In Which Our Author Is Revealed To Be An Elephant Tied To A Stake

I can't remember her face any more. Not really. It's been twenty-three years. At the time, I remember thinking she looked like a young Louise Erdrich. She had full lips from her one-quarter Native American grandparents, dark hair, chipmunk cheeks, big secretive eyes. But the photo above, which is a photo of a young Louise Erdrich, doesn't look anything like her.

We met in 1989, in my English 112 class. There's no point in detailing the odd details of our romance-that-wasn't, beyond the basics: she sabotaged my relationship successfully and I failed to sabotage hers. We slept in the same bed a lot. She wrote erotic stories about me and I returned the favor. We were inseparable for months. Once she gave me what I understand in retrospect --- and what anybody but a painfully naive, chronically shy young man --- would have understood to be the let's-do-this. We were facing each other on a single bed, laughing and lightly kissing, and she said, "I can't resist you any more, just put it in me," and I said,

I said,

I said,

"Ha!" Meaning, oh, you're such a witty tease. But now I realize she meant it and she probably thought I was playing some extended head game with her. Things went downhill after that.

I haven't seen her in twenty-three years. I have perfect memory of everything from the video-games department at the Lazarus department store to the book stacks at King Library at Miami but she is so fucking fuzzy, I can only remember her face if I don't try too hard.

She was funny, and brilliant, and neither. She was a mimic. She learned what I liked and pretended to like it too. Later on, when she dated other people, she liked what they liked. There was nobody behind her big brown eyes. But she shone, when she was being me.

But from time to time I will see someone who looks just like her. And when I do, I find that person very difficult to deal with. Three women in particular. They've all made me unhappy. Or vice versa.

When you want to train an elephant, you tie it to a stake. As a baby. It can't pull the stake out. Later on, it grows and it could pull that stake out any time it wants to. It's an elephant. But it remembers its childhood and in its childhood that stake was all-powerful.

I could pull this stake out. I could stop caring about her. And, yes, I know exactly where she is, who her husband is, all about their crappy little lower-class Midwestern life. I could knock on her door and the minute I saw her at forty-one, instead of at eighteen, I would fall out of love forever. I know she's no longer beautiful. I know she's no longer someone I would love. "At her wedding," someone told me, "everyone in the bridal party was simultaneously chewing gum during the vows." Not my kind, dear. I could do that.

Or I could just resolve to never again look into the eyes of anyone like her. That no full-lipped, bottom-heavy, sassy, Native American/Spanish/French/Puerto Rican/whatever brunette will ever get the better of me again. That I will stop chasing her shadow in perpetuity, choose something positive, become a better person, a free-ranging elephant of the American savannah, my son trailing behind me, never knowing the lifelong tyranny of a stake because I'll pull that fuckin' thing up the minute I see someone tying him down to it.

But I won't. Instead, I'm going to get on a plane this afternoon, choose the George Benson/Earl Klugh album we used to listen to together from the thousands of alternatives on my iPod, close my eyes, and look for her face in the long stacks of my bookworm memories.