From the Other Side by
100
(166 Stories)

Loading Share Buttons...

/ Stories

I had taken a year off, returned as a junior and was living off-campus in a ramshackle apartment over a pizzeria and a Chinese laundry. Imagine the pungent blend of pizza and hot laundry on a humid Cambridge day. Life was complicated, as it is for most 20-year-olds, not exclusively focused on academics. The apartment buzzed with students and freaks, jazz, folk music, r&b, black box theaters, and lousy Mexican weed.

That 'Cliffie who had a crush on me who I blew off as a pest and lived to regret it...

I was taking a creative writing class, a welcome departure from my American history major. One of my workshop mates, Lynn, had landed early in her freshman year at Radcliffe, the daughter of a sociology professor, a noted authority on the Soviet Union. Lynn wrote penetrating, reflective, adolescent stories; they were good, clearly memorable, well-written, full of dark, youthful probing.

Her family was friends with Bernard Malamud, the novelist, essayist, and short story writer extraordinaire. She talked frankly, without pretense about Malamud’s influence on her, although she couldn’t define it. She was 17. How could she have described such a thing?

She would show up at my apartment on her bicycle, the same bike she used to ride around Cambridge when she was a high school student, so recently. She would plague me with questions. Who did I like as a writer? Did I ever read women? Why or why not? Why did I say this thing in my latest story? What did Bob Dylan mean when he said “I need a dump truck, mama, to unload my head”? She didn’t ask bullshit questions to appear smart. She was smart. She knew she was smart. The only bullshit questions she asked weren’t bullshit at all: Do you like me? Do you think I’m pretty?

She was so young. She had bad skin. Her hair was a fright. She covered her coltish body in long peasant dresses and mismatched jerseys. Her questions annoyed me, so naïve, so persistent. Still, I liked her, liked her writing and the direct urgency of her curiosity. I was at once flattered by her attention and threatened by her writing and her native intelligence.

Yes, Lynn had a crush on me. I was immersed in a ragged, on-again, off-again relationship with another girl woman, more worldly, more wary, and much less wise. My response, young man, was to push Lynn away.

New Year’s eve, 1965 was unseasonably warm up and down the East Coast. Tropical air from the Gulf softened the winter night to 70 degrees. Lynn and I went for a long, tipsy walk, across the Charles into Boston. The warm weather acted as a de-inhibitor and when we returned to Cambridge, Lynn risked all by staying with me into the early morning hours. She was a virgin, and I wasn’t all that far behind. I remember our young bodies, so smooth in the street light from the dirty window, together, my distance, her young, articulate confusion…”I could love you, she said. “But not if you don’t love me from the other side. And you don’t.”

I lay silent. She was right.

“This will be my first time,” she said. “I don’t think I want to do it with somebody who doesn’t love me.”

I held her, our nudity strangely irrelevant. I don’t remember if we cried together, we could have, but I do remember a sad serenity that drowned out any flicker of missed male opportunity. In the growing jeopardy of first light, we swapped questions, challenges, and stubborn anger, followed by Lynn’s tearful departure from my apartment.

Three years and three thousand miles down the time/space continuum, I was working with a theater company in San Francisco and Lynn had come west to study psychology at a prestigious graduate institute in the East Bay. We met. She had, not surprisingly, matured. Beautiful, exotic, tall, still boho, and fiercely aloof.

Had we had the opportunity to meet again, we might have found common ground on a higher level, but I was immersed in yet another ragged relationship and Lynn had found herself.

#  #  #

 

 

 

 

Profile photo of Charles Degelman Charles Degelman
Writer, editor, and educator based in Los Angeles. He's also played a lot of music. Degelman teaches writing at California State University, Los Angeles. 

Degelman lives in the hills of Hollywood with his companion on the road of life, four cats, assorted dogs, and a coterie of communard brothers and sisters.

Visit Author's Website



Characterizations: moving, well written

Comments

  1. Laurie Levy says:

    I really admire your honesty as the recipient of the crush. This is the only story that dared to take this point of view. The feeling of nostalgia and “what if” come through so well. I have come to think that in life, timing is everything. A well-written story, Charles, with a very different take on this topic.

  2. Ah, those regrets and those might-have-been questions!
    And why is youth, and those wonderfully grungy apartments always wasted on the young!

  3. Suzy says:

    Wonderful story, told, as you say “from the other side.” How interesting to be the recipient of a crush and know that you are. Most of the crushes written about here didn’t know they were being crushed on (is that a term?), nice to get a different perspective. And as always, you write so beautifully. I love phrases like “her coltish body” and “another girl woman, more worldly, more wary, and much less wise.” Musta been that creative writing class you took where you learned it all. . . .

    • Thanks, Suzy, for your kind and supportive words. It was a bittersweet experience to write this story. Another unrequited love. Not sure I learned how to live in that creative writing class, but it did, in ways, keep me alive, and, of course, I got to meet the person AKA Lynn. I’m happy to say I’ve met a few wonderful people while writing…

  4. Marian says:

    One thing I’ve found in love, Charles, is that timing can be everything. Thanks for a revealing story that shows how you and Lynn evolved and how timing interfered.

    • Oh, yes, timing certainly plays a huge part of destiny here on the good ol’ time/space continuum. I often think of people with whom I have a great deal in common who I often shared space and events without knowing until later. But yes, striking, how quickly we were all changing in our fast-moving youths and in those fast-moving times.

  5. And now I have a crush on Lynn…wish I had known her. What a gorgeous, evocative story, Charles!

  6. Betsy Pfau says:

    Somehow, I didn’t see this two months ago, but still…WOW! Your writing always blows me away, Chaz. The image of the the two nude bodies lying in the murky light, perhaps both crying, she won’t give in if you don’t love her. Oh my god. I wish I had been so wise and self-possessed. Incredible story, told with virtuosity.

    • Wow back at ya, Betsy. Thanks for your kind words. Your new comment prompted me to re-read this piece, written just two months ago when I had been moved to recall that sad, sweet relationship. So glad you enjoyed this retrospective “from the other side.”

  7. Dave Ventre says:

    Sweet and brave. I have to my knowledge only once been anyone’s crush, and it was someone in whom I had no interest in because I thought her unattractive. I was young. Oddly, her physical “type” a few years later became my favorite and still is!

  8. Good to read your sweet story of a youthful relationship again Chas, and can see those two young bodies bearing their souls in that grungy apartment!

  9. pattyv says:

    Curious to know C, do you fall more in love with Lynn as the years pass? Does she represent something more than unrequited love? I know there must be many more love stories from you to catch up with, but in this particular one your more serious relationships with other women were referred to as “wary or ragged”. I loved the way it’s written, a glimpse into the delicate fabric of a unique and extraordinary encounter.

    • Thanks for your perceptive remarks regarding Lynn and “The Other [dark] Side” of a love affair. For a variety of reasons, I don’t think I knew what love was at the time. Lynn and I probably wouldn’t have made it for long, but she was an extraordinary young woman. She was a very young version of the soulmate I met a decade later.

  10. I am confused by the various years of the comments: I guess it means you wrote this story a few years ago and re-used it for a different prompt, perhaps for several different prompts? Well, that’s permitted. Anyway, I never saw it before and I really like it. It is truly a MOOD piece. Very evocative of the time and also of the specific relationship. Enchanting.

Leave a Reply