Our First Love

by Anthony Lamarr

  “Yeah, I have something on my mind,” I responded as I walked toward him.

  “Then get it off.” Caleb stepped right up to me.

  I didn’t back down. “I should get it off, shouldn’t I?” I didn’t blink as I stared back into his eyes.

  Caleb didn’t back down either. “I would if I were you.”

  “I read your blog,” I told him.

  “And?” he asked.

  “And she’s mine.”

  “Says who?”

  “I said she’s mine. Now, get rid of the blog.”

  “Make me.”

  I swear I didn’t know I was going to swing, but my fist slammed into Caleb’s jaw before I realized it. Caleb staggered backward and fell on the sofa. As I stood staring in disbelief, Caleb jumped up from the sofa and charged into me, knocking me backward on the floor. The fall knocked the breath out of me, and I landed on my back with him straddling my chest. I tasted the blood gushing from my lips after he jabbed me twice. Finally, I managed to gather my senses. I grabbed my briefcase, which was on the floor beside me.

  “I’ve been waiting to do this for ten years,” Caleb said, then grabbed my collar. He was about to hit me again when the briefcase careened into his head. He fell on the floor beside me, and I hurried to my feet.

  “Get up!” I yelled. “Get up!”

  Caleb scrambled to his feet, and as soon as he stood, I tackled him. We landed on the sofa and the sofa flipped over on top of us.

  That’s when I woke up with my fists balled up so tight that my fingernails were cutting into my palms. It took more than just a few minutes for me to calm down. I read somewhere that dreams are a reflection of our subconscious thoughts, so I decided not to allow myself to dream anymore that night by taping my eyelids open.

  * * *

  “Ouch!”

  That’s what I got for running out of paper tape.

  * * *

  Karen was in the faculty parking lot waiting for me when I arrived on campus this morning. She walked up to the car as I got out and jokingly asked, “Who arched your eyebrows?”

  I closed the door and pressed the lock button on my keychain.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” Karen apologized, then reached for my hand.

  I pretended not to see her extended hand. “I have a meeting with Hubert, so I don’t have time to walk you to your office.”

  She continued holding out her hand. “Nigel, is something wrong?”

  “No. I have this meeting and…”

  “Don’t let me keep you,” she cut in.

  I stepped past her outstretched hand and began my trek to the School of Journalism. I hated lying to Karen, but I’d rather lie and avoid her than let her see me like this. Jealousy was making me crazy. I know Caleb hadn’t really had sex with Karen, but I’d bet my life that in his mind, he’d been with her every day since he wooed her with the tulips.

  Between first and third period, I walked over to the campus parking office and changed my decal back to the School of Journalism’s faculty parking lot. When I returned to my office, I listened to three messages from Karen. Two were left on my cell phone’s voice mail. The other was on the office phone’s answering machine. The messages were all the same. “Call me when you get a chance.” I deleted the messages and turned off my cell phone.

  * * *

  Karen wasn’t waiting for me in the parking lot this afternoon. Her Pathfinder was still parked next to my car, but she was nowhere in sight. I was slightly relieved. As I drove out the parking lot, I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw her. She was standing in the shadow of a maintenance building waiting for me to leave.

  * * *

  I had to choose. So I chose the life I couldn’t live without and cremated the life that made me want to live.

  * * *

  Withdrawal cravings wouldn’t let me sleep. I needed to hear her voice, see and feel her. Make things right again. I conned my fingers into dialing her number on my cell phone, but no matter how much I enticed them with the promise of touching her, I couldn’t persuade them to press the send button.

  During an interview a few years ago, a local author of self-help books told me that it takes approximately twenty-one days to break a habit. So, in twenty-one days, I would have forgotten her. I looked at the clock; it was 4:30. I reminded myself that I could write day one off if I could make it through the first night.

  It finally dawned on me why I fell in love with Karen the moment I saw her at Barney’s burial. Her quintessence gleamed like a celestial flare. She was beautiful. Kind. Alive. And she was complete. There was no longing in her heart, because she owned all of her tomorrows. She was alive. And I saw what my world could be like with her in it.

  * * *

  I was content with our life until the possibility of another life dangled in front of me.

  * * *

  Day five and counting.

  I expected her to call, or show up at my office, or pull in the driveway and knock on my front door. I expected her to do something. Anything. But she didn’t. It’s the eighth day and I hadn’t seen or heard from her. It’s like she said, “to hell with Nigel.” Talk about adding to my insecurity.

  Caleb wasn’t interested in my day anymore. Most of the time, he’s waiting for me to get home so he could quiz me about one of his newfound memories. Today, he questioned me about the weekend when the entire family helped me move into the freshman dorm, Rawlings Hall, at Howard University. It wouldn’t be long before he remembered how we died on the shoal of Flatley Creek three years later.

  * * *

  I kept hearing Barney ask me, “Have you ever really loved someone?” Now, I could answer him truthfully. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to be the man who sullied Karen’s heart, but I had to find a way to stop loving her. I’d convinced myself that I’d done the right thing by protecting my brother and saving our world.

  Day thirteen didn’t count; I backslid. I had not driven the Lumina in four months, but I decided to take it for a spin after dinner. I must have forgotten to dismantle the car’s pre-set programming. On autopilot, the Lumina retraced my voyeuristic passes by Karen’s house. I wanted to stop several times, but the car wasn’t programmed to turn in her driveway and park. Its settings only permitted it to drive by. I had passed by her house at least eight times before I remembered how to manually steer the car. I decided not to beat myself up because of my relapse. I decided to redo this day tomorrow, because I don’t have the resolve to start over.

  * * *

  It helped when I blamed Karen. It wasn’t all her fault. But then again, if she had not come into my life, our world wouldn’t be facing extinction, and I wouldn’t know how unpalatable love can taste.

  * * *

  Day eighteen. Almost there.

  I had to choose. I had to choose. I had to.

  * * *

  Hubert knew without asking. “I’m down the hall if you want to talk about it,” he said during lunch.

  “Talk about what?”

  “The break-up,” he answered.

  “How did you know?”

  “The gray cloud over your head,” he responded.

  * * *

  Twenty-one. I did it. I let her go for twenty-one whole days. That means she should be out of my life.

  The truth was I would have loved her anyway. Even if I had known what I know today—that she would abscise us and send our world spiraling out of orbit—I would have still walked that contorted line, fought in vain to hold on to her, and lived again.

  Loving her did more than change our life. Her love changed everything. Time was no longer an obdurate reminder of our existence. Minutes. Hours. Days. Weeks. Months. Time didn’t exist. So, the tragedy of loving her was not all the conversions she brought to our life. The real heartbreak was that even in the absence of time, there was an ending: a denouement that left us with no tomorrows.

  I didn’t know who I had become, but I
was not the man I was before I met her. On the rare occasion when I was able to summon enough courage to look in the mirror, I barely recognize the anguished reflection staring back. His pain felt like mine. And his tears stung the same. So he and I must be…me.

  The sun leered like a Peeping Tom through my window this morning. My T-shirt and my boxers were saturated with the anesthetizing sweat of a hangover brought on by way too many cocktails of darkness and excavated memories. And I was tired…so tired that it hurts to simply be. But my heart—against my will—beat the same. Seventy-three. Seventy-four. Seventy-five beats per minute. Meaning, I was still here. Still here. Still here.

  CHAPTER 21

  Every spring Nigel and Caleb took turns ushering the hands forward one hour on each of the seven clocks inside their house. They did the same during the fall, except they got to relive the hour they spent waiting to set the clocks’ hands back. Last spring, two hours after midnight on the first Saturday in April, Nigel expunged an unlived hour of their life. Two weeks ago, it was Caleb’s turn. He began with their official timekeeper, the grandfather clock in the living room.

  It was only an hour. Sixty minutes. Three thousand, six hundred repossessed seconds. Hardly enough time to choose and live lives of their own making. But as Caleb circumnavigated the clock’s face aboard the minute hand, erasing the hour between two and three, he asked Nigel, “If you could do anything you wanted to during the hour we’re losing, what would you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Nigel answered. “I never thought about it.”

  “Think about it now.” Caleb turned and watched as his finger steered time into its scheduled orbit. “What would you do with the hour if you were bound only by your imagination?”

  Nigel shrugged his shoulders. “I really don’t know.”

  “Come on, Nigel. Do more than breathe.”

  “I need a minute to think about it.” Nigel walked in the den to change the time on the desk clock. He could have pressed the time button down, then pushed the hour button once, but he deliberately annulled the hour minute by minute. As he watched the red digital numbers slowly morph into the next minute and then the next, he considered Caleb’s question. Nigel really didn’t need to think about his response. He already knew what he would do with the fading hour. He would spend it with Caleb and their mother and father. He would not want their parents to be as they were when they died. He wanted time to have passed for them and given them more years, more stories. They would tell their two sons about their upcoming retirement and reminisce about olden days. They would have no memory of that wintry night fourteen years ago. In this hour, that night never was. He would be the only one present who remembered, because to rid himself of the memory, even in a make-believe moment, could be fatal. He might not be able to return to this life.

  “I would spend the hour making love to Karen,” Caleb announced to get Nigel’s attention.

  Nigel put the clock back on the desk, his attention on Caleb. “You would do what?”

  “I would spend the hour making love to Karen.”

  Nigel walked into the living room and sat on the sofa. “You would spend your so-called lost hour making love to my girlfriend?”

  “Can the attitude, Nigel! We’re speaking hypothetically. What if…”

  “Yeah, but your ‘what if’ is about having sex with my girlfriend. You shouldn’t go around talking about having sex with your brother’s girlfriend. Not even hypothetically.”

  “You’re right,” Caleb said. “My bad. But my advice to you is: if she’s your girlfriend, then you need to act like her boyfriend.” His apology and advice sounded sincere, but the fire in his eyes betrayed him. If Caleb could do anything he wanted to do with the lost hour, he would do exactly what he said: make love to Karen. He’d fantasized about making love to her, but in this hour it would be real. They’d be alone inside his office where they first consummated their love. He would stand in front of his desk and she’d walk up to him. The fire in their eyes would speak for them as they undressed each other. He’d let his fingers explore her body. He would tease every inch of her body, then kiss her navel and savor her desire. He would make love to her like no man has ever made love to her. Like no other man could.

  Caleb tried to hide the mounting bulge in his pants. He fidgeted with a black ceramic ashtray on the stand next to the recliner, then inconspicuously placed the ashtray on his lap. Before Karen came into their lives, he didn’t think about women and sex. He accepted the improbability of finding love in his world years ago. But now, all he thought about was making love to her. He’d been staying hard for so long—three, four times a day—that he’d started wearing briefs under his boxers to conceal his restive lusting.

  “If I could do anything I wanted to,” Nigel said and looked directly at Caleb. “I’d spend the hour here.”

  Nigel’s reverent tone sent chills through Caleb.

  “Here?” Caleb asked.

  “With you, Mom and Dad,” Nigel answered.

  “Here with me, Mom and Dad?”

  For the first time in fourteen years, Nigel could not stop his heart from declaring, “I really miss Mom and Dad, Caleb. Oh God, I miss them!”

  The deluge of tears engulfing him was a measure of Nigel’s inconsolable grief and a proverb about the futility of asking, what if.

  “So tell me, Caleb. Do I get to live my lost hour?”

  “If I had one wish,” Caleb extended an olive branch, “you would.”

  ETERNITY

  Eternity is our lives

  before and after

  each breath.

  CHAPTER 22

  Karen wanted to be the woman Nigel loved. He was not her first love. She had been in love before. But loving Nigel was unlike loving any man before him. She loved him, the flesh and bone man, and not the beguiling passion of captured love. She wanted to be the woman who caressed Nigel. Possessed and protected him. In return, he would make her whole. She had already accomplished most of her career and personal goals. And she was beautiful. Intelligent. Single and independent. The only thing missing from her life—at least the only thing that mattered now—was someone to share it with. She wanted a man who needed her love and nothing else. A man whose pure touch left her yearning for all of him. A man who wanted to give her his all. And her heart had told Nigel was that man.

  Nigel’s scars made him even more attractive. His naïveté made him irresistible. And she got high off of his insatiable desire. The marvel in his eyes when he made love to her was euphoric. She was addicted to the virginal sensation of hearing, seeing, and touching him. She could not get enough of him.

  Karen didn’t stumble blindly into this. She knew Nigel was running from an extant past. That’s why she didn’t try to get too close too fast. She figured he would open the door when he felt it was safe to let her inside. While she waited for him to let her in, she nurtured her overwhelming need to know him with information acquired by other means. The faculty personnel files provided his home phone number, address, and educational background, but it was a fourteen-year-old front-page article in the Richmond Times’ online archives that gave her a real glimpse inside his world. The article provided details about a tragic past that he was still living but longing to forget. The article also told her who Caleb was. Even though the information in the news article was public information, she felt she was invading his and Caleb’s privacy. But, eventually, she convinced herself that she had a right to know about Nigel’s past since she was planning a future with him.

  * * *

  Karen knew who Caleb was when Nigel blurted out his name while she and Nigel were making love in Nigel’s office. Blurting out Caleb’s name and the confused look on Nigel’s face when she thanked him for the tulips made her doubtful about who actually sent them. She tried to ignore the obvious and what it implied, but the truth kept shouting in her ears. Caleb. Caleb. Caleb sent the tulips.

  Nigel had mostly avoided her since that day. She hadn’t seen him in weeks, and he
no longer called or returned her calls. She felt she was losing him, but she knew she had to give him space. And he needed time. So today, she committed to giving him space and time.

  She missed him already.

  * * *

  A black Lumina with a FAMU faculty decal was in the driveway of 207 Circle Drive. Karen had seen this car before. Her Pathfinder veered off the road, but she regained control and pulled into a parking space by the Myers Park tennis courts. She got out and stared across the street at the black Lumina parked next to Nigel’s white Lexus. She remembered seeing the Lumina at the turnpike gas station and parked down the street from her parents’ house in Orlando. She recalled seeing the car pass her house; parked across from the gym; and a few vehicles back on the highway. All these sightings were after Barney’s funeral but before she actually met Nigel. She started to put the pieces into place, but her heart stopped her. Despite her suspicions that their meeting in the faculty parking lot wasn’t pure coincidence, she wasn’t ready to know the details surrounding his pursuit of her, at least not while she was pursuing him.

  * * *

  Karen wished she didn’t miss Nigel so much. If he didn’t occupy every minute of each day, she might not have followed him when she saw him leaving campus. If she had not, then she wouldn’t have had to turn a deaf ear to the alarming thoughts reverberating in her head. She decided to ignore the truth that everything about their relationship, beginning with the way they met in the faculty parking lot. Knowing that he stalked her and plotted to gain her affection was damning but not enough to quell her love for him. Instead, she chose to regard all of it as evidence, adjudging it as proof that she was the woman he loved.