Site Presented By
Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Curtis Sittenfeld, Rebecca Traister, Geraldine Sealey, Andrew Leonard and others reflect on their lost loves.
Feb 14, 2005 | Regrets, we've had a few.
They're not all do-over regrets, not all rending-of-clothes, gnashing-of-teeth regrets -- though some may be. Often our pains over lost loves are the kind that hit us gently when we see a face that looks familiar, or pass a restaurant where we once enjoyed a good meal, or a bar where we caught the eye of a person who has since disappeared from our lives. They come up when we recall a decision we once made -- maybe in our teenage years, maybe six months ago -- that caused someone we loved, lustily, longingly or lightly, to drift or slam their way away. When we wonder where a person is, and whether they think about us, and how it is that we don't know the answer to that because we used to know everything that person was thinking.
Sometimes we let good people go out of our lives. Often, it's because we don't see the good until it's too late and they're long gone. Just as often, perhaps, it's because we do see the good, and it's just not the right time to have it in our lives. And then there are the poisonous or frustrating people we allow to linger too long, the relationships that we draw out because they pain us and the pain feels good, and then when they're gone there's a gaping absence where all that pain used to be. There are those we're not brave enough to kiss, and those we're not brave enough to hear tell us that they love us, and then there are those who run from our bravery -- from our valentines and protestations of eternal devotion.
And so we let those souls who have brought us happiness, companionship, good sex, or maybe just the promise of any of those, spin off into the world. We cut them loose, consciously or unconsciously. And then, later, we think, "Maybe I really let that one get away."
And so for Valentine's Day we took some time to think about lost loves.
Lost but not lost
She lives in Portland now, maybe Eugene. Or someplace else, I don't know. When I Google her, the trail has gone cold: a photograph she took five years ago, some software company where she used to work, bulletin boards for Dickens fans and would-be female mystery writers. That might mean something or nothing. Maybe she's married now, and has kids. (Like me.) Maybe toys sleep on their sides in the living room all night, and she lives in a wooden house on a bluff where she can't quite see the ocean from the big picture window, but she can sit there in the morning drinking coffee and watching the fog roll around the big cypress trees. I can promise you one thing: Sometimes when she's sitting there with that fat Italian coffee mug, she hits a little patch of stillness and there I am. Uninvited and unexpected, maybe unwanted. But still.
Here's how it happened with Samantha, or at any rate here's the story that I've taught myself, to explain whatever really happened. Everybody I knew used to go to this one nightclub on Haight Street every Monday night. If you were young and white and the right kind of bored, and you lived in San Francisco when I did -- in the middle of the '80s, the really bad plague years -- you know the one I'm talking about. It was a cavernous place full of curtains and staircases and murky recesses. The rest of the week it was a gay disco, and I suppose the idea that men with bad mustaches and German Army undershirts had recently been humping in the shadows was part of its sleazy appeal to the rest of us, the suburban refugees who thought we had built a little island society where we didn't have to care about the Reaganites, the pious liberals, our parents, our overachieving siblings at Georgetown or Yale.
We did care about bands, of course, and while nobody had yet used the expression "alt-rock" in Time magazine, that's what the Monday-night scene was on Haight Street. Alt-rock in embryo. So on this particular Monday the Jesus and Mary Chain were playing, and as usual they sounded like somebody had the record player and the vacuum cleaner on at the same time. I came up a staircase and around a curtain -- I was going for a drink, or wishing that my friend who usually had drugs wasn't trying to get clean this week, whatever -- and there was Samantha.
I hadn't seen her for four or five years. We'd had big crushes on each other in high school, as we later admitted, but had been too geeky to do anything about it. She was tall and blond, yeah, but blond has never meant anything to me, by itself. (I loved her just as much with chestnut hair, and during the brief black-with-white-streaks period.) She was also bony, with big eyes and big teeth, she smoked a lot, and she'd been taking complicated prescription medications as long as I'd known her. I seriously believe that one reason we never wound up together was that we saw into each other a little too far. We could see ourselves sinking into long nights of bottomless near-depression, endless hours of drinking jug wine and watching British TV shows on some unvacuumed sofa that smelled of cat.
On that night, though, the mutual alcohol buzz was just right, and the idea that we were cool for being in that place with those people -- sure, that seems a little pathetic now, but it was surprisingly powerful. Coming around that curtain and seeing her turn to look at me -- she was wearing a tight white T-shirt, peg-leg black Levi's and a moth-eaten cashmere cardigan with the sleeves rolled up as far as they could go, and the orangey stage lights were creating a buzzing nimbus around her head -- was the closest I've ever come to actually being inside that movie you make in your head about your own life when you find yourself alone on Friday night.
So that was how it went. We pretty much jumped each other. There was the moment when her arms went around my neck and her face pressed against mine and I could smell the cigarette smoke and faint gingery conditioner in her hair, and all the doubt and shame of my existence lifted and all my nerve endings seemed to wake for the first time. I was drunk on holding a prodigious power over another person, if only for a second or a minute, and drunk on utterly surrendering myself to her power. And as you know perfectly well, from that time with that girl or that guy on that dock or at somebody's summer house or on the beach the night of the fireworks or behind the piece-of-crap trailer where they held history class, there's just no drunk like it.
"Anthony, where have you been all this time?" she yelled in my ear. "How are you? Are you married?" I said no, which wasn't exactly a lie, and that was the first of the times we would say things to each other that weren't exactly lies over the course of the next decade or so. (Pretty much the last thing she said to me, the last time I talked to her, was "Of course I love you," and I'm sure that wasn't exactly a lie either.) We dragged each other into one of those alluring dark corners, and the things we said on the occasions when we came up for air -- well, you know, you've said them yourself: You're beautiful, I've always loved you, always, always, god I've missed you, how could we let this happen, we will never, no never, some drunken angel was watching over us and steered us into each other, like a truck into a lamppost.
Couldn't we have just left it there? That was as good as it ever got for Tony and Samantha; we hadn't hurt anybody yet, not even ourselves. Couldn't she have gone home to her mom's house and me to my freezing fleabag apartment, played Bryan Ferry and Frank Sinatra records until we fell asleep, and realized amid the next afternoon's hangover that it was a perfect love affair the way it was, entire within itself, unrepeatable and unchasable? That might have saved us a lot of drift and coldness and indecision, three-hour phone calls, midnight car rides to nowhere, lies and not-lies told to each other, other people and ourselves.
It's a stupid question, of course. Six or seven years later, during a phone call on a night something really bad had happened, I asked Samantha if she would have married me if I'd asked her to that night in 1985 on Haight Street. She said, "In a second. Oh, in a second. I almost asked you." That made it better, in a way, because that would only have ended in disaster. Everything did anyway. Look at us now, sitting wherever we are thinking about each other, lost but not lost.
-- Anthony Dever (a pseudonym)
