Chapter 8: First Love

Although I’m a young man, I’m clumsy with women. It’s a clumsiness that has driven me, for much of my short life, into the depths of a self-imposed exile. Loneliness is more suited to my needs. I can get by feeding off myself – inventing activities like going to the movies on my own. On dark Saturday nights I watch men and women collide perfectly on the screen. These movies taught me what women expected of men. The actors were never clumsy, and so I felt less of myself.

Considering my clumsiness, I never expected a woman to take my overtures seriously. I shied away. Love became a concept fiercely imagined, and in no way did I ever expect love to permeate the wall I had built around myself, until I accepted an invitation to a gathering at the Supper Club.

I thought this another foolish endeavor, because at parties I’m always the one who sips my drink off to the side, unable to get involved. I am reluctant to admit who I am, what I do, or where I come from, because I actually don’t know who I am or what I do, and as a child we moved around so much that I can’t express to anyone where I’m from. But I went to the club with my neighbor down the hall, because I had nothing else to do on a Saturday night. Neither could I escape how people socialized. At parties I’m always the first to leave.

When I arrived, a hostess guided my neighbor and me to people I had never seen before. I shook hands, and for a moment I thought myself transported to another time and place where they did the jitterbug and listened to the Andrews Sisters on Voice of America. I did have a choice, however, on where I could sit – either behind a pillar, where I’d get drunk alone, or up front where a solitary woman dreamily listened to the swing music. I couldn’t decide at first, because I had nothing to talk about. There was nothing I could do to lift this curse of clumsiness. I didn’t know how she’d react to a strange man sitting next to her. I sensed she was alone, but I didn’t know if she’d be kind to a stranger. Being without a woman for so long had humbled me. Reluctantly, I did sit next to her, because I blocked everyone’s view by standing in the the aisle where the showgirls streamed through and filled the theater with a heated expectation. I asked if I could sit next to her, and she surprisingly nodded her head.

We didn’t talk. The golden horns of the jazz men muted whatever greetings we exchanged. Her perfume caught me off guard at a time when I needed to be vigilant about everything I did, said, and believed. Her blonde hair surprised me, not because it was natural, but because I never saw blonde hair so up close before. It reminded me of Connecticut for some reason, but after the trumpets sounded, I found out she moved to New York City from California. She knew very little of New York but mentioned an address in Midtown. She said people in New York were very abrupt. She traveled from coast to coast for a living.