“Those kids you teach must be nuts about you,” he said.
“Well, I’m no fool. Students start rebelling against their teachers in junior high, but in elementary school, they’re fighting to sit on your lap.”
He regarded me—he was still in the center of the room, and I was just inside the door—and the only way I can describe the expression on his face is to say it was one of enchantment; I had no idea why, but Charlie Blackwell found me enchanting. And I recognized, with a pang that was at once sorrow, remorse, and the first stirring of hope, that it was a way no one had looked at me since Andrew Imhof. In the last fourteen years, I had been on plenty of dates, I’d been in relationships, I’d even been proposed to, but there was nobody I’d enchanted.
“Alice, what would you do if I kissed you right now?” Charlie said.
We looked at each other, and the room was filled with shyness and promise. After a long time, I said, “If you want to find out, I guess you’ll have to try.”
I’D MET SIMON
Tornkvist at a shoe store when I was twenty-six; he was buying clogs, and I was buying Dr. Scholl’s sandals. He was six-four and slender, wore John Lennon–style glasses with gold frames and round lenses, and had floppy blond hair, a wispy blond beard, a droopy left eye contiguous to a scar running from the outer tip of his cheek-bone to below his ear, and an amputated left hand. His injuries were from Vietnam, which I guessed before he told me. Because he’d been left-handed, his writing looked childish; this was something I learned later.
As we sat in the store waiting for the salesman to return with shoes, I remarked on the unseasonably warm March weather. After we’d made our purchases, we stood on the sidewalk outside the store, continuing to talk. Perhaps ten minutes passed, and then he held up his left arm. He wore a long-sleeved rust-colored velour shirt, and the sleeve was folded under his elbow and pinned at his shoulder. He said, “Does this bother you?”
“No,” I said.
“Then would you like to see a movie sometime?”
We went to
and I made sure to sit on his right side, in case he wanted to hold my hand, but he didn’t try. Afterward, we ate dinner at a pub on Doty Street, and he said he’d found the movie overrated, though he did not explain in what way. He was a year younger than I was—this surprised me, because upon meeting people, I had a silly tendency to think of those who were shorter than I was as younger and those who were taller as older—and he was working as the dispatcher for a plumbing company while taking classes at the university. He hadn’t decided on a major yet but was inclined, he said, toward philosophy or political science. He had grown up on a pea farm outside Oshkosh.
I didn’t find our conversation very interesting, but the entire time, I felt a sort of internal shuddering, as if my ribs were about to collapse and I had to concentrate fiercely to hold them aright. I recognized this sensation for what it was: physical attraction. Simon drove me home (I had wondered if he might have on his steering wheel what we’d called, growing up, a “necker’s knob”—Dena’s grandfather, who’d lost his right hand in a tractor accident, had had one—but Simon did not and was a perfectly competent driver with one hand), and outside my apartment I scooted across the seat and kissed his cheek. I had never made the first move, but the fact that Simon was a little younger emboldened me.
He seemed surprised but receptive, and we curled toward each other, he wrapped his right arm around me, and I hoped he would set his left arm on me, too, the stub, but he did not. I know now—I didn’t know it then, but years later, I read an article—that there are amputee fetishists, and while denying such an inclination in myself feels rather defensive, I sincerely don’t think that’s what it was. I recognize in retrospect that I wouldn’t have been attracted to him if not for his injuries. But it wasn’t the injuries, per se. It was that if he set his handless arm on my back, it would be an act of trust, he would make himself vulnerable in order to be closer to me, and it would give me the opportunity to show I was worthy of the risk he’d taken. Unjudgmentally, I would care for him.
The question he’d asked outside the shoe store notwithstanding, Simon himself didn’t appear all that self- conscious about his wounds. He also had scars, as I discovered over our next several dates, on the left side of his chest. In Phuoc Long Province, in the early winter of 1970, his company had been ambushed, and he had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. He was matter-of-fact about this, as about most everything; he referred more than once to the Vietnam War as “a bill of goods,” but he expressed his political views infrequently and succinctly. He was certainly not the first person I knew to have fought in Vietnam. More than a dozen boys from my class at Benton County Central High School had gone over, and Bradley Skilba had been killed in Tay Ninh in September 1968, three months after we graduated; in 1969 Yves Haakenstad had come home in a wheelchair, paralyzed below the waist; Randall Larson had died northeast of Katum in 1970. Sometimes I thought of how things might have been different if Andrew Imhof had gone over also—not an impossibility—and if it had been in Vietnam that he had died instead of at the intersection of De Soto Way and Farm Road 177. Probably it would have been easier for his family, I imagined; it would have felt like an honorable tragedy and not just a waste. Clearly, it would have been easier for me, without the suffocating guilt. But I’d still miss him, he’d still be gone, and in some ways, it would be worse to know it had happened in another country, that he’d been so far from home; in the end, it didn’t really seem a better sadness.
The first few times Simon and I had sex, it was flushed and protracted and new and exciting. Since Pete Imhof, I had slept only with Wade Trommler, whom I’d dated for two years in college; although we’d broken up when I turned down his marriage proposal the summer before we were seniors, I would always be grateful to Wade for his kindness and tenderness, for being so different from Pete. In the time since Wade, I had gone on dates here and there, and I’d often been able to sense when certain fellows would have asked me out, had I given them encouragement. But these men seemed to me, as Wade had, mostly innocent, boyish.
During my senior year in high school, I’d stopped thinking of marriage as my birthright. It wasn’t just that I no longer considered myself inherently deserving or that I no longer believed I was looked after by the universe. It was also that I would not want to marry a man unless I could show myself to him truly—I had no interest in tricking anyone—but I couldn’t imagine showing myself to most men, revealing myself as someone more complicated than I seemed. If thinking of the exertion and explanations that would require discouraged me, it also made me calm. I didn’t work myself up, as other women I knew did, panicking over finding Mr. Right. I accepted that the years to come would unfold in their way, that I could control only a few aspects of them. To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.
Then I met Simon, who was a variation I hadn’t anticipated. He represented neither solitude nor phony bliss but some third possibility, a redemptive coupling. I thought this had to be the next best thing to being accepted completely—to completely accept someone else. I still partly agree with this notion, though the rest of what I thought about Simon, about my own capacity to take care of him, I now see as vain and wrongheaded.
We dated for eleven months, during which time we lived a mile and a half apart and saw each other twice a week. I was busy teaching, he was taking classes and working at the plumbing company, but that should have been
