Sunday reprise: Naked, not yet clothed by experience

This is one of my memory columns from two years ago. I hope you enjoy it, especially new subscribers, and if you’ve been reading for free, that you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. There’s a lot more where this comes from, including my coverage of wars and kittens and political and judicial felons, high and low.

It starts with a car – an old Chevy or Ford bought for $100 from a guy down the street, or a hot rod you lovingly wrenched and polished until it shone, or your dad’s car, a Buick or Olds with bulging fenders and a hood so long it reaches into the next county, or even the backseat of the cop car you were shoved into after you got caught speeding down a dark highway, the steering wheel shaking in your hands as if it had a life of its own.

Driving a car is maybe the first time in your life you feel like you’re in control, even in those moments when you aren’t, because the thing is as big and as powerful as you see yourself.  You can wave out the window at guys you know pedaling along on their bikes, or girls you wouldn’t dare approach in the hallway at school, or even the teacher who gave you a D in English because he didn’t like your attitude.  You want attitude, asshole?  I got attitude for you right here under my right foot.

Driving a car, you are someone, even though you have no idea who that is.  For a teenager, a car is perfect.  It speaks for you in a rumble or squeal of tires that sounds good but says nothing, because you don’t know anything – not about yourself, or about life, or even much about cars.  But most of all, you don’t know anything about girls, a lack of knowledge that takes up more space in your mind than your ignorance about cars.

Girls are about exploration.  You desire them; you even bump into a feeling you haven’t got a word for yet that you’ll soon come to know as lust.  And somewhere in there with your mixed-up sense of girls as this marvelous, unknowable, unreachable, mysterious other is adoration.

For a brief time, post-puberty and before you know any better, girls are like a pile of leaves under a tree in the fall that you can dive into and lose yourself without knowing, or caring, why you’re rolling around other than it feels so good.  You don’t know it yet, but up there in the tree, you are a leaf on a branch blowing in the wind, your life still unlived, trembling with possibility.  For now, that’s what love is: possibility.  Falling to the ground into the pile of leaves that will contain your life is far, far off in the distance.

But for now you’re naked, not yet clothed by experience.  Love is a word in books and movies and in secrets you don’t dare share with your buddies.  Uttering it, even to yourself, seems foreign, unless you’re describing a set of boss headers or a chrome manifold you saw in the window of a speed-shop to one of your friends:  I would love having those things on my flathead, man.  That would be hot.

Instinctively, you associate love with power, you sense its potential energy.  What else could cause you to be “be swept off your feet,” a line of dialogue in a movie you never forgot?  Is that why girls are so unknowable, and for now untouchable?  Because they’re powerful?  Just look at yourself plumbing the depths of this word you know nothing about! So few letters and yet so great a mystery!  In English class, you had to memorize a sonnet by Shakespeare that the teacher told you was about love.  You couldn’t see it until standing before the class, reaching into your memory, you fumbled though its final lines –

So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give                                   

That I in thy abundance am sufficed,
And by a part of all thy glory live.
Look what is best, that best I wish in thee.
This wish I have; then ten times happy me.

You know how people say when they must give a speech or even address a group of their fellow workers, that they feel naked?  That’s how you felt right then. You felt naked standing there in front of your classmates, especially in front of girls, because you felt love’s power.  The sonnet had been indecipherable all through the process of memorizing it.  Even the line in which the word appeared was incomprehensible –

I make my love engrafted to this store.

Store?  What store?  Woolworths?

What was so embarrassing was that you thought everyone could see right through you, they could see that you felt it, that you were in love’s thrall, and yet you didn’t even know what it was.

Just as you fumbled through Sonnet 37, you fumbled through your feelings until one night in the backseat of a car in Fort Worth, Texas – of course it would be in the backseat of a car – you fumbled your way into love for the first time.  Her name was Mary Gail, and you had met her the previous summer when you were visiting your grandparents in Washington D.C.  Her father was a colonel in the army, and they lived across the street from your grandparents’ house, and while you were visiting that summer, you had met, and it was like something exploded between you.

Her parents’ house had a screen porch, and you used to get up in the middle of the night and meet her on the porch and make out on a chaise lounge.  Everyone was asleep, so you didn’t talk or even whisper much, and it was the first time you had felt anything like that about a girl, and as it turned out, it was the first time for her, too.  You didn’t do much more than kiss and tentatively explore one another’s bodies, but it was enough. 

At the end of the summer, you went back to Kansas, and her father got stationed in Texas, and you spent the whole year writing letters back and forth.  They weren’t love letters per se, but that’s what they amounted to, as each of you described the tribulations of being 14 and how your parents didn’t understand you and how you couldn’t stand your teachers and how it felt when you got your driver’s license – yes, you could drive at 14 in the state of Kansas – and how you wished there weren’t 500 miles between you. 

But you were both Army Brats, and you were clever, and so it came to pass that she talked her parents into letting her invite you to visit over the Fourth of July weekend, and you talked your parents into letting you take the Greyhound down to Texas, and and thus it was that you ended up in the backseat of her older friend’s car at a drive in movie – it was a triple feature – and you spent all night in the backseat, in the presence of her friend and her boyfriend in the front seat, completely unembarrassed, telling each other I love you. 

You never “did it” with her – inexperience has its limits – but you felt it, especially all night in the backseat of a car at a drive-in movie! – you felt love’s power.

You want to know how powerful love is?  You were 14 that summer.  Eighteen summers later, a truck pulled up outside your house in Sag Harbor and a guy wearing khaki pants and a khaki shirt rang the doorbell and delivered a box.  When you opened the box, inside you found a sculpture – it was a child’s mannequin, its head turned slightly left, arms by its sides, used to display clothing -- but this one had been painted in bold colors as a harlequin with eyes outlined in elaborate triangles, even its fingernails glistened in reds and yellows and blues. 

In the box with this marvelous harlequin was a card reading, For my first love.  No signature, no return address, but you knew who it was.  You called around and finally squeezed her father’s phone number out of a clerk in the Pentagon and and called him and talked her phone number out of him and called her.  She was married, and so were you.  She was a playwright in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and you had just published your first novel.  The world had turned and sent you spinning off in directions that ended up meeting in the written word, which made a certain kind of sense:  She had been a great correspondent at 14, and so had you, apparently, because she still had all your letters.  You never talked again, but you remembered how it felt.

It's only a four letter word, but if you’re lucky, your leaf falls off the tree into a pile of leaves, and the seasons pass, and love is gained and lost, and then one day you get raked up by someone from whom you learn that love is the only thing in life that you can lose again and again and yet find as if for the first time, still trembling with possibility.