Richard Sharon - Diary of a Lover

Susan ate her lunch, smoked a cigarette, and lifted her eyes to glance across the table at me from time to time. She never acknowledged that she knew me, except casually as one of her students.

"Say, Dick, what's this I hear about you and Mrs. Wiggins?" Hugh asked. "One of my students that's in the family-living class with you came in and told me this wild story. I laughed for an hour."

Family living was a course required for senior students. It was part of the "new" education, and concentrated on the birds and bees in general and simplistic terms for those dummies who* by some mischance had not yet learned. The emphasis was on successful marriage, money management, and interpersonal relationships between men and women, or "boys and girls" as they were called. Mrs. Wiggins was another venerable paragon of the faculty. She was almost at retirement age and carried about her the stiff demeanor of an old-school authoritarian, her back straight as a flagpole, her hair white and frizzy, and her complexion pale, with fine, blue veins prominent all over her face. I always had the feeling that if I even mentioned the word sex to her she would melt into a puddle on the floor out of embarrassment.

"Well," I said, "you all know Mrs. Wiggins, I mean, what a fine lady she is, and all that."

Everybody grinned but Susan.

"Well, this morning we were talking about premarital intercourse, or 'the evils of experience prior to marriage,' as Mrs. Wiggins put it, and she and I were having a running argument. I said that virginity wasn't the issue anymore, that when a relationship started between two people it was new, from scratch, and that what either of them had done in the past wasn't important, it was only their present, their 'now' that mattered. She said that a girl had to be a virgin or she simply couldn't live with herself, and that her husband would never respect her if she had 'prior experience' or 'gave in' before the wedding ceremony. She asked me how I would feel on my wedding night if I found out my wife wasn't 'pure' as she called it.

"And then it happened. It wasn't what I meant to say; it just came out wrong, because I never would hurt the old girl's feelings, but what I said was, 'I don't think I'd feel bad if my wife told me she wasn't a virgin. How did your husband feel when you told him?' "

The teachers broke into a roar of laughter, except Susan, who choked on her coffee but managed to keep a straight face.

"I didn't even realize what I'd said till I saw her turn bright purple. She began to cry and stomped out of the room when the class started to laugh, and I had to run out into the hall after her and apologize. I told her I hadn't meant to say that, that what I'd really meant was, would her husband have loved her any less if she hadn't been a virgin? Anyway, I finally got her calmed down, but she wouldn't return to the room for the rest of the period. There I was, standing out in the hall, patting her back and telling her what a nice lady she was, and of course I knew she was pure when she got married, and all the rest of it, and I kept thinking, what the hell am I doing here? This is absurd."

Ken put his arm around my shoulder. "Well, I hope she forgave you good, because once you get on her list you'll have a hell of a time getting off."

They all were still laughing but Susan, who kept dabbing at her lips with a napkin, though she had finished her lunch some time before and was only drinking coffee.

Driving home that afternoon, Susan said, "I didn't expect to see you in the TLR."

"I told you I'm a privileged character."

She laughed. "I believe you. That was some story about Mrs. Wiggins."

I glanced over at her. "It was all you could do to keep from breaking up. You even choked on your coffee when I got to the punch line, but you didn't laugh."

She remained silent.

"Why are you so different around the other teachers?" I asked. "If I told you that story now, you'd laugh your ass, I mean you'd laugh yourself silly."

"I have my reasons," was all she said, then added, "and they're none of your business."

"I thought I was your friend."

"Nobody is my friend. You're just a kid in one of my classes who drives me to and from school," she said quietly, turning her head away.

I pulled over to the side of the street and parked. Susan was staring stiffly straight ahead. I put my finger under her chin and turned her head to face me. Her skin was so soft there that I almost leaned over and kissed her. I had the feeling that I could have, but I didn't. I just looked through those stupid glasses of hers and into her eyes. She looked sad, a lovely face looking sad and compassionate and her eyes were a little wet.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean that."

"Didn't you?" I asked.

I threw the car into gear and drove her home in silence.

It wasn't so much what she had said; it was just the idea of Susan pulling rank, reminding me that she was the general and I was just one of the -troops who had become too presumptuous and familiar, stepping over that invisible line between professional acquaintance and friendship. Now, she had seen to it with one simple sentence that I was put back into my proper place, Leroy driving Our Miss Brooks to school.

The way we looked at each other, however briefly, the electricity that had grown to spring from each of us to the other, told me that she was full of shit. Susan, I thought, was scared, and still I knew that" there was something not right. Sometimes I felt so close to finding what it was, but it always seemed to slip past me, elusive and subtle.

It was warm and balmy, so I went home and changed to old Levi's with the legs cut off at mid-calf, grabbed a windbreaker, and headed for the beach. I parked by the windmill at the end of Golden Gate Park and walked across Great Highway past the seawall to the beach.

The surf slid in slowly, smoothly, caressing coarse, granular sand, wet from the previous surf. The water was a rare deep blue and the air so clear that I could see the small Coast Guard lightship parked at the three-mile limit, and the Farallone Islands a few miles beyond, inhabited only by birds. I walked in the wet sand for about a mile, feeling my toes squish in and make little puddles, the windbreaker slung over my shoulder.

When I returned there were four people leaning against the seawall, watching the sky and water: a couple, an old man, and a young girl listening to classical music on a portable radio. I walked slowly over to the seawall and stood a few feet from her, facing the surf while watching her from the corner of my eye. She was beautiful, long, black hair flowing free to the small of her back, tight Levi pants cut off like mine and showing slim, slightly muscular legs and a small, firm ass. She was wearing a loose, white T-shirt which revealed tanned arms, and breasts which were neither large nor small, but in perfect proportion to the rest of her body. Like me, she was barefoot, and seemed to be a few inches shorter although it was hard to tell because she was leaning over the top of the seawall, with her chin cupped in her hands, delicate fingers making a lovely spread pattern up the side of her face. Her radio played a Beethoven piano sonata, but I can't remember which one.

I edged a little closer but, lost in thought, she didn't notice me.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" It was just a statement to get her attention, not a real question.

"What?"

She turned to face me and suddenly the green of her eyes seemed to bore into my soul and explode, shattering my consciousness to a thousand pieces and leaving me speechless with shock.

"Oh my God! What are you doing here?" Susan gasped, her expression filled with a mixture of fear and surprise which couldn't have been any less than mine.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, my mind reeling. I felt as if all my senses had failed me. It-was beauty and the beast, and all I had ever seen was the beast. How could I have been so stupid as to not see through it?