1985, Texas, and 2004, Washington D.C.

By DL

I look at the picture often, and smile at the utter innocence grinning back at me.

Elaine and I are sitting side by side at a Saturday night dance, the highlight of our 10th high-school reunion. I’m wearing a blue suit and yellow shirt, a silk tie. She’s wearing a blue-and-white dress, brown hair pulled back and tumbling past her shoulders.

I’m smiling broadly, very happy indeed, while she looks down at her swollen stomach, one hand on her belly and the other hand pointing a finger at me.

I thought the teasing gesture was all in fun – she was and is married to another man – but a few months later, I got a letter from her about the reunion in our Texas hometown.

She wrote, “I felt something during the reunion I’d pretty much forgotten in these 10 years – my crush on you! Silly, I guess, to bring it up now, but I figure there is no harm, and hey, what guy wouldn’t want to hear they were the subject of a girl’s affection, right? Not just any girl either! (gotta stroke my ego too!)”

My heart thumped at the erotic power of what she wrote. Elaine the cheerleader, the girl who inspired inchoate yearnings in boys as soon as she hit puberty in elementary school? Elaine the semibad girl, with a crush on me, the four-eyed “most likely to succeed” type?

I pulled out the picture again; my mind raced over delirious images, no jokes now. I saw slow-dancing to “Color My World,” kisses under the mesquite trees, furtive caresses in the high-school hallways. Fantasies ran wild as the unknowing past collided with the informed but impossible now.

In schoolboy crush mode, I carried around the letter and some pictures she sent me, including another pregnant picture, where she’s holding a bumper sticker that says, “Life is a beach.” I imagined us meeting, even after I got married. We once seriously discussed it, when I was to be in Dallas on business, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, we wrote sporadically, then more so as my marriage collapsed. I attended other reunions in our hometown – 20th, 25th, 30th – but Elaine never made it. As technology changed, we switched to e-mail and talked on the phone, usually around our birthdays.

Our repressed naughty sides emerged, and in instant messages, everything unimaginable among the high-school lockers rose to the surface of our dreams. I sent her sex toys for her birthday, purchased at Babeland in New York and delivered via a discreet childhood friend who lives near her.

We even fantasized about alternate paths from the moment the pregnant picture was snapped. Instead of going our separate ways, we pictured a hot Texas night, back to my hotel, a few shots of tequila, hands wandering, Tex-Mex music on the radio, baby lotion for her swollen belly and breasts, all grown up so we know and do in our imaginations what we didn’t know and didn’t do then.

Here is the reality of separate ways converging.

Elaine and I did finally meet, 19 years after the reunion. The gods arranged for us both to be in Washington, D.C., one sweltering July with our families.

I was divorced, dragging my Game Boy-addicted son around Air & Space and other museums. Elaine came up with her son and other relatives, no husband, to play tourist. After much cell phoning and direction giving, we finally met at the National Archives, struggling to find each other amid the crowds.

And then, there we were. Not only had Elaine and I not met in 19 years, I hadn’t even seen a postpartum picture of her; she never sent any because she was embarrassed by a weight gain. But no matter – there she stood, Texas drawl thicker than ever.

The moments were as awkward, as you’d expect, as we tried to talk merely as childhood friends with kids and others around. Stolen moments remained a fantasy.

For now, we remarked on how damn hot Washington was, and wasn’t the Declaration of Independence something to see? We did introductions all around and got group pictures outside the Archives.

In one picture, we have our arms around each other, squinting into the sun. We’re both looking at the camera, easily touching but no hands pointing at stomachs.

In this picture, my smile says, “This time, I know.”

DL is a writer in the New York area. He is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, December 31st, 2007 | Email This Post

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