“Maybe. Anyway, I figure the camera’s mine now, and since I’ve got it, I’ve been making use of it. Want me to take your picture sometime?” he said, and grinned.
“Sure,” she said. “When?”
He looked at her.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“Why would I be?”
“I don’t know, I just... I mean, we’ve hardly said a dozen words to each other.”
“Well, don’t you want to?”
“Sure,” he said. “Hey, cool.”
Connie’s reputation, he discovered on their first date (“I told you so,” Maury Atkins said), was firmly rooted in fact. Try as hard as he might, Jamie could not convince her to engage in anything more intimate or spirited than the rather expert kissing she’d learned from one of her older sister’s boyfriends one night while Janet was at the ballet with a visiting junior from Harvard. “He was some kisser,” Connie disclosed after she and Jamie had been kissing for something close to two hours in the front seat (they had not yet graduated to the back seat) of the used Dodge he’d bought three years earlier with the back pay he’d accumulated overseas. Jamie recalled the story told by one of the stand-up comics about the ugly man walking down the street and thinking he had an extremely beautiful mouth because he overheard one girl saying to another, “Did you see the kisser on that guy?” He did not tell the joke to Connie that night because she was, in fact, a very good kisser; he was tempted instead to ask her for the name of her sister’s long-ago boyfriend so that he might send him a dozen roses and a letter of recommendation. It was a pity, Jamie thought after their fifth date, when he was already hopelessly in Connie’s thrall, that Janet’s boyfriend (whose name had been Archie Halpern, a hell of a name for such a good kisser) hadn’t taught Connie the joys of petting as well.
For this oversight, Jamie was obliged to devote much of his energy during the harsh winter of 1950 attempting entry into Connie’s laden blouse, the buttons on which were guarded as jealously as had been the gates of Stalingrad during World War II. By spring, he did manage to steal one or the other of his sneaky hot hands onto her sweatered, shirted, bloused or blanketed (this one day when he popped into her unlocked hotel room in New Haven and surprised her naked in bed with nothing but a blanket over her) mounds, but never would she allow him to touch those prized beauties in the flesh. He heard with some surprise, therefore, that Fodderwing Foley had put in his hand, so to speak, during the torrid summer of 1950.