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In my letters I took on a personality that differed from the self I knew in real life.

Then epistolatory me was a foreign correspondent dispatching exciting cables and communiques, full of dash and wit and glamor, quoting from the books I read, imitating the grand styles of the authors recommended by a teacher in whose special, after-school class I was enrolled.

The letters took their source from a stream of my imagination in which I was transformed into a young man not unlike my bunkmate Eliot Sands -- he of the porch steps anecdotes -- who smoked cigarettes, performed the tango, wore fifty dollar suits, and sneaked off into the dark with girls to do unimaginable things with them.

Like Eliot, in my fantasies, I had a proud bearing and, with a skill that was vaguely continental, I would lead Jessica through an evening of dancing and handsome descriptions of my newest exploits, would guide her gently to the night's climax which, in my dreams, was always represented by our almost suffocating one another to death with deep, moist kisses burning with love.

The night after reading her letter about her surgeon uncle -- it must have been late in September -- I had a vision of myself returned in ragged uniform from The Front, nearly dying, my head bandaged and blooded, and Jessica bending over me, the power of her love bringing me back to life.

For many nights afterward, the idea of her having been so close to me in that imagined bed would return and fill me with obscure and painful desires, would cause me to lie awake in shame, tossing with irresolution, longing to fall into a deep sleep.