Now I read the letter again in my bathroom, sitting on the gilt vanity chair, door latched, the present and future locked out, only the past intruding.
It still bore the wrinkled marks of the crumpling I’d given it, and a lot of the ink was smeared from bathwater.
This past week, Jay told me what my mother had done to deter him from pursuing me further. She’d sent him clippings of our wedding—it had been written up in major newspapers—and told him, in the sweetest note, he said, that I was married and happy and she’d not given me his pleading letter for fear of upsetting me. My mother, a devout Methodist who never missed church, told an outright lie.
A lie I compounded, of course, by being deliberately vague when Jay asked me if I had received it. So he still believed my mother’s story was true, that the letter had “arrived” the night before my wedding, but I’d not seen his heartfelt plea, I’d not deliberately and consciously rejected him. I’m not sure precisely what else he believed. I was too afraid to ask. All he admitted was that he was “mighty disappointed” to hear of my marriage and assumed it was an arranged thing. I didn’t disabuse him of that lie.
Why couldn’t I be honest with him? With any man? With myself? I wanted to be. I wanted to stay true.
Jordan had cautioned me not to ruin my life when she’d urged me to go through with the wedding to Tom. However, it felt as if I’d done that very thing. I’d ruined it by not waiting for Jay.
Pulling myself together, I stood, a resolution forming in my mind. Still holding the crumpled letter, I went back into my bedroom and gazed at my wedding photograph on the dresser by the door. In it, Tom stood straight and proud, his arm looped through mine. I looked pale and ill, but there was more than one reason for that and it was not just Jay’s untimely letter or the knowledge he had written many more I’d never received.
My dress was simple and loose for good reason. I had been expecting our first child. Jordan had known, and my mother suspected.
I lost that baby at five months, shortly after our honeymoon, and the doctor told me then I was unlikely to carry a child to term after that.
He was wrong, and when Pamela was conceived, I was filled with joy and fear. Tom’s ardor for me had waned considerably by then, so it was only by great luck that his passion burned at the right moment and darling Pammy was the result. I determined to do everything in my power to make sure this child thrived.
I also knew by then that my marriage to Tom was less than perfect. I knew he found pleasure in other women’s arms, and I felt like a fool for not realizing this would be my fate, to be the betrayed wife. After all, he’d quickly bedded me. Why would he have any reservations about taking other women he wanted? It was a habit of his.
We had traveled to Europe by then, and he’d had a lover or two while there, I was sure, judging by the smug glances he sent to singers in smoky jazz clubs and a young female reporter we met at a dinner in Paris.
Yet, I stayed true. I decided that I would never give myself so freely again, that Tom was my husband, and I would remain faithful. I embraced it with the zeal of a religious convert. It was a form of revenge: to be what he couldn’t be. I knew he was aware of my virtue and resented it.
But I knew he’d resent my infidelity to him even more.
At least I had Pamela. That beautiful creature had come from all this turmoil.
A sob crawled up my throat and almost choked me, and reflexively I felt my hand crumpling the letter once more into a ball. I let out a feral cry and ripped the paper into little pieces, not wanting it to haunt me any longer.
Then I pulled the photograph from its silver frame and consigned it to the same fate, its waxy fragments joining Jay’s letter in the trash bin.
The past thus destroyed, I drew my own bath and sank into a field of lavender bubbles, where I stayed until I declined the request to come down to dinner.
Jordan was right. I needed to make a plan. With details, not just vague notions.
Tomorrow afternoon, I’d ring up Nick and this time, I would be the one arranging the rendezvous at his home. For me, him, Jay…and Pamela.