The Lesson
Inspired by true events, I wrote this in December of last year, for a freshman writing seminar based on autobiography taught by Professor Crawford. He is one of the most enchanting and deeply fascinating people I've ever had the privilege of knowing. He awakened, in all of us I think, the ability to look into our hearts from the outside, like some inert creative power we never would've thought existed. And I thank him so much for that. This wasn't easy to write, and even after a distance of nearly four months, it still isn't easy to read.
- m.f.
“Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts, uncritically -
to those who hardly think of us in return.”
- T.H. White
TODAY, OUT ON the autumn road, where the asphalt dipped low into the valley and a stiff sky met vermilion canopies, my brother says to me, “Julia, don’t ever sleep with someone unless that person can look you in the eye and tell you they love you, all right? Don’t ever.”
“All right, Ben,” I say.
He is driving with one wrist perched on the steering wheel while the other hand rests on the passenger seat where Meg once sat, and where I sit now. Gusty winds come roaring through the open windows. He keeps them open so he can feel the bite of fall in the tremors sweeping up his hair, and in the crisp drafts tumbling into his lungs with every swallow. It felt good. With thoughts of Meg still fresh in his mind, he couldn’t keep his chest from smoldering the way it did, and his only certainty, for some reason, is that having the windows open would breathe some clarity into him.
The pain he feels is not unfamiliar. It is a theater of discontent he’d visited once before as a boy, at a time when affection between children was a clumsy exercise involving simultaneous feelings of elation and misery.
Perhaps it was Ben's realization that the years since those childhood days failed to prepare him for a second onslaught of acute heartache. This is what's making him drive without a destination today. We pass the Hudson on our right, its choppy surface glinting in the late afternoon light. A red-lipped horizon kisses what is left of the sun. Below that, a skein of wild geese pushes south, like a banner of noisy freckles dotting a blushing sky.
MY BROTHER RECALLS his brief tryst with Meg the way he would describe a delayed video game explosion. Following the hustle of attraction and the immediacy of desire, the suddenness of finding himself in the throes of a love unrequited was a sort of drawn-out shock. His world had burst soundlessly in slow motion, leaving nothing in its wake for the residual ash to fall gently onto. He’d been interested in another girl when he and Meg were first acquainted, at a party hosted at his friend Will's apartment just off campus. She was a senior at the same college Ben went to. That party happened at the start of fall semester of his freshman year, and he doesn't recall speaking to her aside from asking where the beer keg was. Ben was all hung up on Kim at the time, and didn't give much thought to Meg's presence. But a chance encounter at Grand Central Station a few weeks later would change that.
CHEEKS FLUSHED, WITH a sweep of mousy curls: that was her, running across marble because she was on the cusp of missing the last train home. He recognized her immediately as the attractive senior girl living with his friend, but wasn’t sure if she’d remember him.
Once on board, my brother had a hard time falling asleep. The old man in the next seat smelled rank and coughed persistently. The last thing he expected was for Meg to tap him on the shoulder and offer him the seat next to her, let alone remember him, but when she did, a combination of relief and flattery hit him immediately. Then he looked at her, and I mean really looked at her. Until that point, Meg was just another pretty face, and he suspected that Meg was sleeping with Will anyway. My brother is a fool like that sometimes, but he isn't skin-deep. The pretty girls who throw themselves at him are the only ones he seems to associate with, but it’s only because he’s too shy to talk to anyone else.
On the train, they shared a real conversation, the one that he’d later replay in his mind a thousand times just to figure out the exact moment in which she’d carved out a place for herself in his memory. Despite being exhausted from travel, they talked tirelessly about everything: life, family, school and foreign films (they shared the same obscure favorites). She confessed, a little sheepishly, of her ownership of a small Latin inscription tattooed just above her ribs. With an almost uncontainable excitement, he revealed his own. He discussed his desire to travel to Chile, not knowing she’d lived there for six months. She has an older brother, and he has me. In another world, they could have been the same person.
Meg, with her eyes like wet stones and softly arching lips, made him feel like a schoolboy again. In every way, he wanted to impress her, needed to fill his own shoes around her. After they’d arrived back at campus, it started to rain. No numbers were exchanged, but she did say, "I'll see you around," before disappearing. When he retired to his dorm, he lay awake watching raindrops trace clean streaks across the filthy windowpanes, wondering why he felt so unprepared to reconcile his need to be her friend and his desire to be something more.
He noticed her all the time after that. They'd see each other at the same parties, but spoke occasionally, awkwardly, and always briefly. He was beyond himself, feeling like his heart and his mind were in a cage, and from the way he acted in her vicintiy, it was clear she had the keys.
THE PARTY HOUSE is crowded, and drowning in music, but he manages to find her, as he always does, never far beyond his reach. And she is radiant, standing there on the staircase.
"Hey, dude. Come down and have a smoke with me," he says. He is surprised at how easily that comes to him.
She stares at him for a hot second, and he’s afraid she won’t answer, because that would make him the weak one, the one who broke the silence. Then the corners of her mouth rise slightly in a half-contained grin, and she replies, “Okay,” and his doubts are obliterated.
They share a cigarette in his car, with the radio on, and he is nervous. He let's her finish it, drinking in the smell, watching the smoke from their mouths mix in the crisp air, listening to her hum the chorus of an old Weezer track. When she's done, she thanks him before walking back inside. She doesn't turn around to make sure he'd follow. Confused, but still determined, he stays in his Jeep to finish another beer.
THE ALCOHOL IS strong, liquid passion, and everyone is dancing that night in searing darkness. It is the combination of surprise and earnest desperation of seeing Meg getting down momentarily with someone else that finally breaks Ben's resolve. At the song change, he pulls her away from the guy, and suddenly Ben's hands are on her hips and her fingers are splayed across his chest and it is all Ben could do to keep himself from trying to get even closer to the heat of her body.
The bass is heavy, enticing. Ben smiles into her neck, not sure what he meant to do by stealing her like that, but the result was perfect. And Meg had eagerly welcomed his swift touch. He knows it's true, as she leads him to the wall, as she glues herself to his waist, as she raises her face to his. He knows it's true, that no drug would ever replace the memory of this lush night. All of his ecstasy is matched in her kiss - all zealous lips and aggressive tongue. When he steps back to catch his breath, he sees the only thing he's ever wanted.
They are wordless for the rest of the night, neither of them wanting to shatter the lure with conversation. And to Ben, at least, there wasn't anything to be said that couldn't be understood through kisses and touches. He allows nothing but his frantic pulse to echo through the silence.
Later, when they stumble into her bedroom, the faint pressure of the first kiss is still heavy on his mouth. This time, he pins her to the wall, tips her into the blankets, and then it's clothes flying and it's hands pushing at each other and what they were doing would look like wrestling if their lips weren't joined, and it feels a little like wrestling, too. Her eyes begin to glaze, as she yields under him the way he'd always imagined. His fingers trace the elegant architecture of her collarbone, her pelvis, the valleys above her hips. In the galaxy behind his eyelids, little stars explode.
THE NEXT MORNING, he woke up to her sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed. “My housemates will be up soon,” she said quietly. He looked at his cell phone. Ten o'clock. He winced, but said nothing. The tone of her voice said what she didn’t have the courage to articulate. You need to leave, Ben, before they see you here. And just like that, it was finished.
In his head, the difference is real, profound. This will ruin him; he believes this. After what feels like a long time, he dresses and walks out silently. The walk back to his dorm is cold, but he doesn't remember feeling the chill the night before. The night before. A thousand images of the previous night lace the fringes of his vision. Yes, it was real, he tells himself. And now she's through. Deal with it.
He would've screamed into the trees if it weren't for the pounding in his chest rising into his throat. Defeated, lost, and aching with infinite depth, he edges into his sunlit room. He lays down on his bed, fully clothed, and covers himself with the blankets. Her smell gathers around him like a lack of entropy. It drugs him to sleep.
ALL IT TOOK was one train ride to convince him that time was the culprit, the catalyst that changed him from the innocent ten year-old who knew only the cleanest, unadulterated pains, to the wretched college boy fixated on a girl who saw right through him.
My brother, awake in his thoughts, reflecting and unafraid, does what he can to show me life’s dramatic slants. He worries that someday I might become someone’s Meg. And for a moment, riding there in the passenger’s seat of his old Jeep, I feel ageless, like I’ve been spread over time.
"Don't ever."
“All right, Ben,” I say.
I cannot promise him anything.