My First Love
My wife and I raced out of Philadelphia as if fleeing a pestilence, only to run into dense shore-bound traffic. We were headed to the coast, a four-day weekend in Stone Harbour, New Jersey. with a stop in Atlantic City.
I have never traveled this route without being flung back to the summers that I spent in Atlantic City during college in the early 70s. There are photos from those years, but I don't need them to prompt trips back in time. The familiar geography alone does the trick.
An hour after leaving Philadelphia, we stood on an avenue in the fading light of the June evening. We stopped there to see what had become of the house where I had spent my college summers, working as a waiter in a restaurant in the next shore town south. It was a white wood-frame house of three creaking storeys, with a black wrought-iron fire escape attached to its side like an afterthought. I had lived on the second floor.
The house was gone, as were others that had line the street. "It's as though it vanished," I said. I gazed upon the profound emptiness in front of me and the ghosts of my past that drifted across it. I pictured myself sitting on the porch leisurely reading novels, lazing on the beach under clear skies, and sprinting to work on my bicycle for the sheer pleasure of feeling the power of my own youthful body.
Then my first love, Jayne, came to mind.
"What are you thinking about?" my wife asked.
"Nothing much. Just those times when I lived here."
I first saw Jayne on an early July morning. I had just begun to clean the front windows of the restaurant, when a girl approached the entrance. I watched her walk through the door. she smiled as our eyes met, and I found myself stammering a hello.
"I'm the new waiter," I said, feeling heat in my face.
"I'm the waitress who's been here too long."
"But it's only a week into the season."
"Exactly." Jayne laughed and went to prepare for the tasks ahead.
Throughout the day I wanted to stop amid the rush of customers to talk to her. Whenever I saw her, my gaze lingered, sometimes into a stare that would have embarrassed me had anyone noticed. In the following days, we began to chat during the mid afternoon lull. At first self-conscious and tongue-tied , I was soon talking with a scarcely controllable passion that I had never known before.
Before long we met on the beach. That afternoon I lay on a blanket with her in a state of near delirium, my breath shortened by her smooth skin glistening in the sun.
On subsequent days we strolled along the beach or sat in the apartment house listening to songs of longing and loss that seemed to speak to directly to us. I can no longer remember our conversations, but they were never as important as her mere presence.
I had known other girls, even had a high school sweetheart, but what I felt for them seemed trifling in comparison. This was all consuming, which is the nature of first love, a sensation felt in our very blood, like intoxication or illness.
about a month after meeting jayne, I drove her home after a party Halfway there, it began to storm. The streets became streams, and we moved slowly along in the three-o'clock darkness. Parked outside her house, we sat in the car and talked.
"My heart sometimes jumps when I think of you, " I said to her.
"It's true."
Lying in bed some nights, with the whisper of the ocean just reaching me, thoughts of Jayne could literally make my heart skip a beat. What else could cause that reaction but love? I nearly told her, but it seemed necessary in the sweetness of the cocoon around us now, shielding us against the rain.
I left Jayne that night picturing long days ahead spent with her. But that was the last time we saw each other outside work. A week later Jayne joined me in " our " rear restaurant booth, looking serious.
"What's the matter?"
She paused. "My boyfriend and I are getting back together."
"He says that he loves me, and I think I love him too."
I could not find nothing to say. "I'm sorry."
I spent the rest of the afternoon in a daze that barely diminished over the remaining three weeks of summer. I had never in my life felt so hurt, and I thought that I would never recover from it. I felt bitter and angry.
The wound refused to heal. Many months passed, yet there remained a place inside me where Jayne had been, that caused me to wince when I touched it. Then one spring Saturday two years later, I entered a bookstore in Philadelphia and asked young woman on a ladder where I might find the Shakespeare sonnets I needed for an English class.
She looked down and told me where to find the poetry section. I thanked her, found the volume and soon left the store. at the end of my English class a few weeks later, I walked into the hall and saw the bookstore girl leaving a nearby classroom. I remembered her wheat-coloured hair, her warm voice and intelligent green eyes.
She saw me and smiled in recognition.
"The girl on the ladder," I said when we reached each other.
"The Shakespeare sonnets."
"Do you always remember the books people ask you about?"
"Only if the people are memorable."
I smiled at that. We were both heading for the other classes, but exchanged names before parting.
I ran into Susan often after that and we usually said hello or joked and then went on our way. Sometimes we met behind the campus library and sat in the shade of the sycamore tree, talking and loafing. If she failed to show, that was all right. We were just friends passing time, and I preferred it that way. After the anguish of Jayne, I was wary of opening up to anyone.
One afternoon, however, our talk found its way to our parents. "You would like my mother, I think," I said," but my father's been dead since I was 11." I had not intended to mention something that I rarely divulged, even to close friends and I nearly wished I had kept silent about it.
Susan touched my arm. "It's been a while," I said.
"I am still sorry," A darkness crept into her usually bright eyes. "I lost mine at the end of high school." It was my turn to say that I was sorry. We sat some long minutes in the slow afternoon, muted by these thoughts. But I learned then, It was one of Susan's virtues not to allow the wounds that come with life to crowd out the joys and we were soon talking of more cheerful matters. A few weeks later we began to date.
That summer I went to the shore for the final time as a collage student. Once a place for adventure and wild excitement, it now seemed little more than a place where I had a guaranteed job. I felt older, wiser, certainly less naive. And there was a sense of things coming to an end-my youth and the things of youth that we must shed to live stable, responsible lives. This trip was also different in that Susan would occasionally visit on weekends.
Because I worked during the day, we had only the evenings to spend together. the hours felt precious and we often passed them by the sea merely talking, as though we had stored up what we could not express to others.
Some nights a pathway of moonlight lay across the water, connecting the shore to the horizon. "It's as though we could walk on it," I said once.
"Where would it take us?"
"Wherever we want, I like to think."
"Where would you go?"
"I don't know, but I'd want you to come along."
"Gladly."
We held each other as the night deepened and cooled. It was here, as the waves crashed in the darkness, that I let Susan fully into those guarded places where I'd cloistered my sensitive injuries. She was delicate with them and as she revealed to me her own secret fears and wishes, I knew what true love was.
After Susan had boarded the bus back to Philadelphia and I was alone, I often wrote to her. She has gathered those letters, yellowing and in a cursive that has changed over the years in a purse of Pink silk at the bottom of a chest of drawers we received from her mother after we married. I have Susan's letters, too, that I keep in a shoe box. When I read them, I am reminded why I wanted to spend my life with her.
Susan and I rose early in Stone Harbour the following morning and went to the beach to 'greet the ocean,' as my wife always says. We walked in the still cool air and the special hush that comes with morning by the sea.
"It's so lovely," Susan said, clutching my hand and I agreed.
Overhead the sea gulls wheeled and cried as we walked barefoot in the cool, wet sand. After a distance, we stopped and I sat with my back close to a dune, while Susan kept to the shoreline, staring out to sea or looking about for interesting shells or stones. Often she turned and looked at me, the bright early morning sun framing her back.
First Love, I thought, may cut and mark us the deepest but love that lasts and grows does so because it joins and nurtures what is dearest, finest and noblest in two people. And because it understands and forgives what is less so.
First love may register in the blood with dizzying effect but the love that endures takes up residence in the soul. In this way, love becomes something far more powerful than bone and flesh. It completes us, gives us the wholeness we need to navigate safely through life.
I could have watched my life for hours as the waves broke and advanced towards her bare feet. In a world sometimes marred by hurt and anguish, I felt profoundly grateful that the sun had risen for me on such a love.
I could feel it now flowing from me to her and back to me again, joined everywhere, complete, like the seas and a harbour against all tempests.
by Albert DiBartolomeo illustrated by James Mcmullan (Readers Digest 2000)
