THE LEAVES WERE FALLING, IT WAS SPRING

THE LEAVES WERE FALLING, IT WAS SPRING

The leaves were falling, it was spring.  The snow drifted to our thighs, the heat was unbearable.  Dust in the night behind our cars.  The sweet song and feel of breath on the neck.  There was grass.  There was the sound of surf.  On my back in the sand.  Dark head blotting the stars, legs. Oh, Lord, the sweetness!  Unless you came to the surf’s edge in winter, and saw what waves and winds do to drifting snow, you could not understand strangeness. 

I hadn’t seen her for many years.  The years change us.  Sometimes we don’t realize how much.  Even though we feel it.  She was changed.  When I knew her, she had still the look of newness and bewilderment, though being young, she neither saw it in herself nor in others.  Then, I was in love with her.  But I was in love with many, then.  It didn’t mean anything.  But she was unusual.  She stayed in my mind for many reasons, long after everyone else vanished.  She was not good.  That was one reason.  I was not good, but that was different. 

     She was bad.  She was Irish-Italian.  Any one would know who lived in our community then that that combination produced seductive women.  The men, not so much!  But the women—dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes or green: Mediterranean Colleens!  She was the most astonishing of this breed.  And she was bad.  Not merely for the flirting, the daring, which later turned into perfervid passions over which men crashed against each other.  She was bad because of the way she did what she did.  She played while others bled.  She was bad.  She was what we meant by bad.

     I worked in the bowling alley until two in the morning.  Closing.  She waited, sitting at the cafe, smoking.  The lights were off and she stood at the door as I locked it, her hair dark, her eyes gleaming, her cheeks soft.  There was nowhere to go at that hour.  Nowhere but where people go who are out at that hour.  But that was not what she wanted.  She said she had no brothers and she thought of me as one, and she needed a brother.  We took my car and went to Belmont Lake and sat for hours talking, staring, not at each other, but through the windshield at the smooth dark lake.  She talked, I listened.  She told me many things.  It was after that night she left, and not long after she left, I did.  I hadn’t seen her since, until now.  The smell of her provokes a flood of memory.  I drown.

The years change us.  People change us.  We coarsen.  Boredom threatens us from within.  Love turns leaden.  We look elsewhere.  We become social.  We throw ourselves into the collective and discover new purposes, excitements.  We become our ideals.  It is inevitable.

     It is not exactly that the past lives in us like night shadows on a wall.  Such shadows grow indistinct and fade as light rises.  Not exactly.  Bodily essences!  One can, if one works at it, call back the body from the past, though much of what one calls when one works at it is delusory.

     Her cheeks were still soft.  Her hair black as it once was.  Her eyes still gleamed.  She had become what she was meant to be.  I was on the beach.  It was a cloudy, windy day, unpleasant.  No fishermen.  Two mothers with children, cold but stubborn, playing in the sand.  The ocean was dark gray, foaming onto the beach.  Heavy, roiling clouds crossed obliquely.  Gulls hunched in the protective lea of the dunes.  I sat in the cold sand, wrapped.

     The world was grander for me, and I filled more of it, having become a man of the world.  As we are wont to do.  It is inevitable.  This, however, was not THE ocean, the place where shadows were thrown on the sand by driftwood fires.  Where one felt with equal intensity both the wind coming off the waves and breath on one’s neck.  This was ocean.  I sat in the cold sand and looked beyond the breakers. 

     “You!” she said.

     I looked at her.  Long I looked.  She was in a pea coat, collar up.  Barefoot.  Hair loose, oblique across her shoulders, blowing with the clouds behind her. 

     “Me,” I replied.

     “And me!” she said, and sat beside me.

     Long we sat, side by side, me feeling her as more than shadow, she in silence.  Our knees touched. 

     “The last time we sat side by side,” I said, gesturing at the ocean, “it was a lake we stared at.”

     “Now it is an ocean,” she said, unsmiling.

     “Water,” I said, “dark and windy today.”

     “Water, still,” she said.

     “Still,” I said, unsmiling.

     It was as if the seasons changed, sun crossing overhead, clouds foaming above, surf foaming at our feet, summer, fall, winter.

     She stood in the midst of it.  Navy blue in her pea coat.  The wind covered her face with her hair.  I stood.  Held out my hand.  She took it.  Thus began what has not ended.   

Old wrecker.  Bad then, bad now.  But not bad.  It was the passion.  It was the past.  Dry the summer.  Hot.  She was still girlish.  I, still, loose, ready to turn at her word into whatever she willed.  Not a brother.  Not any longer.  Into. . . ! 

     Wife.  Children.  Home.  Vocation.  The world.  Sand on the beach.  Rearranged by tempest.  Me.  Her. 

     It was this way all summer and fall.  Winter set in.  We were unaware.  One room.  Ivy covered the windows, dimmed the light.  We seldom left.  No one invited.  Prolonged interinanimation.  I lived in her face, she in mine.  All knocks the world thrusts week after week we smiled on and kissed away.  We made our own light.  It was enough.  It was all.  Winter light through the ivy vines was bright as obliteration.

     Hand in glove, we walked where we met, on the beach, after snow.  Cold.  Crystal Xanadus carved by wind and wave.  Ice thrown up by surf ringing the air.  Igloos.  Domes.  Canyons.  Echoing the rush.  Blue on blue.  Mirror bright.  We walked in the light of Lordship.  Immensities.  We laid in the snow and looked at the sky, leg over leg.  It was too much for us.  Almost, our breathing stopped. 

     Why did she leave after our communion at the lake?  She was with child.  Where is the child?  It is grown up and on her own.  The father?  Never involved.  Other men?  None.  Life stopped.  To begin.  Again.  Now, begun.

     But there is wreckage in my wake.  Cold.  I wrap myself in snow.  Green her eyes.  Like a spring meadow.    I look in them and am satisfied.  Shafts of ice glint at their edges.  She is bad, still.  What redness is this in the snow?  It is not me.  I have given what there was away.  I am no more.  I live in her face.  She in mine.  That is all.