XENITH

First Love
by David Plick

I found my first love because of my first date. Not that I went on my first date with that special girl, she just loved the story. She loved other things too: the oldest tree in New Jersey, cats, E.E Cummings, Billie Holiday, and the rain. Her name was Angie.

The story went like this:

I picked up Jenny Sullivan, a Ridge High School senior that claimed she was a recovering alcoholic. She laid her hand atop the ashtray flicking her cigarette every three seconds and talked into her shirt. I nodded at all of it not saying a word because I was seventeen and had no idea how to act. Mainly I was feeling proud that day because I could roll a joint, and I wasn’t high when she told me about rehab but I wished I was. Underneath the pasty pale makeup and purple eyeshadow she was attractive—round healthy face, big blue eyes with long lashes, skin like pillows with dimples, Daddy’s a dentist smile, and a slim tight, muscular even, figure, she could’ve been a ballerina.

And then rehab talk, typical of Basking Ridge kids, have nothing better to do when their parents are partners at Goldman & Sachs, or Gynecologists in Gramercy Park, lives spent commuting in their sedans or taking a peek at Nancy Reagan’s moldy vagina. So their kids shoot up, blow lines, or smoke some reefer, which is what I wished we were doing, too bad her sponsor wouldn’t have liked it. I was a virgin and should’ve taken anything I could get, but damn I would’ve loved a girl to smoke some weed with.

So she was going on and on and I was just glad to have something to do on a Friday night. I could show off my college windbreaker. Chain smoked during dinner even while she buttered her dinner roll. She didn’t realize I was a hopeless romantic, that I might want to hold or kiss those dry palms or stained fingers, and I needed optimism, someone whose memories of drug addict parents or that dirty Uncle that touched you could never toss dirt on a future that’s wide open and ready for the spin. Everything was there for the taking but Jenny Sullivan wasn’t paying attention.

Instead she’s saying, “Like, who gives a flying-eff about who loves America and who doesn’t. We all live here. We all know the deal. I hate the effing bullshit cheerleading bumper stickers.”

I thought about how I had to be the fastest car on the road. If you’re driving eighty I would blast eighty-five whipping and weaving around Mack trucks and Mommy SUV’s scaring the kids in the back. I’d roll up my windows, turn up some trip-hop, and make myself a little home.

And if I had the stage what would I say? I’d talk about how once I was awkward but came into my own, and they’d connect with me, listening, sipping their scotch on the rocks and letting their cigarette burn away. I’d tell stories that’d make pretty girls touch my arm, and later I’d go out and talk politics with guy friends that would slap me on the back. I had a future.

I fumbled around my windbreaker pocket and dangled my keys trying to send subliminal messages. After five minutes I gave up and the mozzarella sticks arrived. I was already looking at the dessert menu and said, “No dessert tonight huh? So much food. Stuffed huh?”

“I just don’t get it,” she started again picking her head up for the first time. “I just don’t get why effing people need to have so many bumper stickers! Like I give a flying-eff if they went to the Outer Banks or love Darwin and some shit. I just want to tailgate you, not hear your opinions.” She put her head back down and took staccato drags on her cigarette, waiting for my response.

The tailgating bit was a decent joke, but I couldn’t laugh. I told her about my friends: one that will eat anything for money. Another whose mother is Vice-President of a huge corporation that was into S&M. And how my buddy Krieger’s beagle was on anti-depressants. “Even the dog’s depressed in my house. The fucking dog is on anti-depressants!”

“Maybe he misses the hunt,” I would say to him.

Her eyes rolled into the back of her head. She was a zombie looking for brains. I was sure of that. The waiter brought out our chicken fingers and I threw whole pieces down my throat soaking them in Coke to make the lumps slide through. She didn’t eat. She said she was full.

“Do you mind then?” I asked and started on hers.

“And these bitches with their huge sunglasses! Does your boyfriend beat you? I want to see your face!”

I dropped her off and kissed her on the cheek because let’s face it, we weren’t into each other, and she smelled like an urn.

I didn’t tell Angie any of that. Here’s the part of the story Angie loved:

Jenny Sullivan’s family had just moved into a new house—a farm ranch that was a quarter of a mile from the road. The driveway wasn’t finished towards the end with potholes and puddles that lasted about fifty yards. I was disoriented on the way out getting banged around like that, and having had my license for only a couple months—driving straight was challenging enough. Anyway, I smashed into her “Little House on the Prairie” mailbox, tearing my side-view mirror off, throwing her mailbox to the ground, crushing “Little House’s” little old lady in the front waving goodbye to her houseguests.

“See ya later Granny and give my regards to Walt and the kids!” I thought as I hooked around for a K-turn knocking the post over, and then immediately slammed on the gas to head home and thought, “If she doesn’t make me pay for the mailbox, the night was a success.”

This wasn’t actually my first date. I just told Angie that to make the story charming. And the part about the “Little House” mailbox was a lie too—I have no idea what the mailbox looked like, and I didn’t have those thoughts afterwards. Angie loved the story though, shook my arm while she laughed, and a week later she asked me to her prom saying, “Now Dave, when you drop me off back at my house afterwards, in the event you run over my mailbox, could you just come inside and tell me?”

“Sure,” I said. “That would make me a better prom date.”

For the next eight days we’re inseparable.

For the next eight days it rained.

She loved the rain.

It was April, and we were both seventeen, talking about how the earth was waking up from its six-month-nap, and everything’s growing. Sapling Magnolia’s feeding and getting green, bees not just sitting down for Sunday brunch floating along, but hopping from dandelion to dandelion with starving plants giving thanks–they leaned in towards the bright sun. We were both tall and confident with strong, unfounded opinions. We screamed and sung and danced and flung, everything that came out of our mouths matched our steps. We saw the world around us. There’s no question what would happen next, it happens every year, colors … warm green beds and watersheds and birds that whiz pass little heads, and she showed me all those nooks and niches I had never known growing up in a cement neighborhood. Those parts you can’t see from the highway–they’re hidden in that little corner out of a poor kid’s reach. Those poor kids that always seem to grow up to be hopeless romantics.

Long drives, two, three hours around farm roads and winding up and down the mountains, listening to PJ Harvey, talking about cookie-cutter houses, and how we were different, and there’s so much to explore it’d be so sad to stay in the same place. She drove stick accelerating inches from the incoming bumper. I closed my eyes certain I would die. Hers were always open. Those eyes that were a different color than mine.

Angie liked small things and took me to the side streets. Like in Princeton where the risotto’s made from scratch with old lady hands, and they only read local news from local writers. We sat down on a bench with maples and cobblestones lined up, people marching looking homeless, probably Socialists making their own clothes. They knew we were outsiders eating risotto in the rain.

“Oh, you write poetry?” I asked. “I’ve written some poems.”

“Let’s hear it,” she said.

We went home, picked up our writing and parked in the back of Lord and Taylor.

“You first,” I said.

“Don’t, I’m shy.”

“Why? You’re the one that brought it up.”

“Okay,” she stood up and took a breath with her head down, kept her eyes closed. “Here’s one I wrote last week about my manager at work.”

Angie started reading and all I saw was her face. She had opal black hair, straight with no bangs, combed to the side–it reached down the middle of her back. Later, when we would become physical, I would press it against her white tank-top and let it swing in the rain. Pale skin with a high upper-lip–I thought her gums sticking out was erotic–and she didn’t have the body men cheat on their wives with, but she was beautiful. We met each other when we’re both coming out of our ugly phases, surprised or flattered when someone cute or popular showed us attention.

“It’s called Poor-Souled Joel.

Joel, your soul, is poor.
You need to feed it.

Give it granola and caramel popcorn
and turkey with mounds and mounds of mashed potatoes,
it’s crying cranberry jelly Joel
feed it
Grandma’s homemade pea soup

let it hug your mother

Joel, your soul, is poor.
You need to feed it
lazy Sunday afternoons picking lilies and purple daffodils
grinding your swollen hands
into wet dirt and pulling out the weeds.
Look at them and know you changed the earth.
Don’t let it have coffee and Jolt Cola and piles of lines
of dirty dust.
Keep it away from the back page of the Journal,
the market is make believe it’s your soul that goes up and down
your soul is poor
and gasping for woods night air and crackling of pine
and stories about carving your name into the third pew while Grandma
put on her eyeliner through the sermon.
Joel your soul
is having cardiac arrest
and it needs to rest
Joel,
or you’ll be next.”

She moved her eyes to my eyes. We couldn’t look away. She waited for me to speak. “Horrible,” I told her. “Worst poem I ever heard.”

“Your turn.”

“You want me to go after that?”

“It was the agreement.” She smiled at me, leaning up against her car.

“Alright,” I told her. “Mine is called Pool-Hopping.”

“What’s pool-hopping?” She asked.

“You don’t know what pool-hopping is?”

“No, what is it.”

“I can’t believe you don’t know what that is. What kind of neighborhood did you grow up in?”

“What am I deprived? What is it?”

“It’s when you trespass into someone’s property and swim in their pool, usually at night.”

“Oh okay, seems like fun.”

“It is, can I read now?”

“Please.”

“Like I was saying, it’s called, Pool-Hopping.

Low-income minds pass low-income time,
we hopped pools.
Low-income souls play low income roles,
we hopped pools.
An empty refrigerator, mother armed with brandy
father can’t see you smoke your first cigarette on the stoop
drink a beer by the generator
Cousin running from the cops
Lives of metal where nothing grew
except the grass around the development pool in late May preparing for the summer season,
we didn’t want to swim,
we wanted to be chased.
Stash your sneaks by the tree one hundred yards out jump out
chlorine dream
water so warm when your heart believes America
dive in the shallow end,
swim to the world’s edge,
escape sound.
and we could play Monopoly until we passed out with Doritos
hanging from our lips and
Coke breath arguing over the greens and the reds
We owned that property and the pool.
and the landlord chasing us in flip-flops and Hawaiian shorts
never stood a chance,
clip-clopping
oh no we’re pool hopping son!
flashlight screaming Polish
never stood a chance
when low-income feet fleet
half of us basketball celebrities scurrying
left right
knew all the short cuts
Section-8 was sectioned off
and you had no right thinking!
What were you thinking?
you could chase us back there to our homes in our land,
where we lay
and dream.”

Angie loved the oldest tree in New Jersey. She took me there, showing me its arms that stretched out like an old man, leaves dangling. She laid her head on my chest. I held it there–a poor hopeless romantic wanting to say all those things I had thought of saying to the first girl I loved like, “You look like a great Italian painting.”

But what if she came back with, “Which artist?”

I only knew two, so I would have to pick the right one. Which one did The Mona Lisa? I thought. I couldn’t remember so I left that idea to the side. How about, “Your eyes have history. Your soul may be old, but your heart is young.” Right then her leg grazed an area near my penis. She told me she thinks I’m sexy, and my words stopped. This should’ve been a tender moment. I had just started wearing tighter shirts, not feeling embarrassed by my physique. I enjoyed her comment a little too much. She laughed, looking down. I felt strong holding her. She started breathing heavy on my neck–it was probably one of her first experiences of sexual arousal. It was more accurately for me, somewhere between the 4000th and 6000th moment of sexual arousal, but I was equally confused as to what to do, how to perform, and how far does one go? Because I was a hopeless romantic, not a drifter at some highway rest stop. I wanted it sweet.

I had to say something, had to confront the nerves. We always laughed and told each other stories, where was the right one for this moment? We had roots there underneath us that ran miles deep gripping on proton particles and interweaving molecules, infinite stories and memories surpassing all of our lives. So much to talk about. So much to talk about but we were too hung up on our own chemicals. She started rubbing from my fingertip slowly down my arm. What did this girl think she was doing? I needed to say something. I was nearing orgasm so I said, “It’s a pretty tree.”

She nodded.

“And an old one too, right?”

“Yes,” she said, “the oldest in fact.”

I decided to stop talking. I was content to merely look at her. Inevitably a hopeless romantic with a hopeless erection.

And I wanted to start slow dancing there in the rain, but she’d think it was a cliché. I liked clichés.

The next week she showed up at my Mom’s apartment saying she had an incident with a teacher. She asked me if I was high. “No,” I responded.

“Would you tell me if you were?” She asked.

“No,” I said again.

“But you’re not now?”

“No,” I shook my head slowly from side to side.

She went on to tell me how this English teacher that cracked her gum insulted her citing very personal issues Angie had written about saying, ”Angie, just because your father abandoned you … or … I know you’re an escapist Angie, but…” And I was too high to offer advice but I did listen attentively putting my head on her stomach. Later that day she took me to an Irish festival and I sobered up, listening to some folk tunes and stories, then we went back to her house where she played some music for me. She started crying and I didn’t know why–I assumed it was the song or something. She played me a classical piece she wrote called, “The Deepest River in England.” It was piano, violin, viola, and cello.

She was the first girl I deeply kissed for hours and saw partially naked. Her torso was a vast expanse to me–vanilla plains, and I loved exploring it. I was confused at some things–what do I do with her nipples in my mouth? Bite? Nibble? Lick harder? Whatever I did though, which I can’t quite remember, she seemed to enjoy it.

One day when we were laying in my bed she asked me, “What percentage of our attraction to each other do you think is physical?”

“Percentage?” I almost never understood her.

“Yeah, between physical and mental,” she said.

“I’d say fifty/fifty, I don’t know.”

“That much?”

I wasn’t sure if she was calling me dumb or ugly. She always dictated our conversations with this hint of doubt. And I didn’t know what to say or do in return. Nobody trained me, if anything these moments were my training.

And I was learning. I learned that retired social workers often became Ornithologists. I learned that all men fantasize about their dental hygienists, want to cheat on their wives with girls either named Chloe or Maribelle, and that no matter what happened for the rest of my life part of me would love Angie. She wouldn’t have sex with me. I tried. I begged. She told me she wouldn’t let me lose my virginity to her.

“People aren’t living for themselves,” she started, lighting a cigarette in bed. “Birds beaks hover above us like halos and we can’t see it. It’s beyond the binoculars out of focus because we’re all blind to each other, letting cold shoulders spread through the ribs, and all people know is that they’re not the wings that climb to heaven like Spanish steps.”

Her tone sounded important. I tried to listen to all of it without breaking to the usual visceral intrusions of TV commercials, playing Pete Sampras in pick-up basketball, or me drawing a picture that isn’t a mountain and river scene. I thought everything I needed was right there coming from her soft mouth with creamy risotto bits in the corners. As she spoke I decided I loved her, but I didn’t think she loved me.

There was so much she didn’t know about me. She didn’t know I”m afraid of painters. A Jersey boardwalk brought this out with the balloons popping around us, heavy metal music, and bald men screaming, “Come on guy! Win a stuffed animal for your girl huh? Two balls for two bucks!” And this painter doing caricatures wanted to do a picture of me. His previous paintings lined up next to him: people with obscenely large mouths, Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, and Michael Jackson.

“No thanks,” I told him.

“Come on! It’s fun! Then I’ll do one of your girl for ten, half-off.”

“No thanks,” and as I started walking away I heard him say something about me not being able to look at myself. That the world is isolated into billions of parts that are all blind and deaf, and it could all be spiritual perfection if our souls were open and could hear the whispering in the wind. If someone wasn’t bold they didn’t deserve it, and if you didn’t have the humanity you might as well be dead. I looked back at him.

Teens on Tilt-a-Whirls, splashing in the dunk tank, Log Fluming, laughter and people everywhere, how could this be? This painter had no right taking moments and trivializing them, making them microcosms. Why did he single me out? I didn’t know who I was anyway. I was looking for love.

We moved closer to the ocean waves, they splashed and drowned out the Seaside Heights din as we held hands. I didn’t think she heard him. I wanted to turn back and tell him that’s not why I didn’t want the picture. That I didn’t want to be isolated and would give myself over to anything that was worth believing in. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t sure if souls exist. That I’ve never seen or felt a soul, or love, and I didn’t know where I came from, or what happens when you die. That I knew nothing. I turned around and said, “Did you say something?”

“Yeah, I said suit yourself. You sure you don’t want that picture?”

“No thanks.”

There were other guys.

She said she was a virgin like me, and I believed it from our mutual awkwardness when I managed to get some of her clothes off. She had older men in her life though, which girls without fathers sometimes do. Her ex-boyfriend that she still met for dinner was an artist with a weak heart–something rare that made his lips blue. He was in his late 20’s and probably going to die before he was 40. I thought he was her ex-boyfriend because I was her emerging boyfriend.

And another guy.

The previous summer she worked at a coffee/gelato shop on Main St. where she played a Billie Holiday album. She loved Billie Holiday. Some guy heard it and came back with a tape of other jazz, probably Ella, Nina, Sarah and some French stuff I was too small town to know about. He was twenty-eight or so, a musician, or something like that, a writer, at least she claimed he published something, who knows? Stealing young girl’s innocence thrilled him. His name was Stephen. To hear his name made my testicles shrink.

All of them were in love with her. She would ask me if I was, knowing that was precisely her intention from the start. She sang to me like one of her crackling 78’s, raspy and unforgiving, profound and hypnotic, tired me with long drives, drugged me with poetry and sonatas, “are you in love with me?” She’d always ask. “I don’t know Angie, I’m not sure what that means.” “Well… ‘Here is little Effie’s head, whose brains are made of gingerbread’”. She loved E.E Cummings. I shrugged my shoulders. “When the judgment day comes God will find 6 crumbs’…are you in love with me?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s go to the opera, sit front row center, laugh at the tragic parts and cry at the sad ones, just like Scott and Zelda. Here’s an arpeggio I invented…are you in love with me?” “I don’t know Angie. I’m not sure what that means.”

Her real name was Angelina. I’m sure Stephen called her that. The first time I called her Angelina she never spoke to me again.

And what could I say about her? Or to her… What could I say that I haven’t said? I always managed to say the right things, “Everybody’s trying to be a Picasso. I just want it to stop raining.” I said what was on my mind, and she brought it out of me. I had no words anymore. The more time passed the more she would forget. I’d become a blip. Living parallel, running until the end, but never seeing the thrilled mutations of expanded hips and guts. Not her and me anyway. And how will I be remembered?

I told her a story once about when I was a busboy and these customers didn’t have any utensils. They asked me for it and I got a set for them. I made a bad joke, I said, “See, no eating like cavemen for you,” and she thought it was hysterical. I couldn’t believe her. She called me every night after that for a story to tell her that would put her to sleep. “Is that all I’m good for?” I asked.

“I adore you,” she said.

That’s almost like saying I love you.

I tried to talk to my best friend Kreiger about it, but he was a drug addict just like his dog.

“When’s he gonna call? When’s he gonna call?” Kreiger was always waiting for someone to call about something. I was upset and yelled at him, called him a “braindead loser” when he wouldn’t listen to me. Then I was the only person Kreiger wouldn’t pick up his phone for.

I was back to myself. Back to the lonely summer, and with the penetrating Jersey humidity, everything started to die. It was going to wither away and dust the Atlantic. Summer drained the rainwater that once fell for eight days in a row–it’s all gone–buried then dissolved into the smoky air. Grass was burnt, heat exhaustion and everyone was panting, escaping into central air. Dandelions down, bees hidden away letting the flowers wilt. Everything was getting smaller again.

I started thinking that Angie was dead, that everyone was dead. I didn’t want to mourn the fact that I would never see her again. I remember the morning, the one time she slept in my bed, and she woke up yelling out, “Where are you? Where are you?” and I came over with coffee breath and held her body. Her body that became invisible, beyond my reach. Ran from me until it was out of sight.

I thought about how Angie liked small things, that little mural she made in the corner of her room of her cat playing with string, and tuning my guitar up one step, then back down, old lady hats in thrift stores, and talking to guys in diners that sat up at the bar by themselves rather than at a table. That guy that’s always saying, “Cool Hand Luke, now there’s a movie. Paul Newman, he had blue eyes, not like those schleps today from God knows where. They got no class, they don’t know real cinema. Back when it was ‘going to the pictures’ ya know. Love was a real thing back in those days. You stuck in cause it was the right thing to do, the right thing to do for the family. It’s too easy to walk away today.” And he would leave the diner, paying for Angie’s coffee, and straighten his sleeves saying, “They took him right down the road. That Luke smile of his, he had it on his face til the end. That old Luke smile, he was some boy.”

At the end of the summer the rains of Hurricane Andrew came through Jersey leveling Palmyra’s Tea Room. Rare books and antique furniture were thrown, pounds of Moroccan mint and Jasmine kicked up into the air. Eastern European waitresses out of work. The worst storm this town had ever seen. This was where we were when she told me about the other guys.

At first I was thrilled that I discovered an artsy spot to go to that I could work on my chess moves. She sat on a purple plush antique ottoman smoking Capri’s and I heard, “He was married when I met him.”

She gave me no warning, just started talking, not even looking at me.

“He came into that espresso shop I was working in and I was listening to ‘God Bless the Child’, you know, ‘Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that’s got his own.’ He didn’t look at me like he wanted to teach me, he just looked at me like he was curious. But I think I wanted him to teach me. He brought me a tape and I listened to it knowing this was going to hurt in some way, I just had to find out. He came back in the next week and told me about his music and his shows. For a while he wanted nothing to do with me, I was just chasing him going out to see him. He said we couldn’t do this, he had so much to work out. I was too young. I just had to keep going out knowing he could love me.”

I knew she thought her life was poetic with abandonment and domineering Italian mothers, a small backroads house with a colonial wrap around porch, a baker stepfather named Angelo. She had a boyfriend with blue lips, all she needed was to be a mistress for an older man. There was nothing poetic about knowing me.

I sat in my car at the overlook above the Tea Room smoking a joint. I went there countless times for that purpose and didn’t know that shop existed. I didn’t know Angie existed. Watching then I saw withered chess pieces and ottomans floating downhill over ground-up earth, through fallen Magnolia branches and torn books. You couldn’t stop that water from moving. You couldn’t stop the small things from being swept along. Rotted dandelions and bee carcasses, reddened blades of grass rolling down to the river, and flooding the highway.

***

David Plick is an MFA candidate at The City College of New York. His work has appeared in Iconoclast and is forthcoming in Fiction. He’s currently completing his first novel, Only Whales Keep a Schedule.

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