|
Epilog: Sea Writing in Sand
Years ago, when I was divorced and dating again, near 40, one of my girlfriends was a beautiful young woman of 34. This was in the San Francisco area, far from the Northeast where my youth and the stories in this book took place. I'll call this woman Eve—both because she was young and the Eve of her personal world and future, but also because I'm far along on the eve of reflection and stillness. Of my intimacies with Eve, there is little I want to tell.
She was (is, wherever she may now be) a remarkable woman. She was pretty in a sort of a softly chiseled, athletic way. She was a skier, swimmer, scuba diver, anything fast or exhilarating. I have always been, was then, and am now, a writer. We writers often lead dull lives. Mostly we walk, we think, and we type.
Very few women, with the best of intentions, can sustain themselves in their needs with such a man for a long time. Eve, though she had the best of intentions, did finally leave me for someone more like herself. I understood he had was a combat flight instructor, martial artist, parachutist—the kind of man she would take hiking or deep sea diving.
She did admit, though, that she had acquired from me insight into a totally different world of thought and expression. For almost a year, we complemented each other well. During that year, we spent much time together, and made love passionately. I was past the rebound from a disappointing marriage and a mildly embittered divorce.
Eve was good for me in many ways, and she caught me at the right time, not on the rebound, but back on my feet. She was actually the last great fling before the long marriage in which I have grown mature, and with which spouse I will be lucky to find the sunset many years hence.
Yes, I did end up marrying a woman just a few years older. My first wife, ironically, was many years younger than I, and even less mature though beautiful. So I have had the best of all worlds in women both younger and older and I have no complaints. The only reason for this epilog, mainly, is to say that Eve gave me the nudge, the insight, to record the adventures of my early twenties.
Parenthetically, I should note that I was already a man of substance. I was no longer a stray leaf blown against every October tree. I had a wife and children, and a nice salary, and a seat by the warm bench at the fireplace on the other side of the window, while outside the cold wind blew. I always remained an outsider and a lone operator, only my hunt took me not to the Summers of this world (a state of being from which I was permanently barred when I stopped being a Spring in my late 20s). My hunt took me to the attenuated air and refined philology of the Classics.
I realized, as I lay beside Eve one night, this beautiful athlete five or six years younger than I, that she was the older woman, the Summer. That is, she was in the age bracket of the women I had romanced in that phase of my life. She was a young woman, who might have dated me as a younger man. As the younger man, I moved in a world of confusion and short-term gratification. I bounced from job to job, place to place, woman to woman.
The older woman, the Eve I might have dated, was mysterious to me, alluring, accomplished, a teacher, a bringer of forbidden fruits. Now I was years older than Eve, and I could see her from the other angle—a girl still. She was young, still possessing that freshness and that blush of innocence. It's all relative, of course. Every person ages differently, gains wisdom otherly. We can only generalize as we try to grasp this life with its sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal rules that we must each figure out on the fly.
I see Eve in my memory as a serious young blonde with a swimmer's wide shoulders, crisp gray eyes looking almost fiercely at the waves rolling in at Redondo Beach as she stands holding her surfboard like a Greek goddess holding a spear. I see her with damp, tousled locks over her forehead, as she wipes a blue-wetsuited wrist draped with a sprig of kelp across her runny nose. As spots her wave and starts to trot, leaving an arc of dark, torn footprints in the wet sand. Faster and faster she runs, drops her board, throws herself on and starts to paddle into the wall of water still on the horizon but coming fast.
She told me one evening, as we sipped wine by a hot fire in the stone cottage, that she did have a young boyfriend once. I told her I had been such a lover to one or two women almost twenty years earlier. She laughed. I asked her why she laughed. She shook her head. I prodded, and she reluctantly answered with diplomatic honesty: "He was like a child. A real challenge. He was fantastic in bed, and he could out-run and out-play me at most things. But he was just a kid. He was kind, but he was self-centered. It was all he knew. He was groping his way forward through life, and I helped him a little, but it's hard to be a younger man's lover, older sister, sometimes a little touch of mom even."
"So you moved on," I said.
She nodded. "I moved on with life. I had my little play time, and he grew bored and probably found someone else like me. I think he had an easy time with older women."
"Older girls," I corrected.
She shrugged and looked perplexed. When does a girl start being a woman? When does a woman stop being a girl? Is it relative? Is there some date and time when she punches a ticket, goes into a booth as a girl, and comes out as a woman? She didn't know, and neither did I. She grinned. "All I know is that, at the moment, I am enjoying being with an older man." "I'm enjoying it too," I said, and we clinked glasses. I lay back on the rug, dressed in my jeans and sweater, and she crawled close beside me with one arm over my chest and her lips by my ear.
I listened to the rhythm of her breathing, and thought of the waves splashing back and forth in the changing tides. I thought of the arc of abandoned footprints out on the sand, not far away, probably already erased by the water to leave the sand blank and fresh for new writing.
|
