Beyond Nostalgia (6 page)

Knowing that every man on this crowded intersection had to be watching, envying me, made me more than a little self-conscious, but I loved it. I relished it. Although just a boy, I now had something that grown men ached for but could never have. I could see it in all the passing, straying eyes. Theresa was something to look at alright. A rare beauty who commanded unwanted attention from the opposite sex, and jealousy from her own, everywhere she went. I was enjoying it now, but because of my own jealous nature, I would in the future have problems dealing with all the male attention Theresa attracted.

Standing on the bustling corner, people darting every which way like so many worker ants, I asked her, "Where do you wanna go, the Keith's or the Prospect?"

"Gone with the Wind is playing at the Keith's," she said. "Everyone says it's terrific. It starts at 8:05. But, if you want, we can check out the Prospect first and see what's playing there … we have enough time."

Now, I knew that all the girls were flipping out over 'Gone with the Wind', so I figured it had to be some mushy, frilly love story. Nevertheless, being as crazy about Theresa as I was  and thrilled just to be with her, not realizing I was about to take in the greatest film classic ever produced, I was more than willing to make an uncharacteristic sacrifice. Nobly, I offered, "Gone with the Wind sounds good to me, if you want."

"Oh, Dean, that'd be fantastic," she said, knowing well and good how most boys who hadn't seen the movie felt about it.

Arm-in-arm we headed up Main Street to where it runs out smack in front of Keith's RKO Theater. The shared excitement of being together propelling our steps, we walked faster than we realized. When we were about halfway there, striding past Hardy's Shoe Store where I always bought my four-dollar penny loafers, I told Theresa I liked her outfit. In the glow of the store's lights I could see her face had flushed a bit. For a few steps she didn't say anything and her confident smile turned bashful. But then it widened and she said, "It's just a little something I bought during the week." It wouldn't be until a couple of weekends later that she'd admit she bought the collegiate outfit, and several others, to impress me, that she had taken almost a hundred hard-earned dollars from the small college fund she'd saved from her part-time earnings at a College Point book store. money she had been putting away for her all important education, for two years now, since she'd been back in New York, this time. 

Unlike me, Theresa was a planner. And as time went on, that would prove to be one of our few differences. She looked to the future, while I only lived for the here and now, a philosophy that, in the not too distant future, I would pay dearly for.  

Once inside the theater, we climbed the carpeted stairs and I led Theresa past a green-lighted loge sign into the darkness of the balcony. But not all the way up. It was common knowledge that to take a girl to the last row on the first date was presumptuous. A guy had to show he respected his date by avoiding the last row of seats. But it was a huge sacrifice since you knew damned well that's exactly where you wanted to be, the most private place in the entire theater. As we tentatively toed our way into the darkness, up the balcony steps beyond the mezzanine, this unspoken rule flashed in my mind. But now it was irrelevant. Theresa was different than all the rest of the girls I'd dated, and just being with her was enough for now. I wasn't going to rush intimacy this time. When the time was right for both of us, I'd know it. But still, I wanted us to have a little privacy so I lead her to two end seats, next to the wall, three rows from the top. By this time, 'Gone with the Wind' had been playing for three straight weeks and attendance at the Keith's was beginning to wane. The flick was no longer attracting sellout crowds, and that was good. It turned out that nobody would sit in our immediate vicinity, nobody next to or behind us. We were so far up there that, when the volume dropped during the romantic scenes, we could hear the rapid-fire clicking from the projection window high on the wall behind us.

It was during one such romantic scene, well after the intermission that we began to kiss along with Rhett and Scarlet. When Theresa snuggled closer to me, I figured it might be some sort of sign, a signal maybe. So I kissed her, tentatively at first, not knowing how she'd react, just a benign meeting of our lips. But soon, once we'd gotten a good taste of each other, our desires overshadowed any inhibitions we might have had. Arms locked tightly around one another, fingertips in each other's hair, massaging, we eased naturally into that ancient primeval ritual. We kissed away the rest of the theater, the whole rest of the world. Other than our two throbbing hearts and the cells of our bodies, nothing existed. For the moment, we were Adam and Eve. Everything else had gone extinct, or better yet, not yet been created. 

A hundred and nine pounds of solid gold in my arms, my chest firm against her breasts, only the arm rest separating us, our breathing quickened and deepened. Then Theresa surprised me. She slid to the edge of her seat, pivoting sideways, and laid her leg over the top of my thigh. Deep in my stomach a strange wonderful feeling stirred. I felt like I was going to lift-off, right out of that velvet chair, when ever-so-gently she pulled her lips from mine, pecked them twice, then went to work on my neck. Her face brushing inside my high-boy collar, she slid her open mouth along the thin sensitive skin on my neck, occasionally pausing, kissing it, warming it with the heat of her rhythmic breath.

My response to all this stimulation was purely natural, not contrived or mechanical like it had been with all those nameless girls before Theresa. I slid my hand, slowly, from the long wispy hairs on the nape of her neck down inside the front of her tennis sweater and shirt, intentionally telegraphing the movement, giving her ample opportunity to stop me if she wanted. But she didn't stop me. Unchallenged, slowly, my hand found its way beneath a bra cup coming to rest on her bare breast. Ever so delicately I began to massage her.

Slowly, but deliberately, she withdrew her face from where it laid nestled in my neck. Raising her half-closed eyes to mine, she brushed aside a tress of hair.
Oh no
, I thought,
here it comes.
She's going to stop me and I'm gonna feel like an A-1 jerk.
But, she didn't. Again she didn't say a word, but her bedroom eyes cried out to mine. They told me, "It's OK, Dean, but you better be who I hope you are, who I think you are. Please … please be for real." 

Then, as I held her in my palm, feeling the hard swell of her nipple against my fingertips, she kissed my mouth again, lustfully and for a long time. Right then and there, in the Keith's balcony that spring night in 1967, Theresa Wayman sequestered my heart. I knew then I was deeply and irrevocably in love with her. 

Chapter 5

Two weeks after 'Gone with the Wind', I had the displeasure of meeting Theresa's mother.

It was late at night, May fifth, my eighteenth birthday. I was wearing Theresa's gift on my left wrist and had been stealing glances at it ever since she'd given it to me earlier that evening. She'd gone out and bought me that ID bracelet I liked, the one I was eyeing in the jewelry store window the night we met. One could only imagine how much it meant to me. 

My arm around Theresa's waist, the ID resting on the heel of my hand, it was just about midnight when we turned up her street. We'd had a super time at a small get-together at her friend’s house and were now cracking up as we relived some of the night's funny events. I remember our laughter echoing loudly in the night-time quiet and Theresa putting a hand over her mouth, and then one over mine, as we traversed the row of sleeping households on her block. 

But a moment later, two doors from her place, all our light-hearted merriment came to an abrupt end. As if someone had thrown a mood-switch, Theresa’s smile vanished and her face slackened. 

"Shhhhh," she said. "Listen."

For a moment there was only the sound of our slowed steps. But as we got closer to her stoop, we both heard what Theresa had dreaded; that sad bluesy music. The volume was lower this time, but it was the same sad sax that was playing the first night I took Theresa home after the dance.

I was more than surprised when her voice suddenly became contemptuous. After seeing her for three weekends now, I didn't think she was capable of such ill feelings. "Well Dean, she's home. I guess you're going to meet her this time." Drumming the door with her fingernails, her other hand on the knob, she turned to me then and said, "Thank God, her man of the evening must have left by now.  She's turned down the stereo, the fireworks must be over." Then she unlocked the door. "We might as well get it over with Dean. You might as well meet her." 

We stepped into the blackness of the common hallway, and I fired up a nervous smoke. I kept the blue flame of the Zippo alive so Theresa could see the keyhole. The dim light it cast danced eerily on the door. 

Theresa sighed as she unlocked it, and I followed her into the dusky living-room. The only pale light came from a cheap plastic lamp, a sorry Tiffany knock-off standing forlornly on a tiny end table. The walls were bare except for one that cordoned off the kitchen. On it was a tarnished star-burst clock and, to the left by the doorway into the kitchen, an eight-by-eleven black and white photograph. From where we stood, I couldn't quite make out who was in the picture, but I did take in the rest of the room's shabby appointments. The sparse furnishings were old, mismatched furniture that my friends and I would call "early depression era." Even the room's focal point, the sofa, was years overdue for the trash heap, a hulking old celery-green monstrosity with a frazzled fringe skirt and permanent ass-impressions on the two end cushions. The coffee table, one of those cheap pecan colonial jobs, was covered with tattered old issues of Silver Screen, Modern Romance, and True Confessions, most with coffee rings on their covers. There was also a Ronson table lighter, a glass ashtray with a cigarette butt mountain rising out of it, and two, near-empty wine glasses, one with cherry-red lipstick on the rim. I figured Theresa's mother and her date had probably abandoned the latter during a soulless romantic moment. Against the opposite wall, a vinyl-covered portable stereo sat uncertainly atop a metal snack tray, still playing that God-awful, depressing music. The rug felt paper-thin beneath my feet. In the swarthy light, I could only tell that it was brown. 

The place looked like it was moved into yesterday after a ten minute, fifty-dollar shopping spree at the Salvation Army. Nevertheless, except for the mess on the coffee table and all the furnishings being so shoddy, the place was actually clean. I knew without being told it had to be Theresa, not her mother, who kept it that way.      

Hearing the muffled growl of a flushing toilet from behind a door somewhere off the kitchen, Theresa and I just looked at each other. She asked me to sit on the sofa. Before I did, I whispered to her that this wasn't going to be any big deal, to relax. 

Still, she looked so grave in the dim light, like a war-weary soldier preparing once again to do battle. Without saying anything, she emptied the ashtray for me then came back and took the wine glasses into the kitchen.

Tapping a long ash off my cigarette, I said sure, when she asked from the kitchen if I wanted a Coke. I heard her open the refrigerator and then her mother's cough as she stepped from the bathroom into the kitchen.

"Where the hell you been?" her rough voice demanded to know, her speech loud, deceitful, wobbly from drink.

The music on the stereo ended. The sax quit its weary moaning. There were two clicks as the music machine shut itself off. The place became dead quiet. Then I heard Theresa whisper a desperate plea, "Shhh, please, Mom. Dean's in the living room … I don't want to fight now."

"Who the hell is Dean?" Mrs. Wayman asked in a mildly interested tone. The fridge opened again and I heard a
whooshhh
as she pulled the tab from a can of beer. "Shhhit, Goddamned beer all over my hand."

"Here's the dishtowel, Mom, wipe it off."

"Who's … who's this Dave character?    

"Dean, Mom … Dean Cassidy.  He's the boy I told you about."

"Oh yeah, I think I remember now. Well, let's get a look at him, see what you got."

"Please, Mom. He's very special to me."

A moment later they appeared side by side in the archway. From where I sat in the dim living room, the bright light from the kitchen behind them, they looked like cloned silhouettes. About the same height, Theresa maybe a wee bit shorter. Both of them slim with good curves in the same places. But Mrs. Wayman was thinner, too thin, bordering on skinny. Nevertheless, at a distant glance, you'd swear they were sisters.