Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by Ed Tarkington

  Compared to Patricia’s, my own childhood seemed mundane. She had lived all over the world—Venezuela, Austria, France, Singapore, Guam. When Patricia came of schooling age, the Culvers were living in western Africa, where her father was supervising the construction of a mining facility. There was considerable labor unrest in the area, and threats of violence had been made against the company executives. This gave the Culvers the excuse to send Patricia off to England, rather than to one of the nearby English or American schools, which the Culvers considered substandard.

  “Both of my parents are insufferable Anglophiles,” Patricia explained. The peculiar English accent she clung to despite having lived elsewhere most of her life seemed calculated to appeal to her parents’ pretentions.

  Patricia was sent to the Blaine School for Young Women in Cheltenham for the express purpose of gaining admission to Cambridge or Oxford. The trouble was that, unlike in the United States, where most students are free to major in whatever subject they choose upon being admitted to a university’s college of arts and sciences, British applicants must select a major in advance and sit for a series of related subject tests called A levels.

  “My father wanted me to be an engineer, like he was,” Patricia explained. “He thought it was the only worthy subject. But I didn’t care a whit about engineering, then or now. I wanted to study literature. ‘What are you going to do with a degree in literature?’ he said. ‘Teach?’ ”

  I thought Patricia would have made a very good teacher—assuming that she wouldn’t have slept with her students.

  Patricia felt she could have earned perfect scores in history, literature, and French. Instead, at her father’s insistence, she sat for exams in engineering, mathematics, and geology. She managed Bs in math and engineering but earned a dismal C in geology.

  “Geology. I was undone by the earth itself,” Patricia lamented. “Only the Prince of Wales could get into Cambridge with a pair of Bs and a C on A levels. And for my father, the difference between Oxford and, say, the University of Edinburgh is like the difference between Harvard and Harvard on the Hill.”

  Harvard on the Hill was the nickname for the local community college.

  With Oxford and Cambridge out of the question, her mother suggested she throw herself into a bid for the Olympic equestrian team. Hence they’d be able to tell their friends Patricia had reluctantly declined admission to the world’s most elite universities to pursue her true passion.

  She lived like that for most of a decade, long after it became obvious that she had neither the skill nor the quality of horse necessary to make the Olympic team. Her parents never complained—on the contrary. If Patricia was never going to do something worthwhile, Jane Culver argued, supporting her lifestyle on the horse-show circuit was, at least, preferable to seeing her graduate from a second-rate college to become a teacher.

  “That way, Mummy reasoned,” Patricia said, borrowing a phrase from Jane Austen, “I would be thrown ‘in the way of other rich men.’ ”

  But Patricia had no interest in Europe’s most eligible bachelors. Not that she was a stranger to the company of men—or women, for that matter—nor was she shy about sharing details, real or imagined.

  She refused to identify herself as bisexual; instead she characterized her sapphic adventures as a “natural phase.” Temporary lesbianism, according to Patricia, was “an ordinary by-product” of the all-girls boarding environment, as was “buggery,” as she referred to it, in the all-male schools. I’d seen no evidence of similar conditions at Macon Prep—on the contrary, Macon seemed to be as hypermasculine an environment as one could conceive. My classmates bartered issues of Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler the way kids of the Old Man’s generation traded marbles and baseball cards. All anyone ever seemed to talk about was “getting pussy,” though as far as I could tell, I was one of a scant few who had seen or touched a flesh-and-blood vagina.

  Given the staggering ubiquity of every variety of pornography that has overtaken American culture since then, the extent to which Patricia’s erotic fantasies astonished me when I was fifteen seems almost comical now.

  “Do you want to watch me with a woman?” she might ask.

  “Yes,” I’d reply without much hesitation.

  Once, when I was behind her, she reached back and, withdrawing me from the familiar place, guided me into the little aperture above it. “Pretend I’m a boy,” she said; I trembled and swooned.

  Another time, with her legs resting high across my shoulders, she reached up and around and plunged an unwelcome finger into my own little orifice.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What you want me to do,” she said.

  I didn’t agree at all. But I didn’t stop her either.

  It’s difficult to comprehend even now the power Patricia had over me in those weeks when we were making regular trips up to the hayloft. I couldn’t concentrate on anything at school. I spent most of my classes daydreaming about Patricia or napping, exhausted as I was from all the sleep I was losing. I avoided my parents as much as possible. I gave up caring about Leigh. If I thought of Paul, it was to assure myself of how impressed he’d be that I was carrying on an affair with a sexy older woman. Nothing mattered but getting over to the barn, where, after finishing my work, I could follow Patricia into the tack room to make out and arrange a midnight tryst or even do it right then and there, while the horses snorted and stamped on the other side of the wall.

  SEPTEMBER PASSED INTO October, and the week of Charles and Leigh’s wedding was upon us. The house and the stable became overrun with guests and visitors, drawing Patricia into a whirl of cocktail parties, champagne brunches, and group outings. I saw her in the afternoons when I came over to work, but there were too many people coming and going for us to spend any time alone. Afterward I retreated in misery to Paul’s room, from which I could see the swirl of activity around Twin Oaks from the windows, having nothing to distract myself with but piles of neglected homework assignments and the consolation of old love songs on vinyl. Two weeks from Saturday, Patricia would be leaving for Florida with Reggie to prepare for the winter equestrian circuit. What would I do with myself then?

  On Thursday afternoon, Patricia made the rather daring gesture of calling me at my house. My mother was out running errands; the Old Man, as usual, was at the office.

  “They’re all gone,” Patricia said.

  The wedding party was at yet another reception, this time at some lake house just out of town. Patricia had begged off because of the horses.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said.

  Reclined on the blankets up in the hayloft, I studied the part in the center of Patricia’s scalp as she drifted down to perform her delicate ministrations. I closed my eyes and wished that it could go on forever—that life could be a perpetual blow job from Patricia Culver, naked and musky on a bed of hay in the warm glow of early fall.

  To my vexation, Patricia abruptly sat up, cocking her head toward the partially opened hayloft door.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  As soon as I spoke, I could hear it too—the sound of a car drawing closer to the stable.

  “Get dressed,” she said.

  Patricia leaped up and reached for her clothes. I kicked into my jeans, imagining Brad Culver coming for me with his pistol.

  “Rocky,” a voice called. “Are you in here?”

  It was Leigh Bowman, of all people.

  I looked to Patricia. She shook her head.

  “Rocky,” Leigh called again. “I’m coming up.”

  I scrambled to the hatch and descended the ladder, almost falling from the ceiling to the floor right on top of Leigh Bowman, who was preparing to climb up in a russet cocktail dress and black patent heels.

  “Hi,” I said, smoothing my disheveled clothes. “How’s it going?”

  Leigh looked up at the wooden slats of the ceiling and the hatch to the hayloft.

  “I thought you were out at the lake,” I sa
id.

  “I wasn’t feeling well,” she said, still studying the ceiling. “Charles understood.”

  “Oh,” I stammered.

  Her eyes dropped from the hatch back to me.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” she said.

  “On horseback?” I asked.

  “In the car.”

  “I’m not finished with my work,” I said.

  “Yes, you are,” Leigh replied.

  She grasped my elbow and pulled me toward the door.

  “Come on,” she said.

  As we walked out of the barn, I glanced back, wondering what Patricia was thinking as I left with Leigh. When we reached the car, I opened the passenger side door and slipped into the seat with the resignation of a condemned man.

  9

  IN HIGH SCHOOL, Leigh drove a Volkswagen Dasher with a tan interior and a four-speed manual transmission. I remember once seeing her work the stick and level her feet up and down on the clutch and gas pedals while simultaneously lighting a cigarette and balancing a beer between her knees. But the Dasher had been replaced by her father’s old BMW.

  I listened to the quiet hum of the engine as Leigh steered the car along the rolling hills out toward the intersection with the highway that led up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. As she drove, she studied the road with a strained, purse-lipped concentration that suggested she was working up to some sort of big speech. It was all at once comfortingly familiar and unbearably weird.

  When we reached the end of Boone’s Ferry, she began.

  “I have a real weakness, you see, Rocky?” she said. “I have a terrible time letting go of the past. Every time I think of even the slightest, most insignificant mistakes I’ve made, the shame hurts so badly I can hardly bear it. Can you understand that, Rocky?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not going to be that way anymore,” she said. “On Saturday, I’m marrying Charles. After that, I’m going to file the past away and forget it ever happened. So if you’re going to know any of it, you’re going to have to hear it now.”

  She paused for a breath and smoothed her hair behind her ears, keeping one hand on the wheel. In my mind, I tried to replace this staid, proper-looking woman in the cocktail dress and pearls with the old Leigh, sunny and lithe, her hair hanging long and free well below the shoulders of her Mickey Mouse baseball shirt with the navy-blue three-quarter-length sleeves.

  “Paul,” she said with a sigh. “He could have made a fool of so many girls. But he did it to me. And what a fool I was. A stupid little girl. But I loved him. What girl wouldn’t? Daddy could just tell that Paul was going to ruin me. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  I did. Paul hadn’t just done it to Leigh. He did it to the Old Man and me too.

  “Before that day the two of you showed up in Charlottesville,” Leigh said, “I was almost ready to break it off with him. It wasn’t Barton, or any other boy. I can’t deny that getting attention from boys who were so different from Paul got me thinking about what else might be out there, but really I felt like sooner or later Paul was going to be the one to leave me behind. I was just preparing for that.”

  She touched my knee.

  “You were such a precious little boy, Rocky,” she said. “You used to look at Paul like he was floating two feet off the ground. Do you remember that?”

  “I remember,” I said.

  A smile flickered across her face.

  “I knew as soon as I saw you together that something was wrong,” she said. “Your mother would never in a million years have let Paul take you any farther than Pearsall’s Drugstore.”

  By then, Leigh had driven out past the foothills toward the mountains, brilliant with fall color. I stared out the window at the peaks above the glistening James River as I listened to Leigh recount what took place in the days before I last saw my brother.

  Someone in Akron had called the college, and an associate dean was appointed to notify Paul about his mother’s death. When Paul called home, he discovered that the Old Man already knew; in fact, he had already cut a check to pay for the funeral arrangements. When Paul offered to drive over so they could go up to Ohio together, the Old Man told him that he wasn’t going and that Paul shouldn’t feel he had to go either.

  “It seemed horrible and ugly at the time that your father would say something like that,” Leigh said. “But I understand now what he felt like. When it hurts so much to remember that you just want to forget.”

  I thought about Anne and wondered what she was like when she met the Old Man. She must once have been someone worthy of his love.

  Paul didn’t bother to call Leigh, or Rayner, or anyone else. He went to Ohio alone. No one came to the service save for an elderly aunt and a cousin he’d never met. After burying his mother, Paul went to a lonely, forlorn Morrison’s Cafeteria with these people he’d never met before in his life. Paul told Leigh he thought they had only shown up because they figured they’d get a free lunch out of it—which they did: Paul paid the tab at the register.

  I thought of Paul with these two strangers at a corner table in a noisy room filled with the scent of Salisbury steaks drying up under heat lamps next to the little molded Jell-O cups and plastic ramekins filled with chalky chocolate pudding. After they’d eaten, the three of them lit up together. According to Leigh, smoking that cigarette was as close as they came to anything resembling a family moment. I imagined Paul flipping that Zippo of his and holding it out for those two old women to lean over and tip their Pall Malls into the flame.

  When they were finished and had run out of things to say to each other, Paul stood up and hugged both of them because it was less awkward than shaking their hands. After that, he drove straight to Spencerville, stopping only for gas, on his way to me.

  “He was out of his mind, you see?” Leigh said, a tremor edging into her voice. “But I don’t think he wanted to hurt you. I think he thought you needed to be saved.”

  “From what?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I could believe a word she was saying. But I wanted to hear it all. Truth or fiction, I needed a story.

  “From ugliness,” she said. “From your father. From Spencerville.”

  She shook her head and let out a bitter sigh.

  “You have no idea how ready I am to put this town in the rearview mirror and never look back,” she said.

  “You won’t stay away forever,” I said.

  “Watch me,” she said. “You’ll leave too, when you have the chance.”

  “If you hate it so much,” I said, “why’d you come back to begin with?”

  “Rocky,” she said, “the story isn’t over.”

  She reached back between us to her purse, which sat on the floor behind the console. She fumbled for an orange prescription bottle. With a trembling hand, she shook one of the pills into her mouth and swallowed it dry.

  The way Leigh remembered it, we were all going to go out west and start over, like Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson.

  “I told Paul he was too upset and that he needed to calm down and think about what he was doing,” Leigh said. “I told him how sorry I was about his mother but that he needed to take you back home right away.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He said you’d be better off dead.”

  Better off dead. Was that what Paul had in mind, I wondered, when he took me up on that bluff and started plying me with beer and cigarettes?

  “If I’d thought for a second that he would hurt you, I would have come with him, like he asked,” she said. “But I told him that I couldn’t leave, because I had a midterm. Can you believe that?”

  After we left, Leigh went into Maury Hall with her study buddy Barton and sat down to take her test. She tried to answer the questions, but all she could think about was Paul—how alone he must have felt—and me, so young and small and trusting, utterly oblivious to what Paul was going through. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, she walked out, stepping over a confused Barton as she made
her way to the aisle. She went straight to the house and sat on the porch chain-smoking, waiting for the phone to ring.

  In the early morning hours, Paul returned. He told her what he had done and that he was leaving right then; she could either come along or say good-bye to him forever.

  “He was so broken,” she said. “I couldn’t let him leave alone. Besides, I’d never walked out on a test before. In the moment, running away seemed easier than explaining that decision to my father.”

  Within a few hours, they were off, heading west with the rising sun at their backs. Paul had pawned what was left of his mother’s jewelry, so he had enough money to keep them going for a while, drifting from campground to campground.

  Somewhere along the way, they heard about a commune nestled into a little green alpine valley outside Taos, New Mexico, called New Nazareth. The people there weren’t normal hippies. They were Christians—“Jesus freaks,” they called themselves.

  “I thought Paul just wanted to gawk at the Bible thumpers,” Leigh said. “I figured, why not? Paul was going to do what he wanted regardless of what I had to say about it.”

  In New Nazareth, there were no crusty hippies sleeping in tepees or dilapidated dome houses. Maybe forty or fifty people lived there full-time, but on any given day there might be two hundred people or more hanging around. They all looked like hippies, but there was something different about the blissed-out expressions on their faces. It wasn’t just acid and pot, as it turned out. Their trip was something else entirely.

  The New Nazarenes greeted Paul and Leigh with predictable warmth—“brother” and “sister” and so forth—and led them down to a large tin-roofed building with a covered porch at the center of the commune’s grounds. “You’ve got to meet Stephen,” they said. Who was Stephen?

  “He’s the prophet, brother,” they said.

  Almost as soon as they said it, a springy, reedy man with a beard down to his chest and a mass of kinky black curls appeared at the head of the stairs to the meeting hall. While Leigh and the New Nazarenes looked on, the bearded man approached Paul, his mouth parted in a toothy smile. Without saying a word, he put his hands on Paul’s shoulders and pulled him into a tight embrace.