I never got over my first lover. He broke my heart.
~~~
In second grade at Our Lady of Grace, sister Mary Helene told us a story about the little boy who hit his
mother. This boy knew hitting his mother was a sin. He did it anyway. Every day. The mother told him to stop,
but he never would. One day, the boy suddenly died. The boy had been dead only a few months when a little
hand came poking up out of the grass growing over his grave. The mother didn’t know what to make of this, so
she went to her parish priest. When, after some questioning, the mother shamefully disclosed to the priest that
her little boy had been in the habit of hitting her, the solution became clear. The priest told the mother that she
had to go to her son’s grave and hit the hand with a stick – a hundred strokes, every day. She had to hit and
hit and hit this hand, until she had paid her dead boy back for all the times he had hit her.
“Think how much trouble this caused the mother!” Sister Mary Helene said. “She had other children to take
care of! And her housework to do! Think what a nuisance it was, for her to have to find time in her busy day to
go to the grave and hit her dead boy’s hand!”
Busy as she was, the mother dutifully went, and struck the little hand until it finally sank back into the earth –
proof that the debt of offense had been paid in full.
This and similar stories warning of life’s punitive side had been banned from the catechism by the time I met
Gene Christie ten years later. But as events would unfold, their essential truth would become clear.
When I met Gene in 1977, I had long been attending the public schools, and even at church, hell and even
purgatory were seldom mentioned. No longer was I obliged to enter a confessional stall every Friday, and
whisper my sins in secret shame. Now all I had to do to obtain instant forgiveness was to chant, “I repent,” in
chorus with the rest of the parishioners, and this just once a year on Good Friday. We didn’t even have to name
our sins.
“God is Love,” we sang each Sunday.
“God is everywhere and in all things,” preached the priest.
“All You Need is Love,” proclaimed hand-made felt banners hung on gaily-painted brick walls. It was only be a
matter of time before I was sucked into this vortex .
I fell in love with Gene Christie on first sight, and stole him from my best friend the spring we graduated high
school. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t really hers yet – he was someone she met up with at parties -- but
Shannon had marked him for the first boy she was going to sleep with. Gene was from our hometown and a
sophomore at the state university where Shannon was headed in the fall, thus their futures seemed sewn up.
He had invited her to a party up at his dormitory, and for courage, she had brought me. It was a mistake. Soon
as we arrived, Gene smiled and kissed Shannon hello, then turned to me.
“I know you,” he said. I had never seen him before in my life. He was so beautiful, I would have remembered.
He described my house, said he had been to one of my sister’s parties the year before, and had caddied for
my father on the town golf course. I thought he must be lying.
“You know me,” he insisted, smiling. He said he had spoken to me at a hometown bar at Christmas. I scanned
a jumble of beer-strewn memories: ex-jocks from our high school coming up to us underage girls saying,
“Hello gorgeous,” or “Will you marry me?” I still couldn’t place him.
“This is Celeste,” he introduced me to a friend. “She’s from my home town.” I smiled from embarrassment.
Gene smiled back. He was the type of boy with the big muscles, alligator shirt, pretty face and soft-spoken
manner to make mothers swoon.
Every time he spoke to me, Shannon would try to recapture his attention by saying something like: “We went
to the beach before we came up here today,” or, “I have some reefer,” or, “There’s a party at the lake next
Friday.”
Gene glanced at her as if she were a traffic sign he had elected to disregard, and turned back to me. He knew
everything about me – that I was smart, that I had just won a big prize at school, where I was going to college
in the fall, and after Shannon stomped off in a huff, he took me by the wrist, pulled me into a room, closed the
door, said, “You’ll like college,” and kissed me for five minutes.
It was the best kiss I ever had. He had the softest touch, and when we finally closed our mouths and pulled
away, I saw that he had the softest-looking sort of beauty; it was if I were viewing him through a mesh, or
mist. His deep set eyes were the exact median between green and blue, and they tilted down slightly at the
outer corners, so they had a permanently heartrending cast, like the eyes of a child who is smiling, but also on
the brink of tears. His hair was tousled, with gold lights at the crests of the curls, his skin was smooth and tan,
his teeth were white, and his wide mouth was embarrassing, for it immediately prompted thoughts of more
kisses. He had a massive upper body, but was slim through the waist and below; he was just an inch or two
taller than me, and looking into his eyes I said, “What about Shannon?”
He smiled and said nothing. The room he had pulled me into was the bathroom, and people were banging on
the door. Gene left first, then I flushed the toilet and exited.
Shannon had done something stupid, left me stranded at the party knowing no one but Gene. I would dart
here and there, sipping watery keg beer from a plastic cup, and he would follow. Upstairs, downstairs, outside
the dorm, inside. In time I did have to use the bathroom in earnest, and when I emerged he was leaning
against the wall opposite, waiting, his head tilted at an obsequious angle, a curling forelock of hair hanging
down.
By the time Shannon came back, Gene and I were standing out in the quad in front of the bonfire – they were
burning a couch and other wrecked things from the dorm – holding hands, and I was falling in love. Falling in
love, like falling in a dream toward a pile of featherbed pillows. From the start it was unreal like that.
When I saw Shannon I disengaged my hand. Gene said he would call me in a few weeks when he was home
for the summer.
“You won’t call,” I said.
“I will,” he said. “Come say good-bye to me tomorrow.”
Shannon and I walked off in silence. We had meant to sleep on the living room floor of her brother’s house off
campus, but she stayed up all night, drinking and flirting with his friends, while I lay awake on the basement
concrete floor, not wishing to squander this magical time in sleep. Even the next morning, neither of us said
anything about Gene. If Shannon had confronted me, I would have said, “I didn’t do anything,” but she didn’t.
She didn’t say anything. We had always been allies, never quarreled, and so had no words to handle the
matter. The only rudeness that occurred was when she hogged the last of the orange juice – a highly
uncharacteristic act.
As for me, I sensed this breach was inevitable. Shannon and I were on the brink of real life – it was time to
turn away from each other, and choose the opposite sex.
Soft spring Saturday morning, with a warm wind stirring the burnt smell of dead bonfire with the fresh country
scents of earth and clover. First it was his head popping out of an upper story window of the dorm. Then he
descended, and stood lolling against the building’s red brick wall, dazzling in a faded knit shirt that was a
deeper hue of his blue-green eyes.
Shannon told him to call her when he came home for the summer. He said it had been nice to see us. I said
nothing. After all had been said, he just stood there smiling his smile, basking in the morning sun, our adoration
and our anguish. His rending eyes, wide shoulders, lean faded jeans, tanned feet in moccasins without socks –
such sick, sick longing.
“Kiss me good-bye,” he said in his soft voice, looking at Shannon.
Her manner was defiant as she stepped quickly forward, but her face was a wreck. Clearly this kiss was meant
to be their last.
“Now you, Celeste,” he said. I looked into his eyes, deep-set and somewhat small in his tanned face, but
couldn’t read them. As much as I failed to comprehend, I bore faith that he embodied the answer to our
turmoil. I hesitated, then stepped up to kiss him lightly on the lips. Throughout he remained leaning against the
wall, his hands folded nonchalantly behind him.
On the bus ride home Shannon slept across the aisle, scowling. Out the tinted windows the sight of cows, silos
and green hills was too bittersweet.
One month later I was sitting on a fold-out chair on our high school’s football field in my graduation gown. Two
girls up on the platform sang, “The Circle Game” in shaky sopranos to the strums of their guitars while other
girls got up from their seats, embracing and blubbering as if the end of the world were at hand. The only time I
almost cried was when Shannon approached the platform for her diploma – the long blond hair falling in a
straight sheet over the gold gown, her wide smile and hurt eyes.
Gene had broadcast it all over town that he was going to call me. After he did, I had to tell someone, some
other girlfriend besides Shannon. On hearing the news Elaine began screaming into the phone and had come
straight over. We had smoked half a joint and had run laughing and singing around and around my basement,
blasting records on the stereo – Elaine and me and my little brother Fritz, who we were babysitting, and who
was only three and therefore always happy to run laughing and screaming about nothing.
Our date was for the Monday night after graduation, and at the Sunday ceremony I was the envy of
everyone. For a gift my grandmother had passed on to me a tiny chip of diamond, her engagement ring, which
I wore. Afterwards when we were returning our gowns in the cafeteria, someone said, “Gene Christie gave her
that ring,” as a joke and Shannon overheard.
“Bullshit,” she said. “Like hell he did.”
Gene had never called Shannon on the phone, driven to her house, met her parents and taken her away.
Theirs had been a stray, sometime thing, indulged in drunkenly, at the end of parties behind a tree, a rock, a
fence. She would come home with grass stains rubbed into the back of her white painter pants, of which her
mother complained.
~~
Gene came to pick me up when it was still light. He rang the bell as other boys had done before him, yet in
truth he was the first one I had ever really wanted to go out with and knew I’d want to see a second time, and
forever and ever amen.
I brought hin out to the back deck where my family was eating dinner. I fetched him the beer my father
offered, then sat silently by his side, dutifully waiting for the preliminaries to be over, pondering the unknown.
For the next several hours I would have in my custody this much sought-after gem, yet I was unsure as to
what to do with him. I stole short looks at his turquoise eyes from time to time, but they returned my gaze,
cheerful but opaque. A stranger.
In his soft and courteous voice, Gene fearlessly plied my father with golf talk, and succeeded in extracting a
number of lengthy responses and a lingering smile. My father was gruff with his family, but kind to strangers.
My mother’s manner toward Gene alternated between over-eager and mooning smiles, symptomatic of her
worm-like devotion to our father. Still her presence was a plus, because she and I were nearly identical. Gene
could see for himself that I would still be pretty and slim, and my hair a waving shade of Chestnut when I was
forty-three. Little Fritz peed off the deck, which made everyone laugh, and my younger sister Candida, who
was blond and shy and ten, sat smiling, because Gene had smiled specifically at her.
Marianne, just down from freshman year, was brusque with Gene, though the two had something in common --
both planned to be doctors. Marianne spoke knowledgeably and discouragingly to Gene of entrance exams, G.P.
A.’s, and the near impossibility of someone from State entering Harvard or Yale Medical School, as he said he
hoped to do.
“You won’t stand a chance,” my sister said, her mouth a hard line in her pretty face. “Not a chance of getting
into any private medical school, come to that.”
We had to make straight A’s, weigh 125 pounds or less, be popular, date cool people. I was lacking in this last
arena. Gene was the first A-list guy I had dated, not being more than a B- list girl myself, socially, in contrast
to my stellar grades. So I had whisked other boys in and out of the house quickly, in some cases instructing
them beep in front of the house, deeply insulting at least one. Better that than have them humiliated by too
stringent standards.
My father was a carnivorous eater who made an evening ritual of sectioning and ingesting his steak. He had
bulky hands for a surgeon, with the first joint of each forefinger held permanently rigid, each having been
jammed in machinery during his factory-working youth. Now his attention, along with his thick smashed fingers,
was fully engaged in paring his steak. He gave Gene no encouragement, as he gave none to us, as none had
been given to him. My father had graduated from a good private medical school; but only after attending a
small Catholic college on scholarship, only after doing the whole thing on ROTC before the Veit Nam War. I
was glad my father said nothing because I didn’t want Gene to have to join the army, nor have to live with him
on some God-forsaken army base in the middle of southern nowhere, an experience my mother often
recounted with horror.
As if this were his only defense, Gene beamed his smile gently across the table at my sister, but Marianne’s
glare was merciless. Then his eyes traveled lightly around the picnic table, finally coming to rest on me.
I blinked at him as if to say, None of this matters, then gazed off through the jungle of trees to the still blue
lake beyond. I could smell Gene’s cologne and was in a daze.
Marianne continued to eye us both with hostility. She was jealous. She had sitting next to her the boyfriend she
had brought down from college, who was big and blond but not nearly as beautiful as Gene. I knew that at
college they were living together. They sat on the bench, defensively entwined, Marianne’s hand on Paul’s big
thigh, Paul’s arm around her waist. Sometimes they sat there and kissed, in front of Gene, in front of everyone.
When Paul kissed her Marianne made a loud smacking noise, Mmmmmmwhah.
In the front seat of Gene’s car I said, “How did you get so muscular?” Gene happily reeled off all of the sports
he had played in high school – football, baseball, hockey, wrestling.
“Do you lift weights?” I asked.
“No, I can’t lift weights,” he said gently, as if explaining something sad to a very young child. Mine was a loud
rude family, and I had trouble adjusting myself to Gene’s niceties, which I had expected to disappear once we
were away from the adults.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I have this bone disease,” he said. “It screwed up my back.”
“How long have you had it?” I asked, looking skeptically at his broad back in a white sports shirt, now twisting
as he turned to reverse the car out of the driveway.
“When I was thirteen,” he said.
“What can they do about it?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said cheerfully. “It just gets worse as you get older.”
I didn’t know what to say. Gene was so matter of fact that I wondered if he wasn’t making it up, so I’d feel
sorry for him and do whatever he wanted later on.
We drove through town in the evening sun, and he chatted in his soft voice, completely at ease. He told me he
had three jobs this summer: landscaping with two friends during the week, pumping gas at nights, and a
weekend shift at the factory where his father worked. He told me he was putting himself through school
completely on his own. He said there were four in his family and just his father; his mother had died when he
was twelve.
“What did she die of?” I asked solemnly.
“Cancer,” he said so lightly I was embarrassed – sorry for him, but also aware that he’d mentioned this to hold
over me later on.
A warm breeze blew in through the open window, messing up his hair, which had grown unruly. The wild wheat-
colored curls made a pretty contrast with the true lines of his profile.
“I was going to get a haircut today,” he said, smiling because I was staring at him.
next page
| r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal winter 2007 fiction |
The Heartbreaker
by Christina Gombar
by Christina Gombar