If a cow ever got the chance...

Purplememe (who should update more because she has a lot of good things to say) sent me an e-mail--the contents of which I can't divulge, as it's not my story--but it made me start thinking about several of my ex-boyfriends. Okay, really just the first one, and how he could be anywhere now. Although I am the absolute champion of unofficial Google stalking and can find damn near anything out about anyone if the information has ever been near a computer, he has one of the five most common surnames in the United States, and it's like trying to find a small sewing needle somewhere in the 162.303 million tons of hay produced in 2001.

(I probably shouldn't admit that about the Internet stalking, should I? Don't worry, I use my powers for good and not evil. Really.)

I was more (well, just more intensely) in love with this guy than I have ever been with anyone, including a couple of people reading this, and those people know what an extreme statement I'm making by saying that. He had gangly legs and floppy brown hair and a French coffee press (which I thought made him sophisticated), an incomprehensibly high IQ and a penchant for using the word "stochastic" when the rest of us would have just said "random". We were both seventeen and this was the summer before college. The week we met, we stayed up for three days straight, just babbling at each other and marveling at our similarities and occasionally kissing (an activity that quickly became less and less occasional). Is this maudlin enough for you yet? We lived a hundred miles apart, and I used to drive two hours to see him, then two hours back, alone on the interstate in the rain and the Wisconsin dark, with the windows down and the windshield wipers sticking, my fingers pressed to my mouth because I wanted to touch for myself the lips he had touched. Because I couldn't believe it, that it was me he loved. We never went farther than kissing that summer. At the time it was enough.

Of course there is a bad end to this story, and there really isn't any plot development or foreshadowing before it happens. We went off to colleges that were three thousand miles apart, and I saw him one more time, over fall break. It wasn't pretty. I said that if he wanted, I would transfer to his college so we could be together, and I knew way before I said it that despite anything I could promise, I would never see him again. There was a lot of martyrdom and dramatic gesturing on my part, and bouts of iciness that alternated with taunting me about my "fearsome devotion" on his. (Yeah, that's what he said. Also--in a slightly different context--"Could you possibly stop gripping my arms?".) I have never been fucked with so much clumsiness or so much indifferent malice, and I can forgive the first but not the second.

Evidently I still haven't forgiven it. Who knew?

Anyway, this weekend driving back from my parents' house with C, we decided to take a slightly different route because traffic on the interstate was all crunked up. He was driving, I was navigating, and we found ourselves--not quite unintentionally, I suspect--in this person's hometown. This is one of the cities you probably have driven past many times, if you live in Minneapolis or Chicago or Madison or Cleveland, even. But you only see the Pizza Huts and Comfort Inns that are a block off the interstate--no transient person ever goes deeper into it than that. I saw the real heart of this city twice, for about a day each time, seven years ago. Staying with his family, sleeping alone in the large and sloping guest bed with the white coverlet. The parents' room separated my bedroom and his: his dad unfailingly kind, his mom amused and distant and not at all worried about me and her son. That summer I was basically incandescent with love, and it was obvious to anyone who looked at me. I hadn't learned to disguise that gaze of total innocent blinding lust, which I can't describe because I never saw it--I only know that I had it because of his mother's reaction, watching me watch her son. She was amused, like I said, and not worried. Because she knew he was smarter than that, that this was just a passing infatuation with a pretty but half-educated farm girl who'd thrown herself at him, that he would go off to college in mid-August according to plan and get straight As in his quantum physics classes, that he would marry a mathematics major and settle in some college town much like this one, with a low-paying but prestigious associate professorship leading inexorably to tenure, a tastefully appointed house and a published monograph on the behavior of quarks under observation and two small but brilliant children. I have no doubt that she was right.

So six years and ten months later we were driving through downtown, trying to get back to the highway. Found the way to the on-ramp, about to turn left and get out, when I saw a familiar sign and said, "C, turn here." He knew perfectly well what I was doing, but I told him anyway, "I just want to see the house. Because I know I can still find it." He said, "I know you can, I believe you, you don't have to prove anything." Still, he turned where I told him to. From that point it was easy--a left, stay straight when the main road curves off, a right, and there it was. The house was shabbier than I remembered it, a more weathered shade of blue, in the front yard an ugly hedge that mostly concealed the picture window. There was a car in the driveway and the lawn was mowed, but no other signs of life. Down the block a man and woman were walking a dog, and I stared hard at the man for a few seconds until he stared back and I dropped my gaze. Then we found the interstate and C drove ninety-five miles an hour the rest of the way to Chicago. He was holding my hand and neither of us said anything. I was staring at the sky, because it was that time of day just after the sun goes down when the blue deepens and presses in and it gets darker every time you close your eyes.

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