Letters to Girls: Past

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Dear DeLynn:

It has been a while since we talked; this letter may come as a surprise to you, arriving, as it does, forty three years between that moment as I sat in my car outside your apartment waiting for a signal from your half-closed drapes that all was, in fact, okay and I could therefore drive away, back to the relative safety of my apartment a scant six blocks away without the fear of angry pounding on my door at an untoward hour...… between THAT moment and this.

Would it interest you to know that I have never known what it was from which I fled?  Further, that I have not, until this moment, decades later, cared? Partially true. A friend-of-a-friend (the second friend being my roommate) tells HIM that he, in yet an earlier--a few months? years?-- episode, also fled out the same back stairway, the same spectral alarm, the same routine… the same girl.  His experience, I gather, was slightly more harrowing: he sees the front door opening as he flees out the rear; while I, a naïf, did not even know there was a tough, older boyfriend.  I only hear your calm but urgent suggestion that I leave via the rear stair.... and in doing so, I catch a glimpse of the muscle car (whose rumbling exhaust alerted you to his arrival in the first place), as big and as menacing as I assume its driver is, parked on the street ironically in front of my nimble two-seater.

Such are first sexual experiences, I gather.  First for me, but obviously not for you. I have to ask: what was going on in your head?  Was I not summoned to your place amid over-the-phone tears?  Did you know I had never before (nor hardly since) encountered sexual tears and hardly, as now, knew what to make of the situation?  Did you know that on my arrival I was just as befuddled by your absence of tears?  Tears that somehow in the last ten minutes morphed into calm, casual normalcy? Normalcy that in the NEXT ten minutes would end up in your bed?

Fortunately for me, your periodic need for drama went right over my head, and only now do I have an inkling of its potential.... its potential eroticism.... its potential HEIGHTENED eroticism.  YOU knew, though; so forgive me for wanting to languish in that post-orgasmic bliss (mine, not yours, for I had not yet figured out how to make that happen) instead of participating in your adrenalin rush of being in the enviable position of bouncing between two highly different males.

....................................

Did you know that I can still conjure up your face?  That mane of curly red hair, of course, but also the details of your freckled face, from a variety of angles.... and your body, that temple which you claimed to disdain because your hips were too wide, but I, in my virginal non-connoisseur state, failed to notice and only marveled at because you were my first?  Did you know that only this year, decades later, I have puzzled over my obsessive attraction to a television personality, a cook, only to realize that her rather unremarkable body, and questionable appeal, perhaps cued by a similar mass of unruly red hair, reminded me at some visceral level of the waists of your too-wide hips that were made, I realize now, for sex?

But did you also know that my main attraction to you was none of that; that I was fascinated not by looks or body, but by the fact I first saw you in a diaphanous gown of white and purple flowers--did students actually dress that way?--and not merely for the dress, but more for the fact that you were operating a drill-press in that garb as you worked on a studio arts project in the department woodworking shop.  And your project, a rather gruesome assemblage of glass tubes and vessels and blood-like, coagulated gunk, served up on a Swanson tv-dinner tray, was praised by the faculty for actually "getting" the intent of the assignment.

How we, over days and weeks, got from drill-press to bed is a hazy memory--who initiated this?  I suspect it was you.  I suspect it because I was guileless, clueless, and would not have known that which I sought and certainly as clueless as to how to get there.  But in that bed, you take over and show me how it's done.  As I enter you for the very first time, an odd, incongruous image begins to form in my head as our clutching, rhythmic movements begin.  It is an image not of anatomy and lust but of train tracks and railway switches in the night.  Like some black and white movie.... iron rails and wooden ties against the soundtrack of a new kind of breathing, short and staccato, coming solely from your nostrils, your mouth firmly closed.  That (and You) were my first and the imagery and soundtrack endure as a type of metric against which all other sex is measured.

....................................

I remember a moment afterwards, student center cafeteria, sitting with you, that crimson hair unwashed and tied back tightly, and me similarly feeling like I had not slept all night and we run into the wife of my professor.  She, a stylishly dressed and maturely attractive Jewish filmmaker, asks if she can sit with us, lowly members of her husband's department, and I then get to look at the two of you side by side, and I think: what am I doing here?  where is this going?

You caught that, that moment of confusion, the professor's wife blithely going on about academic-social matters, and likely carried it with you through our later couplings, the same nostril breathings of your passion and reinforced by yet another look as I drop you off after your request for a ride across town to your parents' house, a tiny suburban affair on an eight-lane arterial within which, one presumes, you spent your adolescence.... and then your request that I not come in.

Truth is, my parents' house was equally humble but in a town far away and unknowable to you.  So it is my feigned superiority that again shows through as I comply and drive away.  I see now you saw, and understood, all that.

So this letter comes as a kind of apology.  An apology for youth, of course, but also borne on the realization that decades after looking up to your apartment window, waiting for your assurances that all is well, I suddenly out of the blue think of you again and wonder if our last time together--I never went back, never saw nor thought of you again--was your orchestration all along.

2011