I had to go to work the next morning and when I looked in the mirror to shave, I had bright red hickey marks all around my neck, impossible to cover up. My boss and my fellow workers just laughed when they saw me walk in. By noon with all their joking, I was too distracted to work and asked for the next three days off. My foreman clapped me on the back, and I drove straight home. She’d spent a quiet day in my room, reading a few of my books. Chuck had been instructed to answer any knock on the door, (as he was there all day) and not let John in. But he didn’t come by. I went out and brought back some dinner and wine. We talked and she was still worried about John finding her. So we agreed to drive to Santa Cruz the next morning, where we’d have time to think in a safe place, to make more plans. By now, from the wild night before, I was beginning to hope she was madly in love with me and that my whole life might radically improve for the better.

But that night we had much more restrained, tender love and early the next morning set out. Hiram and Tim were both living in little cottages right near the beach, just a few doors down from one another. We went to the beach that day and sunbathed without much talk and stayed at Tim’s that night, had a take-out Chinese dinner with him and after much talk and some of his friends dropping by later, with several joints passed around, we were shown to a tiny spare bedroom.

Tim was an old college friend, introduced to me in my second year there by Ron D., Barbara’s past love. We’d smoked dope and partied together many times. He took over my studio apartment when I left Berkeley in seventy-six, and was now a high school teacher of history, American history, hating his job and smoking more pot than ever, every afternoon, lighting up a joint the second he came in and closed the door after work. We witnessed this that day and heard his tirade about the agonies of trying to teach students who never cared or listened, between his puffs.

When alone in that small bedroom in the dark, I asked her what she wanted to do. The future was one bright, blank canvass of love for me. I told her I’d take her anywhere and we could start a new life together. I said this in complete sincerity. I was full of dreams. But ‘no’, she replied. She just needed a few days' getaway, which I richly delivered and which she thanked me for with a kiss. But tomorrow she needed me to drive her back to Berkeley. She had plans in her head and this was only a ‘goodbye’ to me.

Laurel asleep. Pixabay.com

My bubble burst that instant. Now I remembered the ‘farewell fuck’ that I’d experienced twice before. Her tepid affections the second night should have clued me in. I felt like a fool, a tool, and a bit resentful about it, deciding I’d be as cold as she was from now on. The single bed was so narrow that we were shoulder to shoulder but I didn’t even think of putting my arm around her. We just lay there beside each other in the dark. I was looking straight up at nothing and thinking how perverse women were, madly in lust one night and frigid the next. Their minds were a mess of bad wiring. But it was all so quick and unexpected a hope and so swiftly nipped in the bud that I concluded I’d be over her soon, forget her crazy behavior, put women out of my mind, and return home to sanity and eighteenth century reading again. With that thought and a long sigh, I fell into a deep sleep within minutes.

But the next day the weather was miraculously beautiful for mid-winter. The sky was a pure blue and the sunshine unaccountably warm for February. It must have heated my blood because instead of driving straight up Highway One along the coast I took a detour on a little winding road that went into the hills of the coastal range, the same road my friends and I explored so often in high school. I remembered it had fantastic vistas, which she, as an artist, was bound to admire, however screwed up the rest of her brain was.

I pulled over near the top and insisted we take a short walk to a place I knew. She was reluctant to get out of the car of course, but I insisted that this spot was so rare and fine and unknown to the rest of mankind, I was going to show her a treasure she would never forget. It was a small, level plot of grass, like a landing cut into the side of the steep hill, clear of trees, where one had a perfect view of the ocean for miles up and down the coast, so beautiful, I’d dropped acid there with my friends over ten years earlier, discovered by chance in our wanderings, and no one knew this place but us.

I could see she was reluctant to see it. She just wanted to get back and move on with her private plans. I pulled her by the hand, and we took the five-minute stroll, and she agreed the place was rare and the view magnificent as she sat down on the grass, wet and green in this short interlude of winter, baked and brown nine months out of the year, as was all of California. This day was even finer, warm, still, without a hint of breeze or sound, the sky not blue but azure, as the atmosphere had a clarity which only happens on such rare days in winter, with no summer haze. The ocean in the distance was turquoise, streaked near the shore with the faintest white dashes, the whitecaps of waves. She was so struck by this beauty after a few minutes of gazing, sitting next to me, she put her arm around me, a wordless thanks.

I insisted we make love one more time, in the soft grass. She reluctantly agreed but I could see her heart wasn’t in it. She just laid back, lifted her long skirt and was silent, staring past me at the sky. It was quickly over and I felt sad. We drove back the next hour not speaking a word. It was a sad end for an affair but her quiet and her looks seemed so remote I didn’t say anything, thinking it might bring out some reproach from her and tarnish the brief love we shared. I dropped her off a few blocks from my place. I can’t even remember the parting. It wasn’t a kiss. It was just a cold ‘good-bye’, or less than that.

This was Thursday afternoon. I went home and read books. Friday, I wrote the brief recap already quoted. Then Saturday morning I have a longer entry, describing my Friday night, and my feelings about my life.

“Sat. 8.30 a.m. Jan. 21. Friday eve: dazed and languished at home till 9 p.m., waiting for a call from Laurel that did not come. Reading Otway. Finished ‘The Orphan’ started ‘Don Carlos’. Only the greatness of the plays distracted me from melancholy. Then Steve called. We visit Jim and do lines in his room. Then Jim C. arrives and joins us. Then we go to a lame journalist party on North side till one. Then to the Plough, talking to Paddy and Cora, then to the bartender’s house till three, a terrible group of drunk, leftist people, a crazy girl and bartender. Then Steve and I repaired his pad and got cranked up and talked about life for five hours”.

The talk was elevated, exampled, made me feel good, assertive, constructive. I did more than 70% of the talking, telling old, enthused Greek tales. Steve is a great, polite listener. This saved me from ruinous thoughts of Laurel. I’ve had too much input too fast. Time will solve the mysteries that will only torment me now. I was reluctant to do speed last night thinking it would only aggravate my frayed emotions. But the opposite occurred, with Steve’s good company. We became better friends. Much to my surprise Steve recited Keats’s sonnet, ‘When I have Fears’, from high school memory” …

This was one of the first nights (the first of many) where we spent time sitting and talking in Jim H.’s warehouse room. Before this we’d just score and split but I have this note: “Warehouse. Jim told a girl that she had ‘Grecian’ eyes. He played ‘Patti Smith’ tapes in that room full of strange, hip, posters and objects, all art”.

The girl was a curly, black-haired, Jewish sprite sitting on Jim’s high, loft bed above us, scribbling pictures with a fury and rarely joining our lively conversations. She was a student at the university. Her name was Beth, but everyone called her ‘Bethadrine’. She would get tweaked, become speechless and be an object for others to stare at, like a statue, to ponder and leave alone.

Before I leave Laurel, I feel compelled to address a question that has long mystified me. What makes a woman a wild and lust-crazed minx the first time you sleep with her, half-enthused the second time and little better than a bored, limp body forever after?

In Dale there was never any change at all, and sex was mutually enjoyed on the tenth or twentieth repetition, often more so, promising an unending future to look forward to, an ‘endless summer’ of mutual gratification. It wasn’t any change in my performance, which was fairly even, except that it was always improved by the elevating enthusiasm of the other party, her libido increasing my own. I attribute this to her broad experience.

In Laurel I believe this sharp decline was driven by the idea in her pretty head that she owed me a debt, for all the kindness I showed her and some poetry I read to her in her over the last year of torment living with Mike, and that one good lay would pay it off. My kindness to her was natural and free, from my good heart, no strings attached, and in part an homage to her beauty, repaid with a smile. So I suppose I was the pure gainer by this fortuitous reward. It was unexpected and unasked for. It certainly added to my self-pride in the conquest of a beauty. I hope the pleasure was mutual, as her screams and moans the first night indicated. I wonder if she considered me a conquest, a far more valuable and lasting gain in self-esteem than the momentary ecstasy. Once the debt was repaid, the matter was closed, the book shut. Only this could explain her lukewarm behavior the next few days. A young women’s mind is incomprehensible, probably even to themselves as they rarely try to express their thoughts.

I had a friend in the electrical union year's later, Ron P. Few people could get along with him because he was moody and sometimes completely lost his temper on someone for no apparent reason. But I was always the type to make friends with oddballs and we worked and shared an out-of-town house together on several occasions. On one job in Sarnia, driving to work one dark winter morning, he dangerously cut off the head safety engineer right at the front gate of the parking lot, causing him to swerve and nearly hit the fence. The safety man, high up in the echelon of our superiors, pulled in, parked right next to him and confronted him in anger, asking, "why the hell did you do that?" Ron calmly replied, "because I felt like it." Ron sat with me at lunch and told me the story. He was mysteriously fired a few days later.

But the remark stuck in my mind. Ron had a sort of feminine mind with all his moodiness and this remark, the more I thought about it, seemed perfect for all occasions. I even imagined using it myself when caught in a corner. I believe a woman's mind works along this line quite a bit. It's a resolution to the most complex questions and inscrutable mysteries of behavior. Remember it well.