She was staring at him now, a stunned look on her face.
“Let’s finish packing,” he said.
On the plane back to New York, he busied himself first with sorting out his little containers of exposed film and checking the numbers on them against the shabby little notebook he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket, next with reading Time magazine from cover to cover and pointing out in a friendly stranger-on-a-plane way the work of various photographers he knew, and then paying excessive gourmand attention to the virtually inedible “snack” the airline served, and finally — she was sure — flirting with the flight attendant, a bosomy southern belle who looked more like an Eighth Avenue hooker than the real-life ones prancing that stretch of sordid turf.
In the taxi on the way back to the city, he commented on how good it was to be home again in the Big Apple, and then repeated to her a joke he told her he’d overheard at the track, something about a dog learning to talk, something about a dog getting shot, she really wasn’t following it, her mind was on the looming possibility that this might be the last time in her life she’d ever see him. When he finished the joke, she laughed politely.
She was certain that she herself had little or nothing to do with his decision to end the relationship. She was being evicted by a person she’d never met, an eighteen-year-old twerp “finding herself,” or whatever the fuck she was doing, someplace in Europe, a daughter who, by her irresponsible mindlessness, her adolescent inability to get her immature ass on a goddamn airplane, was somehow causing this. She wished she could explore this further with him, probe whatever promises he had made to himself or to God — “Bring my daughter home safely, and I’ll never, never fuck around again” — investigate the possibility that he was linking his daughter’s profligacy to his own, perhaps even accepting as his own the guilt that silly teenage twit should have been feeling. But the taxi meter was ticking, the watch on Joanna’s wrist was ticking, the minutes were flying past, the opportunities were vanishing second by second.
“Here we are,” Jamie said.
He carried her suitcase up to the front door, and waited while she searched for her key, and then unlocked the door. She debated asking him to come in for a drink.
“I’ll call you,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.
She watched as he went down the steps to the waiting taxi, watched as the taxi pulled away from the curb, knowing he would not call, knowing he was gone forever, and blaming it on his dumb wandering cunt of a daughter.
10
May 4, 1970
Dear Mom and Dad,
I guess I ought to explain first why I wasn’t on that plane from Venice, as you thought I would be. I know that must have come as a surprise to you, because when I spoke to you on the phone (you, Dad) I told you I would be coming home. I know you went to a lot of trouble getting that ticket to me, and I really am sorry if you think there was any duplicity or betrayal involved when I cashed it in at the airport in Venice. The problem was we needed money to continue our travels, and I couldn’t think of any way to get it except by telling a lie I hope you will forgive.
You’ll want to know why I have come here to Greece, I guess, instead of coming home as I promised I would. I can only say that there are some things I must do at this stage of my life, and I can assure you I am in the presence of a very warm and loving person and that no harm can possibly come to me. There are hippies like me and Paul all over Europe, and I’m sure we will find hippies wherever we travel, wherever we go, young people like us who are trying to learn about life by actually experiencing it and savoring it.
I will be staying here on Mykonos for several weeks to learn some Greek. Barbara Duggan plans to stay here indefinitely (she is living with a very nice southern boy named Robby) but Paul and I plan to travel around some of the other islands before settling down someplace. It is impossible to describe the natural splendor of this island. Flowers and green hills, air fresh from the Aegean breezes. I can’t give you an address for you to answer until we settle down, but I will write to you from time to time to let you know how I’m doing.
All my love,
Secretly, Connie blamed it all on Jamie, tracing it back to that Sunday night in March when he’d delivered his long-distance telephone harangue to Lissie in San Francisco. His violent reaction that night had bewildered her at first, his anger seeming out of all proportion to what had actually happened. But then she’d begun wondering, Oedipus and Frank Lipscombe aside, just what had really triggered his rage. Had it truly been the knowledge that Lissie had lied to him, that Lissie was no longer a virgin, that Lissie was living with a boy he didn’t know? She wondered.
She had read somewhere — or perhaps Frank had revealed this during one of his learned Rutledge-party discourses — that unusual or unexpected behavior, deviation from set routines or schedules, unexplained absences, long meditative silences and deep sighs, sudden outbursts of anger, excessive apologies or remorseful breast-beating, all added up to trouble right here in River City, sure indicators that the male or female partner in a marriage was philandering. Jamie had over the past several months, certainly — and perhaps longer before she’d detected it — exhibited all of these symptoms, plus what she might have termed a lingering absence, a perpetual removal from the circumstances of their life together. She was, she came to realize, living with an empty cipher these days, and she thought she knew why: Jamie was involved with another woman.
The abiding suspicion that there was certainly someone else, the accompanying anger and indecision led to a helpless sort of despair in which Connie asked herself the same questions over and again: What should I do once I know for certain? Call his hand? End the marriage? Turn the other cheek? Do I even want to stay married to a man who needs other women? Is Diana Blair the other woman? Diana, who had once confided, “The way I look at it, Connie, there are the Titters and the Twatters. The girls who press their, you know, breasts against their partner’s chest, and the ones who use the, well, lower parts of their anatomies to achieve this... uh... closeness that makes it easier to dance well together. It becomes a problem for me, since I’ve been... uh... unfortunately and... uh... overabundantly endowed... well, Jesus, you know how big my tits are” — and here she’d giggled — “which of course makes it almost impossible for me to dance without some sort of frontal contact” — and she’d giggled again. Could he have possibly taken up with Diana Blair, the U.S. Open?
Maybe I should call her, Connie thought, pick up the phone, lay it right on the line: “Diana, are you having an affair with my husband?” An affair! The nice little words we’ve invented to accommodate the most despicable human behavior. Maybe the kids are right, maybe our values do reek, maybe our system is rotten and rotting further, maybe they’ve got the right idea, go out there and live with someone, live with a dozen someones on a commune, forget about marriage, forget about nineteen years of marriage — oh, dear God, what should I do?
She could not call Diana, nor could she flatly accuse Jamie of infidelity simply on the grounds that he’d been behaving strangely for the past God knew how many months. Without evidence that he was actually “philandering” (another one of our nice little words; fucking around was more like it) she would risk placing herself in an impossibly weak position if she happened to be wrong, become the abject, sniveling wife, “I’m sorry, darling, I’m sorry — you rotten bastard!”