What a wonderful reunion he must have had with Jerrold! The truth was hard to tell . . . Oh, Terrence, what truth did you tell them? That we loved each other, and that fate or circumstance or cruel people intervened? Or that we loved each other, and you were facedown on the porch, mistaken for a thief on the day you came to break up with me?

I read his letter so many times the ink smudged from my tears. I kept it under my pillow at night and in my pocket during the day. But within days my initial joy, relief shriveled when I realized there was no suggestion whatever that he would be coming back. He would not be coming back. Did he have someone else? Someone new? When I read that letter truthfully, I mean, telling myself the truth, I knew that Terrence, in moving to Paris, in writing the book he had wanted to write, had crawled out of the ruins of life in LA. He had found a new life. Clearly, he went out with new friends, black and white, and no doubt there were women. There was absolutely nothing in his note to suggest his heart was breaking over me. My heart was breaking over him. I needed my own oubliette.

One afternoon I took this tissuey aerogramme and put it in a big manila envelope, alongside Julia’s plain wedding ring and the lock of hair from the first Aaron Greene. I took the cache of letters Terrence wrote me from Alabama, the two photographs of us, and the gold bracelet he had given me at Christmas, put all this in the envelope, and sealed it. I drove to the bank, where I placed it in the safe-deposit box that held Julia’s diamond choker, the diamond ring, the ruby earrings, the rope of perfect pearls, and other relics from the past, from a life I needed to forget, a life no longer my own.

Chapter Thirty-seven

How could this meeting be anything but bad news? So bad Carleton Grimes felt it had to be delivered in person? I assumed he set this meeting for late, six o’clock at the Paragon commissary, because he didn’t want to be seen publicly with me. I parked the MG and found the commissary; the place was closing, so I waited at an outside table where low, flowering hedges bristled with twittering sparrows. I felt like one of those dull birds, though I wore silk trousers, a silk blouse, and a much-needed spray of Panache. It was the first time in weeks that I’d left Malibu except to go to the movies, the grocery store, or Irene’s house. Oddly, Gordon and I are actually getting along better than we ever did. Maybe misery loves company. Gordon is pretty miserable these days.