installment of that old-pals-togetherness. I played it as dealt. “Pizza,” I said, and that’s what we did. We took the long walk around the outside of the Jubilee area to the Porta Marina train station, where all the little food and trinket shops had sprung up. I noticed that somewhere between the refectory and the entrance to the grounds we’d begun to hold hands as we walked. I also noticed—very carefully observed—that Gerda’s earlobes were bare and teeth all uncapped. I knew what that meant. Well, sort of. I knew it meant either that she had no special sexual demands and was not currently in a formal relationship … or else that she didn’t want to advertise her sexual tastes, as most young people did, because she didn’t think it was anyone’s business but her own. Anyway, we ate pizza from the first shop we passed, or at least she did. I didn’t have much appetite. I was too busy looking her over, especially when she was looking the other way, and wondering what she’d been doing on the old Chang Jang . Not to mention that that fishy rice was clumped like a lead weight in my belly.
And then, when she had finished devouring her pizza, she exploratorily ran her tongue over her teeth a time or two. Unsatisfied with the result, she unwrapped a coat of ruby-red foil from something she pulled out of her bellybag and popped it in her mouth. I guess I was really enjoying watching her chew, and showing it, because she grinned and pulled out another stick of the stuff for me, this one wrapped in green foil. “Cleans your teeth,” she informed me. Maybe it did. That wasn’t why I enjoyed it so much, though. It was the taste of the gum itself, I guess, that really got my little buds tingling, fruity and flowery and, I think most of all, just a tad warmed by the flesh of Gerda Fleming.
What I was basically doing at that time, you see, was falling in love.
I didn’t talk much. I mostly just listened while she told me that, boy, those zeppelins were really something, weren’t they? And she’d taken passage in one on the spur of the moment to go to Munich to see her sick old great-aunt Mirabelle, who wasn’t really an actual relative (Gerda explained, though I hadn’t asked) but had been her granddad’s live-in girlfriend when Gerda was little and they’d kept in touch. When she let me know that it was my turn to talk a little she was sympathetic (demonstrated by little hugs) as I told her how boring the wineshop was. Then, when it was getting late I walked her home. She lived in volunteer quarters, a lot nicer than mine, in a building that had once, I think, been the Italian equivalent of a pretty comfortable motel. She invited me in for a drink and we wound up in bed. And by the next day she was my recognized girl. And, short version, kept on being my girl for the next week, and the next, and the next, and, for all those weeks, we never did get around to visiting the Jubilee’s gift shop or Ferris wheel. Never had the time.
7
MY GIRL
Was I surprised that all this happened?
You bet I was. Not so much by the way I was feeling about Gerda—which really was not totally unlike the way I’d felt about, say, Tina Gundersack, back in the processing camps in North Carolina, right after the evacuation or, for that matter, eight or ten other nubile young girls one time or another. But none of which, when you came right down to it, had ever showed any signs of feeling that way about me. I could only suppose that what was going on was some totally unexpected case of the “L” word.
You know the word. Love. The word that had never accurately described any relationship of mine before.
And why was I graced with this new thing now? I couldn’t think of a reason. The old Romans (it had said in one of my readings) explained it pretty well. They thought that love was a kind of lunacy. Probably the old Romans were right. But when Gerda and I did things together it didn’t feel like lunacy. It felt fine.
So Gerda
And then, when she had finished devouring her pizza, she exploratorily ran her tongue over her teeth a time or two. Unsatisfied with the result, she unwrapped a coat of ruby-red foil from something she pulled out of her bellybag and popped it in her mouth. I guess I was really enjoying watching her chew, and showing it, because she grinned and pulled out another stick of the stuff for me, this one wrapped in green foil. “Cleans your teeth,” she informed me. Maybe it did. That wasn’t why I enjoyed it so much, though. It was the taste of the gum itself, I guess, that really got my little buds tingling, fruity and flowery and, I think most of all, just a tad warmed by the flesh of Gerda Fleming.
What I was basically doing at that time, you see, was falling in love.
I didn’t talk much. I mostly just listened while she told me that, boy, those zeppelins were really something, weren’t they? And she’d taken passage in one on the spur of the moment to go to Munich to see her sick old great-aunt Mirabelle, who wasn’t really an actual relative (Gerda explained, though I hadn’t asked) but had been her granddad’s live-in girlfriend when Gerda was little and they’d kept in touch. When she let me know that it was my turn to talk a little she was sympathetic (demonstrated by little hugs) as I told her how boring the wineshop was. Then, when it was getting late I walked her home. She lived in volunteer quarters, a lot nicer than mine, in a building that had once, I think, been the Italian equivalent of a pretty comfortable motel. She invited me in for a drink and we wound up in bed. And by the next day she was my recognized girl. And, short version, kept on being my girl for the next week, and the next, and the next, and, for all those weeks, we never did get around to visiting the Jubilee’s gift shop or Ferris wheel. Never had the time.
7
MY GIRL
Was I surprised that all this happened?
You bet I was. Not so much by the way I was feeling about Gerda—which really was not totally unlike the way I’d felt about, say, Tina Gundersack, back in the processing camps in North Carolina, right after the evacuation or, for that matter, eight or ten other nubile young girls one time or another. But none of which, when you came right down to it, had ever showed any signs of feeling that way about me. I could only suppose that what was going on was some totally unexpected case of the “L” word.
You know the word. Love. The word that had never accurately described any relationship of mine before.
And why was I graced with this new thing now? I couldn’t think of a reason. The old Romans (it had said in one of my readings) explained it pretty well. They thought that love was a kind of lunacy. Probably the old Romans were right. But when Gerda and I did things together it didn’t feel like lunacy. It felt fine.
So Gerda
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