I need a shave, he thought.
She didn’t like the fact that I needed a shave; she said it rather petulantly, as though how dared I even attempt to pick her up when I needed a shave? But of course I wasn’t trying to pick her up; she simply reminded me of Doris. How had I ever mistaken her for Doris in the first place? Doris has brown eyes. Had. And Doris was seventeen, I can remember, certainly I can remember. So how could she possibly have been Doris, when Doris is probably as old as I am now? Doris is probably fat and sluggish and stupid — who cares about Doris? Anyway, Doris was fourteen, not seventeen.
Wait, he thought.
He seemed terribly confused all at once. His pace slackened, and for a moment he did not know where he was. He looked around him to get his bearings. Yes, this was Park Avenue; that was the old New York Central Building far down at its end, blocking the avenue, and rising above it like a majestic finger, the new Pan American Building. Yes, this was Park Avenue. How the hell could Doris have been fourteen? And who cares?
I do, he thought fiercely. I care. I did care. I cared very deeply, and that matters to me. It is important to me that I know I cared about someone and something, that... that
No, wait, he thought, please. It isn’t all gone, it really isn’t, it hasn’t all been for nothing. God why did she have to
Wait.
Please.
Wait.
I
can remember.
If you will only grant me, please, a little
time.
Please.
I desperately need a little time, only to organize my thoughts, only to prepare myself, you see, that’s all, simply to prepare myself for a life I
Grant me this, please.
“I know who Doris is,” he said aloud, fiercely. A man walking past turned to look at him, and then hurried by, glancing back once and not again. Buddwing shook his head to clear it.
She was fourteen when I met her.
That is how she can be both fourteen and seventeen. That is logical and clear, and not at all mysterious.
He moved away from the side of the building.
She was fourteen when I met her, he repeated to himself; I can remember exactly what she was wearing. She had a plaid coat, the dominant color of which was a very pale shade of lavender, and she was wearing saddle shoes that were very dirty. She looked very dirty all over, as a matter of fact, though she certainly was not; it was simply that her black hair was very wiry and always looked uncombed and also this was a time when girls were wearing very sloppy sweaters. So the effect was one of total slovenliness, though she wasn’t really dirty. She was a very clean girl. She told me that later, the time, well, that was later, the time she called me a sailor. You see, I do remember, there is nothing here I have forgotten. I have almost total recall, I can remember it all, even the buttons on the very pale lavender coat, which were rather large cloth-covered buttons, the cloth echoing the strongest color in the plaid, which was a thin square of deeper purple.
And we were going out to Coney Island; it was toward the end of the season. That’s why she was wearing the plaid coat in the morning, but she took it off later in the day, and then was wearing it again at night when we made the long ride back in strange Brooklyn subway cars until finally we transferred to the White Plains Road line, and by that time she was asleep. I wasn’t supposed to be with her — that is, she wasn’t my girl, she wasn’t even my date. The entire thing was rather confused, because we were still kids, you see. I was only fifteen, a year older than Doris, and dating was something still a little beyond our reach. This was a gang sort of thing, with my cousin Mandy.
Yes, Mandy. Why yes, Mandy.
Isn’t it odd that I can remember Mandy when I haven’t seen her... why, it must be... it must be fifteen years, twenty years? But I can remember her very clearly now with her hatchet face and her thick body and her piano legs. And of course it was Mandy, who was always running around in her stupid cheerleader sweater and leading everyone as though she were standing in a stadium somepla
I played football.
No.
But I remember something about a stadium.
I must have played.
But... it was Mandy who organized the trip to Coney Island, and I spent most of the day watching Doris, and that was the beginning of it. She didn’t seem very much interested in me. I bought her two hot dogs, but she kept walking alongside the thin fellow with the very long hair and the duck’s-ass haircut, I hated that creep. He was older. He was seventeen. I think my cousin Mandy had her eye on him. But so did Doris, and I spent thirty cents for hot dogs, a lot of good that did. She fell asleep on the way home. I asked if I could walk her to her house, but she’d already made plans with that thin lanky creep.
I must have played football.
Because I remember a plaid coat and a stadium.
If it wasn’t Doris in the plaid coat, then who was it?
Look, I’m doing very well, I really am. I remember this all very well, oh, a few odds and ends left out, I don’t... I don’t know what she called me; that seems to be the difficult part, remembering just who I was at that time, just who this boy who fell in love with Doris was or... or... I can’t remember the house I lived in or what my mother and father looked like, but I do remember her, I do remember all the heady moments of that first long love, the bicycles on the path that day... well, that, yes, that first time.
We learned each other, I suppose. We learned the mysteries through each other, the mysteries of touch. I never drew her picture the way Beethoven did with his girl, I never used that as an excuse, but we spent days in the woods together, long days when we would take the bicycles at nine o’clock in the morning, carrying picnic lunches, and spend the morning and most of the afternoon in the woods near Tibbett’s Brook. And we learned, we explored, we touched, we felt. She was my girl, you see, but more than that, she was everything female, the pulsing softness of her would sometimes leave me stunned with wonder. I can remember the first time I touched her breast, the breast of a girl, any girl — I can remember that so clearly, the pure silent shock of it. I can remember the first time she opened her blouse and showed herself to me, I can remember staring at her, and then touching her in new wonder, seeing what my hands had known for months, her eyes averted shyly, I can remember. I can remember her with enormous tenderness, I can remember almost all of the love I felt for her, the odd bright quickening of my heart whenever she came into view with that silly plaid coat and that slightly embarrassed look on her face as though her own emotions were overwhelming and somehow shameful.