First Love

by Hunter James

He was never sure where it came from. It was almost as if it had been waiting for him around the corner all along, ready to smack him to the ground when he wasn't even looking. He had not even suspected it was anywhere in the neighborhood; yet there it was, catching him completely off his watch and leaving him a little crazy inside, as though he had drunk or absorbed some sensuous and exotic liqueur unknown except to a privileged elite whose powers were forever greater than those of other men.

All he knew was that suddenly everything was different—the way the night looked and felt, the way the moonlight came through the trees, the sound of voices in the abandoned school-bus where he sometimes joined the other guys in the neighborhood each night to smoke cigarettes and wait for Sarah Musgrove or one of the other neighborhood strumpets to get there. Everybody liked talking dirty to Sarah and getting their hands up her dress. Never anything more than that, not when there was a crowd around. Sometimes she would bring a friend, occasionally even a second. Those were the best nights: no more than two boys to a girl, hands going like crazy, working them up to wild whoops and yells and often getting very little for it in return.

In those first days, after the Phantom of the Opera had dropped those drops of enchantment into Ryerson’s eyes, he just couldn't figure out what it was exactly that had come bursting in on him without any warning at all. He sure didn't know what to call it, but it struck with such destructive power that forever after that he could recall the very moment he felt its impact. All he could think of was one of those love potions his teachers had read about in English class: two drops on your eyelids while asleep and you dote on the first girl that crosses your path of vision when you awake.

Well, when he woke from his dose, halfway through the next school day, his eye fell upon a most unlikely prospect: the lovely blonde Alva McElenney, two years older than he and already, as a sophomore, an all-state basketball player.

So there he was. He knew he had no chance with her, but at least his eyes hadn't landed on Patricia Willard, who had been giving high schoolers the time of their lives at least since her fifth year in school. Or maybe because of some predestined fate he was not permitted to see her—really see her—at all until he had first seen Alva McElenney, the girl he thought he could love forever, the one girl he knew he could never have.

Her older brother, Josh McElenney, had been the best player ever to wear an Old Fork uniform. During his last two years on the varsity the team had won all the big trophies, two state championships, and maybe half a dozen regional titles, and would almost certainly have done so again if he had not gone off to war and died in the Philippines. Gone and greatly lamented, he was, but not before teaching his younger sister the game of basketball as few girls in Ryerson’s day had ever managed to learn it.

She was a natural anyway, as her brother had been; and there Ryerson was, a mere eighth grader (though already a first-string guard on the junior varsity basketball team) who had fallen so powerfully under her spell that he really felt a little ill when he wasn't around her, which was most of the time. About the only chance he had to see her up close was during homeroom class, when everybody was coming back from lunch.

She had always managed a little smile, a very sweet smile, though meaningless, when she came to get the books she had left on his desk after her fourth-period class in American history. He liked to think she permitted the smile only because she felt he was a real comer as an athlete. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't; but for some reason, on the day after his mystical experience under the full moon of October, he had seen an Alva McElenney who, till that moment, might never have existed at all.

Her smile was different, her voice, her eyes, the way she looked at him. Yet it meant nothing. Not with her being two grades ahead of him and already a celebrity of sorts. What possible chance would he have with her? How could he possibly even so much as think of sitting next to her on the activity bus, much less asking her to join him for smokes or maybe to meet him downtown at O'Hanlon's drugstore?

During those crazy hours he thought at first that he might be able to arrange it through Patricia, or “Trish,” who was always willing to oblige if someone’s “virtue” was at the stake. Another cherry crushed and bleeding. Maybe not such a good idea, though, to ask for that kind of favor till she got over her sulk: she sure didn’t care a great deal for the way he had been eyeing Alva McElenney in recent weeks. It was sort of an odd piece of timing, but she had wrangled out of him only a day or two before a promise that he would pay her a visit on the very next night that her old man was working late.

"Trish, you know I don’t have any way to get out to your place.”

“Walk. Ride your bike. It couldn’t be more than three miles.” She pouted for a moment while running her hand up his thigh. “Damn you, Ryerson. You never even come to see me when you do have a chance. Like all those summers you spend out at your family farm—not a good mile from where I live. Yet I’m always having to beg you to come. It’s like pulling teeth to get you to come by and say hello.”

“OK, Patricia. I mean, Trish. I will change. I promise you that from now on I will mind my manners.”

He was never quite sure why she had picked him out special, or why at that particular time, maybe only because she knew all about what the full moon could do to guys his age and had seen in him something he had not seen in himself.

Trish, a stringy haired girl on the marginal edge of good looks, had learned everything she knew from her father, a shocking thing for her to say and for him to know, and yet a real break for Ryerson: He had just turned thirteen and was still hopelessly naïve when it came to girls and he guessed she had sort of figured that out and hated to see him to go on and become a big sportsman and president of his class without being properly introduced to what she liked to call "the fruits of love."

Trish was the champ all right. Even Sarah Musgrove, who lived much nearer to Ryerson, in the days before he and his family had moved into town, could never quite match her in that.

-*-

Well, there came a day when he just couldn't stand it any longer. Long after the full moon had waned, if he wasn't seeing Sarah, he would just walk all about the neighborhood alone, feeling the new sweet overpowering melancholy inside him and thinking of Alva McElenney. Why had fate so prepared it that the mystical drops of love potion would not fall on her eyes as well?

He knew something eventually had to happen and one day it did. When Alva came by after lunch to pick up her books, with Trish sitting right beside him and glaring at him with all her might, the strange demonic force that had seized him and shook him like a rag doll under the October moon simply took over his whole being. At least that is the way he remembered it later. Because he could think of any other way to explain why, all of a sudden, he caught hold of her hand and pulled her toward him—and, god, what a wondrous smell of perfume!

"Such a lovely, white, luscious hand. May I keep it for a while?"

That got a bit of a laugh out of her, though very little else. "I'm afraid you would have to keep me with it, sweetie."

"You all planning to go undefeated this year."

"We always plan on it."

"Well, so do we."

"Yes, I know. You and your buddy Gregg. That play you two boys worked out last year. Really, a truly beautiful thing to watch."

The next day he stopped her again:

"Play you one on one."

"Oh. You will, will you?" She paused and looked back just for a second. "See me at recess and we'll talk about it."

It was quite a lot for him to say to a girl he hardly knew at all and who, till now, had frightened him half to death with her air of huge confidence and unspeakable good looks.

He did not have a chance to see her at recess and there was no time to talk when she came to pick up her books the next day. Her smile stayed with him day and night and he never got off to sleep without seeing it—and not just her smile either. Because now, he thought of her either crawling into his window naked or standing by his bed with the cover rising before him like a pup tent as that same strange demonic power filled him with its maniacal lust.

Still, it meant nothing. She could have easily have been Lauren Bacall and him a shameless leper begging alms at her door for all the good it would do him. It was the same thing every day: whether he spoke or found it impossible to think of anything original to say. He could do nothing but walk around with the picture of her laughing face in his head, moon or no moon. He found myself staring at her, unable to help it, like a helpless sheep dog, hardly able to speak of her at all until the day she had spoken those fateful words:

See me at recess and we'll talk about it then

-*-

He just went all crazy inside after that. It was more conversation than he had ever expected to get. He kept thinking about all the success his junior varsity team had enjoyed long before he ever realized his life belonged to Alva McElenney. The team had gone undefeated when he was only a seventh grader and had not won a game by fewer than ten points.

He and Gregg Alpin—they had been close friends from their very first day in school—had spent the whole summer developing a beautifully executed play that no one had been able to stop completely and almost no one had been able to stop it at all. The timing was very nearly perfect—Gregg's high leap and Ryerson’s rocket-like pass just as he was going up for the basket. Everybody knew what was coming and nobody could stop it. Gregg was almost six feet tall and almost a year older than Ryerson even though they were in the same grade.

Now, as an eighth grader, Gregg could leap as high as any one on the varsity and both he and Ryerson could run with the best of the upperclassmen. Another year's experience and they would surely be ready for their first sortie into the "big time."

Long after that he liked to boast that they had been years ahead of our time. With his playing days long behind him, he would watch the big college teams execute to perfection almost the same play he and Gregg had developed as mere kids. Not that he was ever so full of himself as to think he could have played with the generation of performers that came along during the next quarter of a century—but at least he and Gregg had had the idea.

Perhaps that is why Alva had not dismissed him as a mere trifle, and after pestering her for weeks, every time she came by to pick up her books, he eventually got her into a challenge match. He skipped study hall one afternoon and got down to the gym as the girl's varsity was just completing its workout. Alva suddenly turned and flung him the ball.

"OK, hotshot, let's see what you've got."

They ignored the bell for sixth period and spent the next hour in a give-and-take that left Ryerson unashamed of his performance even though Alva was already good enough to play for the boy's team and everybody knew it.

He was about to go in for what would have been his last shot when old one-eye Becker came in and broke it up, threatening to throw both of them out of school for violating Old Fork's athletic code. Well, everybody knew he wasn't about to throw Alva out of school, which meant that he was helpless to do anything about Ryerson either.

Becker kept looking at his watch and bellowing for everybody to get the hell on back to class. Becker, who also had only one arm, held the door while they all filed out, blinking at the two players ominously with his good eye, his flesh a little broken and pasty-looking. A real wreck, Becker was. Ryerson had long ago made up his mind that the old coot would never again bring him under the lash as he had when he was a mere second-grader. Ryerson was still hoping for an excuse to take him down for the count?

Was this the time?

Well, perhaps not in front of all the girls.

Above, alone in the oily and squeaky hall, Alva stopped him and said, "Come here a minute, hotshot.”

“Whatcha want?”

“Let me see your hands."

"My hands?"

"Yes. Hold them out and let me have a look."

"Ah, you're going to read my palm."

"Better than that. Yes. You've got the hand-span for it and, with your speed, you could be as good as Josh, maybe better, maybe the best we've ever had here if you . . . don't let yourself get sidetracked."

Then she rushed off with her pile of books, laughing merrily and leaving him to wonder what she meant by "sidetracked."

"Well," Patricia said when he came in next morning. "You two certainly seem to have a lot to say to each other these days."

"We're only talking basketball. It isn't anything."

"Oh? Do you think I haven't seen you just go all to pieces every time you look at her. Do you love her? She really is very lovely, isn't she, but I'll bet she won't do for you what I can do. And her two years older than you are. And besides, she is already going steady with Eddie Hugh Morris. I understand they plan to be married as soon as she graduates."

Ryerson said nothing, but he had begun to wonder if Alva had begun to feel for him something she had never felt for Eddie Hugh Morris. He also knew that word of their meetings on the basketball court and their little conversations were rapidly getting around the school. Maybe he would read about it in the next issue of the Old ForkTattler.

Did you know that old Ryerson has the hots for Alva McElenney?

You don't say? Does she know?

Dunno.

Boy, wouldn't she get a laugh out of that?

-*-

He was really beginning to feel really good about himself, knowing Trish would not abandon him in the hour of need and that maybe one day soon he might even get up the nerve to grab a seat beside Alva on the activity bus. But that was before he found out that Gregg, who had led the junior varsity in scoring though he could never had done so without his teammate being able to get him the ball exactly where he had to have it, had also taken a liking to Alva McElenney.

Not only that, he had actually had the nerve to ask her out—and she had accepted. Gregg was a big swell-looking guy for his age, and Ryerson figured any chance he had of winning over Alva McElenney were gone forever.

Soon they were doing everything together. After that she always seemed a little nervous when she came by his desk, although she never left him without a smile. Then something happened. Gregg had been seeing her for no more than two weeks before she began to look a little distraught and not quite sure of herself. Ryerson was almost certain that she had been crying.

"Are you surprised?" Trish asked him. "As well as you know Gregg? They have broken up, you know. I knew from the start that it wouldn't last. Nothing ever lasts with Gregg. But you should know that, Ryerson, a lot better than I."

There was something in her voice that struck him as a little odd, but he decided it was only his imagination and thought no more about it. Trish was right. Nothing ever lasted with Gregg. He began seeing a lot of other girls after that, mostly going after those who were a class or two ahead of us; but for some reason his love affairs always came up lame—a week, two weeks at most, and then it would be over.

"Bed 'em and leave 'em," everybody said. "That's Gregg's motto."

Well, maybe that's what you could do when you had those killer good looks and were a real comer on the basketball court.

Killer good looks. That's what he had all right. People were always saying that Gregg really was almost "too pretty" for a boy. The story was that Alva had cared greatly for Gregg, despite the slight difference in their ages, and a lot of people were worried that whatever had happened between them might affect her game. For a while it seemed to do just that; but soon the shots started falling again and people were talking about another state championship.

Of all the girls Gregg had taken out, only Betty Henshaw, who had made the cheerleading squad as a ninth grader, was able to make her romance last from one issue of the Tattler to the next. Of course, everybody knew that old Bette was an even more experienced tramp than Trish Willard.

"I guess he was just waiting for the right one," he told Trish one day.

"No. You will see. It will be like all the others."

It was over almost as she spoke. It was just about the last time anybody ever saw them together. The last girl at Old Fork High School he ever went out with. Ryerson began to see a lot less of her; she started coming by earlier to pick up her books, before he had got back from luncheon recess. For that matter he began seeing a whole lot less of Gregg himself. He never came around to the old hangouts—to smoke in the parked school-bus or to try his luck at getting his hand up the dress of whatever new "loose" girl had arrived on the scene.

Then everybody heard that he had taken to drink. Not just an occasional beer or anything like that: the really mean stuff, distilled in radiators and dispensed by the quart or gallon in the slums of East Winston.

Ryerson had never been friends with Gregg since the day he asked Alva out and they would never truly be friends again. By this time they were in the tenth grade and Ryerson was splitting guard duties with the guy who had been first-string the year before. Gregg, meantime, had lost all interest in basketball: he had gone out for cheerleader instead.

Patricia had predicted that, too. Or at least found out about it before anybody else. Was it only because she knew Gregg so much better than others, or at least knew something about him that no one else had guessed? She had actually been Gregg's first "conquest," or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, she passed on to him the "fruits of love" she had first learned from her father and later from an obliging uncle who, almost before she was out of the crib, began to take an excessive interest in her “proper upbringing.”

"Did it last very long?" Ryerson asked her once. "Between you and Gregg?"

"Longer than most, though not as long as all that."

"Don't understand."

"Well, I can't tell you now. Maybe some time, I mean, if by now you haven't already figured it out for yourself."

Gregg had his own car now, a beat-up old 1936 Plymouth, and soon he was drinking more heavily than ever. He had never been wealthy, and Ryerson couldn't figure out where he was getting his money, but he always had enough to keep a pint of Four Roses of some of that raw “popskull” in his glove compartment. He knew all the black bootleggers in East Winston, and couldn't have been more than sixteen before he could phone all of them up and give his business to the first who arrived on the scene.

You could see the end coming for him one night when he actually passed out and retched all over the basketball floor one night while trying to lead a cheer. He later laid it all to a rotten case of food poisoning, but that was the all for him as a cheerleader.

In class one day Ryerson again asked Trish if she had any idea why he had taken up drink and lost all interest in basketball, what with the absolutely marvelous future he had in front of him. All the girls he would ever want. A scholarship to any college he wanted to attend.

"You mean you still don't know—haven't even guessed? And you were his best friend. Really, Ryerson, sweetie pie, I've never thought of you as being slow to catch on to things."

That was what really set him to thinking—mostly about the times he and Gregg had been alone together. He began to remember little incidents he hadn’t thought about in years. Maybe the real reason is that they were too close, and it just never occurred to Ryerson that the best friend he’d ever had could actually turn out "that way," not even after he began to talk a little more openly at what he was after. He remembered, now, all those long ago summer afternoons when Gregg would invite him to join him in the kitchen while he stripped and gave himself a "splash" bath at the kitchen sink.

Even if Ryerson had been certain that something was not quite right, he would never have said anything. He would tell himself that it was nothing more than a phase his old pal was going through and that he would surely grow out of it in time. Not a phase that interested Ryerson at all. Still, Gregg was always hinting at the "pleasures" he and some of the other guys had enjoyed together. Circle jerks and all that. And maybe more than that.

Later he began to hear talk that Gregg had fallen under "evil" influences as a child. Looking back on it after they were long out of high school, he wondered how he could have misread all the signs. He could remember strange visits to Gregg's house by a prominent doctor who held himself up as his mother's “entertainer.”

The old fellow apparently had some of the same tastes as Trish’s uncle, taking a fervent liking to young Gregg as well as to his mother. The father had left home long ago. Nobody knew why, but some people had talked as though his mother was not only "loose" but something much worse. There were only hints, nothing anybody would come right out and talk about in the nineteen forties, what with a war going on and our country fighting and dying so that it could lay claim to a moral superiority unknown to other nations of the world. Even after it had dropped those nasty bombs on Japan.

So he still didn't think a whole lot about it. At the time there was nothing more than those sly little hints Gregg was always dropping as he stood washing himself at his kitchen sink. Maybe it wasn't until Ryerson started going alone to movies down at the Crumb theater and being approached by all sorts of odd characters who would come in and sit down beside him and slap their hands on his thigh—well, it had just never occurred to him till then that he would ever actually meet something as exotic as a real "queer."

Once or twice Gregg had turned to him, with that half-smile on his face, and say something like: "Well, old boy, are you ready to have some really hot times?"

He never was. He would always just laugh it off. Then one afternoon he watched a trifle uneasily as Gregg turned toward him with his implement of warfare now “high and lifted up.” Ryerson noticed right away that it was almost embarrassingly small. He had heard the same said of Rudolph Valentino. A real shame for a man who had set out to conquer every woman worth having in all of Hollywood. Now he could see that maybe it was part of Gregg's problem.

Ryerson would turn away without interest and say something like: "Well, maybe later. Maybe it's something we can talk about." And Gregg:

"Talking about it spoils all the fun."

"Ah," Trish said, after he had told her of those almost-forgotten experiences. "So you did know?"

"That he prefers boys—men? Yes. I mean, I guess I knew but didn't really think anything about it. Like it was only a passing phase or something. I mean I could never think of him as being really "queer."

"And you said nothing?"

"I guess I just didn't want to think about it."

"The love that dare not speak its name," she said a little sadly.

"Is that literary? It sounds like something I have heard somewhere."

"Yes, Ryerson. You must know by now that I can read books and be very literary and still be your favorite class tart.”

"Somehow I get the feeling that it is not entirely his fault. I think his mother had a lover who was also a little that way. I think Gregg must have begun with him. Like all the other parts of this ‘strange and eventful tale’ I just didn't think a whole lot about it at the time."

"And talk of it—never."

"No. I tried to think that, well, he wasn't such a bad guy in spite of this terrible affliction that he has."

In those days, everybody thought of it that way—as an affliction. A lot of people still did. Ryerson wondered sometimes how he felt about even though he found it awfully difficult to imagine himself being caught up in the same sort of "mystique."

-*-

He never did overcome his feelings to talk about it openly, at least not with anyone who did not already know the whole story. He never did feel really easy about it even with those who did. Maybe because of all those Baptist revivals he had attended as a child. But at least now he knew, or thought he knew, why Gregg had taken so heavily to drink. Trying to forget how he was. Trying to pretend he was really like everybody else. Ryerson also knew, or guessed, where he had been getting a lot of the money that was keeping him in liquor, probably from older men who undoubtedly paid him well for his favors in the downtown bus terminal or in movie houses or in the washrooms of crummy hotels.

How many others had guessed the truth? Till they were long out of school it seemed that almost no one had. Maybe the girls he had gone out with, but who, in those days, other than Trish and Sarah Musgrove and Betty Henshaw and maybe a few others would ever talk about that openly to a boy? His friendship for Gregg, of course, had subsided long before he learned of his "dark" secret, mainly for the contemptuous and even arrogant way he had stepped between Ryerson and the lovely Alva. He hadn't even liked it when he was out leading cheers for the Old Fork basketball team.

Trish still saw him occasionally, mostly for old times sake or maybe, as she told Ryerson one day, because there was no one else in school willing to perform the only act of love that had ever made him feel comfortable with a girl. In those days most girls would shudder at such a thought—or so he had been led to believe. Just too many revivals, too much Christian singing, too much doom in the air.

"You never did that it for me."

"Sweetie pie, you never asked, and, besides, how can I do anything for you when I have to work like the devil just to get you to come and see me.”

-*-

He had always thought himself more capable than almost anybody of holding a grudge long after it has served any useful purpose. Still, he wondered sometimes if it hadn't been for the way he felt about Alva whether he might have been able to forgive Gregg—perhaps even have been able to keep him for a friend. Alva had ended any hope of that. Had he gone out with her only to show him he could succeed where everybody else—and mainly Ryerson—had failed, to make him jealous, to get back at him for all the times he had been rebuffed in his own kitchen? Was it his way of getting "even”?

Ryerson never got her back, which is not to say that he ever had her in the first place. He tried to forget all about her. They never even spoke except in casual meetings. One night long after those mad love potions had been insidiously injected into him and drove him all crazy with just thinking about her and her smile and how, someday, somehow, she would knock on his window one night and beg for the love that had lived only in his fancy—long after all that she came and sat beside him on the activity bus. She was a senior, with only a week left in regular season.

It was the first time she had ever done that. It wasn't as if there weren't plenty of other seats. He spoke of Gregg only as a way of making conversation.

"You ever see him anymore?"

"Not for ages, sweetie. Why do you bring that up now?"

"I was surprised that it ended so quickly."

"I'm afraid I can't—shouldn't—say anymore about that."

"It's been so long. I thought you might. Anyway, I guess I know the answer."

"Yes, I thought you might. Anyway, I don't think we should talk about it now."

He said no more. The first girl he had ever loved. He sat there struggling to hold back the feeling that can never be evoked by anything other than a first love. He kissed her then, knowing it would probably be the last chance he ever had; and, to his utter astonishment, the kissing got to be really heavy. For the first time in years he felt as he had on that night when the dark phantoms of the full moon and smacked him with a madness he had never fully overcome.

"No more," she said. "Not now. please. There's too much feeling in your kisses. Maybe we should just talk for a while. My stop will be coming up pretty soon."

Then she looked at him as though she were seeing me for the first time. "You aren’t like him at all, are you?"

"Gregg? You mean, you thought I was?"

"How could I know, sweetheart? You were such good friends at one time."

"That’s all changed now. We both know why. Does everybody else know?"

"Well, it's all very strange. Whether everybody knows or whether nobody wants to talk about it."

"Will you kiss me again?"

"Not tonight, old boy. Not again. No, no, please! Besides, you're much too young to be getting serious. I will have been out of school two years by the time you graduate. You have too many things to do in this world. You would never be happy with married life, even with one your own age, after the first excitement had worn off."

He kissed her anyway, as she twisted frantically at her engagement ring. The truly stunning thing was that she kissed him back, just as fervently as before.

"I think I love you, Ryerson. You see, with Gregg . . well, I can only say what I said before . . . that there was never any real feeling in his kisses . . . but I promised myself I would not say anymore about that, and I won't"

Nor did she. It didn't matter. Love? The word he could not imagine ever hearing from her. He kept thinking about the days when he and Gregg were riding bikes together and how he would sit with him each afternoon watching him take his splash bath. His old friend never failed to become fully aroused and at least once had told Ryerson how his own mother had taught him strange things about "doing it" with other men.

"I'm afraid," Alva said, "that he will have a really rough time of it before it's over. Living here in the South, as he does. Nobody will ever accept that in him, and he will never accept it in himself. We both know that that is why he's started drinking so much. It does seem a little strange that nobody else has ever understood why."

"I love you, Alva. Do you know that you are all I have ever wanted since you used to come by home room to get your books."

"You know I'm promised, Ryerson. You know I shouldn't be sitting here at all and that I certainly shouldn't have let you kiss me."

"Well, if we could just have sat together sometimes after the games, going home on this old rattletrap of a bus, maybe it would have made a difference."

"I don't know, sweet. I just don't know. How could I ever have foreseen such a thing when you first spoke to me all those years ago? People say I am at the very top of my game, but what does it all mean? What does it matter about my game after I'm out of school? There will be nothing left for me then. Just a house, a husband, children. It's so much different with boys. So much more they can do with their lives. But I will never forget you, Ryerson. You are a lovely, lovely person."

He looked at her, at the tears she was holding back. Then she said something quite strange indeed:

"Why why why, did this have to happen to me, denying me the one person I know I can never have? If life just didn't play you such dirty tricks. Do you understand? You must forget me now, and make a real life for yourself. There's not a college in this state or anywhere else for that matter that won't be begging to pay your way through school? You will have lots of girls. You would never be happy if I allowed you to become tied down without your ever having a real chance at life."

"It won't be the same."

"You say that now, but I'll soon be little more than a hazy memory to you."

"You were the first. There will never be anything exactly like that. I love you."

"Oh, shut up, Ryerson. You're only making matters much worse. I have already compromised myself too much as it is. You have many glorious years ahead of you. For me, the good days are about over."

"Maybe there's nothing left for any of us."

"It can't be helped, sweetheart."

"Well, I may never see you again. You were my first love. Nothing can ever change that."

"I don't know. I just don't know, Ryerson, and, baby, I just can't talk about it any more right now. She got up. "Goodbye, Ryerson. You take care of yourself now. I think I'm the next stop."

-*-

He never saw her again. He saw Gregg only when he managed to make it to class and at graduation and, after that, not at all for many years. Out of school, he practically ruined himself with drink in almost no time at all. For a long time he still had the good looks that had captivated both the men and women in his life and he had married a lovely girl, perhaps the loveliest in her whole class at the town’s biggest and most elitist high school. She had been some sort of Fruit Bowl Queen or something, or at least that's what Ryerson always called her when he was feeling particularly ill toward his one-time friend.

He had heard about their marriage after he had long left the town, though naturally he was not surprised to learn that it had lasted less than a year. When they broke up everybody laid it to his drinking. Even now nobody seemed able to accept the real truth about Gregg or at least nobody wanted to talk about it. Ryerson would always wonder about that. Whether out of simple disbelief or shock or dismay or whatever it was, his secret never did really come home to anyone else in their class, except to the girls who had refused to oblige his "strange lusts."

He never married again. He turned even more heavily to liquor and, as one might guess, to unsavory men in seedy hotel rooms, looking for what he hated in himself and yet what he had to have. He thought of it often, how if he had lived in a later time his friends and acquaintances would have held him up as a man of undeniable probity and possibly even nominated him for Congress, if his inclinations had lay in that direction.

It must have been fifteen years before Ryerson saw him again. They were at a class reunion. Ryerson was sure he did not even recognize him at first. He no longer had the "killer" good looks of his younger days. He was already among the walking dead, sallow all over, his hair all coming out, his teeth all yellowish and misshapen and truly grotesque.

Ryerson kept thinking of those yellowish fangs Lon Chaney used to grow when the full moon was transforming him into Wolfman. He and Gregg had seen a lot of those movies together. He wondered if his old friend any longer bothered to look in the mirror. All anyone could say was that he was a real mess, sitting there laughing that horrible laugh of the undead, with a drainage tube in his liver.

Yet even now, after all this time, for all his old classmates knew, for all everybody knew, no one ever talked aloud of "the love that dare not speak its name." Only that he was born a drunk and died a drunk. Ryerson realized for the first time that he no longer hated him—that after all these years of holding a grudge he might even be able to forgive him.

He often wondered what Alva thought, where she was, how the guy she had married was treating her, whether she was even alive. He had never even tried to find out. Had life gone on to treat her as it had so many others with providential disdain? He was in another state, working for a big-city newspaper, when he heard of Gregg's death. Everything had changed by that time. Men now openly boasted of the "malady" that had driven him to drink, destroyed his basketball career, turned him into a silly cheerleader and finally put him in the grave at an unseemly early age—the first in his class to die.

Yes, it is true: born in a later era he would have lived to find glory rather than infamy in his "affliction." He would have been the darling of the "politically correct," toasted by the cognoscenti, honored not less for his "decadent" way of life than for making it known to all the world. Perhaps he would have been chosen as a drum major in all the Gay Pride parades; his classmates would have watched with applause as he marched down Fifth Avenue, kicking his legs high, twirling his baton.

Alas, he had known nothing of what might have been, only the beatings in filthy jail-houses, the condemnation of the Evangelicals. Even now Ryerson would sometimes remember those first days when they were still friends, when he never knew that his mother was a whore and her lover a pedophile. Then he would remember how he had sat at that class reunion watching him die right in front of him and all the others with whom he had once been friends.

He would think of the unseen force that shapes and finally destroys all who stand in its way, and how it had insidiously smacked him up beside the head with a two-by-four on the very night before he was to see the one girl he could never forget. Then he would hate him all over again, hate him even as he thought of him lying there all dead and yellow in his grave, hate him all the more as he asked himself why Gregg had taken it upon himself, knowing it could never mean anything, to steal from him a girl he knew that he himself could never love in a proper way. Ryerson would finally have to face an ugly truth: that he could never, when it came right down to it, entirely forgive him after all and that he would live with the hate and maybe even learn to enjoy it, sometimes with a smirk, sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a quiet sneer of disdain.