Whenever I showed up back in Moscow I got solemnly handed packets of letters in Imogene’s cramped black hand, pages and pages and pages of them. I couldn’t believe the paper she would waste, as well as the abuse of taxpayer money involved in using the diplomatic pouch. She had heard me take an eight-bar vocal break on my Decca cut of “Somebody Loves You, Darlin’,” on the station out of Charlottesville, and decided it was a code to announce that I was leaving my wife for her. “I am altogether open and YOURS, my dearest DEAREST Eddie,” she wrote, if I can remember one sentence in all that trash. “I will wait for as LONG as it takes, though KINGDOM COME in the meantime,” if I can recall another. Then on and on, with every detail of what she did each day, with some about her internal workings that I would rather not be told, though I was happy she had her period, and all about her unhappiness (that I wasn’t there with her) and hopefulness (that I soon would be), and her theory that I was in the air talking to her all the time, broadcasting from every frequency on the dial, including the shortwave that brought in stations from the Caribbean and the Azores. If she caught the Osborne Brothers doing “My Lonely Heart” and “You’ll Never Be the Same,” she knew that I was their personal friend and had asked them to send her the private message, never mind they recorded it in the early Fifties. I couldn’t do more than skim a page here and there—the handwriting got smaller and scrunchier and then would blossom out into some declaration of love printed in capitals and triple underlined. Just the envelopes, the bulky white tumble of them, were embarrassing me in front of Bud Nevins and the whole embassy staff, embattled here in the heartland of godless Communism. How could I be a cultural ambassador while shouldering this ridiculous load of conceited infatuation?