Love and Death on Long Island

by Gilbert Adair

  I thought of how my lover would receive the letter; how abnormally solemn he would become when he read it; how, too, he would certainly decide to keep its nature and contents from his fiancée, doubtless the first secret kept from her in a union that would know many others; and how, at the last, he would briefly toy with the idea of destroying it. But if I knew him, and no one on earth knew Ronnie Bostock better than I, he would not destroy it. Rather – in a fuller and more mature understanding of what had happened to him and equally of what might have happened to him, in the slow dawning on him that his career and his life, boding so far from brilliantly either of them, might have taken a very different course had he but been capable of opening his heart to another whose own life he would soon see to have been transformed and perhaps even cut off in its prime for love for him – he would return to it often, read it again and again over the years, then no longer have to read what he would have come to know by heart but cherish it against the insentient world as a source of pride both possessive and possessed. And because he would not destroy it, it would end by utterly destroying him.