We got carded away from three bars. Gene was already twenty, but I was just seventeen and my only I.D. was a
temporary license of my sister’s with the old expiration date rubbed out and updated, which didn’t fool anyone.
In the parking lot of the third place Gene got resignedly behind the wheel of his car, which he refused to start.
Sunset rays were streaming in, making his head, with the longish curling hair, appear as a face on a Roman coin.
“Well, I guess I’m going to have to take you home now,” he said.
“No!” I almost shouted, and he laughed and leaned over to kiss me. It was so good we had to kiss two or three
more times. Kissing him was the best thing in the world so far – there could be nothing to fear in what would follow.
I bubbled over with compliments: his eyes, his hair, his musk cologne – aftershave – he corrected – his profile.
“You’re more gorgeous than any movie star,” I said.
“That was my line,” he said, smiling as he turned on the engine.
At the fourth place, we got in. They let anyone in because they charged a cover. Too early for the band, we sat
nearly alone in the big empty place. It was rough going. Oh, he was very gay and laughed a lot – more at his own
stories and jokes than at the ones I attempted. He had an abandoned way of throwing his head back and closing his
eyes, which in combination with his curling hair and small features made him resemble a little child.
The night went too fast. While I kept asking myself if this could be real, he kept inquiring if I had known this person
or that person from his grade in high school. Though I didn’t know any of them, he talked away about all of his
friends, until it became clear that he must wish to be with any of them rather than me tonight.
He seemed especially fond of a girl called Doris.
“She was voted most talkative my year,” he said. “When you’re with Doris Marini, you don’t have to put on the
radio,” he added approvingly.
A hint that I was being too quiet, so I said, “I remember Doris, we were in choir together. The teacher used to call
us by each other’s names. People thought we looked alike.”
“You do look alike,” Gene said. “But you’re much cuter.”
Gene never criticized, swore, complained or gossiped. I tried to follow his example, but found myself without much
left to say. Life was necessarily reduced to a level of smooth platitudes, such as that the small private school I was
going to attend in the fall was a good one.
“It wasn’t my first choice, though,” I confided. “I didn’t get into Yale.”
Finally – something we had in common: he had also longed to attend Yale, and had likewise been rejected.
“But it doesn’t really matter where you go to school undergrad,” he said, almost superciliously. “It’s the graduate
school that counts.”
He didn’t want to stay long, and paid the bill when it came.
In the car I was afraid of quiet and kept firing random questions at him. Did he ski? Yes, he did. His uncle had a
place in New Hampshire, and we would have to go up there in the winter. I murmured that that sounded great. In
fact, it sounded unbelievable, like a lie.
To fill the silence I continued my barrage of questions, one after another.
Where did he want to live when he grew up?
“I wanna live in the country and have a blood hound and five kids,” he said right away.
I laughed uneasily at this reference to so many children, and remained quiet with disappointment as we approached
our town. It was barely dark, only ten-thirty, which would be interpreted as failure.
He took a roundabout country road by the reservoir, pulled over to a grassy clearing and shut the engine off. It
wasn’t completely silent: some purifying pump connected with the dam made a cooing, jingling noise outside.
“And you thought I wasn’t gonna call,” he said.
I went to him probably too quickly. It’s not much use describing what followed note for note; if you’ve ever been
with a person who is physically, chemically perfect for you, you know how it feels. What amazed me about Gene was
that his muscles were so hard, so obviously powerful, yet every caress, every movement was perfectly controlled,
light and gentle; his mouth was like a feather. All of the things which can deter passion – the slobber, the stubble,
the roughness – were absent, everything was in perfect consort to my wishes; all worked toward building desire.
In the half-dark, Gene’s eyes were metallic, and cognizant of his nearly total hold over me. Yet he was not the
aggressor, or at least, not always. He never touched me anywhere until long after I wanted him to, nor did he iterate
threats, say, Do this, or even, Please. And I never said stop. Between kisses he buried his face in my hair saying, “I
can make you feel so good,” repeating in a hypnotic whisper that joined forces with the cooing sounds of the water
pump outside.
At a quarter to twelve a car went by. I woke out of my trance, pulled away and said, “Wait.”
He said my name and held me to stillness in his arms. In the moonlight I could see the child-like supplication in his
eyes. “It won’t hurt,” he said. I sighed and pulled away again. How stupid did he think I was? But I went back.
“I would marry you,” he said, and with that I returned to my side of the car.
He said he wasn’t mad.
“Hey, lighten up,” is what he said, turning the ignition key. He was smiling and unruffled.
We kissed again when he dropped me off. He kept saying, “I don’t want to let you go,” and held me so tightly that I
believed him.
“I’ll call you,” was the last thing he said.
I was so saturated by this experience, I didn’t care that it took a few days. At my summer job in the mall I worked
my cash register like a somnambulist, every movement, word and gesture infused with his presence, drifting along
in a cloud of sensuality. When the manager gave us a lecture on security procedures, I pretended to pay attention,
but knew that none of it was real. I aided customers, rang up merchandise, gave change, smiled and said thank you.
The entire time I was off in a field of tall grass and white wild flowers with Gene.
Gene called me Tuesday of the following week, and mumbled something about seeing me on Friday. I didn’t
mention it to anyone because I could tell his heart had gone out of it.
That Friday he still hadn’t called to confirm. It was raining when I came home from work no one was home at first,
then it was just my father. What the hell was going on? Where was my mother? Where were my sister and the kids?
Didn’t anyone leave a message?
I, too, was scared. In those days, my father had nearly nightly temper tantrums -- the rising malpractice insurance
bill, the patients who called at all hours, the time Marianne and her boyfriend crashed the car in New York, Fritz’s
hair wasn’t washed, Candida had a fever. The copper fruit mold ice tray flying across the room, the drawers ripped
off their rollers. Dinner time a shambles of roaring accusations, food refused, and much later, grease splattering on
the stove in a self-made, self-righteous meal at ten p.m. We all tiptoed around my father’s anger, no one would
deliberately provoke him by staying out without calling. There must be something gravely wrong.
My father told me to call grandmothers, aunts, neighbors, Marianne’s friends. No one knew where they were. I was
in that worst state of doomed optimism, telling myself like some mad deceiving person on a commercial that Gene
would at the last minute call, and all that had gone wrong this night would be reversed. Every time the phone rang
and it wasn’t Gene or my mother or the police or the hospital I grew more furious. Where was everyone? My father
was pacing the length of the house, still in his clomping leather shoes and self-important jacket. Nearly every time
he passed through the kitchen he took a shot off of the Vermouth bottle in the cabinet. When he’d paced to the other
end of the house I’d dash in and take a hit off of it, too.
It was cracking thunder now, and I was sure everyone was dead. I envisioned a bleak future alone with my father.
They all walked in the door at ten – my mother, Fritz, Candida, Marianne and her boyfriend Paul, whom they had on
the spur of the moment gone to pick up, three hours away in Pennsylvania. They were happy, rain-soaked, laughing.
My father and I exploded in unison. Their gaiety froze, then faded as they tried to explain. They had had an
adventure. They had been caught in the storm on a country road and found the greatest little Italian restaurant, and
see? Brought us loads of take out.
“But you should have called!” I yelled, and ran up to my room. Then started crying.
Gene did not call. Not the next night, or the following week, or the week after that. It took almost to the end of the
summer before Shannon and I got back together, and her absence magnified Gene’s loss. In the end, other friends
had to step in and explain to her that my date with Gene had been a failed, solitary thing. Yet of the two of us
spurned, she was the luckier. Her hopes had been dashed quickly and brutally. Having been scorned more
discreetly, I was left to taunt myself with a grain of hope. We never mentioned him.
I kept having accidents all summer. I cut my foot on a rock in the lake, slapped a band-aid on it and ignored it until
the wound had grown green and infected. I had short spasms of uncontrol – serving off my bicycle, I scraped my
knees, and this pain, too, gave me a concrete reason to feel forlorn.
It felt better to eat less and less. This hunger at first distracted me from my longing for Gene, then came to
symbolize it. Through the summer I got browner and thinner, preparing for the unknowable time when I would see
him again.
In the evenings after my job, I went to the town park to play tennis or swim. The pool’s basin was patterned with
rows of tiles – Greek blue, moss green, a blue that was almost white, and a particular smooth faded turquoise, the
exact median between green and blue, which was identical to the color of Gene’s eyes. I did thirty laps in the pool
each night, with each turn touching one of these perfect tiles as if it were a talisman. Soon there was nothing in the
town – not a double yellow line dividing a hot black road, not a gas station or street sign, that didn’t signify him.
The summer drifted away. The dusty dirty July leaves swirling up with every passing car, the silver jet planes
piercing the burning glass of sky, every word I uttered, and every thought I dreamed was filled with his presence. I
wished I could transport myself to another place, because here, I thought, everyone knew. They could not help but
know: every small act, from washing my face in the morning to switching the light off at night – including my work in
the mall, washing the cars, weeding the patio and fixing the family dinner salad – was a lie. I told myself I was
offering these acts up, but deep down I knew they were all sham and empty of motivation, save the vain effort to
masque my deficiency. I never forgot, and because of this I rang false to others. I could not blame my family for
disliking me that summer. I washed the dishes even when I skipped dinner, took my brother on outings,
complimented my older sister though she had vanity enough for the entire town, and spoke cheerfully, if awkwardly,
to my father when he came home from the hospital each evening. They all responded to my false good will with
irritability and suspicion, and how could I blame them? I didn’t have a boyfriend for the summer.
At the drugstore in the mall I searched the men’s aftershave shelf until I found the musk scent that was Gene’s. I
bought a small bottle, not to wear myself, but to open and sniff, and fleetingly summon the swooning sensation of his
presence.
I could not put a stopper to what he had inspired. In the hot evenings I would walk alone on the hilly country road
by the reservoir, past dark wet woods, till I got to the small clearing of grass where I could hear the cooing, jingling
noise of the water pump. I would lie there among the white wild flowers and weeds, brown in my cut-off shorts and
peasant blouse, close my eyes against the late sun, and think of him abstractly as all beauty, all sex, trying to
fathom some sense of this new phase of life he had seemed to offer, then quickly withdrawn.
When I was growing up, my town had always seemed a constricting, closed-minded place. But since meeting Gene
it had all become washed in glory. And now it became clear that a golden town had existed all along, one we had
shared without knowing each other, and this knowledge brought sadness.
Our town wasn’t large, but I neither saw nor heard anything of him all summer. In time it seemed as if I had merely
dreamed him.
The end of August, and life was turning, this home town chapter nearly over. Soon it would be time to go. In the
mornings I heard the birds sing again, welcomed the cool evenings of the shortening days, and on my walks noticed
the faint ripe smells carried on the wind from farm fields. There were lists to make, things to buy and pack, meeting
after meeting with friends – one more day at the beach, one more bike ride, phone call, tennis game, swim.
The evening before I was scheduled to leave for college, I walked the three miles up to the town park. I had vague
plans to meet some friends, to watch their tennis game and perhaps take a turn. I had worn my bathing suit under
my clothes in case I decided to swim. It was hot, though late. I stood in the shallow end of the pool up to my thighs,
and reflected that there had been more to the summer than having Gene, or not having him. There had been money
to earn, there had been all the books I’d read, there had been the weekend at Shannon’s family’s place in Vermont
– the day we’d climbed a mountain, the day we’d ridden wild horses. There was now, standing here in the pool,
savoring the contrast between the still cold water on my legs and the warmth of the sun on my dry back and hair.
There was being able to decide not to go in all the way after all.
I dried off, pulled on my shorts and shirt, and sat on the plateau overlooking the courts. The pop of tennis balls, the
screams of children on the playground, the crack of a baseball hitting a bat behind me.
The sound of something shaking the chain-link shell at the bottom of the baseball field. I turned and saw Gene – his
pastel eyes in a brown face through the diamond wire. His shirt was off, showing his huge tanned chest, and his
trousers were the deep blue green of a landscaper’s uniform.
“Hey, I know you,” he called out softly, with a big smile.
I just stared. He spoke again.
“When you leaving for school?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” I replied. “Freshman orientation.”
“We don’t have that much time,” he said.
Gene put on a T-shirt and urged me to get up and meet his friends, the other landscapers with whom he had been
playing ball. One was called Bruce, the other Rob. Both were good-looking and preppie, slightly effeminate-looking,
and slow in their words and movements, as if drugged. Bruce, in aviator sunglasses and ponytail, crouched on the
pavement near their truck, smoking a cigarette that he held between his thumb and forefinger as if it were a joint.
The way he scowled up at me made me feel superfluous.
I sat in the front of the truck with Gene while the other two rode in the open back with the mowers and sheers. I
could see them through the back window, talking and sharing a real joint, and observed their struggles to keep it lit
in the open wind. As he drove and small-talked, Gene kept turning to smile into my face. He made no explanation
for our summer apart, and I requested none. We dropped each of his friends off, and I let Gene talk on and on
about his jobs and friends. Having dreamed him so intensely all summer, I was oddly unmoved in his presence.
My summer alone had sifted out my problem with him, and this time when we went up to the reservoir I didn’t
hesitate. While we were making love and afterwards he was so happy – what did he have to be so happy about?
Already I knew I would never be as happy with him as I had been at first. Yet he was so at ease and in his element,
that my unease disbursed like stardust.
“See? I told you it wouldn’t hurt,” he said afterwards.
I laughed and punched his shoulder, kissed him on the face in the dark and told him he was beautiful, and also that
I’d decided his eyes were more blue than green. I kissed the muscle of his upper arm and remarked that even his
sweat smelled good. We went swimming in the reservoir and afterwards dried off on the rough blanket we’d been
lying on, got dressed and he dropped me off home before eleven.
“Have a great, great time at school,” he said, keeping me there at the top of the driveway in his truck for at least
five or ten minutes. “I love you,” he said. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving.”
~~
For several days after this I felt as if I were engulfed in a swarm of benevolent bees. Looking about at the neat
lawns, white-trimmed brick buildings and steeples of my college, it all seemed unreal, a vacuum place I’d been sent
by mistake. My mother, who had driven me up, my baby brother and younger sister who had come along for the
ride – seemed like vague shapes, like the ghosts of the Indians native to my home town, whose presence I
sometimes sensed sitting alone down by the lake at dusk.
After they left I crept about the sterile dead campus unmoved, as if I were watching a play I’d seen before. Through
a haze I regarded the marble archways and concentric paths streaming with rugby-shirted youths, and felt as if at
any moment I would wake up in a world where I would always be with Gene.
Love did not interfere with my success at college; on the contrary, it enhanced it. After three or four days, this cloud
of sensuality lifted, like a balloon or sun in the air, but Gene remained safely in my orbit, a guiding force, distant
enough to allow my full participation in the new life around me. For him I endeavored to make each day perfect,
from my sleek hair, to my minutely organized room, to the excellence of effort I put into my studies, even to the
generosity I tried to show my new friends; all was for him.
The fear and loneliness that plagued other freshman never touched me. Other girls gorged themselves for comfort;
I lived on love. Love gave me confidence and great strength, and this reassured others. I sat on committees, wrote
editorials, sang in recitals, and on Saturday, pushed ghetto children from the city on swings. I attended rollicking
fraternity parties, was asked to and duly attended sedate semi-formals; I swam and jumped rope, painted and
sketched. I had three best friends and circle after circle of acquaintances, like ripples in a pool; I wrote dozens of
letters to hometown friends at their colleges. Never to Gene, though, and never about Gene. That would have
broken the spell.
Yes, there were fears, moments late at night those first few weeks afterwards, thoughts of accidents and eternal
damnation. I would lie on my bunk at midnight with garish red patterns swirling under clenched eyelids. Yet my
visions of hell had by now grown vague, were no more than these whorling patterns of red, and before long this dark
vision would be replaced by one full of light: a pale altar, strewn with yellow rose petals. I dreamed the rose petals,
saw them at such close range I could feel their velveteen softness where they lay, so faintly yellow against a white
linen runner, such as lines a church aisle for a wedding.
I saw him home at Thanksgiving of course, but only out at a bar, only in a group. He came up to me and said,
“Hello gorgeous,” kissed me, sat down on a turned around chair and asked me about school for five minutes. Then
went back to throwing chairs and food around with his friends. Shannon rolled her eyes and told me she had run into
him at parties up at State. “You should see him,” she said. “He’s a total slut, fucking all the freshman girls.” Not her,
though, she was quick to assure.
I didn’t react. There was nothing to say. He couldn’t be with every girl as he had been with me. It was impossible.
And how was she to know the extent of his entanglements? Someone with so fine a profile couldn’t be so debauched.
I, too, had dated other people at college. Sometimes I told them I was attached at home. Sometimes I passed
myself off as just another jittery virgin. I went from boy to boy to boy. Some of them kissed me with obvious
inexperience, their lips furiously sealed. Some were rubber-mouthed, leaving wide tracts of wetness across my face
like a snail’s. Others were rough, and when they touched any part of my body, kneaded it like some inanimate,
despised dough.
Following these disgusting interludes, I would return to my dorm room and open my small bottle of musk, inhaling
deeply to banish the incursions.
Over Christmas break my grandmother died. At her funeral I knelt in church and prayed, not for her soul, which
had gone straight to heaven, but for Gene and me. We had been born in a jaded age. How could I expect him to
want to marry me in a world of free love, where no one was a virgin anymore?
Sometimes I thought wicked things, such as that he would fall ill. He would recognize me there at his bedside, see
my reigning goodness as some beckoning light. Perhaps even a situation would arise where he’d need my father’s
surgical skills. But it was useless praying for impossible things; Gene never called.
Yet he proved benevolent. Before I went back to school for the spring term, I saw him out at the bar again. We
were each with groups of friends, and at the end of the night he abandoned his and offered me a ride home. Initially
I affected a certain detachment, but could not feign coldness when he kissed me goodnight. Before I left him he
looked at me from his rending eyes and said, “Keep in touch.”
Soon after I went up to his college to visit Shannon and some other girls from my hometown. I didn’t expect to see
Gene, would never have sought him out in his wild men’s lair.
“He’s an animal,” people said.
He came looking for me. Came strolling up the hill to Shannon’s dorm, strolling up and down the halls until he’d
found us. He took off his giant down coat and took his place with the rest of us, seated on the floor. He was so soft-
spoken and polite, it was hard to ascribe the terrible things people said to the person sitting next to me, with the
cowlick and innocent eyes.
I left with him. He was a resident advisor and so had his own room and a private bath. Everything was beautifully
clean and neat. No Farrah poster on the wall, no Playboy magazines in the bathroom. At first I just sat at the desk
while he sat cross-legged on the bed. The conversation refused to turn personal. An hour went by. My face was a big
question mark, which he ignored.
No harm done, I thought. Perhaps seeing him normally like this will put him in perspective. I got up to use the
bathroom before leaving, and when I emerged he arose from the bed, stood in front of me and smiled. Soon as I
felt the hard muscles through the soft flannel of his shirt, his kiss, which obliterated all the false kisses that had come
between us, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. Why walk away from the best thing in the world?
But in the morning I was disquieted, buttoning up my blouse and combing my hair in front of the mirror. He crept up
and put his arms around me from behind. Our reflected images clashed; my thick dark hair and stricken eyes
extravagant against his fair muted half-tones. He had showered, and his eyes shone like lightning; his shirt was
white as snow.
He took me by the wrists and pulled me around so we were face to face. “Don’t cry,” he said. “I love you.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and looked encouragingly into my eyes.
Out in the hallway, big-eyed freshman boys greeted Gene. “This is Celeste, she’s from my hometown,” he said to
each, as if I were his chosen one. From their faces it was clear he was their idol. No one laughed.
He clung to me at the outer doorway, his arms so tight around me that I felt a strange shudder deep down, as
affecting as any he’d given me the night before.
“Come by any time,” he said after he let me go. “I’ll always be here.”
temporary license of my sister’s with the old expiration date rubbed out and updated, which didn’t fool anyone.
In the parking lot of the third place Gene got resignedly behind the wheel of his car, which he refused to start.
Sunset rays were streaming in, making his head, with the longish curling hair, appear as a face on a Roman coin.
“Well, I guess I’m going to have to take you home now,” he said.
“No!” I almost shouted, and he laughed and leaned over to kiss me. It was so good we had to kiss two or three
more times. Kissing him was the best thing in the world so far – there could be nothing to fear in what would follow.
I bubbled over with compliments: his eyes, his hair, his musk cologne – aftershave – he corrected – his profile.
“You’re more gorgeous than any movie star,” I said.
“That was my line,” he said, smiling as he turned on the engine.
At the fourth place, we got in. They let anyone in because they charged a cover. Too early for the band, we sat
nearly alone in the big empty place. It was rough going. Oh, he was very gay and laughed a lot – more at his own
stories and jokes than at the ones I attempted. He had an abandoned way of throwing his head back and closing his
eyes, which in combination with his curling hair and small features made him resemble a little child.
The night went too fast. While I kept asking myself if this could be real, he kept inquiring if I had known this person
or that person from his grade in high school. Though I didn’t know any of them, he talked away about all of his
friends, until it became clear that he must wish to be with any of them rather than me tonight.
He seemed especially fond of a girl called Doris.
“She was voted most talkative my year,” he said. “When you’re with Doris Marini, you don’t have to put on the
radio,” he added approvingly.
A hint that I was being too quiet, so I said, “I remember Doris, we were in choir together. The teacher used to call
us by each other’s names. People thought we looked alike.”
“You do look alike,” Gene said. “But you’re much cuter.”
Gene never criticized, swore, complained or gossiped. I tried to follow his example, but found myself without much
left to say. Life was necessarily reduced to a level of smooth platitudes, such as that the small private school I was
going to attend in the fall was a good one.
“It wasn’t my first choice, though,” I confided. “I didn’t get into Yale.”
Finally – something we had in common: he had also longed to attend Yale, and had likewise been rejected.
“But it doesn’t really matter where you go to school undergrad,” he said, almost superciliously. “It’s the graduate
school that counts.”
He didn’t want to stay long, and paid the bill when it came.
In the car I was afraid of quiet and kept firing random questions at him. Did he ski? Yes, he did. His uncle had a
place in New Hampshire, and we would have to go up there in the winter. I murmured that that sounded great. In
fact, it sounded unbelievable, like a lie.
To fill the silence I continued my barrage of questions, one after another.
Where did he want to live when he grew up?
“I wanna live in the country and have a blood hound and five kids,” he said right away.
I laughed uneasily at this reference to so many children, and remained quiet with disappointment as we approached
our town. It was barely dark, only ten-thirty, which would be interpreted as failure.
He took a roundabout country road by the reservoir, pulled over to a grassy clearing and shut the engine off. It
wasn’t completely silent: some purifying pump connected with the dam made a cooing, jingling noise outside.
“And you thought I wasn’t gonna call,” he said.
I went to him probably too quickly. It’s not much use describing what followed note for note; if you’ve ever been
with a person who is physically, chemically perfect for you, you know how it feels. What amazed me about Gene was
that his muscles were so hard, so obviously powerful, yet every caress, every movement was perfectly controlled,
light and gentle; his mouth was like a feather. All of the things which can deter passion – the slobber, the stubble,
the roughness – were absent, everything was in perfect consort to my wishes; all worked toward building desire.
In the half-dark, Gene’s eyes were metallic, and cognizant of his nearly total hold over me. Yet he was not the
aggressor, or at least, not always. He never touched me anywhere until long after I wanted him to, nor did he iterate
threats, say, Do this, or even, Please. And I never said stop. Between kisses he buried his face in my hair saying, “I
can make you feel so good,” repeating in a hypnotic whisper that joined forces with the cooing sounds of the water
pump outside.
At a quarter to twelve a car went by. I woke out of my trance, pulled away and said, “Wait.”
He said my name and held me to stillness in his arms. In the moonlight I could see the child-like supplication in his
eyes. “It won’t hurt,” he said. I sighed and pulled away again. How stupid did he think I was? But I went back.
“I would marry you,” he said, and with that I returned to my side of the car.
He said he wasn’t mad.
“Hey, lighten up,” is what he said, turning the ignition key. He was smiling and unruffled.
We kissed again when he dropped me off. He kept saying, “I don’t want to let you go,” and held me so tightly that I
believed him.
“I’ll call you,” was the last thing he said.
I was so saturated by this experience, I didn’t care that it took a few days. At my summer job in the mall I worked
my cash register like a somnambulist, every movement, word and gesture infused with his presence, drifting along
in a cloud of sensuality. When the manager gave us a lecture on security procedures, I pretended to pay attention,
but knew that none of it was real. I aided customers, rang up merchandise, gave change, smiled and said thank you.
The entire time I was off in a field of tall grass and white wild flowers with Gene.
Gene called me Tuesday of the following week, and mumbled something about seeing me on Friday. I didn’t
mention it to anyone because I could tell his heart had gone out of it.
That Friday he still hadn’t called to confirm. It was raining when I came home from work no one was home at first,
then it was just my father. What the hell was going on? Where was my mother? Where were my sister and the kids?
Didn’t anyone leave a message?
I, too, was scared. In those days, my father had nearly nightly temper tantrums -- the rising malpractice insurance
bill, the patients who called at all hours, the time Marianne and her boyfriend crashed the car in New York, Fritz’s
hair wasn’t washed, Candida had a fever. The copper fruit mold ice tray flying across the room, the drawers ripped
off their rollers. Dinner time a shambles of roaring accusations, food refused, and much later, grease splattering on
the stove in a self-made, self-righteous meal at ten p.m. We all tiptoed around my father’s anger, no one would
deliberately provoke him by staying out without calling. There must be something gravely wrong.
My father told me to call grandmothers, aunts, neighbors, Marianne’s friends. No one knew where they were. I was
in that worst state of doomed optimism, telling myself like some mad deceiving person on a commercial that Gene
would at the last minute call, and all that had gone wrong this night would be reversed. Every time the phone rang
and it wasn’t Gene or my mother or the police or the hospital I grew more furious. Where was everyone? My father
was pacing the length of the house, still in his clomping leather shoes and self-important jacket. Nearly every time
he passed through the kitchen he took a shot off of the Vermouth bottle in the cabinet. When he’d paced to the other
end of the house I’d dash in and take a hit off of it, too.
It was cracking thunder now, and I was sure everyone was dead. I envisioned a bleak future alone with my father.
They all walked in the door at ten – my mother, Fritz, Candida, Marianne and her boyfriend Paul, whom they had on
the spur of the moment gone to pick up, three hours away in Pennsylvania. They were happy, rain-soaked, laughing.
My father and I exploded in unison. Their gaiety froze, then faded as they tried to explain. They had had an
adventure. They had been caught in the storm on a country road and found the greatest little Italian restaurant, and
see? Brought us loads of take out.
“But you should have called!” I yelled, and ran up to my room. Then started crying.
Gene did not call. Not the next night, or the following week, or the week after that. It took almost to the end of the
summer before Shannon and I got back together, and her absence magnified Gene’s loss. In the end, other friends
had to step in and explain to her that my date with Gene had been a failed, solitary thing. Yet of the two of us
spurned, she was the luckier. Her hopes had been dashed quickly and brutally. Having been scorned more
discreetly, I was left to taunt myself with a grain of hope. We never mentioned him.
I kept having accidents all summer. I cut my foot on a rock in the lake, slapped a band-aid on it and ignored it until
the wound had grown green and infected. I had short spasms of uncontrol – serving off my bicycle, I scraped my
knees, and this pain, too, gave me a concrete reason to feel forlorn.
It felt better to eat less and less. This hunger at first distracted me from my longing for Gene, then came to
symbolize it. Through the summer I got browner and thinner, preparing for the unknowable time when I would see
him again.
In the evenings after my job, I went to the town park to play tennis or swim. The pool’s basin was patterned with
rows of tiles – Greek blue, moss green, a blue that was almost white, and a particular smooth faded turquoise, the
exact median between green and blue, which was identical to the color of Gene’s eyes. I did thirty laps in the pool
each night, with each turn touching one of these perfect tiles as if it were a talisman. Soon there was nothing in the
town – not a double yellow line dividing a hot black road, not a gas station or street sign, that didn’t signify him.
The summer drifted away. The dusty dirty July leaves swirling up with every passing car, the silver jet planes
piercing the burning glass of sky, every word I uttered, and every thought I dreamed was filled with his presence. I
wished I could transport myself to another place, because here, I thought, everyone knew. They could not help but
know: every small act, from washing my face in the morning to switching the light off at night – including my work in
the mall, washing the cars, weeding the patio and fixing the family dinner salad – was a lie. I told myself I was
offering these acts up, but deep down I knew they were all sham and empty of motivation, save the vain effort to
masque my deficiency. I never forgot, and because of this I rang false to others. I could not blame my family for
disliking me that summer. I washed the dishes even when I skipped dinner, took my brother on outings,
complimented my older sister though she had vanity enough for the entire town, and spoke cheerfully, if awkwardly,
to my father when he came home from the hospital each evening. They all responded to my false good will with
irritability and suspicion, and how could I blame them? I didn’t have a boyfriend for the summer.
At the drugstore in the mall I searched the men’s aftershave shelf until I found the musk scent that was Gene’s. I
bought a small bottle, not to wear myself, but to open and sniff, and fleetingly summon the swooning sensation of his
presence.
I could not put a stopper to what he had inspired. In the hot evenings I would walk alone on the hilly country road
by the reservoir, past dark wet woods, till I got to the small clearing of grass where I could hear the cooing, jingling
noise of the water pump. I would lie there among the white wild flowers and weeds, brown in my cut-off shorts and
peasant blouse, close my eyes against the late sun, and think of him abstractly as all beauty, all sex, trying to
fathom some sense of this new phase of life he had seemed to offer, then quickly withdrawn.
When I was growing up, my town had always seemed a constricting, closed-minded place. But since meeting Gene
it had all become washed in glory. And now it became clear that a golden town had existed all along, one we had
shared without knowing each other, and this knowledge brought sadness.
Our town wasn’t large, but I neither saw nor heard anything of him all summer. In time it seemed as if I had merely
dreamed him.
The end of August, and life was turning, this home town chapter nearly over. Soon it would be time to go. In the
mornings I heard the birds sing again, welcomed the cool evenings of the shortening days, and on my walks noticed
the faint ripe smells carried on the wind from farm fields. There were lists to make, things to buy and pack, meeting
after meeting with friends – one more day at the beach, one more bike ride, phone call, tennis game, swim.
The evening before I was scheduled to leave for college, I walked the three miles up to the town park. I had vague
plans to meet some friends, to watch their tennis game and perhaps take a turn. I had worn my bathing suit under
my clothes in case I decided to swim. It was hot, though late. I stood in the shallow end of the pool up to my thighs,
and reflected that there had been more to the summer than having Gene, or not having him. There had been money
to earn, there had been all the books I’d read, there had been the weekend at Shannon’s family’s place in Vermont
– the day we’d climbed a mountain, the day we’d ridden wild horses. There was now, standing here in the pool,
savoring the contrast between the still cold water on my legs and the warmth of the sun on my dry back and hair.
There was being able to decide not to go in all the way after all.
I dried off, pulled on my shorts and shirt, and sat on the plateau overlooking the courts. The pop of tennis balls, the
screams of children on the playground, the crack of a baseball hitting a bat behind me.
The sound of something shaking the chain-link shell at the bottom of the baseball field. I turned and saw Gene – his
pastel eyes in a brown face through the diamond wire. His shirt was off, showing his huge tanned chest, and his
trousers were the deep blue green of a landscaper’s uniform.
“Hey, I know you,” he called out softly, with a big smile.
I just stared. He spoke again.
“When you leaving for school?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” I replied. “Freshman orientation.”
“We don’t have that much time,” he said.
Gene put on a T-shirt and urged me to get up and meet his friends, the other landscapers with whom he had been
playing ball. One was called Bruce, the other Rob. Both were good-looking and preppie, slightly effeminate-looking,
and slow in their words and movements, as if drugged. Bruce, in aviator sunglasses and ponytail, crouched on the
pavement near their truck, smoking a cigarette that he held between his thumb and forefinger as if it were a joint.
The way he scowled up at me made me feel superfluous.
I sat in the front of the truck with Gene while the other two rode in the open back with the mowers and sheers. I
could see them through the back window, talking and sharing a real joint, and observed their struggles to keep it lit
in the open wind. As he drove and small-talked, Gene kept turning to smile into my face. He made no explanation
for our summer apart, and I requested none. We dropped each of his friends off, and I let Gene talk on and on
about his jobs and friends. Having dreamed him so intensely all summer, I was oddly unmoved in his presence.
My summer alone had sifted out my problem with him, and this time when we went up to the reservoir I didn’t
hesitate. While we were making love and afterwards he was so happy – what did he have to be so happy about?
Already I knew I would never be as happy with him as I had been at first. Yet he was so at ease and in his element,
that my unease disbursed like stardust.
“See? I told you it wouldn’t hurt,” he said afterwards.
I laughed and punched his shoulder, kissed him on the face in the dark and told him he was beautiful, and also that
I’d decided his eyes were more blue than green. I kissed the muscle of his upper arm and remarked that even his
sweat smelled good. We went swimming in the reservoir and afterwards dried off on the rough blanket we’d been
lying on, got dressed and he dropped me off home before eleven.
“Have a great, great time at school,” he said, keeping me there at the top of the driveway in his truck for at least
five or ten minutes. “I love you,” he said. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving.”
~~
For several days after this I felt as if I were engulfed in a swarm of benevolent bees. Looking about at the neat
lawns, white-trimmed brick buildings and steeples of my college, it all seemed unreal, a vacuum place I’d been sent
by mistake. My mother, who had driven me up, my baby brother and younger sister who had come along for the
ride – seemed like vague shapes, like the ghosts of the Indians native to my home town, whose presence I
sometimes sensed sitting alone down by the lake at dusk.
After they left I crept about the sterile dead campus unmoved, as if I were watching a play I’d seen before. Through
a haze I regarded the marble archways and concentric paths streaming with rugby-shirted youths, and felt as if at
any moment I would wake up in a world where I would always be with Gene.
Love did not interfere with my success at college; on the contrary, it enhanced it. After three or four days, this cloud
of sensuality lifted, like a balloon or sun in the air, but Gene remained safely in my orbit, a guiding force, distant
enough to allow my full participation in the new life around me. For him I endeavored to make each day perfect,
from my sleek hair, to my minutely organized room, to the excellence of effort I put into my studies, even to the
generosity I tried to show my new friends; all was for him.
The fear and loneliness that plagued other freshman never touched me. Other girls gorged themselves for comfort;
I lived on love. Love gave me confidence and great strength, and this reassured others. I sat on committees, wrote
editorials, sang in recitals, and on Saturday, pushed ghetto children from the city on swings. I attended rollicking
fraternity parties, was asked to and duly attended sedate semi-formals; I swam and jumped rope, painted and
sketched. I had three best friends and circle after circle of acquaintances, like ripples in a pool; I wrote dozens of
letters to hometown friends at their colleges. Never to Gene, though, and never about Gene. That would have
broken the spell.
Yes, there were fears, moments late at night those first few weeks afterwards, thoughts of accidents and eternal
damnation. I would lie on my bunk at midnight with garish red patterns swirling under clenched eyelids. Yet my
visions of hell had by now grown vague, were no more than these whorling patterns of red, and before long this dark
vision would be replaced by one full of light: a pale altar, strewn with yellow rose petals. I dreamed the rose petals,
saw them at such close range I could feel their velveteen softness where they lay, so faintly yellow against a white
linen runner, such as lines a church aisle for a wedding.
I saw him home at Thanksgiving of course, but only out at a bar, only in a group. He came up to me and said,
“Hello gorgeous,” kissed me, sat down on a turned around chair and asked me about school for five minutes. Then
went back to throwing chairs and food around with his friends. Shannon rolled her eyes and told me she had run into
him at parties up at State. “You should see him,” she said. “He’s a total slut, fucking all the freshman girls.” Not her,
though, she was quick to assure.
I didn’t react. There was nothing to say. He couldn’t be with every girl as he had been with me. It was impossible.
And how was she to know the extent of his entanglements? Someone with so fine a profile couldn’t be so debauched.
I, too, had dated other people at college. Sometimes I told them I was attached at home. Sometimes I passed
myself off as just another jittery virgin. I went from boy to boy to boy. Some of them kissed me with obvious
inexperience, their lips furiously sealed. Some were rubber-mouthed, leaving wide tracts of wetness across my face
like a snail’s. Others were rough, and when they touched any part of my body, kneaded it like some inanimate,
despised dough.
Following these disgusting interludes, I would return to my dorm room and open my small bottle of musk, inhaling
deeply to banish the incursions.
Over Christmas break my grandmother died. At her funeral I knelt in church and prayed, not for her soul, which
had gone straight to heaven, but for Gene and me. We had been born in a jaded age. How could I expect him to
want to marry me in a world of free love, where no one was a virgin anymore?
Sometimes I thought wicked things, such as that he would fall ill. He would recognize me there at his bedside, see
my reigning goodness as some beckoning light. Perhaps even a situation would arise where he’d need my father’s
surgical skills. But it was useless praying for impossible things; Gene never called.
Yet he proved benevolent. Before I went back to school for the spring term, I saw him out at the bar again. We
were each with groups of friends, and at the end of the night he abandoned his and offered me a ride home. Initially
I affected a certain detachment, but could not feign coldness when he kissed me goodnight. Before I left him he
looked at me from his rending eyes and said, “Keep in touch.”
Soon after I went up to his college to visit Shannon and some other girls from my hometown. I didn’t expect to see
Gene, would never have sought him out in his wild men’s lair.
“He’s an animal,” people said.
He came looking for me. Came strolling up the hill to Shannon’s dorm, strolling up and down the halls until he’d
found us. He took off his giant down coat and took his place with the rest of us, seated on the floor. He was so soft-
spoken and polite, it was hard to ascribe the terrible things people said to the person sitting next to me, with the
cowlick and innocent eyes.
I left with him. He was a resident advisor and so had his own room and a private bath. Everything was beautifully
clean and neat. No Farrah poster on the wall, no Playboy magazines in the bathroom. At first I just sat at the desk
while he sat cross-legged on the bed. The conversation refused to turn personal. An hour went by. My face was a big
question mark, which he ignored.
No harm done, I thought. Perhaps seeing him normally like this will put him in perspective. I got up to use the
bathroom before leaving, and when I emerged he arose from the bed, stood in front of me and smiled. Soon as I
felt the hard muscles through the soft flannel of his shirt, his kiss, which obliterated all the false kisses that had come
between us, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. Why walk away from the best thing in the world?
But in the morning I was disquieted, buttoning up my blouse and combing my hair in front of the mirror. He crept up
and put his arms around me from behind. Our reflected images clashed; my thick dark hair and stricken eyes
extravagant against his fair muted half-tones. He had showered, and his eyes shone like lightning; his shirt was
white as snow.
He took me by the wrists and pulled me around so we were face to face. “Don’t cry,” he said. “I love you.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and looked encouragingly into my eyes.
Out in the hallway, big-eyed freshman boys greeted Gene. “This is Celeste, she’s from my hometown,” he said to
each, as if I were his chosen one. From their faces it was clear he was their idol. No one laughed.
He clung to me at the outer doorway, his arms so tight around me that I felt a strange shudder deep down, as
affecting as any he’d given me the night before.
“Come by any time,” he said after he let me go. “I’ll always be here.”
r.kv.r.y. quarterly
Heartbreaker Page Two
by Christina Gombar
Heartbreaker Page Two
by Christina Gombar