One night I brought home a sculptor with tiny hands. It was rather late, and I’d been drinking beer for the past five hours, and the lavatory door was shut. Lilly had me so well trained by this point that I’d gotten used to asking a neighbor, or even using a jar in a pinch; but I wasn’t about to knock on a neighbor’s door at three a.m., and squatting over an empty Maxwell House can in front of my new friend would have spoiled the mood. So I knocked. Lilly asked for five more minutes, which made the sculptor arch his eyebrows. When I told him my roommate was a photographer, his eyebrows fell and he explained in a disappointed voice that he had thought she was shooting up. It took rather longer than five minutes for Lilly to come out. When she finally did, I ran right in, knocking over I don’t know what, but the next morning my white pumps were covered in brown splotches. Look, I told her, stop mooning around waiting for bad news, and find out what happened to your man.

LETTER TO SAM DECKER, SEPTEMBER 1953: Sometimes we’re splitting an egg salad sandwich at Horn & Hardart. Sometimes we’re heading to the IRT, deciding whether to see a movie or spend a quiet evening at home. Sometimes we’re simply on a city street, our arms brushing as we walk. I wish the dreams were grander; then perhaps I wouldn’t wake up believing them. Instead the truth hits me each morning like a fall from a third-story window.

The recruitment station looked the same as it had in July, but photographing a place is an entirely different thing from going inside. I was in such a state by the time I stepped through the door that the duty officer had to help me to a chair. He confirmed your absence on the lists of dead, wounded, or missing and was kind enough to explain the difference between an enlisted man and a draftee. I’ve spent so much time picturing you injured, captured, or buried in an unmarked grave that it didn’t feel very different to learn that it will be years before your term of enlistment ends and you are discharged—and still my heart rushes to defend you, insisting that you never lied. The fault is mine: I wasn’t paying attention. Before you gave up hope or changed your mind or stopped writing to me for some other reason that I will never know, I failed to notice that among all the pretty words in your pretty letters was never a promise to join me.

When I see men in uniform drinking coffee or running to catch the bus or standing on a corner smoking, my heart still leaps in my chest. Even now, as I write a letter that I will never send.

12. Chair, New York, 1953