A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

After I’d taken her back to her own door and then gone home myself, I thought about it. I’d been very intent in the first place: I could tell that easily enough, as I took off my clothing piece by piece to get ready for bed. But that wasn’t the important thing, that was just a reflex, little better than a muscle-spasm. I sat down in a chair first, to quiet down before I tried to sleep, and I turned the whole thing over in my mind.

The important thing about her refusal was the vastly longer term of life and the far more indelible imprint it gave to our relationship. It changed what would have been an overnight thing into a more or less permanent affinity, at least as far as the foreseeable future was concerned. On the one hand there would have been a few short weeks of furtive, overheated meetings, and then oblivion. No name to remember, no face to recall. On the other hand, there was an uncurtailed succession of joyous, daily encounters, sprightly, open and unashamed, and though immature perhaps, in every sense a budding love affair. And an imperishable print on the memory. She stayed with me ever since. I still remember her name, and some of the things she said, and some of the clothes she wore, and some of the ways she looked. There’s a sort of inverse ratio at work there.

Women, even very young girl-women (which amounts to the same thing), must walk a precarious tightrope. If they fall off, into somebody’s waiting arms, they almost always lose him in the end. If they stay on, even though he’s been kept at a distance, they capture some part of him.

I think I dimly sensed this to some extent, even that very first night as I sat there and thought it over. But if I didn’t then, I certainly realize it now, as I look back from forty years away. For I must have had some girl fully, must have had my first girl fully, then or not long after. But not a trace of recollection remains. Yet Vera still stays in my mind. The very fact that I’m writing this is proof enough of that.

That first-night incident on the bench set the whole pattern from then on for our little sentimental interlude. (And I suppose it was little, but it was a valid one nevertheless; seventeen and nineteen can’t have a bravura romance.) It was understood between us without speaking about it any further, it was crystallized, that that was the way it was going to be. And that was the way it was. And I myself wanted it that way now just as much as she did. She personified that to me now, she was its identification. She wore a halo, as far as I was concerned. Youthful and jaunty and informal, but a halo just the same.

We met every day from then on, without missing one. But not always at the same time. For my schedule of classes was zigzag, no two days alike, and since it was all Greek to her anyway, no matter how often I tried to have her memorize it, she always got to the bench before I did in order to be sure to be on time.

I’d see her doll-sized figure from a distance. As I came closer she’d jump to her feet and fling her arms wide in pantomimic welcome, while I’d break into a headlong run, and as I reached her, I tossed my books carelessly over to the side in order to have both arms free for the hug that would follow.

There was something of the antic in this. We both recognized it and we both would have been willing to admit it. But the underlying emotion was bona fide enough; it was just that we didn’t know how to handle it, so we parodied it. If we were too young to actually be in love, to know how to be in love, then we were certainly smitten with one another, infatuated with one another, that much was sure.

We’d sit there for hours sometimes, oblivious of the needling cold, huddled closely together, sometimes my coat around the two of us, our breaths forming bladder-shapes of vapor like the dialogue-balloons cartoonists draw coming out of their characters’ mouths.

We talked a lot. I don’t remember about what; the language of the young. You forget that language very quickly; within a few short years it’s a foreign tongue, the knack for it is completely gone. Sometimes, though, we were quiet and tenderly pensive.

I used to get home at all hours. I ate alone almost every night now; everyone else had usually finished by the time I showed up. But I’d find something put aside and kept warm for me. What it was I never knew half the time, I was so wrapped up in retrospect repetitions of what had just taken place. I don’t recall that my family ever voiced any remonstrances about it. They seem to have been very lenient in this respect. Maybe being the only male, even though a very unseasoned one, in a household of two doting women had something to do with it.