Lie With Me

I met Susan in 1973 at a dinner hosted by Dan and Rachel, mutual friends who thought we might make a good couple.

By the end of the evening, I agreed, and a few days later, I invited Susan for dinner at my apartment.

Standing side by side, we chatted while chopping vegetables for a stir fry. When the conversation lagged, I asked Susan if she’d like to hear some music.

“How about ‘The Four Seasons,’” she said.

I pulled out “Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ Greatest Hits.” When the drum solo announced “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” Susan laughed.

Then she hugged me.

I still feel that hug today, 50 years later. Lights went on, lights went out, lights flashed through me – lights did whatever lights do when something big happens. At age 24, I knew something big had happened to me.

Hug and song over, Susan applauded my taste in music. “I’ll take Frankie V over Antonio V any day,” she declared. I knew she was lying, but I didn’t care and didn’t know if she assumed I’d been aiming for laughs, or she simply didn’t want to embarrass me.

I didn’t tell Susan that I wasn’t aiming for laughs. I’d never heard of Antonio Vivaldi or his “Four Seasons” concerti, as she certainly had. However, as Frankie V and Frank S would say, I had her under my skin.

That presented a challenge: I didn’t think her interest in me had moved the dial very far, while my dial broke the glass on the meter. The challenge as I saw it, was convincing her to fall in love with a better version of me.

Susan had grown up in an upper middle-class, well-educated family in suburban Nashville. She told people she “went to college in New Haven,” shorthand for Yale. New Haven is also home to Southern Connecticut State University, so, when she told people she had gone to college in New Haven, I said something like, “I’ve heard Southern Connecticut State is a really good school.”

Among Susan’s other pedigrees, she spoke French, played the flute for a local symphony, and had been accepted for a doctoral program at a school in Princeton, New Jersey. She loved springtime and dawn.

I was this short Jewish guy from a lower middle-class family in Brooklyn, living in Nashville, by way of East Tennessee State. I spoke like an educated New York cab driver, and I preferred autumn and dusk to springtime and dawn, which Susan judged a sign of depression.

Susan hung out with self-impressed friends who set off my smug alarms. While I was outwardly acting the part of working-class hero, I was working to rebuild myself to fit what I assumed was her ideal. I bought a “Viva Vivaldi” album, which turned out to sound like elevator-disco music. I read a couple of books I’d spotted around Susan’s apartment and dropped references into our conversations; and I did everything I could to make her laugh – the only talent I had confidence in.

I sent her clever notes; I told clever, well-rehearsed, spontaneous stories. And I came up with clever gifts. My favorite was a 24^th birthday present: a red-and-white checkered bowling shirt, with “Susie” embroidered on the front, “New York Philharmonickers” sewn on the back, and the number 24 emblazed under the “team” name. When Susan unwrapped it at her party, she looked puzzled, her smug friends traded looks of “amusement,” and I resisted the temptation to lecture on irony or bad manners. None of this, however, dampened my enthusiasm for Susan.

A week after the birthday party, I showed up at Susan’s with greased hair and a sleeveless T-shirt to take her to see “American Graffiti.” Back at her apartment after the movie, I surprised her with two tickets to the symphony. She surprised me with a captivating performance of “I haven’t gotten over my last boyfriend” and a superb finale of “I hope we can still be friends.”

I dropped my head and slowly walked out the door, trying to look even more broken than I felt; I had no “Walk like a Man” exit routine in my repertoire.

I called my friend Joe, hoping for sympathy. Instead, he suggested counseling, to figure out why I had put myself through such turmoil, trying so hard when it was clearly hopeless.

“What if she changes her mind, and it works out?“ I asked Joe.

“Then I’ll suggest counseling for her,” he said, with a hint of a smile.

“What did you see in her, anyway?” he continued. “She just doesn’t seem your type.”

That was precisely what I had seen in her, I should have admitted to Joe. But, then he would have insisted on counseling for me.

Instead, I spent the next few months hoping Susan would call and afraid she would call. Finally, I got tired of beating myself up and called her, inviting her to join Joe and me for a movie. She said she was glad we could be friends. I smiled, thinking to myself, “Step one, check.” We got together in safe situations a few more times, and I finally convinced myself that Susan really did want to be friends. I still wanted to raise our children and grow old with her – as friends, of course.

Finally, I gave up thinking I had a future with someone who (1) hadn’t gotten over someone else, (2) hadn’t gotten into me, (3) hung out with friends who thought she was slumming, and (4), was packing to leave for graduate school.

So I beat her out the door, enrolling in journalism school at the University of Missouri. Boy, did I show her!

At that point, I surprised myself. I moved to Columbia, Missouri, took up residence in the journalism program and practically moved in at the newspaper, a general circulation daily published by the program. My writing was finding its way to Page 1 and I was finding my way to self-esteem. I went days at a time without thinking about Susan.

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Then came “The Call.” If this were a TV show, it would have broken for a commercial the moment I picked up the phone and heard, “Hi, it’s Susan.”

Susan was driving her younger brother to college at Washington University in St. Louis in two weeks and wanted to visit me for a couple of days. I held myself together just enough to say yes. When I hung up, I enjoyed the best 30 seconds of my life.

Then I unraveled. “I can’t do it,” I thought. “I’ll never pass this audition.” It was pure terror.

I slapped myself around and made up my mind to win the tryout. I composed a list: what to wear, what to do, where to go, what to say, where to eat, how to eat, how much to tip.

Ignoring Columbia’s sweltering summer, I chose a reporter ensemble for Susan’s arrival: blue corduroy jeans and a long-sleeve white shirt – wrinkled, sleeves rolled up. That critical decision out of the way, I turned to my entrance.

Yes, my entrance. I knew I’d look weak if I were waiting for Susan in my apartment, so I decided to leave a key and a note, explaining that I’d been called back to the newsroom to finish a big story. It didn’t matter that I was off that day.

I stumbled through the next two weeks. Susan was due on a Friday at 4, so I headed for the newsroom at 3 and waited for her call. When it came, I loosely covered the receiver and yelled across the newsroom, “I’m leaving. Call if the mayor gets back to me.” Ignoring the puzzled stares, I retreated to the men’s room to brush my teeth, reinforce my deodorant and practice breathing.

When I pulled up, Susan was sipping a beer on the porch and reading the newspaper. She kissed me on the cheek and thanked me for leaving the paper opened to one of my articles. (I had thought about highlighting it, but even I had some limits – and no highlighters.

We walked to a quiet Italian restaurant, with Susan looping her arm through mine and leaning her head against my shoulder. I would have been content to die at that moment, but I had no such luck. We did get through dinner without my spilling anything, and, after tipping generously, I showed Susan around town.

Returning home, I fretted (and perspired heavily) over the next big challenge: our first night of sleeping together. I’d even practiced lying in bed and reaching for my nightstand drawer, to make sure I could find a condom in the dark. I could, and we did.

When I awoke the next morning, the spot next to me was vacant. Tracking kitchen sounds, I found Susan making coffee. “Good morning,” she said, her back to me; when she turned, her face said something else.

At that moment, standing in the kitchen, I knew Susan had already answered whatever questions she had about me and us, and the answers were “no.”

I wanted to call “do-over,” but her eyes told me she had checked out. My face must have convinced her to keep it to herself, so we entered into an unspoken conspiracy of silence.

I dreaded the next two days, but I didn’t have the courage to pull the plug. So, pretending nothing had changed, we proceeded with our plan to camp overnight in the Ozarks. It quickly took on the features of a forced march, with awkward silences and clumsy conversations. Susan gradually slipped into automatic pilot, tuning out as I cursed the steamy Missouri heat, snapped at our server in a roadside restaurant, and tore up a map that directed us to a Dairy Queen instead of the state park. I was falling apart; I was sure she was counting hours until she left.

We finally found the park, and a campsite – which, in keeping with the weekend theme, turned out all wrong. The only open tent site tilted at a 45-degree angle. The picnic table was anchored 10 feet from a dumpster overflowing with garbage and mosquitoes. And our campground neighbors were a bunch of mullet-heads, with a Confederate flag and hints of “Deliverance.”

We pitched our tent, hauled water from the pump, wiped away sweat, and hit the trails. Our map promised a “breathtaking” waterfall; two miles in, we found an IV drip of water crawling over a giant rock, spray painted with “Realty sucks.” Had I packed a can of paint (or a highlighter), I would have corrected the spelling or replied “Your right” to the existential realtor. Instead, Susan and I silently marched back to the campground, where we discovered that our neighbors apparently considered Metallica best appreciated at 200 decibels.

I now understood why Jed Clampett fled the Ozarks and the south lost the Civil War.

Wishing I could leave, too, I tried to fill the silence and the time with mindless chatter and rehearsed jokes. Susan laughed – a few notches too loud and a few seconds too late. Then, pointing to the tilted tent, I joked about “the gravity of the situation.” Susan responded with the worst possible move: She hugged me.

I screamed to myself in pain and tightened. She asked what was wrong, but my garbled words communicated only distress. With an “I can’t talk right now” wave of my hand, I staggered away and found a trail leading out of the campground. I also found my voice.

“Shit,” I yelled. Then I picked up a rock and threw it at a tree. I missed.

Then I cried.

I don’t know how long I cried or how far I walked, but – drained of energy and emotion – I stumbled back to our campsite. “Let’s go to bed,” Susan said.

If anyone had asked what was least likely to happen in the tent that night, I would have quickly answered, “We made love.”

We made love. Considering the dynamics, “making believe” is a better description, but it happened. I don’t remember starting or finishing, but I awoke the next morning, entangled with Susan and frozen in place, afraid to stir her or do anything to take us back to where we’d been the day before. When she woke up, however, her eyes were clearly packed for home. I wondered what new test I had failed.

We broke down the camp, loaded our car, and headed back to Columbia in silence. I drove and Susan slept, or at least kept her eyes closed. I catalogued everything I hated about her, from her elitist friends to her snobbish taste in music to her annoying laugh. But I succeeded only in reminding myself that I still wanted her more than anyone or anything I had ever wanted.

When we reached my apartment, we transferred her belongings to her car.

“Snack?” I asked. Susan said she was meeting her brother in St. Louis for dinner.

“Lie with me awhile?” My desperation immediately embarrassed me.

Susan shook her head, gently kissed me on the cheek and turned toward her car. Promising myself I wouldn’t look back, I climbed the steps to my apartment, opened the screen door, and looked back. She didn’t.

I hated her for a year, throwing out “Viva Vivaldi” and keeping Frankie Valli. Then I gradually returned to some sense of normalcy, even going days without thinking about her . . . or Vivaldi.

After another year went by, I heard from her. I was back in New York, where my father was dying. I had kept a lifeline with friends back in Nashville, including the couple who had introduced me to Susan. One or both of them apparently had spoken with her and told her about my father.

The note was perfect – perfectly appropriate for the situation. Perfectly Susan. It was brief. Susan expressed her sympathy without overwriting. And it ended with this sentence, which I still remember, verbatim: “I wish you well, and I’ll check in with Dan and Rachel to find out how you are doing.”

I was awed. In that one sentence, Susan had managed to express kindness and absolutely close the door, without slamming it. The letter was perfect.

Today, more than 40 years later, I still look back, and I realize I had not only tried to hide who I was; I never tried to find out who Susan was. I think I fell in love with the idea of falling in love with someone like her – unlike anyone I’d ever met before and, in my mind, much too good for me. I wondered what would have happened had she spent that awful weekend with the real me, but I eventually stopped thinking about her.

I did ask Dan and Rachel how she was doing, but only twice.