April 18th, 1976

Temperatures in the 90′s the last few days. Unseasonal blasts of summer. Sitting at my dining room table waiting for new friend Don to pick me up. We are going to mass together at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

In a week much has happened. High romantic drama with Gregg. Job offer at Garfinckel’s. Great strong channels of positive energy.

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The most wonderful afternoon of lovemaking. Truitt. Remember him? New copywriter at work. I’ve wanted him for weeks. Free-floating fantasies about him every day. We spent a sweltering late afternoon loving. 

Can anything so deep and sweet and wonderful be sin? No. No. I’ve seen war. I’ve seen photographs of Nazi concentration camps. I read newspaper stories of murder and atrocity. A man is knifed beyond recognition a few blocks from the Lost and Found. Wickedness and evil. How can such a tender afternoon of naked wonder be considered in the same context? No. No.

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I am in bed late Easter night. The telephone rings. I suppose it is Gregg. It is a collect call from Richard. He is on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. He has run over a dog on the highway. He is sobbing uncontrollably. He has waited over an hour by the side of the road waiting for someone to claim the dog. No one comes.

Richard comes to my apartment. He is a mess. A drunken incoherent blubbering mess. I pity him. We spend the night holding each other. But there is no passion left in me. For him or his body. I pity him. This morning he leaves abruptly, he calls me later at work and talks of suicide.

Tonight I go to sleep peacefully alone in my apartment with my dog.