I met him when I was fourteen years old. He was a friend of my father, much older than me – twenty-seven -, and devastatingly handsome. He was a Special Forces soldier, and I remember when he would come over, he and my father would talk about war and politics. All summer, I would try to find excuses to be around him. Then one night, he came over while I was swimming. I don’t remember where my father was, but for whatever reason I had the house and the pool to myself. He had swimming trunks. I kept swimming over to him, hugging him, laughing, and pressing my tiny boobies against him. Nothing happened. Not even a kiss. But at the end of the night when he was about to leave, he said, “You should come to my house and swim.”
“When?”
He shrugged. “Whenever.”
He left. Later that night, I dried my hair, grabbed my wet swimsuit, and walked to his house. It was after midnight. I knocked on the door but nobody answered. So I did something completely insane: I just opened the door and walked in.
It never occurred to me that he might be with another woman, or that he might be sitting up in bed with a gun aimed at my head, or any horrifying possibility. I simply walked inside, found my way to his bedroom, and sat down beside him on the bed.
I repeat: I was fourteen years old. I don’t know why I was so bold. I can’t picture myself doing any of this presently. But I did. He woke up, and slung a sleepy arm over me, and pulled me down into the bed with him. That is how I lost my virginity.
After it was over, I ran home and looked in the mirror. I didn’t look any different but the whole world had changed.
That summer, we sneaked around like spies. I was blissfully gaga-happy. Then my parents found out. He moved away.
Two years later, my father died and I called him up. It was after midnight. He said he just turned off the light and right as the phone rang, he thought, out of the blue, “That’s Cara.”
It was me. I talked to him for about ten minutes and asked if he wanted to see me. He said yes. We made a plan to meet the next day.
We went to his place. I don’t remember being there any kind of major seduction scene. I was sixteen; I had no moves at all and I honestly wasn’t thinking about sex, though I believed myself to be deeply in love with him. I think he was trying to be respectful. Since he wasn’t going to make a move, I kissed him. I stayed over that night, and the next, and every night until I left for London.
He came to see me in London. We sent letters back and forth. I called him from English pay phones, and our conversations were quick:
Me: Hi, London is great, I miss you. I love you.
Him: I miss you. I love you.
Me: I went to -
Click. Call disconnected.
When I walked back through customs at Houston Intercontinental Airport, he was standing there, waiting for me. I was so tired, and so shocked to see him. I think the expression on my face when I saw him must have been utterly confounded. I remember I dropped my luggage and kissed him and the other people around us all said awwww and some applauded. That night, he made dinner for me. I was giddy. I was talking in an English accent and he wanted me to tell him everything. I stayed up late, talking about England and how I was happy to be back and uncertain what to do now that I was back. I figured I should finish my education, but I had no idea where to go or what to do. “There is time for all that,” he said.
We were together for two years. I don’t remember ever being loved like he loved me. As I look back, those days seem impossible – it seems impossible for me to have felt as accepted by anyone, and what I felt for him seemed to spring from the earth itself, like an electrical current for which I was only the conduit – it was too big to have originated inside me, and too big for me to contain. I was only a teenager, but I was starved for love. And I had it with him. I loved him with blazing bright passion. I loved him because he was kind, and gentle, and smart, an he was all mine. We ran together, and cooked together, and made love twice a day. I wanted to write, so he made sure I had an office and a computer and plenty of uninterrupted time to write. I remember he had food poison once and I lay in bed with him for six days, keeping a cold cloth on his forehead, and trying to comfort him for the few minutes before he ran back to the bathroom. He refused to let me take him to the doctor, so I nursed him back to health as best I could. I also remember he had a mysterious pain in his leg. He would do various stretches that I recommended, and I would massage the leg for hours at a time. “You take such good care of me,” he would say sweetly.
I honestly tried to. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to be so good to anyone since him. I was fully present. Fully invested. I massaged his leg and his back, I made him dinner, and mostly, I just loved him. He asked me to marry him and I said yes.
But I was in college. I had other things going on. He was already an adult but I was just starting to live.
I broke his heart.
A few years later, he called to tell me he had chondrosarcoma – cancer of the cartilage in his leg. He said the tumor was the size of a grapefruit. He made it sound like it was no big deal. The doctors were going to remove it and he’d be back at work on Monday. I wanted to see him. He agreed to see me.
He seemed the same. The tumor in his leg wasn’t visible, and he didn’t even limp. He looked healthy, tall, and in shape. His sense of humor was still in place. We made love. After, in that drowsy, blissed-out state that I’ve never experienced with anyone but him, I looked up at the ceiling and murmured, “Don’t you dare die. As long as you’re in the world, I will believe in love.”
We got into a fight. How dare I say such a thing, he demanded. I had no intention of being with him, I was selfish and mean to say such a thing. “You’re right,” I admitted. I apologized. I got dressed. He walked me to the door. The anger had drained away. All that was left was the tenderness that was always between us. “Come back,” he said softly, and he pushed a lock of my hair behind my ear, and made me look into his blue eyes. “Stay with me.”
I never saw him again.
I still don’t know how to explain that concession. I had met someone else, someone I didn’t really like but felt that I should like. I had started a company. I was in college. Life seemed to be taking me on a trajectory farther away from him, and I was a hostage to that futurity. None of these are very good reasons to abandon someone you love, and I offer them only for perspective, not for any leniency.
Then for the past few weeks, for no reason I could identify, I have been thinking of him. I had been wondering if he was the only person I would ever think of with such unadulterated, pure love. It was uncomplicated (at least at first) and passionate, and he loved me. He loved me completely – as I loved him. I was wondering if we only get one chance, and once it’s gone, it’s gone for good. Or will there be another person who loves me like that? Is it possible that God is warped enough to send a true love to me at the age of fourteen? Why would God be so cruel?
So tonight, because I was thinking of him, I googled. The first entry that came up was his obituary.
He passed away three weeks ago of the chondrosarcoma, right when I began to wonder what happened to him, and began to question if he was my first, last, and only shot at love.
He had a wife and children. A successful marriage. A successful life.
He probably had not thought of me in years. He had been fighting the cancer for a decade; his mind was certainly on other things. The obituary says he was in hospice – a fact that is like a bomb in my chest. He was so strong. He was a Green Beret! He was independent and loved his freedom. And he was in hospice. Because he was dying. And I didn’t know.
I don’t know how to name the degree of sadness I feel. I don’t even know exactly why I’m sad. His death shouldn’t matter to me, it was all so long ago.
But it does matter.
The wide spaces between us began to contract in these last few weeks. I felt him very near. I would be running and suddenly remember his smile. I remembered with an almost hallucinogenic clarity a shirt I bought him for Christmas one year; he hated it but wore it for me. I remembered lying on damp sheets, looking at the ceiling with him as if we’d just witnessed something incomprehensible and wonderful. The questions that attached to these memories were hard to answer, so I kept avoiding them.
If I want any kind of peace, I must use metaphysical explanations for all this. In my hippie-dippy moments I imagine that his soul was loosening from it’s moorings, ready to soar, and he was reaching out to me, to share those sweet thoughts with me while he still could.
Or maybe it was all a coincidence. I tell myself that, but I don’t really believe it.
If I could have written the story of his life, I would have written it exactly the way it went. He found a very nice wife who loved him, and he had the children he wanted, and a nice home in the suburbs. He died surrounded by people he loved, who were very proud of his service to this country, and who would miss them for the rest of their lives.
Maybe, because I can’t help but believe he hated me for my lack of faith, I got the fate he would have written for me: the perpetual belief that there is “more” and “better” in the darkness beyond the present light. I follow it, and follow it. The world is black and still I am seeking.
