An Education in Love

Marty had a goatee and high, intellectual cheekbones that gave him a boyish, vulnerable air, even as he was dissecting the academic endeavors of his classmates. Leonora knew everything about him. Leonora was the one that brought me in, got me acquainted. She told me how she used to track him between classes, she memorized his gym locker number and studied his college friends. She wasn't a stalker. It was his interest that had stimulated her own. At poetry reads, he was always in the first row, undressing her with his eyes. Leonara simply wondered if he was a sociopath; most of her boyfriends turned out to be in the long run, and she was heading this one off at the pass.

Eventually, they became friends. Marty made his move, Leonora rebuffed him, eviscerating him and his buddies in a few curt words. Coming from the perfectly pink lips of the exotic Leonora, this provided excitement rather than resentment. By the time I was introduced, Leonora was a fixture at their campus version of an Algonquin Round Table.

Their circle of queer, brainy acquaintances included Seymour, a deathly pale physics undergrad from Tampa; Georgette, a theater major from West Linn with high strung tendencies and linguistic acumen, and Tony. He was the joker of the group, underachiever and clown. Tony had melting brown eyes but a slightly stocky figure. Hair usually messy, but no one really noticed what he looked like, such was the appeal of his personality. I should have become the poet, but I don't know quite what purpose my addition to the circle served. I guess I had wits enough, and just enough genuine cynicism that I maintained my position on a day to day basis.

So these were the players, I just wanted to set them out. I had a thing for Tony but ended up with Leonora after a Nietzsche party and too many Fuzzy Navels . She smoked like she made love; in short, fragrant bursts that seemed to leave no tell-tale sign. I remember studying her knee-high wool socks in contrast to the delicate, silk undergarments she wore, and wondering where this woman came from, exactly. "Are those real cigarettes? What's the tar ratio?" I tried to geek her into abandoning me, but I guess I was the solution to all her boy problems. "I roll them myself. What you smell is Lavender. Intoxicating, no?"

I rolled over and opened a bag of Frito's. Leonora disappeared, she hated watching people eat, so I was left alone with my vague discontent over this latest experimentation into feeling. I wanted Tony. Didn't I? There wasn't real regret, though. I didn't feel like I'd been made love to by a woman. That should shake your foundations, that should freak you out from a labeling perspective at least: Allie, the bisexual. Allie swings both ways. Nope, none of it. My mind didn't seem to be buying the gravity of the situation. As usual, I felt very little outside a curious objectivity for my involvement in the acts that had transpired. I wasn't very drunk, either. Still, I called Leonora and left a message asking her to explain what had happened once I was sober enough. Call it a fall-back plan.

We repeated the process three more times in the course of the semester, but our non-relationship screeched to a halt when I suggested that we invite Tony to partake in our fantasy voyage. Leonora literally washed her hands of me then, pouring dish soap onto her pale, slender knuckles and scrubbing with a toothbrush. I wanted a photograph so bad. Photography has become my imaginary hobby; I don't own a camera, and haven't actually taken any pictures but I keep seeing pictures that I really want to take. I have a theory now, that a pictorial representation of my more lurid experiences might possibly result in an emotional connection to physical reality. For nearly four years I haven't been able to feel except in the most disassociated ways. This has made me intellectually curious about the human experience. I tried to explain this to Leonora on the third knuckle, second hand, but she just wheeled around and spat, "You're not even a sociopath. You're a socio-prat." We did not delve into the gender ramifications of that summation because she was headed out, and I lacked enough genuine confusion regarding our involvement, anyway.

I did put on lipstick and resuscitate my campaign to win Tony. It was disappointingly easy. We went out a couple times, once to a bar, twice to the movies, and he hit on me outside my door just like he was supposed to on the third date. I made him take me back to his place. I don't know why, I had just been so sure this was what I wanted, and so I tried to give it a chance, feeling the man at his source. From the disarray of his bed, I asked him if he had the same disassociation from his actual life that I felt. He was so incredible around people, so easy, so pleasing. "Do you ever feel like you're watching yourself from the backseat, saying all the right things, cheering yourself on?" I don't know which answer I was hoping for, a 'Yes' or a 'No'. In response, he startled me by leaping up and performing Jaque's monologue from 'As You Like It'.

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages...."

"Hello Georgette" I muttered and proceeded to pout under the frayed and fading polyester quiltlets he had stacked on his bed, sans sheets. The monologue was really pretty good, but I was needing connection, not a n introduction to new art mutations, so maybe courtesy took a hit that morning.

We didn't do it again, but we talked a lot. I think Tony is probably gay, and found my fling with Leonora admirable in comparison to his suppressed desires. But I've had a lot of theories lately, none of them mean anything. Martin figured out I was a techno-whiz and since then, our conversations have gotten more and more weighty. I can't sustain that; I'm a spot intellectual, only. I can apply my brains to most anything and bear impressive results, but only for a short duration. There is a definite lack of stamina, so I turn playful after awhile, and this seems to disappoint the truly brainy sort, who bask in a heated exchange of ideas. When Marty got going the last time, I reached out deliberately and overturned his milkshake. I swear to god, he sat there a full ten minutes waiting for me to detail the act into a theorem of some sort. He thought the drippings of milkshake were a model, a visual aide, and trailing my fingers in the muck just whet his appetite for the next big breakthrough. I didn't laugh either; the slow plop, plop, plop of ice-cream onto his khaki trousers had me mesmerized. I thought for a second I was going to feel something. Cold on fingers...yes, it was coming from deep, deep inside....

"Quantum foam?" Marty prompted helpfully. My God, he was actually being patient! I hated to leave him hanging, but the strange build-up in my brain took precedence over my companion, and so we continued to sit, both on the verge of an elusive breakthrough-

and then I sneezed.

Marty's sweet, despite all the yadda yadda. He went to all his classes that day with chocolate spattered trousers. I went to art (which I wasn't taking) and painted over someone's still life canvas in green and yellow till the actual class came in an hour later. I left hurriedly. Nothing, nothing. College is a trip.

It was March, March that I fell in love. After burning through all my friends except Georgette (whom I just can't handle) I'd settled down into the simple intellectual experience of relating.Seymour may have been the worst of all. His kisses were cold and analytical, plus he's a vegan. I allowed him to take me to his studio apartment and show me a video tape of a horse giving birth. His hand found my knee, and then we gave each other one of those really honest looks, the kind that says, "I know you, you know me, this isn't about to happen." I wish Marty would at least teach him about foreplay, that tape would scare off Norman Bates.

So it wasn't Seymour, and it wasn't Leonora. Tony had become a best friend, but I felt like a fish in a bowl, swimming in circles, looking for connection. I'd been changing my majors around, and landed on Sociology. His name was Jack Sander, he was the professor of 'Society and Identity', an upstart from Yale, 3rd year on campus. Much too old for me, or so I believed. I was conditioned to automatically discount anyone 40+ at first view as too old. Well, I developed a crush. It was his way of talking, of getting all excited, and his compact, insouciant bottom didn't hurt. I started to daydream, but I was just one in a milling crowd of lost kids, and other girls felt the same way I did. They'd mill about him and call him "Professor" in that sort of nauseating sing-song voice.

I'm going to back-track here, it wasn't just his way of talking, it was his actual voice. Have you ever met someone whom, when they talk, you realize you can see their entire person? I mean, you have the ability to listen to their voice and hear who they were as an 8 year old boy, and also hear who they will be as an 80 year old man. His core came through to me, through a particular pitch and timbre, I could hear it, I could hear all of him. I knew him in an almost unbearably complete way. You've heard the phrase 'Love at first sight', yes? I have not experienced that. For me, physical attraction more often develops after a few viewings, and if I do feel an immediate desire at first glimpse, well, that feeling has nothing whatsoever to do with love. The first day listening to Jack Sander talk, I knew I was hearing something I'd listened for a long, long time.

Jack became my reason for being at school. My friends faded a little as I started experiencing this idea of knowing someone on a new level. The way I was feeling was new also: I felt shy. I reveled in that, I hung around alone at tables in the commons, after regular hours. I started pacing the library in a dreamy state. Sometimes I thought of Tony's monologue and wondered if I was just acting and if the connection was just a product of my searching mind. Eventually, fatefully, I bumped into the good professor.

For a second, I didn't think that he recognized me at all. I had no idea how to impress him, I knew him too well. How do you open a conversation with a stranger when you know that you know them more deeply than anyone, but they don't know that you know them like that? There are too many ways to open up your mouth and sound psychotic.

"Allie, is it? You're in my Social Problem's class."

"Yes."

Nothing more came to mind. I was looking at him, just standing there like a big, dumb lump, and I don't know how she did it, but bless her, the spirit of Jane Austen came to my rescue and I lowered my eyelashes. A hot blush crept over my cheeks. Though the light was dim in the library, he saw it, and Jack Sanders was, impossibly, enchanted. Consider it: this modern day, independent girl with all the wiles of Cosmo at her disposal, and wits enough to challenge Marty the Brain, hooked a man by blushing and waxing demure like a tongue-tied maiden from an historical novel. Isn't love a backwards proposition?

And perilous. I couldn't focus. I lost every shred of the glib, objective collegiate and embarked on the high and low extremes of an emotion junkie. I wasn't alone. Jack sometimes spouted poetry, and I accepted it with the roses, the hugs, the amazement of discovery. Love. I got safe on the other shore of my anti-feelings. Watching him teach: bliss. Seeing him get excited over a topic as we stood in the deli line, I'd stop listening to his words and grin like a dope, just taking in the beauty of this man. My words would slide down my throat and it could seem like standing under a waterfall of emotions. I let them fall over me at first, not sure how to cope with the overwhelming connection of my nerve endings to my heart fibers. Our hours seemed to rush by like winged dreams, but who's complaining? I explained to Jack once how he awakened me, how I was feeling again after such a long time because of him, and with the grace of a wonderfully confidant boy, he took it as his due. We did not discuss or examine the ramifications. He did not try and probe for the deep seated psychological causes of my former lack of feeling, and this saved me feeling silly. I never brought it up again.

I'm in bed with the man, and I'm probing my own meanings. Tonight when he threw back his head and shuddered, I felt a wild rush, like fear and excitement, and the center of my chest felt like you do when you fall from a height on those crazy raise-and-drop-you carnival rides. I just laid still, letting my heart catch up, and feeling his arm curve around me. He took my head in his big, warm hand and snuggled me to his chest, as I listened to Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.

I think it's weird how you can lose yourself and then run into you again. I can't but my finger on the cause, except to admit that I feel safe. Jack makes me feel so safe. That scares me a little. I've begun to divine that nothing's permanent, nothing. That hasn't bothered me before, but now I take in his face, and I know I'm here. Up to this point, I don't know where my heart has been, in correlation to my body, but tonight I'm all here, with him. Is it wrong to want that forever?

Jack bought me a camera for Valentines Day. We're going to figure out how it works together. Right now I'm going to close my eyes and explore him with my hands, give these thoughts a chance to breathe. There's nothing but good in this room. Tonight I'll curl up in an ecstatic nest, knowing we'll explore some of what's left of our shared experience tomorrow.