The one who got away
I was at a party talking about the “ones who got away” with some folks, and I mentioned that I’d had a weekend with a girl I’d dated and now wasn’t seen but for whom I still had feelings. Then in a different context I mentioned that I keep a blog, and I was asked whether I blogged about this missed connection. I was embarrassed to say I hadn’t, so I’m going to change that.
“Lana” and I met my second year of undergrad, her first year, when I recruited her on recommendation to play cello in the pit band of an opera I was directing for the student opera society that fall. When I opened the door to let her in to the first rehearsal and saw her, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I developed my crush on her through the eight(?)-week rehearsal process, but never successfully made a connection outside of the process of preparing the show itself.
After the last performance we had a party for the cast and crew at my apartment; I convinced her to come, though she was reticent, because the harpsichord player, whom she and I both adored, was going to be there. My mother and my step-father’s sister hosted the party, as they had come for the performances, and my mother kept everyone’s glasses full of wine. Lana was wearing a short black velvet dress.
Towards the late middle of the evening, after my mom and aunt had gone home, Lana was sitting next to me on the couch. I put my arm around her, and she leaned in to me. Then I kissed her. We went back to my bedroom immediately, forgetting everything else, and fucked immediately. When I pulled down her underwear she was so wet it dampened my sheets. In the midst of sex, when she was on top of me, someone accidentally opened my bedroom door, looking for the exit from the apartment, and immediately slammed it shut again. Lana and I clung to one another in fits of laughter.
From that day through the end of the semester we we together. We had sex the next day, and the next. I was terribly anxious that if we didn’t have sex every day it meant that we were growing apart from one another, but I couldn’t communicate this with her. In November we went down to London to see Britten’s War Requiem at the English National Opera and stayed at the house of a friend of my mother’s. We had sex in the basement guest bathroom, and she sucked me off. It was the only time I’ve ever orgasmed from oral sex.
We were fighting more and more by this point. Lana was vaping a Juul at the time, and had been smoking cigarettes too, and when she was on a holiday with the ski club had played a game where she and another person had to hold their arms together with a burning cigarette balanced between them till the loser pulled their arm away first. Lana still has a scar on her forearm from that. I was anxious about her while this was going on and demanded but did not receive constant updates.
I went to visit her during winter break at her parents’ house in Seattle, and I hit it off with her parents (whom I saw for lunch when I was in Seattle last and who sent me a very nice card after my mother died). We had fun with sights and beach and her dog, but tensions were rising. I snatched her vape out of her hand and took it away, and she got mad at me when I asked why I had to tip at the café if the waiters were already making fifteen dollars an hour. Her father brought us to evensong at the Episcopal cathedral (?) in Seattle, which he loved that I loved.
A night soon after we got back from winter break Lana was out with her friends and I was out with mine; I decided to find her using a social media location sharing service (Snapchat map) and drop in on her. Her friends were very angry because, as it turned out, she had just been complaining about how I was suffocating her. Trying to have sex with someone every day becomes a burden and a chore after a while, and I wasn’t able to voice my anxiety about our relationship, which is a synechdoche for our relationship as a whole. Later that night, after she sent me away and my friends encouraged me to leave, she kissed another guy. The next day she told me about it and said we were breaking up.
It broke my heart to pass her dorm on the way to the gym, but I did it often because it felt good to be angry.
In the late spring of that year we got back in touch, I don’t remember who initiated, but she agreed to come over. I kissed her as soon as we arrived and we (hate)fucked once or twice from there. She decided soon that she wanted to continue to be friends, but that we weren’t going to have sex anymore. I agreed that I wanted to continue having her in my life. We exchanged letters and messages through the rest of undergrad, and the last I saw her was at my last birthday party in St Andrews the fall after I graduated, shortly before I moved away from the town for good. A friend of mine remarked that Lana and I had great chemistry.
After that we fell mostly out of touch, with a few sporadic messages around the time my mother died, because I reached out to anyone I knew for support.
Last November I went to London to get away from Chicago and clear my head, and I reached out to everyone I know who lives in London, including Lana. She and I had drinks and dinner the second evening I was there. When she arrived at the pub and saw me her face lit up with joy. We stayed together talking till the last pub closed. We hugged goodbye and held each other tight. I told her I missed her, and she said that she missed me too. We agreed to meet again before I left, and we saw one another for breakfast the morning of my flight out. When she finally got to me at the café from the rain and construction she looked so relieved.
After that time we began exchanging letters again, a practice I missed from the old days. We had agreed that we should have a weekend away, and she suggested Paris. During my week in London I rode the Eurostar (train) over to Paris for the day to have lunch with my dad, and this reminded her that the two cities weren’t very far apart at all. We negotiated our weekend, and she found a place for us to stay, and I went there when I came back from Japan this past May.
I arrived in the afternoon and crashed early, and she arrived late in the evening. We met in the morning. This was on Friday. After breakfast at a local café we went to the newly-reopened Notre Dame de Paris, walked around Île de la Cité, Île Saint-Louis, and Le Marais, and made our way up to Bassin de la Villette. She accompanied me to a comic book store I love in that area to get some issues of Métal Hurlant, which is difficult to find outside of francophone Europe. That evening we walked over the hill of Montmartre to find dinner and some drinks in the 18th arrondissement.
On the way up the hill some girls asked us to take a picture of them, and then offered to take a picture of us. They asked us if we wanted a picture of us kissing, and we broke down in laughter and said we were just friends. The weekend so far we had been holding one another very closely, arms wrapped around, holding hands, caressing. She wasn’t officially dating but had been seeing for several weeks now a guy in London whom she really liked.
After our dinner we sat out on a sidewalk place for a bottle of wine, and I said that I really wanted to kiss her, being honest about my feelings, and she said she didn’t want to, being honest about hers. I rested my head on her shoulder then, and she kissed my forehead, and I looked up at her to say that she was teasing me now, and then we were kissing. We kissed all the way back to the hostel we were staying at, and then on the hostel patio before going to bed. I could spend a long time describing each of the kisses as we walked back over the hill around Sacre-Cœur and down to the hostel, in the stair case up to the patio, on the patio seating. I couldn’t get enough of her, and it seemed reciprocated.
The next morning we did not kiss. She said she had been very drunk the previous night, as had I. She did not make any causal connection between that fact and the kissing. After breakfast in a café we walked some around the neighborhood we were staying in, had some more coffee, and continued to sit very close together. We went up to the flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt, then had lunch at La Recyclerie, where we visited the happy chickens. Lana loves chickens.
After we went down to the former Royal Gardens, then got random nibbles and sat in a picnic at a small park nearby. Then we walked among the first arrondissement, quickly giving up in face of the crowds and returning to the Bassin for more waterside cuddling. That whole day we’d been talking, among other things, about the nature of our relationship. She asked me, in the first, whether I still fantasized about getting back together. The answer is, of course, yes, but I realize there isn’t a realistic trajectory where that is going to happen. Mainly because she doesn’t want to. But I told her I cherish in my heart the idea where maybe she moves back to Seattle to be near her parents, and I go to UW for a doctorate, and we see one another more often…. She said she didn’t want to lead me on, which she wasn’t, because she was being honest.
On the metro ride up to the bassin I stood next to her without cuddling and awkwardly placed my arm to support myself without touching her. I said I was nervous about touching her for the same reason she didn’t want to lead me on, by which I meant that I didn’t want to lead myself on. She said she understood but that I should still feel comfortable holding on to her. I did. We sat by the bassin and talked more, about our futures, our feelings, and I told her directly that she is a worrier, which she is. About her future, about what might go wrong, about getting older, about not finding a man quickly enough, about whether she’s going to be able to have kids. She’d never thought of herself as a worrier, but she is. I have a dozen letters of hers from six years to prove it.
That evening we went to la gare le gore, a night club in a reclaimed station on the peripheral train line. I asked her if I could dance with her, and she said yes but that I couldn’t “grind up” on her. I rested my head on her shoulder from behind but didn’t otherwise touch her body, and she jumped forward and snapped at me, “what did I just say?” I danced next to her the rest of the evening, pointedly ignoring her until we agreed it was time to go. As we were getting ready to leave she kissed my exposed upper shoulder at the based of my neck from behind me, and I stepped away from her and dragged her out of the club.
As we were waiting for the taxi I didn’t exactly berate her, but I did say forcefully with no elevation in the volume or pitch of my voice that I was not going to be played with, and that I had made a great deal of effort to come here and be with her, effort that I didn’t have to make and would more than happily make again in the future, but that she was going to have to decide one way or another, but that I wasn’t going to put up with being toyed with like this. She apologized, because I was right, and I said I had already forgiven her and that there was nothing more to be sorry for. I just needed to tell her what I told her.
We parted the next day on warm terms, agreeing to plan another such trip for the future. It hasn’t worked out yet, but it’s not been that long yet. After four years of separation, I can be patient till I see her again, because I know there will be another time, and I know that our relationship is a sturdy thing that I can handle confidently and firmly. We’re going to stay in one another’s lives, as we agreed years ago (and I’ve got the letter to show it), but we also agreed, in the afternoon when it was cooling down and we were huddling for warmth on a picnic table bench next to the Bassin, it’s best for us to have sex with other people and report back to one another about it, as opposed to having sex with one another. Not that the sex wouldn’t be great; the problem is what would happen after. And I’ve already had sex with her, that’s where this all started, so I don’t wonder about what it would be like, because I know. She’s right, of course, that this is the stable configuration. The only difference is that she draws the line such that kissing is out of the question, whereas I draw it so that kissing is perfectly allowed. Because she really is a great kisser, and our bodies feel perfect pressed up against one another.
