You Can't Buy Love Like That Page 6

  She moved with her eyes toward the floor. Her energy, contained in spite of her swagger, emitted vibrations that were both shy and charismatic. We arrived at her door, and, after several tries, I was able to jiggle the lock enough to open it. Keeping the key, I promised to get her a new one by the end of the day. She thanked me and left the door ajar while she went back downstairs to unpack her parents’ car. I continued down the corridor and knocked on doors and introduced myself to the new students. The presence of thirty freshmen filled the floor—the jittery, frenetic energy of young girls feeling the first blush of freedom along with the terror that comes with the absence of boundaries.

  After the first couple of weeks, everyone had settled in, and I grew accustomed to my new role, searching for ways to balance my responsibilities with my studies and my social life with Mike. Though most girls on my wing dropped in occasionally, only Nicky came to my room on a regular basis, most often in the evenings after dinner. At first we talked about the more mundane things at school, but soon we engaged in much deeper conversations, asking questions like “What is the purpose of life?” and “Where do we go when we die?” We would continue our dialogues during the day, taking long walks down by the railroad tracks across from North Campus, where we traipsed through the magical landscape of old tin cans, Coke bottles, and bits of trash folded into the weeds and wild flowers that sprouted up through the gravel between the ties.

  Nicky would interrupt our conversations as we walked to share the names of different flowers, or stop abruptly to watch a toad or a garter snake peek out from the underbrush. Her ability to spot the movement of the smallest creatures inspired me to take greater notice of things in nature. As a biology major, she loved to explore the natural world; my major in sociology made me love to explore the human mind and emotions. These complementary interests led to conversations about the rights of animals and inquiries into which ones were smarter than people.

  She was deeper than anyone I had met up to that point. Her questions were philosophical, her curiosity boundless—her desire to understand the world around her was compelling. Prior to our meeting, I had felt alone in thinking about the things we discussed and was hungry for this kind of conversation. Together, we created a space where we could be more fully ourselves than with anyone else, driven by an innocence and vulnerability that felt precious to me, even then.

  One night she began a conversation with the question “What is love?”

  I looked up and saw her face in a new way, noticing how beautiful her features were in the low light. I fixed my eyes on her hair, which hung over her right eye, and watched how she tossed her head and ran her fingers through it, pulling it behind her ear. It was a gesture I had seen many times before, but tonight it had a sensual quality. Her eyes were soft, her cheeks flushed. She fixed her gaze on mine, and we lingered longer than usual, neither wanting to look away. When my eyes did drop, I noticed the curve of her fingers as she smoothed the corner of a paper on my desk and how I wanted to take hold of her hand.

  “What is love?” I repeated the question. She had a habit of striking matches while we talked and watching them burn. Just then, she lit one and held it in front of her face. We both watched the tiny fire in silence as it crept along the thin wooden stick till she blew it out just before it reached her fingers. It seemed like a metaphor for this moment. Something was on fire here for sure. Her gaze remained steady, and I imagined she asked that question for a reason—that it was possibly an invitation to talk about a feeling that was growing between us. The intensity enlivened and terrified me. I had thought about that question a lot before and wrote about love in my journals, but no one had ever asked me the question, and never a girl who was looking at me the way she was.

  “I think love is a mystery. No one knows where it comes from, or why it ever leaves. It is more powerful than anything on earth, and yet we are totally dependent on someone else to give it to us.”

  I stopped for a moment, picked up the matches, and struck one myself. We watched it glow as I went on. “You can’t create it or control it, and, while it is more valuable than anything else, you can’t buy it anywhere. It is given for free, and that is what makes it rare and precious.”

  The fire had reached my fingers just as I finished my sentence, and I blew it out. My heart thumped in my chest, a metronome of warning, telegraphing memories from the past. Here it was again, this unbounded feeling of flying, this incessant desire to be closer, to fall into this invisible prism of light and color, to feel the touch of her hand on my skin.

  I wondered in silence if she felt the same way—if she could not only see the flame but feel it. Her hands reached for the matches, and as she took them from me, I felt the slight brush of her fingers. It made me quiver. My mind flashed back to the sensual connection I felt with Gina, and I wondered if Nicky had had an experience like this before with another woman. The slow-motion quality of this conversation unfolding, along with the rush that came with the slightest physical touch, made me think there was intention behind her question.

  “Have you ever been in love?” she asked.

  I was afraid I was falling in love at this moment and that she could see it. “Yes, once.” I was not ready to admit I had been in love with a girl when I was fifteen, for fear I would scare her and myself. Gina and I had grown apart when she graduated high school half a year before me and got a job as a secretary. Going on to college, I was sure that had been a once-in-a-lifetime young-girl crush that was behind me. But, I could talk about the boy who broke my heart.

  I told her about Charlie and how I thought he was someone special who turned out to be kind of a jerk. I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out photos of friends and family back home. I searched through the pile and held out the one picture I had of him.

  “He’s very handsome,” she said, taking a long look at the photo.

  “Yes, he was really gorgeous on the outside, but in the end not so much on the inside. In fact, I never really found out what happened. He just disappeared one day.” I didn’t want to talk about Charlie. I wanted to stay in the feelings I had right now with Nicky. “What about you?” I asked.

  “That conversation would require more time,” she said, as she yawned and slowly got up from her chair. I came around to the other side of the desk as she reached out her arms to hug me goodnight. For a second I let my face rest next to hers and feel how smooth it was. We stood there for what seemed like ten minutes, though I am sure it was only seconds. It was thrilling leaning in to her body—so closely pressed together I could feel the beat of her heart. Yet, it wasn’t just physical; it was an experience of knowing someone better than I had known anyone. I felt like I was holding love itself in my arms, and I didn’t want to let go.

  I closed the door behind her, leaned back against it, and silently murmured to myself, “Oh my God, not this again.” I got into bed and closed my eyes but couldn’t sleep—images of Nicky kept appearing, each of us fixated on the match in her fingers burning down, feeling the heat and wondering what was going to happen next.

  These feelings of intense attraction were launched, and I couldn’t stop them; nor could I quell the anxiety they generated. I had thought I was over this. Charlie had convinced me that I was normal, and my attraction to Mike was reassuring. But this hunger was wild, racing—an out-of-control desire to be right up next to Nicky. No doubt somewhere in our shared unconscious there was a craving to be closer physically in a way that matched our growing feelings of mental and emotional connection. At first we met it through athletic competitions, chasing each other outside and wrestling ourselves to the ground—disguising sexual attraction with physical play.

  One night, this contact expanded to a softer version when Nicky offered to give me a massage after I complained of a sore back.

  “Come on,” she said, as she pushed me toward my bed in the other room. “Lie down. I’m really good at this.”

  Without resisting, I agreed and carefully took off my shoes and
placed them beneath the bed before I lay down on my stomach fully clothed in my corduroy Levis and cable-knit sweater. She sat on the bed next to me, and I could feel her hip lean into mine as she bent over my back and pressed her hands down on my shoulders, releasing the knots. Even through my thick sweater, I could feel both the strength and tenderness of her fingers and the sweetness of her touch.

  “Why don’t you take this off?” she said, yanking on my top after ten minutes of earnest but fruitless effort. “The knots in your back are really bad, and I can’t get at them through your sweater.”

  Raising myself up, I pulled it off over my head and tossed it on the chair across from the bed. After I was facedown again, Nicky climbed up on top of me and sat on my backside, her legs straddling my body.

  “That’s better,” she said, as she started at the top of my back and lightly pulled her fingertips across the bare skin of my torso till they reached the edge of my belt. Then she leaned forward and gripped my shoulders with both hands and pushed at the knots with her thumbs repeatedly until they softened. She then worked her knuckles into my upper back, kneading the tissue from top to bottom. She repeated this same pattern for about twenty minutes.

  “Is it okay if I push into you with my elbows?”

  I nodded, uncertain what she meant but willing to find out.

  Slowly, she placed the points of her elbows into my shoulders and then gently lowered her body onto mine, her elbows sliding to the sides, until I sensed her full weight pushing into me, felt her breath on my neck and her hair sweep across my shoulders. She was so close that I could smell the freshness of the Irish Spring soap she used. It was like a dream in slow motion as she raised herself up and again smoothed her hands across my back in soft even strokes—our blended energies swirling between us. I wondered if she could feel my pulse racing or the electrical currents that sped down my arms and legs, making me light-headed. Alternating emotions of ecstasy and panic were followed by the profoundly unsettling awareness that I shouldn’t be feeling this way.

  Silently, I reassured myself that this was okay, that we weren’t doing anything wrong—it was just a massage. My musings were interrupted by a loud knock on the door that startled us both. Nicky jumped off of my back as I quickly reached for my sweater and pulled it on over my head.

  “Just a minute!” I shouted, fearful that the person would walk right in and wonder what was going on. Smoothing my hair, I went to the door and opened it just enough to peek my head out. “Hi, Betsy,” I said. “What do you need?”

  “Have you seen Nicky? She was going to help me with my biology homework.” Nicky hadn’t mentioned anything about it.

  “Yeah, sure—as a matter of fact, she’s in here.” I tried to sound nonchalant as I turned toward the other room and called out, “Hey, Nicky—Betsy’s looking for you.”

  Nicky emerged from my bedroom with a sheepish grin on her face, walked past me, and said, “Want to meet for lunch tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” I responded, as she joined Betsy in the hall. “Have fun, you guys.”

  I closed the door and rested my hand on the knob. My heart was still drubbing wildly. I turned out the light in my study and lay back down on my bed with one hand on my chest and the other on my stomach, hoping to calm the surge of wild sensations. The scent of Irish Spring still floated in the room. What did it mean to feel this fierce attraction to her? Was there something wrong with me? Did she feel this way too? I didn’t want to dwell on any of it, but the thoughts and feelings were too powerful to ignore. I tossed and turned with them most of the night.

  It seemed that we had made another step that night toward greater acknowledgment of the invisible force field surrounding us. And though I was certain both of us felt it, neither of us could speak it. One part of me was grateful Christmas break was a few days away so we would have some time apart to calm the constant rush of feelings that cascaded between us. Another part of me wished that Nicky were coming home with me for the holiday instead of Mike. That thought really scared me, because I knew it should be the other way around.

  chapter

  6

  pain, pleasure and confrontation

  While I was home on break, my grades for the first semester of junior year came in the mail. I knew my performance was not going to be outstanding, but I was unprepared for the shock:

  Cultural Anthropology: D

  Design 1: D

  Art Survey 11: D

  Art History 1: D

  Bowling: A

  Teaching and Learning: A

  GPA: 1.86

  Here in black-and-white were the harsh consequences of all the nights and days spent in conversation with Nicky. Great, I thought. Now, because I didn’t get a 2.7 GPA, I would lose my RA job and have to face all of my friends, who would then know I had failed.

  I slipped out the back door, through the alley, and down to the park. It was snowing, and large round flakes caught on my eyelids as I wandered across the softball field where Gina and I had played. I found a seat on a picnic table and cleared away the tears with my mittens—the cold snow on my face sent an even bigger chill through my body.

  Sitting there, I remembered all the summer days I spent with Gina—sunbathing on the picnic tables, playing softball till the sun went down, smoking cigarettes and trying my first beer. Above all I thought about the sleepovers, where under the covers, she would roll toward me and slide her body up next to mine. I could feel the thrill all over again as I recalled the moment she slipped her arm around me. All of those same feelings were here once more with Nicky—the rush of physical sensations when she gave me the massage, the overpowering desire for her to lean into me, to feel her breath on my neck and the touch of her hands on my skin. I wanted to get out of my body, my head, out of this funnel cloud of fear.

  I knew I had brought this on myself with all the time I spent with Nicky, skipping classes and staying up all night talking. Even as I faced my unknown future, I couldn’t have given up those precious moments. Worse, I had no one in whom to confide about this tangle of love and fear, guilt and joy, and always the undercurrent of gripping anxiety. It was 1967. There were no gay advocates, no magazines or books I knew to read, and there was nowhere to go to find either—certainly not the minister of my church, not my girlfriends in the neighborhood or at college, and, despite my parents’ letters of love and concern, most certainly, not them.

  The temperature continued to drop, and I made my way back across the park to home, where I stole away into the bathroom with the phone and dialed Nicky.

  “Oh, Andi,” she said, using her nickname for me, after I told her about my grades. “I’m so sorry. You must feel awful.” Her sincerity melted the barrier I’d built to shield myself from the judgment I imagined would come from everyone who found out. “What are you going to do? You are coming back, aren’t you?”

  The frantic tone in her voice gave me comfort—she really cared about me.

  “At the moment, I just feel like running away.”

  She suggested that I run to her house, and if she hadn’t lived two hundred miles away, I would have—gladly.

  I heard my mother’s car pull up. “Mom’s home. Gotta go,” I said, and I abruptly hung up.

  My mother was in a good mood as she walked up the steps. Christmas always cheered her, as she loved to buy presents, bake cookies, and have people over. I met her at the door and took the bag of groceries she carried.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” she asked as soon as she saw my face. My mother had a way of knowing when things weren’t right no matter how hard I worked to disguise my feelings. There was no point acting like nothing was wrong, and the sooner I got this over with the better.

  “Well, I got my grades today,” I said.

  “It couldn’t be that bad.” My mother, the perpetual optimist, had no idea how bad it could be. She was not a big yeller or one to become overly dramatic about things. That would’ve been easier for me to deal with. The thought of disappointing her was
the hardest. Especially when my older brother was a mini UNIVAC computer when it came to school—getting all As from kindergarten through college.

  “I got four Ds and two As.”

  Her eyes got wider as she stifled a gasp, and she looked as though she hoped she hadn’t heard me correctly. “Are you sure that’s right?” she offered, hopeful that it was a clerical error and not the result of multiple bad decisions on my part.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  She came over and put her arms around me, and I started to cry. All my fears and feelings came racing out through my tears—my secret attraction to Nicky, my ambivalence about Mike, and my anger at myself for ruining a great opportunity. A few moments later, my dad came into the kitchen, stood close to us both, and laid his hand on my shoulder. Even without knowing what had created the scene before him, he was eager to comfort.

  “What’s the matter, pudding-head duffy?” he asked gently. I hated to admit to them both that I was on the verge of flunking out. I told him of my pathetic performance.

  We all just stood there as I felt my father’s hand gently stroke my head. After several minutes, we all sat down at the kitchen table. My dad took my hands in his, looked straight into my eyes, and spoke his oft-repeated refrain: “You know, Carol, there will be lots of bumps along the way in life, and it doesn’t matter so much what happens to you. It’s how you handle what happens to you that makes the difference.” There was compassion in his voice. I could feel it streaming through his body out of his arms into my hands—like a transfusion of love and hope. He told me, as he often had throughout my life, that he believed in me with all his heart and was certain I could overcome this. He reminded me that I was smart and creative and capable and, above all, that I had the courage to go on.

  My mother chimed in, “It is just a little setback, but it doesn’t mean anything about who you are or how much we love you.”