A Light in the Dark - Part II
The summer I was fifteen, I fell in love for the first time. The bliss of that experience was short lived and what followed was a dreary emotional desert that left me wondering what was the point of living when we are all just going to die.
THIS IS PART 2 of a SIX-PART STORY
Image: Cathal Mac An Bheatha
What did I actually know about the gardener? Very little. He was a Princeton graduate, which gave him a certain cachet, and he would soon be going into the army, which, in my opinion, didn’t compute with his poetic good looks or bookish manner. His name was John, but I don’t think we ever referred to him as anything but “the gardener.” Certainly, I don’t remember ever seeing him handling plants or mowing the lawn or doing what a gardener ought to be doing. Instead I’d see him out on the front porch, bent over a book, hands in his hair. He was reading Anna Karenina, which I found very impressive.
Anyone who’s ever spent a few weeks with a small group of people, all engaged in the same endeavor (in this case learning French) and all, whether they like it or not, suddenly involved in one another’s personal lives and dramas, knows that time stops, slows, thickens, becomes weirdly attenuated. And so it was that summer. That I would one day see John the gardener again, in a diminished and unkind light, was something I, of course, didn’t know at the time. To me he was a mythic figure, a mystery, a nut I had to crack. I was obsessed with him. I wanted to follow him around, be with him every minute of the day, be his love.
If I was playing with fire, I didn’t care. Probably in my mind the whole thing was a heightened daydream, a fantasy that would never actually play out in real life. And boy was I wrong. In the last few days of camp, things changed.
One afternoon I received a message to meet the gardener in his cabin, which was in a wooded area on the fringes of the property. My stomach must’ve dropped to my knees. Certainly I was shaking. Certainly I ran to the bathroom to check eye makeup and lipstick. To change into cleaner shorts, a tighter Tee. I was fifteen, remember, and the gardener was twenty-one, a six year difference that made all the difference. I didn’t know the first thing about birth control -- I’d never even been properly kissed. But my mind was made up, there was no question that I had to do this, and bravely I set out into the woods, so nervous that I chain smoked the whole way there.
The windows of the cabin were grimy and covered with vines and branches; it was impossible to see inside. I stared at the place for a minute or two, wondering if the gardener was actually in there or if this had been a joke. Sweat ran down my back as I smoked the last cigarette down to its filter. Then, slowly, I moved forward and knocked on the door.
Cover photo: Svetlana Gumerova