The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.
–Wisława Szymborska
She didn’t want to leave the car. So I left her there and went down the path to the look out by myself. I tried to explain to her how beautiful it was going to be: Loch Raven, frozen solid as it so rarely was, in the light of the full moon. I told her about how if you waited and listened you could hear the ice crack, like a rifle, not because it was melting, but shifting.
“Are you sure? You’re gonna miss out?”
“It’s okay. You go.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She smiled, not unpleasantly, but her body remained stiff in the passenger seat.
So, yeah, I went down without her.The full moon gleamed off the snow and the ice-sealed lake. It lighted up the night like one of those Fifties movies when they shot the night scenes in the daytime but then messed with the exposure or filters or something. The sky wasn’t black, but a deep, deep, deep black blue.
I don’t remember whether, in the short minutes I sat on the cliff’s edge, I heard the ice crack. I was nervous about leaving Melinda behind. But I hadn’t wanted to cave to her. I wanted to show her that I would witness beauty, even if she couldn’t or wouldn’t.
It was our first date. And as it turned out, our only one. I don’t remember asking her out, or even how I summoned up the nerve. In my mind she first shows up in biology class, having moved to my high school from Minnesota. Everything about her was a little bit more dark and lustrous than we were used to in whitey-white suburban Maryland. Her skin, her eyes, her hair were all glowing brown, like she harbored the blood of the Cherokee beneath her preppy layers of sweaters, oxfords and polo shirts.
That night I had picked her up in my Mom’s new Nissan. Melinda’s house was next to the golf course, up in one of the nice new developments, where the rich people, new to northern Baltimore County, had started living. I remember being polite to her dad. We went to the mall, but I can’t remember if we saw a movie. We probably just walked around, talking, but not much. I was convinced I would only screw things up if I blathered on and on like I usually do. The only way I was going to get anywhere with a nice girl like Melinda was by behaving like someone I wasn’t.
Oh, sure, I had hopes we would make out when I turned off Warren Road onto the gravel by the side of the bridge. But more importantly I wanted to impress her with my deeply sensitive artist’s appreciation of the sublime. She would first see the beauty of Loch Raven frozen over through me. She would be moved. And we would kiss. This was my theory, and my theory seemed to me, while admittedly ambitious, essentially sound.
Like I say, I didn’t linger at the cliff. I hustled back to the car and took Melinda home. There was no good night kiss. Without my galactic backdrop of Lock Raven cracking in the blue black, moon and star-filled night, I simply didn’t have the game for it.
Of course I didn’t blame her for not coming down to the lookout with me. It was the sort of situation that teenage girls are wisely warned against putting themselves in. But I do believe it was my failure to crack her code that discouraged me from asking her out again. Shortly after that she started dating this skinny preppy kid Steve pretty steadily. I heard she lost her virginity to him on prom night, though I harbor my doubts. Even if it’s true, I like to think she did it with the same kind of doggéd faithfulness to tradition with which, earlier in the evening, she pinned his boutonniere to the lapel of his tux.
After we all graduated, we headed to Ocean City for Senior Week. Melinda was sharing a condominium in one of the nicer high-rises with three or four other girls. One afternoon it was just me and her in the apartment: everyone else was down at the beach. We stood facing each other, maybe two feet apart. I had come to pick up a hat I’d left behind at a big party the night before. We were chatting. The electricity between us caught me off guard. I had long since moved on in my infatuations, now chasing a girl that had liked me through all of high school, but whose affections cooled once I finally showed an interest.
Melinda was smiling at me, and she knew the effect of that smile, relaxed and supremely confident. Our chatting came to the subject of that one date we had. I sought to set the record straight. “I didn’t even want to kiss you. I just wanted you to see the ice in the moonlight. Hear it cracking.”
“You didn’t want to kiss me?”
“Well, sure I wanted to but…”
“But what?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t want to spook you.”
“You didn’t spook me.”
“Okay.”
“You could’ve kissed me in the car.”
“I could’ve?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“So what are you going to do now?” She was close to me. Smiling. In control this time.
“I’m gonna go.”
“Ah. Too bad.” She was still smiling.
“It was great seeing you.” I managed to say.
“Was it?”
My heart was huge and hollow as I walked away from her condo door.
“Fuck!”
I thought I was being noble. That’s how I excused my cowardice: fidelity to some other girl who was holding me at distance.
I forgive myself now. The fact is I didn’t completely trust Melinda. She ran with a crowd that for the most part hated me. It seemed inevitable that at that moment, in the condo, after all the time that had passed since our date, she had to hate me too. Maybe she was mocking me? Taunting me? I was petrified she’d pull away if I made a move.
She’s right there. Still smiling. Seventeen. Clear as moonlight.
I invited Melinda to be my Face Book friend, after I started writing this. She never responded. I am as much relieved as anything. I suspect the person she has become would be just as leery of the person I have become as we both were of each other as teenagers. I picture her driving to work, not riding a bus like me. I picture her with good looking kids, but none as darkly captivating as her. I cannot doubt she’s well off, probably even better off than her well-off parents were when I drove past the golf course that night. I wager she loves her husband quite a lot, but with a touch of her unique reserve, which will always leave him wondering, and fascinated.
I don’t want to push contacting her. I certainly don’t want to go back in time and kiss her in Ocean City, or… well, I do, but only if I get to keep my own brimming life back here in the future: my own sons and crappy job and gorgeous wife holding me captive with her own unique reserves.
It’s the wanting we survive in, and what I want, even more than another chance at that summer kiss, is to have Melinda hear the ice cracking in that blue black night.
