!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
We continued, that sultry muggy summer, to engage and disengage, sharing desultory days and nights, both of us afraid, I guess, to be the first to say good-bye for good. One evening, Mike brought out the slides he’d finally developed from the Moratorium march on Washington, so long ago. The crowd, the optimism, those two eternal flames for the Kennedy brothers – scenes from another life, I thought. Until he showed me the one I took, that profile, looking wistful and serene in his father’s ancient jacket. Then I almost cried, my heart literally skipping a beat inside my chest. Why couldn’t he just go away, why did it have to end this way?
One night, driving to another movie, he talked about his dorm, there at USC. “We each get to have our own room, bathrooms in between. Right on the campus, hardly have to walk at all to class. Maybe once I get to know people, second semester, I’ll find a place to live, in the city. Los Angeles!” He started humming, then singing in his scratchy off-key way, “Surfin’ Safari”. “Huntington and Malibu, they’re shooting the pier, at Rincon they’re walking the nose…they’re angling in Laguna, and in Doheny too…I’ll get to see all those places, get to swim off the pier at Santa Monica,” he enthused.
“Don’t forget San Onofre,” I grumbled. It turned out I had fallen in love with someone whose highest ambition apparently was to be a beach boy. I tried to change the subject, to something – someone – he’d been avoiding with me all summer. “Molly’s off at college now, not swimming here anymore?”
His smile vanished for a second, then he brightened. “Yeah, I think she’s gonna do well up in Michigan, probably win the NCAAs when they finally start having them for women.” We parked, and he reached into a pile of towels and notebooks in the back. “Here, you might like this. Something I wrote trying to imagine what it might be like for her, when she gets to that point.”
He handed me a sheet of unlined notebook paper, large block printing spelling out a fantasy:
You know who you’re swimming for, all shook, standing on the block, all shook down, waiting for “Take your mark!” Deep down in your body, something is quieting, Tensed-up, nervous, everything moves in herky-jerky speed. After the greetings, “Go-get-em’s”, the butterflies at the clerk of course, the last few minutes stretch on forever. Stepping out of warm-ups, maybe talking to the others up there with, whom you;re about to remember and forget forever. Everything about you is open in these last moments before your time alone, on the block. Everyone knows you are swimming, what your time is, what you can do, the top seed in Lane Four; you are exposed there as you take the block. And then, the quieting begins; from some deep recess it pours across and through your person, until only two things are left in the world – you, and the race you’re about to swim. And you know for whom you’re swimming.
You know because you feel yourself stepping, curling, grabbing your toes around the edge, waiting for that electronic ‘Beep” to send you flying out. Tensed; and yet completely relaxed compared to the coming effort. Tensed, waiting, relaxed while distant pounding random thoughts course through you. “Oh no, I’m really here! This is it! I’ve got to swim!” Not at all the expected thoughts in that heartbeat before the gun goes off, thoughts of when to flip. how many breaths, when to look, how hard to stroke. Right now, all is possibility, you’re geared, ready, about to uncoil, knowing that the little “BEEP” is here NOW, and you;re OFF, stretching, gaining the future with your hands, driving, not noticing the extreme effort of unleashed legs, flying as a rigid airborne body, only knowing that the next feeling will be a sharp, face-slapping torso-thumping splatting impact piercing into the water. As soon as you hit, POUND your legs start churning, and innumerable other instinctive action kick in, while you blow out hard through your nose to prevent the water coming in. Surfacing, head down, you motor on, now moving confidently, completely towards the end.
I forget the movie we saw that night. All I remember is thinking, once again, that love, and friendship, spiritual and physical, had felt all-fulfilling so long ago, in the spring of our sixteenth years. But now, I needed more, and he was going, almost gone, taking my heart, but thankfully, not my soul.
Mid-August, I realised I had not yet made plans for that trip to Marin, to see Uncle Carl and Helen, Toby and cousin Syl.
“The prices go up, you know, the longer you wait to make as reservation,” my father said when I told him the fare to fly out there.
“But I’ve only got enough for one-way now. How am I going to get back?”
“Maybe that’s a sign you don’t really want to go?” Mom ventured. I went back upstairs, and leafed once more through the fare book. With the cheap shuttles between LA and San Francisco, and then a direct flight on to Boston, I could just cover it with my savings from the summer. I called up Mike.
“Um, say, I’ve been thinking. I’d like to go out with you, when you drive to California next week, say good-bye to you there?” It was a long shot, and I was asking over the phone, not in person when I could use what little charm I had left with him.
Surprisingly, he said, though in a pretty neutral tone, “Sure, OK. That’d be fun, I guess. You sure?”
One more chance to let it go. No, I decided, I didn’t want to leave him hating me. I wanted us to be friends, I wanted him to know he had, indeed, meant – still meant – so very much to me. My words, I knew, after so many times I’d turned away from us, could never say that. Only sharing his new adventure, at least its start, could let him know…what? What was I trying to say with this, that I cared for him, or maybe that I just wanted to lie in bed with him, if only for a few more nights? He’d probably make a proper story out of it, but all I felt was muddled.
“Yes, let’s do that, Mike. One more road trip, our Greatest Hits Tour, OK?”
“Okay-aay,” he answered, sounding more than a little skeptical.
In the end, that’s all it was, a reunion tour for Sarah Stein and Michael Harrison. We rolled cross the plains of Kansas, fell asleep in Snowmass, the cosmic uncaring stars still playing up above, then into the piñon forests of New Mexico, new terrain for us.
Mike swept his hand across the horizon when we stopped for gas in Gallup. “Easy Rider, remember when Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper stop for gas? And he makes sure to keep the last drop from spilling with his black leather glove? Whenever I drive these roads out west, that’s what I think of, those two guys setting off, with all that money in the gas tank, their future fortune still ahead. That’s what I really want, you know, to enjoy the beauty all around me, maybe tell some stories along the way.”
I wished I had his camera once again, to capture that look in his eyes, the romantic lure of his future in this land.
As we dropped down into the LA basin, heading west from San Bernardino into the afternoon heat, I felt over-dressed, even in a short-sleeved pink cotton shirt. “This must be the deodorant capital of the world!” I observed. Mike snorted, “Sorry, no air-conditioning.”
We spent our last night together in another narrow dorm bed, making love not in a frenzy, but with a friendly slow caress. As we started, I murmured to him, “This is just for you.” In the morning, I called a cab and left before he woke, leaving behind a note, written on the back of a memo titled “To: Freshman Students/Re: Introduction to Clinical Medicine (ICM)”. I wrote, in his favorite green ink, using the largest cursive I had ever attempted:
Good-by –
have a good life —— be happy ——
Love
Sarah Jane
don’t be scared – you’re
going to be a good doctor –
– you’re a good person —
please write sometimes —
********