Chapter 3 #3
“I don’t really know it, to be honest. I thought I did.”
They stared with pasted smiles.
“Sorry,” I added.
“That’s OK,” Gianna said. “It’s really old.”
A pause.
“Well. See ya later.”
Off they went.
?
There were so many incidents like this that my composition book was full of dates and scribbles, a zigzag record of our encounters and reencounters. (My notebook collection was now so huge that I kept the ones from childhood at home, in boxes in the basement. I started anew at college.)
Sometimes I leafed through the pages and was taken aback at how many moments I had repeated with Gianna. I remembered what Yaya had said about love: You’ll think you can make everything perfect. You can’t. I wondered if this was what she meant.
I tried getting to know other girls, Boss.
I had two roommates. One of them, Elliot, was a good--looking guy in the theater program who felt sorry for me and would drag me to parties where he chatted up women, then brought me into the conversation.
I tried to engage with them. I really did.
But within minutes I would start comparing them to Gianna, and they always fell short.
No chemistry. Not as funny. Not as compelling.
It seems silly, I know, dismissing potential romances because they didn’t match a fantasy.
What was I saving myself for? Gianna didn’t even like me that much.
Then, one night during finals week of my freshman year, I was heading up the library steps when I saw Gianna curled on a bench. Her arms were wrapped around her knees, as if she were trying to make herself as small as possible.
“Hey, are you OK?” I said.
She glanced up quickly. Her face was tear--stained.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing.”
“What does nothing look like?”
Even crying, she managed to throw me.
“Can I help?” I asked. “I mean . . . I want to help . . . if there’s something I can . . . you know . . .”
“I’m fine, Alfie.” She sniffed. “Oh, God. This is something I swore I would never do.”
“What’s that?”
“Cry over a guy.”
I figured she meant Mike. But I didn’t want to say his name.
“Yeah. OK. Well, I guess—-”
“He’s graduating,” she blurted out. “So he decided we should break up. Just like that. He said he ‘doesn’t see any future in it.’ Like I’m a stock or something.”
She lifted her shirt collar and wiped tears off her cheek. “How does anyone know what the future is anyhow?”
I resisted the urge to tell her it was easy.
“You should leave me alone, Alfie,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m embarrassed.”
Embarrassed? I wanted to tell her how embarrassed I felt around her constantly. How embarrassed I was that her green eyes, even crying, froze me when they flashed my way. How embarrassed I was that her voice right now, hoarse from crying, sounded so seductive I wanted to lose myself inside it.
I couldn’t verbalize such thoughts. Instead, I said the only thing that would come out of my mouth:
“He’s a fool.”
She tilted her head and squinted, as if not sure what she just heard, and for a moment I thought, You have to undo that, right now, go back, say twice. But before I could, her expression melted into a soft smile, and I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that I felt the earth shift.
“Alfie,” she said, lightly touching my hand, “you’re sweet.”
And that was the start of everything.
?
As I read this over, Boss, I realize how chaste it seems. Young people today think nothing of jumping into bed the first time they meet.
All those movie scenes where the couple bursts through the apartment door and slams against the wall, undressing each other in mad abandon.
I’m sure it happened back in the ’70s, too.
But not to me. Not when I was nineteen, anyhow.
Things went slower. And deep down, I sensed that when it came to Gianna, her affection would need to be earned, deliberately, meritoriously.
Maybe I was just too scared to go faster.
In any case, summer came and we both went home, me to Philadelphia and Gianna to San Francisco, her father’s latest transfer. But we spoke on the phone a few times, and after a month she told me she was coming to visit her roommate, who, lucky for me, lived in New Jersey, just over the bridge.
“Maybe we can hang out?” I said.
“Yeah, that would be cool,” she replied.
The week she arrived, we agreed to meet on a Saturday afternoon and go to the Philadelphia Zoo. I figured that was innocent enough. And zoos seemed to work for us.
I borrowed my father’s Plymouth and picked her up at her roommate’s house.
I can still remember the way she bounded out the front door, in a backless blue denim dress with a white bandanna in her hair, her omnipresent camera around her neck.
She smiled before she even reached the car, as if happiness were her default mode.
“Hey, stranger,” she said, pulling open the door.
“Hey,” I replied.
“Let’s go see some elephants.”
We spent the early afternoon wandering through the exhibits, eating ice cream, and giving the animals names.
Gianna snapped pictures, and I asked questions about cameras, lenses, anything to keep her talking.
I loved the cadence of her voice when she got excited, and her bursts of knowledge, which left me bedeviled.
“Did you know llamas hum when they’re happy?
” “Did you know cheetahs can see three miles away?” She was so full of facts that I adopted a standard response—-“I didn’t know that”—-until I said it so often, she started mimicking me.
“I didn’t know that . . . I didn’t know that,” she said, deepening her voice and crossing her eyes like a broken toy. I laughed.
“You should know more things, Alfie Logan.”
“I know that.”
“Ha ha.”
Of course, one thing I did know that Gianna did not was how many miscues I had erased from her memory.
Times I did something embarrassing or mumbled something out of jealousy.
She once said to me, “Don’t you ever mess up, Alfie?
” and I wanted to answer, You have no idea.
Instead, I hid my flaws, afraid they would cost me her affection.
That would prove to be a mistake, and my first lesson in The Truth About True Love: what we yearn for, deep down, is a heart that will embrace us after we make a fool of ourselves.
?
We stayed at the zoo until just past sunset, when the animals, having had their final feedings, began crawling off to sleep.
“We should go, I guess,” I said.
She looked disappointed.
“But we’re having fun.”
“Yeah, we are.”
“You know what my favorite time of day was in Africa, Alfie?”
“What?”
“Just after sundown, when you started to hear the noises. The insects chirping. The cuckoos and the other birds, the nightjars, the owls. Sometimes you’d hear the zebras barking.”
“Why did you like that?”
“I don’t know. I guess it made me feel less alone.”
“You felt alone in Africa?”
She looked at me as if considering a secret.
“I feel alone most of the time.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
“Even now?” I finally said.
“Well, not now, Alfie,” she said, laughing.
And she took my hand.
She took my hand. What an arterial burst of joy!
Her palm was soft and small enough to be dwarfed by mine, and we slid our fingers sideways until they fell in place, then tightened as if snapping two souls together.
We began walking to the zoo exit. We didn’t say a word.
But she leaned into me, and her head grazed my shoulder, and every inch of my body felt like it was smiling.
Nothing in my life ever seemed as destined as that moment.
Sadly, Gianna wouldn’t remember any of it.
?
When I got home that night, the house was dark, and I figured my father was asleep.
I got into bed still thinking about Gianna and passed out happily a few minutes later.
Next thing I knew, light was coming through the window and the phone was ringing.
I was groggy and figured Dad would get it, so I rolled over and tried going back to sleep.
When it kept ringing, I dragged out of bed.
“Hello?” I mumbled.
“Is this the Logan residence?”
“Uh . . . yeah?”
“This is Memorial Hospital. I’m calling about Lawrence Logan.”
“My father?”
“So you’re his son?”
“Yes . . . ?”
“There was an accident. We used his driver’s license to find this number. We called several times during the surgery yesterday, but nobody answered.”
“What surgery?”
A pause.
“It might be better if you came down. Do you have a way to get here?”
“Yes . . . I . . . I have his car . . . but—-”
“We can explain everything once you get here.”
“Hold on, hold on,” I stammered. “Is he . . . alive?”
The words came from my mouth as if someone else were using my voice.
“Yes. He’s alive. Come as soon as you can.”
Nassau
“Wait,” LaPorta interrupted, “what happened to him?”
Alfie looked up from the notebook.
“If I keep reading, you’ll—-”
“Just tell me.”
Alfie leaned back.
“He had a headache. We were out of aspirin. Since I had the car, he decided to walk to the nearest drugstore, which was on a busy boulevard. Along the way, I guess he got something in his shoe and he bent down to get it out.”
“Yeah? And?”
“Someone came speeding around a corner, lost control of the car, and ran into him. Turns out the guy was drunk. After he hit my father, he crashed through the front of a store window.”
“Jesus.”
“It crushed my father’s right leg so badly, they had to amputate it.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No.”
“All because you had the car?”
Alfie shrugged. “Some of the biggest things in life happen over the smallest turns in the day.”
“OK, Socrates.”
“It’s true.”
“And you didn’t know about this until you got to the hospital?”
“They wouldn’t tell me.”
“And when you got there?”
“They took me to his room. He was asleep, on oxygen. His face was all bruised and purplish. His legs were covered by blankets.