First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

by Brodkey, Harold

  It seemed to me he was saying everything I had always thought and never expressed.

  From that first night, we were friends. I suppose any friendship must have a core of mutual need. I was tired of what I had been. I was full of Midwestern optimism about my ability to change. From that very first night, I fully intended to live my life in line with the doctrine Duncan was expounding. But it wasn’t his ideas that I admired and wanted. What I wanted was his Eastern Shore of Maryland manner, and his honesty, and his faith that what he thought was important. And I wanted to look like him. He was very tall. He had a wan, smooth face, elongated and arrogant. He walked with a slouch and often sat for hours among people without saying a word, sometimes without an expression crossing his handsome countenance. But then he might suddenly begin to talk, especially if there was a discussion going on, and he would talk overexcitedly, gesticulate, occasionally not even making sense, and then later he would be inconsolable because he thought he had made a fool of himself. I thought he was charming at those moments. What did dismay me was the way he had of being rendered speechless by a color, or a pretty woman’s gesture of welcome, or an automobile, or the way a girl’s hair blew. He would stand, quite tense and excited, held by a kind of surprised rapture. When he had these quiet transports, I was embarrassed—for myself, because I was unable to share a friend’s emotion. But as I knew Duncan longer, the beauty that seemed to electrify him touched me, too. Duncan was always showing me shapes in the clouds.

  Everything he said explained me to myself or else put a weapon in my hand, and his bitterness struck me like a surge of sunlight, bringing crisp-ness and definition, drenched as I was in the foggy optimism of my home. I was discarding my traditions as fast as I could, but it was difficult work; I had first to locate the roots and then to get them up. And Duncan’s disillusion—any disillusion, in fact—was infinitely helpful. I did my best to speak as Duncan did, with frequent, entrancing pauses, and with small curlicues of contempt.

  Yet if Duncan felt it was a moment for kindness, his entire soul and bank account, his car, his wardrobe, his time were yours. I used to worry about people taking advantage of him; but although he had a terrible memory for telephone numbers and people’s names, he never forgot how much he spent, where, and with whom.

  Girls fell in love with him often. They seemed to find his mixture of melancholy and arrogance irresistible. At first, Duncan would be overwhelmingly chivalrous to them, light their cigarettes, take them out when they asked him. But sooner or later he would begin to feel cornered; he’d cease lighting cigarettes; he’d stop answering the telephone.

  The number of people we saw that year steadily dwindled as we decided they were doomed to be ordinary or as they disagreed with us; and they were struck from our list of acquaintances. He and I both believed that if we were careful and did the right thing, we could escape turning out as our elders had. “They give you advice,” Duncan pointed out, “and never stop to think of what you think of what they turned out to be.” We thought if you travelled far enough and long enough, you would come to a place where everyone liked the things you liked and talked the way you talked, where everyone knew your value without your having to get undignified and nervous in proving it. In this place that we were looking for, you would never have to boast or to make conversation out of pity for an ugly girl or to feel sorry for your parents. One January night when Duncan and I were walking along the Charles—it was cold and foggy—we swore never to hide the truth from each other, always to admit our faults, to admire each other’s virtues, to become men of stature, true stature, and to go to Europe together that summer for a year, leaving college, no matter what our parents said or did about it. We would take bicycles and be frugal and healthy, and we would deepen our culture and our refinement.

  My mother objected violently when I told her I was going to Europe with Duncan. She said I was wasting my inheritance and going to the bad out of sheer obstinacy, and that it was all Duncan’s bad example. Duncan said that, of course, she was right. I got drunk and told Duncan that my mother could go to hell, and he watched me, as I recall, with eyes glassy with admiration. How could my mother compete with Duncan? All I wanted, that year, was to be like him.

  We sailed from Halifax in June, on the Aquitania, for Southampton. Almost as soon as the green hills around Halifax receded and the ship was in open water, Duncan said to me, “I think you ought to write your mother a good letter. You were quite unpleasant to her over the phone. That’s one of your faults,” he added, and he grimaced to show that he didn’t like to talk this way but that he had to, in accordance with our vow. “You have so little tact. On the other hand, you’re much more dynamic than I am. I wish I were more like you.”

  “But you’re not,” I said, candid at any cost. “You mustn’t worry about it,” I went on quickly, “because I like you very much the way you are now…”

  We were free from college and observation; we were molding each other, protecting each other from being ordinary. Duncan put his hand on my shoulder briefly and smiled, and then we paced each other around the deck of the ship to get our exercise in before dinner. The statured figure had to be physically attractive, too.

  We stayed in England just long enough to see the Tower of London, the National Gallery, and Scott’s, and to decide the food was inedible, and then we took the channel steamer from Newhaven. Standing at the rail, we saw the shores of France rise from the waves, green and promising.

  When we landed in Dieppe, my delight—let me say that my delight rose like a flock of startled birds. Everything I saw or heard—the whole pastel city, the buildings as serene and placid as the green water of the harbor—touched off another flutter of the white wings. At one wharf, a group of fishing boats huddled in a confusion of masts, the hulls green and black and purple, arched like slices of melon. Along the waterfront was a row of buildings, with here and there a gap and a pile of rubble or a portion of a wall. But these were the colors of the buildings: pale green and mauve, light yellow like wispy sunlight, faded pink, gentle bluish gray. And then, perched on a hillside, the immemorial hulk of a castle.

  Duncan’s gaze moved lovingly around the scene. “Every town should have a castle,” he said.

  Our hotel room was old, with a sloping floor and a single, huge brass bed. There were no rugs on the wooden floor and no curtains on the high French windows, which wouldn’t quite close, because of their crooked frames. Outside our window, three streets converged and formed a triangular island, planted with plane trees and patterned beds of yellow flowers. Workmen in gray clothes and thick boots were sitting on stone benches and drinking wine. The fronts of the houses along the street were decorated with heavy lintels and occasionally with stringy caryatids, at once frivolous and orderly. In the distance an elegant spire rose, and the sound of bells floated down to us. We washed our faces and brushed our teeth and changed our clothes, singing the entire time—and then, since we were in France, we set out to find some women.

  First, we walked along the beach and saw the collection of Grand and Univers and Windsor hotels; they were shattered, and workmen scurried in and out of their rubbled interiors carrying bricks. Other workmen were fitting dumpy concrete columns into the balustrade that ran along the street, separating it from the rocky beach; as the workmen finished one section, another crew of workmen, with large pneumatic machines, came along and drilled holes in the columns, chipped the edges, and scarred the fluting. Duncan and I stared, fascinated, and then realized that they were making the balustrade look old. Within a few years, people would forget that the balustrade had been repaired after the war; they would see it ancient-looking and indestructible and a tie to an earlier time.

  Duncan and I picked our way over the upper beach, which was mostly rock, and down to the narrow ridge of sand that bordered the ocean. The beach was almost empty, but a few groups of people sat or lay on blankets. The people seemed strangely solid and fleshy. The only sound was that of the pneumatic machines busily re
storing time.

  The channel was gray and empty of ships; it was rather like a border of sky in a faded tapestry. Duncan said that as soon as we shipped our trunk to Paris we ought to set out on our bicycles to see Mont-Saint-Michel. “It’s quite a small island,” he said. “They’ve been working on it for a long time. It must be quite perfect by now.”

  On our way back to the hotel, we passed many women. Only one girl was pretty, and she was running, with her thin print dress whipping around her muscular figure and her arms pumping, and nothing short of a pistol shot would have stopped her.

  In a moment of self-assertion, I said I had no particular interest in Mont-Saint-Michel and it was out of the way, to boot; I didn’t want Duncan to know I was his follower. To my surprise, he gave in, and the next morning, on our bicycles, we set off for Paris. We each had two knapsacks and a sleeping bag. We rode through Arques-la-Bataille and Neufchatel, through Forges-les-Eaux and Gournay-en-Bray. The countryside was green, and we passed the dried-lavender granite spires of old, weather-beaten churches. Duncan told hideously funny, embarrassing stories about himself as a child. One he told me as we swam in a small pond near the road. I laughed so loud a farmer with a seamed face and huge dusty hands came to see who we were.

  At Pontoise, we sat on a terrace above the Oise and watched the rockets of Bastille Day in the night sky over Paris. The day we entered Paris, we spent hours bicycling through endless suburbs, and then at noon, at last, we burst into the Place de la Concorde, with the fountains playing and the gardens of the Tuileries in bloom. And one morning we wakened in a wheat field, surrounded by pale stalks of spiked wheat, and saw on the horizon, shadowy and dim, the spires of Chartres. And at Beaugency we spent a whole day idling on a sandbar in the Loire with a family of seven girls, all of them blond, all of them charming, all of them in love with Duncan. (“You will write to us, yes?”)

  I don’t know exactly when we each decided that the other wasn’t worthy of this paradise. What I do remember is that it became increasingly difficult to decide which hotel we would stay at, which restaurant we would eat in, which road we would take.

  The moments multiplied when one of us would draw his breath and turn away, confront the scenery and remark, “Well, whatever you want…” Against the sound of strained politeness in the background, I remember the sunset at Blois flooding crimson through the sky, and the long allies at Chambord; in such a manner I remember two swallows skimming low over the Loire, chirruping and beating their bent pointed wings. I remember Duncan’s voice at Chenonceaux—the sky was filled with domed white clouds—saying “I don’t care really…. I suppose we ought…” and his voice quivered with resentment.

  We had decided to see the west of France—mostly it was my idea—because there would be fewer Americans there. But actually I had another reason. So far as I knew, it was barren of difficult places like Chartres. At Chartres, I’d had all the wrong reactions. Who would have known that the thing to do with the cathedral was to go into a patisserie and buy a bag full of chocolate éclairs and cherry tarts and then sit down on the grass plot in front of the entrance and stare at the towers while eating oneself into a chocolate coma? Duncan didn’t like it when I said the cathedral was beautiful; you were supposed to feel these things so deeply you couldn’t express yourself, and wouldn’t even want to express yourself.

  Duncan enjoyed Pernod. It made me sick. Duncan hated talking to people. I talked to everyone. My French vocabulary was better than Duncan’s. His pronunciation was better than mine. I became terribly adept at not irritating Duncan before breakfast. I couldn’t see that he appreciated any of this, or that he responded with any similar awareness. For the fiftieth time, I thought him unfair. The moment came when I could no longer stand the sound of his voice, or his ideas. After travelling with him day and night, without a break, for fifty-three days, I felt my senses suffocating in an awareness of Duncan.

  We rode through the flat Vendéen landscape, with its bright-yellow marsh grasses and wheat and green meadows, its white farmhouses, and its tiny drawbridges over canals and streams—two college boys, sun-tanned and healthy, in T-shirts and shorts, so angry with each other that we rode our bicycles ten or fifteen feet apart. When an infrequent car passed us, I would wonder if Duncan would see it in time, but he always did.

  There was a moist, sticky quality in the air. The villages were far apart, and when we came to one, the houses were shuttered and unfriendly. The French were barricaded in their cool, high-ceilinged rooms, cutting into ripe pears with tiny pearl-handled knives, while we bicycled the hot and dusty streets, only to emerge, on the other side of the gray church and white stucco café back in the flat open country.

  The heat was unbearable. At Luçon, we turned off the main road and headed toward the sea again, to a village on the map called La Tranche, which turned out to be three or four buildings along the highway. Just beyond La Tranche, our road climbed to the top of a ridge, and we saw that the flat, grassy countryside humped into the ridge we were on and then flowed into the Bay of Biscay, with no beach, or wall of rocks. The grass of the meadows, green and glowing, waved in the salt sea breezes and melted into the water. One could see the grass continuing underwater out of sight, probably to the rim of the low tide. Cows squooshed through their pasture; around their hoofs bubbles clung like necklaces. French boys and girls, their bicycles lying in the grass, swam over the submerged meadow. A few yards offshore, fishing boats with blue and yellow painted hulls swung to and fro at their moorings.

  I stopped and called to Duncan, who continued a few yards and then stopped. I walked toward him, wheeling my bicycle. “It’s really lovely, isn’t it—” I began.

  Duncan turned to me, and in a voice shaking with fury he said, “Do you always have to say something? Do you feel it’s like dropping a coin in the box at church?”

  We rode the rest of the day in silence. At sunset, we stopped in La Rochelle, where the old Huguenot fortifications still surround the tiny harbor, and we found a room in a strange old hotel near the railroad station. Our bedroom had two huge brass beds with swollen mattresses, which rustled whenever we moved. The back of the building contained a stable. The smell of horses permeated our room, and there was a vast rose trellis outside our window. The roses were blooming. All night long, we drifted on the ebb and flow of the oddly complementary odors; and every hour or so we could hear a train arriving or departing.

  The next day, we bicycled on to Bordeaux. By midafternoon, we were racing, with neither slowing down or asking to rest. We reached Bordeaux at seven in the evening, and we went at once to a café and ordered a bottle of wine and began to quarrel. Several times, the waiter, a fat, black-browed Basque, came running on his toes, one pink round finger to his lips, and we nodded and said, “Pardon, pardon,” and lowered our voices.

  It seemed that Duncan could not stand the way I whistled when I shaved, the way I talked to waiters, the fact that even when I felt bad I smiled. “Is it something the corn belt does to the disposition?” he asked.

  I told Duncan, at the top of my lungs, that he was childish, an arty son of a bitch, and a snob.

  “You’re ill-bred,” he said. “You’re yelling in a café.”

  He said that he’d always thought of me as an intelligent vulgarian but he’d had no idea how really ill-bred I was.

  “All right,” I said, rising to my feet. “That’s it! That’s it! Let’s fight.”

  Solemnly we walked out of the café. The waiter ran after us and waved his bill in our faces. We had to figure out the bill and pay it; as usual, we were overcharged. I hadn’t realized until that minute how dear Duncan was to me or how much he’d taught me. It also occurred to me that Duncan outweighed me by fifteen pounds.

  We walked along, wheeling our bicycles. “All my friends have turned out to be no good,” Duncan said bitterly, at one point. And then later he said, under his breath, “Once, I wanted to be like you—” I thought he was lying just to make me feel worse.

  W
e came to a deserted street lined with warehouses. Duncan leaned his bicycle against a wall. I threw mine to the pavement. We faced each other and advanced. “I’m so angry that I’m going to try to hit your face,” Duncan said.

  We traded five or six blows, and then our eyes met. Shamefacedly, we backed away, and our hands dropped. Duncan sat down on the curb and pulled out his cigarettes and offered me one.

  “You hurt my feelings,” I said.

  “I meant to.”

  “You meant what you said?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  We agreed that we would have to separate.

  “Where will I meet you in Biarritz?” Duncan asked; we had shipped our clothes there, in a trunk.

  “At the railroad station,” I said.

  “When?”

  I got out my map and tried to figure how long it would take us. “The hell with it,” I said, finally. “It’s too hard to figure out. We’ll bicycle there together.”

  “Oh!” Duncan was disappointed. “Well, whatever you say….”

  We rose from the curb and got our bicycles.

  “Your knapsack is loose,” Duncan said politely.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We were much too depressed to find our way by our Michelins, and Bourdeaux, like Paris, is afflicted with endless suburbs. At one o’clock in the morning, we were still hopelessly lost, and we were worn out with the strain of our emotional predicament. Finally, after giving up hope that we might find an open field to sleep in, we settled in the graveyard of a church, next to a flowering hedge and beneath a small apple tree. We spread our sleeping bags and lay down. In a few moments, we began to itch. I suppose we were lying on an anthill. At any rate, in no time at all our sleeping bags were swarming with insect life. We talked about getting up and moving on, but the thought of bicycling was too much for us both. We lay inert, now and then scratching ourselves, immersed in the odor of the flowers, the silence of the graveyard, the buzz of insects. Above us loomed the church. Out on the street, an occasional truck would lumber by, but they were diesel mostly, and diesels rumble with a pleasant noise.