onerous mission

One lack that caused me extreme misery during freshman year was an inability to schedule and keep appointments. The first major incident related to this lack occurred at Thanksgiving. My grandmother knew a family who lived in the city where I was in college. She arranged for me to have Thanksgiving dinner with them.

I was enamored of dorm food, and I felt very comfortable sitting around a table of my peers having a third slice of apple pie or fingering a bowl of jello. On Thanksgiving I was enjoying a plate of turkey when a twenty year old girl dressed in a formal coat and carrying a purse appeared at my table. She turned out to be a daughter of the inviting family. She had been sent on the onerous mission of collecting the cad who had forgotten that he was supposed to be sitting at her table at that moment. She looked extremely annoyed.

I entered a state of catatonic shock. I mumbled that I was not going to come. I had forgot, and I had better just stay where I was. I felt like my guts were going to turn to sand. Her family was actually giving me the option of redeeming myself—or they felt obliged to honor my grandmother’s request.

My hair was growing out. I was turning into a hippie. The kind of hippie who was dropping out because he couldn’t fix himself, that is.

I would have liked to substitute some other boy for myself. He would have been a forgetful type, with a great deal of aplomb. By the time he and the daughter arrived at her house, they would both have been laughing about their families. He would redeem himself at dinner with tales of his grandmother and what it was like to be a freshman during these confusing times. He and the daughter would have dated, and she would have invited him to the family house in the south of France the next summer. Her family would have been concerned about the age difference. This paragraph has taken a predictable turn.

A couple of days later, I had a second Thanksgiving meal, this time with some leftist students I had recently met who went to a different university than I did. We all came close to getting killed at that dinner, but nobody noticed my lack of appointment-keeping skills.

composition

Lenna Low was about seven inches taller than I was. Her face was based on a classic Scandinavian pattern. The summer day when we walked up Cathedral Street, her legs were tanned the color of lightly toasted marshmallow and clothed, to some extent, in cut-off jeans. She wore an orange and purple handkerchief blouse that tied at the back of her neck and barely covered her breasts. Her breasts were about as big as mine, but she said that when she was pregnant with her daughter they had gotten huge. I never actually got to see her breasts, as it turned out.

Now you now know everything there is to know about Lenna, from an image of some unraveling denim and high cheekbones. You can place me, within a year or two’s accuracy, in the swinging 1970s. I’m a Playboy-reading college male cliché, disguised as a sensitive musician.

So what was Lenna Low really? A Quaker with a modest and graceful reserve. A confident mother and the lover of a man I never met. A person who took an interest in me during a lonely summer when I was approaching my fourth year of college, scraping out a flimsy B.A. in art for which I had no talent except perhaps a knack for composition. Composition with nothing to compose.

As we walked, Lenna told me how the previous winter she had accidentally gone down a ski jump on cross-country skis. She couldn’t stop. She broke both her legs and passed out. Her legs looked okay now, though.

I remember her apartment on the first floor of a triple-decker with dark wood accents, French doors, sun pouring in the kitchen windows, hanging plants. Her daughter was a roundish baby. A sitter was present, but the baby’s father was out. She gave me something to eat and I wiped my hands on my jeans. She reminded me about napkins, and I said

“What are jeans for, except to wipe my hands on.”

“You are a silly man.”

The silly man routine worked, I suppose, because we walked into the park that night, sat on a bench, and kissed. I had to stretch to reach her lips. She was very sweet. She wouldn’t let me do anything very important with my hands though. I tried more than once, just in case the first rejection had been a mistake. I remember being tenderly elated as we walked back from the park, feeling the itch of about twenty mosquito bites kicking in. I would like to think that I was discovering the mysteries of Quaker doctrine. The mystery of Lenna, to be honest.

*   *   *

A couple of weeks later, my father and stepmother took my half-brother and me on a vacation to Northern Italy. As the plane taxied to take off, the pilot played Nixon’s resignation speech over the intercom. It was early August, 1973. On the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, I found a pair of large silver filigree earrings in a circular design that I thought would look great on Lenna. But when I got back to the States, she had moved away. She sent me a letter with her new address, and I wrote to her once.

That fall, on a train to New York City, I was playing my guitar when a girl sat down across from me. She was actually a woman, not a girl, with a few years on me and a professional seriousness. She worked in television, producing a children’s show. I think she was not interested in men romantically. I told her about Lenna. She seemed to size me up, evaluating my state of life.

“I think the next relationship you have will be a long one,” she concluded.

I told her that it would have to be a relationship with a tall girl who fit the silver filigree earrings. She indulged me with a half smile.

August burn

[A year passes between the “composition” episode and this one, “August burn”]

When Lenna moved away she left me a forwarding address and we exchanged letters once. Then our relationship faded gently away. As a keepsake, I had the two coleus plants that she had given me. Lenna probably hoped that if I could take care of some living thing I might be able to take care of my self someday. I also had the silver filigree earrings that I had bought for her on vacation. If I had been a gentleman I would have mailed them to her. But I wasn’t.

When Toby dumped me, the situation was different.

Toby was working as an assistant at the art museum. She had let me handle their Matisse drawings. She had slept with me three times. The last time, she said “I love you” and I said  “I love you” to her. But the next day she disappeared. It turned out that her job had been temporary, part of her B.A. program. I didn’t even know where in Montana she lived. It was the end of August, and the skin on my arms burned, but not from the weather. I couldn’t imagine why she would make me love her and then disappear. Suddenly I was truly in love with Toby. I wanted Toby. And Toby was a ghost.

I discussed this with Mark over a pitcher of beer one night, and he had a theory.

“Wasn’t she in some church group here? Didn’t you say she mentioned God in relation to sex and love? What you have here is a religious chick. She is trying to show you that you need God.”

“Fuck.”

“Exactly. Any minute now you will see the light.”

I saw nothing but suffering, as if I were mourning some huge loss. I slept through my days, trying to practice guitar and string my mobile, but cycling down into a series of sweaty naps. I was accustomed to losing things and people. They would be around for a while and then just disappear. But Toby’s mindfucking left me staring at a big hole in my self.