Dexter Green

An Excerpt from the Diary of Dexter Green

14 December 1956, New York

Dear Diary

I once loved Judy Jones. I have just heard from a man I bitterly call a friend – Devlin, his name was. He gave me news that my dear Judy Jones has gone off and married some man named Lud Simms. I’ve heard of the marriage, no doubt, but his description of her, I could not believe. I thought maybe he was just another heart that was set to be broken all over again, but no – it appears as if she loves that Lud man.

Devlin told me that Judy Jones – the most beautiful creature I have ever set eyes upon whose slender lips, down-turning, dropping to mine engulfed me in such passionate moments back in those days, yes, the woman who caused me to break off my engagement with Irene Scheerer – has become a dull woman who sits at home while her husband drinks and parties all over town. How could that be? I had a wild impulse to take a train down to Detroit at once. Yet from Devlin’s description, I could not sense the burning fire and beauty of Judy Jones I once came to know and love. She’s faded, he said. She’s faded. Like many other women who fade just like that.

There was a sense of dullness that came upon me that moment. I had an urge to get myself very drunk to forget all the anguish and desperate emptiness roaring deep within. When Devlin left – thank goodness he performed that gratuitous yet kind act quickly – I looked out the window and saw the sun sink into the dull shades of pink and gold, like Judy setting into pale nothingness.

I thought that I had nothing else to lose, but now I’ve lost something more. It did not matter to me that I could not marry Judy. But what difference would it make, I wonder, if I had married her, and find that she would have just as much faded away before my very eyes? It was my dream, my winter dream that I had lost forever. My dream that I could have the best things in life, where Judy was one of those “things” I craved for, loved passionately, and found myself obsessed with. Judy Jones, whose passionate kisses and melancholic eyes set me afire and whose freshness was like dew in the morning. Yet I found, that they have gone away, like my winter dreams – vanished.

I cried bitterly. They were tears of despair that my winter dreams – dreams of illusion, of youth and of the grand richness of life were no more, all lost into a distant memory of Judy Jones whose beauty was never meant to last.




Samuel K Lis