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seemed to take a long time to reach us. Merry and I were standing on the veranda. There were fireflies and music, a lazy samba, a foxtrot. Merry looked beautiful. We talked quietly and held hands. Once again, as on so many occasions in my life, I was stirred by the power of the image.
    We went to my car and drove to the amusement park at Rye. There, in tuxedo and evening dress, we rode the dragon coaster four times and then returned to the country club. We danced for a while. I experienced a pleasant sense of self-awareness on behalf of both of us. We were being examined by the older couples, our parents’ generation, and it was clear from their glances and the tone of their whispered remarks that we were regarded as something special. Later we met each other’s parents and then her parents met my parents in one of those slapstick ballets of mistimed lunges, delayed handshakes and profound eye-averting silences. My mother ended the last of these silences by telling us about the dances she had attended in Virginia as a very young lady. We all smiled and looked over her shoulder, trying to spot the Rappahannock. I ladled out two glasses of punch and took Merry back out on the veranda. She told me about some of the places in which she had lived and about the unreal nature of life on a military base; it was life without a future tense, she said, and there was always the feeling that you would wake up one morning and find that everyone had left except the women and children. She was happy that her father was now assigned to a college and she hoped they would be able to stay in Old Holly for a few years at least. I was getting bored. In the past, she said, the closer they lived to military base the more difficult it had been for her mother to stop drinking. But things were better now and Merry was fond of Westchester. She said it had substance.
    I went back to school in southern California. After Christmas, Merry went to London for an extended visit. She stayedwith a cousin, Edwina, and her husband, Charles, who was English. She loved London rain or shine; she loved the parks, the theater, the pubs, the policemen’s hats. Her letters were brisk and full of detail—names, numbers and historical dates. Americans cannot keep track of the centuries. Those were the days when I used to wonder who the Pre-Raphaelites were, when did Galileo live, was it Keats or Shelley who drowned. Meredith’s letters gave me a bearing on the English scene at least and I used to study them diligently, memorizing all the kings and their dates, all the hilarious battles, as if her next letter might include a tricky little quiz. Such study was one of the duties of earnest young love; besides, in an odd statistical way her letters were charming, not very different from the epitaphs in Westminster Abbey. My own letters were long, poetic and unpunctuated, well stocked with sexual imagery. I felt that the six-thousand-mile distance between us permitted me some license. I enjoyed printing the words AIR MAIL in bold block letters with my Venus 4B drawing pencil.
    The campus was at the edge of the desert. There was an artificial lake where I went swimming almost every evening, often in the company of Wendy Judd. In the morning I did push-ups before going to class. There weren’t many classes. Leighton Gage was a small, expensive and very modern liberal arts college. (We had theology of despair in a palm grove.) In the afternoon I drank Coke and wrote poetry. I thought about Meredith a lot, her flawless nose and perfect teeth. Using fellow students as actors, I made a thirty-minute film for my junior thesis. It was about a man who goes into the desert and buries himself in the sand up to his neck. A bunch of Mexicans come along and sit in a circle around his head. My film instructor, Simmons St. Jean, said it was the most pretentious movie he had ever seen, but that pretentiousness wasn’t necessarily bad.
    My mother died in April and that summer Merry and I