composition

by chasm8empty8void

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.