After dinner she walked him to the Plaza, where he’d booked a room for the night, and asked if he’d like to have a nightcap in the Oak Bar. When he said he thought he’d better get some sleep before having to cope with the Skokie Marvel again, she said, “Or maybe you’d like to come to my place instead. For the nightcap, I mean. I’m right on Thirty-eighth.” He thanked her, but said no again, and they shook hands and said their good nights. Narrow hips swaying, she went down the steps opposite the fountain, and hailed a taxi.
It was close to midnight. Alone in his room, he almost called Joanna.
And then he thought, No, she’s forgotten me by now, she won’t even remember what I look like. Lew Barker, who was the biggest swordsman Jamie knew, once told him he was constantly shocked by the infidelity of women. “Not the playing-around of married women,” Lew had said, “that’s not the infidelity I’m talking about. Perhaps I mean inconstancy. Yes, that’s a better word, however Shakespearean. Inconstancy. I am constantly shocked by their inconstancy. I’ll enjoy an affair of several months’ duration with this or that delectable young thing, and then for one reason or another will not see her for a while. And then, if I call again to announce myself and my renewed intentions, why this young lady will say she’s no longer interested! When I remind her of the joys we shared together, the ecstatic heights to which we’d been transported, the fun and the laughter, the gay madcap adventure of it all, the romance of wading in the Seagram Building’s pool or waltzing with a blind man on Fifth Avenue — why, Jamie, she’ll have forgotten it all, she’ll have put it out of her mind, she’ll have dismissed me as if I’d never existed. It’s enough to break an old man’s heart, I tell you. The inconstancy of women. Enough to break an old man’s heart.”
He lifted the bedside telephone receiver.
He knew her number by heart, still knew it, started to dial it, and then hung up. I should have taken her up on it, he thought, Lucy, I should have said, “Sure, why not, let’s go to your place for a nightcap, what the hell?” Same blond hair and blue eyes, same young good looks, exactly the same, what the hell. But not the same at all. Not Joanna. Whom he loved.
He turned out the light.
It took him a long time to fall asleep.
June 29, 1970
Dear Mom and Dad,
I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, but no, our plans have not changed, that is what we still plan to do. And whereas India may seem very far away to you, it does not seem far to us, sitting here on Samos, where we can see the mountains of Turkey right across the bay, right across the sparkling water. Please don’t worry, the situation is in control, and we will make our travel plans well in advance before moving on, which won’t be for some time yet.
And please be assured that I will carry you with me wherever I go, and will be proud to carry that luggage. You are in my heart and soul and you will always be. We have all had beautiful lives together, and we are indebted to each other for a large part of it. It’s funny how much I miss you both. I send my essence to you every day and wish you all the best of luck and strength. I know the feeling is reciprocated. We all need each other, but separate paths we must take. I dedicate a prayer to our old age and the force which keeps us striving and experimenting. I miss you very much and of course love you as I love myself.
July 7, 1970
Dear Lissie:
Eight days this time, which I suppose is something of an improvement. And, at least, the reassurance that you won’t be moving on to India for “some time yet,” whatever that means. I hope it means you’ll be giving the idea further thought and reflection, and eventually will decide against it. I don’t know what you think is waiting for you there in India, Liss. I don’t understand any of this too clearly.
I only know that I love you and miss you, and worry about you constantly. I do not know this boy Paul, I know nothing about him. It pains me to think that you are living with a stranger. It pains me to think that the last time we had a conversation of any real substance was when you were in San Francisco, and then in anger over a boy I didn’t know, who seems to have passed out of your life to be replaced by another boy I don’t know. I would not like to believe that the angry words we exchanged on the telephone had anything to do with your decision to run off to Europe. I would not like to believe that your decision to go on to India has anything to do with any anger you may be feeling now.
Lissie, I wish you would decide to come home. I miss you terribly. Please write again soon.
Love,
July 14, 1970
Dear Lissie:
We have not heard from you since your letter of June 29, and even accounting for the usual postal lag, we are beginning to get very worried. We tried to phone you in Greece yesterday, but it turned out to be impossible to reach you. We finally left word with someone in the post office there, or tried to leave word, but we were talking English and he was talking Greek, and I’m not sure he got the message straight. But there are telephones there on Samos, Lissie, we found that out after all our frantic attempts, and I wish you would call us collect as soon as you receive this to let us know that you are all right.
Love,
4-027712E107002 07/20/70 ICS imppmizz csp nvnb
1 203 784 8072 mgm tdmt rutledge ct 07–20 1243 p est
TDMT RUTLEDGE CT 07–20 1243 P EST
MELISSA CROFT
POSTE RESTANTE
KOKKÁRI, SAMOS
GREECE
MOM AND I WORRIED AND CONCERNED. ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? PLEASE CABLE OR CALL AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. LOVE, DAD.
They had still not heard from her by the night of Jamie’s birthday party. He was born on July 23, but that fell on a Thursday this year, and so Connie had planned the party for the following night. He knew there was going to be a gala celebration for his forty-fourth birthday; no one could have kept as a surprise the workmen hanging Japanese lanterns in the trees bordering the river, the caterers arriving to set up tables and chairs, the three-piece band (not rock, thank God!) who arrived looking bewildered at a little past seven, the leader complaining they’d been up and down the street twenty times already, searching for the mailbox. What Jamie hadn’t realized was that Connie had planned a party of such magnitude.
Taking her cue from Jamie’s own hanging of Lissie’s pictures each year in December, she had festooned the living room with pictures of him taken at various stages of his life, pictures of him as a somewhat scrawny little boy, and later as a tall and slender teenager; pictures of him in his Army uniform and on the Yale campus; pictures of him on their honeymoon, pictures of him holding the infant Lissie in his arms, even poster-size blowups of the pictures he’d taken for the first Life essay, so that the living room was a visual history of Jamie Croft from the first shot of him as a baby lying on a furry robe in a commercial photographer’s studio to a picture Connie herself had taken only two weeks earlier, a candid shot of Jamie at his desk, typing a letter to Lissie in Greece.