Tangerine

When I think back to that summer and close my eyes, it all closes in on me, condensing down as though into a black hole, a singularity, this one stunning, blazing moment. A sensory cornucopia. A backyard pool. Water splashing, smacking my ears, punctuating joyous cries; the mingled tang of chlorine and semen; him above me, his hands on my shoulders, arched naked half out of the water, the sun above him like a halo, casting him in shadow; a bronzed god, some son of Neptune. My god. My god that summer.

He was my cousin, somewhere between three and four years older than me. My focus, my point of reference in a world where I was cast adrift, in what I suppose they considered a controlled manner. Security, friendship, familiarity all sacrificed to my parents’ doomed, last-ditch attempt to salvage their marriage; the three of us, my sisters and me, dispersed to various relatives around the country. Me, alone, half way across the continent, dropped from the sky into arid prairie suburbia… with family, yes, but family I hardly knew. Even at home, he was a lonely, awkward kid; perhaps it wasn’t just compassion but some measure of desperation that caused him to offer me his friendship. To me, he threw it like a life preserver. I was grateful beyond words.

I adored him. Everything about him. How he looked, how he sounded, what interested him, where he went, what he wore. Everything. Like mine, both his parents worked; his sister was college-bound and rarely home; and so the empty hours of the early summer were filled up with one another. Minds and conversations wandered. I was curious, and he was semi-knowledgeable; I suppose it was almost inevitable when it happened.

It was only a part of who we were to one another, of course; for the most part, we were about bike rides and wanderings in the forest, trips to the mall and matinees, records and comics and batting practice. But there were those other moments. And that was the deepest, most exciting, intoxicating aspect.

I don’t know how many nights we spent out in that tent in the woods behind his house, lost to the world, but found to each other. I can’t put into simple words how honoured I felt, what a privilege it was to explore him with my hands, my mouth; or the profound compliment I felt in his reciprocation… The discoveries, the revelations... while all around us the world was engrossed in moon landings, we mapped out together what human beings have been discovering and rediscovering for eons. Starlight, crickets, marijuana, sweat, lurid hours in the gulf between waking and sleep. Some of those nights lasted a thousand years. But always, always came the shock, the miracle of morning, sunrise, a new day. A different world.

It was the end of the hippy age, and he was arriving in it just a little too late. He practiced so hard on his guitar. I remember the song he particularly worked to master; Tangerine, by Led Zeppelin. Slow, methodical, fingers plucking the wrong string, then the right one, grinding out the lyrics, over and over. I would sit cross-legged on his bed in the lamplight, listening for hours. It was like he was learning it for me. That I didn’t really understand it then didn’t matter. I would come to understand, I knew.

And then she came.

She was his age. I think they knew each other from school; at any rate, they linked up somewhere and suddenly, there she was. Around. All the time. I tried so hard to hate her. Believe me. But I couldn’t. She was pretty, and she was kind, and she never tried to exclude me. Her own parents were divorced; she would talk to me about it. I wanted her to go away, leave us like we were, but I knew it wouldn’t be like that, that it was never going to be the same again. His wings had dried; he needed to fly. And he needed to fly with her.

He and she, now ‘they’, would often generously invite me along on their excursions, but I would beg off, feeling acutely that I was a third wheel, and more acutely still the demotion from the heady heights I had ascended on wings borrowed from Icarus. The last few weeks of that summer before I went home to school and a broken home were cobbled together from long, bitter days and lonely nights. By day I would wander the neighbourhood, joining in where others let me, feeling the futility of trying to strike up friendships that could barely hope to survive a Junebug’s age. By night, alone, I was forced to confront those things that terrified me… the things that being near him had chased away. The day I went home, he hugged me at the airport, gave me his ball glove, told me to write. I did. He didn’t. But even then, I understood. I didn’t forgive him… because I never had to.

As the years passed and we grew up, I would see him from time to time at family gatherings. But very quickly he had moved out of the place we’d shared and into the realm of men, where precocious flirtations with beer and tobacco were winked at, dirty jokes were the currency of the hour and curse words its spare change. Always, though, he had the kind smile, the nod. The wink. It was something we still shared. And I still loved him for it.

Years later, at some relative’s wedding, he was to pull me aside. Wracked with guilt, he begged my forgiveness, blaming himself, berating himself. With a lump in my throat, fighting hard to keep back tears, I gave him false absolution. How could I make him understand that, until that moment, my heart had been whole, full of wondrous love for something lost but singularly precious in memory? How could I tell him that, at that moment, he had broken my heart, and killed the very last whisper of my innocence? In taking that free, unfettered, affectionate moment of mutual discovery and twisting it into something fearful and monstrous, he had committed the only sin that I could ever hold against him, his only real betrayal — of him and me both.

And now a thousand years between…