I have dieted and lost ten pounds. My friends tell me I have never looked better. In two years I will be forty. I wonder what it would be like to look my age. Or act my age. I would like a life uncomplicated by longings.
I sometimes think that Conrad Schwartzberg was my last great passion. The thought invariably brings tears to my eyes. And yet it is clearly better to live without such disruption. If I have lost the hope of ever being completely happy, I hope I have also lost a certain vulnerability to disappointment. I try to be more cautious now. I always believed in being led by emotion, but perhaps I am beginning to change.
Roberta never called back. For about two weeks I thought that she would and then I knew she wouldn’t. She and Conrad are still together, although I understand he spends several months of the year in California, where it is rumored that he has a new girlfriend, a very young one this time. Perhaps geography makes the situation bearable.
Malcolm occasionally sends a postcard from some exotic part of the world. I give the stamps to Matthew.
I find that with my mind less occupied with thoughts of either Malcolm or Conrad, there is a lot of room in it for other kinds of reflection. Felicia has been urging me to go back to school to get my Ph.D. Lately I have become interested in Latin American literature.
In some ways I have never been more productive.
About the Author
Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in New York City, the setting for all her fiction: Come and Join the Dance, recognized as the first Beat novel by a woman writer, Bad Connections, and In the Night Café. She is best known for her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 and dealt with coming of age in the 1950s and with her involvement with Jack Kerouac. She has published two other Beat-related books: Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, and The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. She has also written a second memoir, Missing Men, and the nonfiction title What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1977, 1978 by Joyce Johnson
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN 978-1-4804-8125-1
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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