First Love, Lost Love
A Pinewood Lake Story
Jory Sherman
Smashwords Edition
First Love, Lost Love
Presented by Publishing by Rebecca J. Vickery
Digital ISBN: 978-1-4658-7269-2
Copyright © January 2012 Jory Sherman
Cover Art Copyright © 2012 Laura Shinn
(Painting of Pinewood Lake courtesy of Jory Sherman)
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Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
First Love, Lost Love is a work of fiction.
Though actual locations may be mentioned, they are used in a fictitious manner and the events and occurrences were invented in the mind and imagination of the author except for the inclusion of actual historical facts. Similarities of characters or names used within to any person – past, present, or future – are coincidental except where actual historical characters are purposely interwoven.
Dedication
For Charlotte and Carol
My wife and I live in Pinewood Lake, California. We are, or were, happy until I became haunted – my mind possessed by a girl and memories from my past. Now my wife is confused and frightened, as am I.
Why are the memories of my first love so overwhelming? Why am I letting them affect our life? Will revisiting the past drive us apart, or prove we were meant to be together?
Chapter 1: In the Beginning
There is confusion here in this mountain place, all because of a girl I lost over twenty years ago. She was buried in memory for so long I thought she would never reappear, but she has, and I must try to put her into focus. Especially now, now that I'm happy and married to the dream I had all my life. The lost girl came back to me in the form of a phone call, then took on further flesh in a letter, and I saw her once, a few months ago, so that she became suddenly real again, suddenly confusing.
Her name is Ariel, which is appropriate. It means "the wind" and that's the way she's been with me, vagrant and elusive, ghostly and singing all the sad gone years that have passed through me. Ariel Singer, her maiden name twenty-odd years ago, a million years ago in a small mountain town like this one, only 1600 miles from here.
I live in a place called Pinewood Lake in California. I'm Joey Victor and my present wife's name is Annette. She's a ghost herself, though she doesn't know it. I love her and she hardly knows that either. This is my predicament and it's so complicated I may not be able to explain it to anyone.
Yet I live in this time and in this place—with my memory of the past in a town called Lowen, Colorado, near the windings of the North and South St. Vrain Rivers. That's where my young boy heart fell in love and started all this, this that is culminated in Pinewood Lake, but not yet finished. I am only forty years old, after all, and cannot see into the future. Annette knows little about my past, my boyhood, because we have only been married five years, yet she is curious, jealous even, and I write these words only to explain to her that she is somehow part of that past she doesn't know.
Annette is the girl I should have married. It took me thirty-five years to find her and then it was difficult to explain to her that I knew about her when I was in my teens. It is still difficult to explain this to her. She is not a mirror-image nor a surrogate lover. She is the one lover, but it took me all those years to meet her, years of pain and sorrow, of missed family, drunkenness, military service and wives, years of poetry and wine, of empty towns, easy girls, and the mist of memories flowing around me; memories of her and the lost girl in Lowen, named Ariel, whose visions have always intruded on my life.
I said it would be difficult to explain.
Yet, I'm going to try.
Chapter 2: Lowen
This used to be a small Colorado town at the forks of the North and South St. Vrain Rivers. I don't even know if it's there anymore. I sometimes go back there in my mind and wade my eyes in one of the rivers. I don't know which one of the two it is. It doesn't matter. It is a river made out of memories.
The town has only 1200 inhabitants. Most of them are loners, tavern dwellers. People from small towns who moved to a small town in the mountains to get away from small towns. The river drew them here, but the taverns keep them here. They play cards, talk, drink. They drink to forget their past or obscure the present. It seems, at times, that they sit at the bars and listen to the river. And, sometimes, I think, they see the river in their drink glasses, in the beer, looking, then, like the way the St. Vrain looks in the spring when it runs full and the sun is shining, shooting amber into its bubbles, its frantic, mud-laden, silt-soaked depths flecked with silicon and pyrite. The river, at those times, dances rampant over the rocks, shoots rusty spray into the air and sings like a lost woman keening for her lost children. Oh, you can hear these sounds and see the shadows it throws on the banks and remember the terrible things in its blind past.
This river of memories is something. It flows full of dead children and suicidal old women. It also has legs in it, from waders who left their shadows on the banks. It is a swift river that moves like melted silver at night when the moon is full over the Rockies. Most of the memories in it are bad ones, but they soon move away, the flow is so swift.
An old woman went there once to find her drowned son. She walked into the river and you could only see her head above the waters. Her head rippled in rhythm with her loon-like cries. The firemen came, and the town marshal, who was only a swamper before they gave him a shiny badge. The townspeople came to jeer. They jeered while the old woman screamed her son's name all over the hurrying waters.
They dragged her out, finally, because they said she was crazy. They said her boy was no longer in the river.
They were wrong.
All of us saw him there, reaching out for his old crazy mother who was screaming.
Chapter 3: Pinewood Lake
Forty years old and another town. Pinewood Lake floating out there like a wide river caught at bay. I don't know what to make of it. I am with Annette and we have children: hers, mine and ours. She is the whole woman, the real woman, and I am still living in the past. I'm a shadow as much as substance because I don't know where Joey Victor is. He is me, but he keeps changing.
A phone call from Ariel after twenty-three years of silence. I look at the phone and listen to a voice I heard in Lowen and in Compton and in my bunk in the Philippines and aboard ship when I was aching for her. I hear the voice and I don't want to let it go.
"Is this you, Joey?"
"It's me."
"Do you know who this is?"
"Ariel. Ariel Singer. But your name is Willows now. Ariel Willows."
"Yes. I've been wondering where you were. I've been trying to find you."
"I've been trying to find you. I wrote so many poems about you. They were published. You never saw them."
"No."
In my ear the keening is subliminal. There is no use to go back to the past, not that far, but man is the most curious of animals. I am the most curious of curious. Especially about a lost love.
Annette, in the next room, hears me. Her brain screams: who, who, who! Oh, God, I can't explain right now.
Annette, beneath me you are the poetry of lost years. There is no past between us, no dead husband, no abandoned wives, only you and me, here in this mountain silence listening to the days riffle through the green pines.
From our front yard we can wander our minds through the forest and we have but few neighbors, you and I. I can leave the phone off the hook. I can hang up the years that have suddenly come between us. Ariel is only a girl I knew twenty-three years ago, part of the shadow that you have noticed. Am I part of the shadow too? I don't know. I don't think so.
When I am with you, in our bed that reeks of pines and our special scents, there are no shadows. There is only you and me. And we have cast no shadows yet.
Chapter 4: Lowen Cougar
The cougar screams at night in this lost town of Lowen. His scream is tawny and rough like a sheared wheat field. I don't know what he means. He makes my hair stand up. He is ignored by the townspeople. There is something he is trying to say. Perhaps he is some kind of symbol of a gone world screaming for help.
There is a girl here.
She is not tawny. She has dark hair, dark eyes, and a dark smile. She shines like the moon in your hand. She shines all through you like silver.
She plays the piano. Her name is Ariel.
The keys move around like dominoes as she plays. Her fingers are deft on the ivories and on the blacks. They are strange birds among the tinkling notes. I wish I could feed them, capture them in their flight.
I am in love with this girl whose name is Ariel.
I will always be in love with her. With her hands, with her piano.
On the mountains above the town, the pines are green and silver because of the moon and the natural color of silence. I look dumbly at the pines because I am unable to speak in their inarticulate languages.
I am only fourteen years old. I don't know what to say. Everything is far away, even the things that seem close.
There is a dark girl in this dark town. The cougar pads along the rimrock trails in the soft articulate light of the moon. Near the sawmill, a nine-foot timber wolf prowls the shadows, sniffing the spoors of men who sweated there while the green chain rang.
She is close to me in my garage room. This is the room I made for myself so that I could escape from my mother. A place to read and think, be alone. I was tired of reading under a tent blanket by flashlight. At the time, this garage was the farthest place I could find that would let me live out my adolescence without parental supervision. Or, maybe the room was a way to sleep closer to Ariel. The teen years are such madness, maybe that was the main reason I made a little private house out of our garage. To be closer to Ariel.
She is next door, asleep, too young to know the fires that stir in me. Pillow, breasts, perfume, the stale dying of the cola's essence. Whispers of the mind, Vic Damone singing, the smell of roses outside the window. So close, so very distant, Ariel. The piano notes, still hurting inside me. Chopin, the cougar, the wolf stretching over the green wet lumber at the sawmill, wary of the yellow cougar, the window aching in its opaque prison of night.
We have just met, Ariel and I. She is the girl I was to meet. I met her.
Now, it's up to the moon.
Let's see what tides it will pull.
Chapter 5: The Schoolrooms
Did you ever go back to the schoolrooms of your childhood? They are smaller now, empty, full of the ghost voices of your companions. I am there now, in my mind, and that's where I have the vision of the lost girl. This is where we looked at each other across the room, where we ached from bell to bell, where we flirted and lived our fantasies of marriage, picket fenced home and children of our own.
She was dark-haired and brown-eyed, tall, with a smile that curved like a valentine.
She played the piano and my heart.
The schoolyard is so vacant now with our absence. It is as though the world has gone dead. There are only the remnants of laughter there among the weeds and the rusting fences. The bricks of the school are sad crumbling things falling out of my mind so fast I can't put them back in their places. The halls are bereft of life, worn from the tread of many shoes that have gone on to graveyards or offices or aboard ships.
We didn't listen to the footfalls when we were there. We can hear them now like a distant muffled thunder.
Her name was Ariel.
A perfect name.
She was a song, and still is. Every movement of her was like a poem. Her smile was the bright one of the new moon.
Where have you gone, Ariel? Were you only a childhood sweetheart put there like some renascent Eve in a garden, only to fade away when life got too complicated?
I am looking for you. I have been looking for you for over twenty years, back there in Lowen, in the schoolrooms, in your house at the piano, and here, on these pages that fill up with my words, my tears.
Chapter 6: The Girls
A dark girl in a dark town. Ariel like a shadow and me, like a sun, seeking.
Before her, though, there was another. Marianne. Golden, azure-eyed, honeyed, she was a girl who made you think of silk and the way bees sought out flowers along the hillsides.
"Talk to me."
"You're so beautiful."
"Kiss me."
"You're better than I am."
"Make love to me."
"I love you."
"Don't say that."
"Talk to me."
There is a grove of trees where the cars park on dark nights. You can hear the St. Vrain River move down to the Platte on silver ribbons while you're kissing a girl you will never see again. In the river, the moon, the smiles of girls, the curl of their eyelashes, the subjective warmth of their thighs, forbidden gardens.
Girl of silver, girl of velvet. I must make a choice.
Down by the river, in the trees, I find the golden flesh, the silk of forbidden touches.
Marianne. Mention me in the rivers, among trees, with the girls I loved. Mention me looking and waiting and longing. Mention the other girls, lost to themselves, afraid to say "yes," afraid to say "no."
I have you here in my scrapbook of search, Marianne and Ariel. Both of you.
The smell of mint in your hair, sweetheart, the smell of rivers in your wide thighs, the scent of flowers in the honey of your kisses.
Which of you is here?
Which of you is my lost girl?
Marianne?
Ariel?
There is no answer.
You both are webs of things that stretch across old pathways. You both are remnants of my aching childhood, intruders on my present dreams.
Ariel. Marianne.
Dark and golden girls. Oh, listen to the pines, listen to the talk of the trees that remember.
Chapter 7: Drinking Forgetfulness
In your drink at a San Francisco bar you could see the girl. You could see Ariel.
Fifty cents a drink.
A cheap way to die, to look at the past shaped like a girl.
It took me twenty some odd years to drink away the vision, to stir out the memory.
You marry other wives. You marry your mother, your sister. You marry your father's dream.
The waters of the St. Vrain ache through strange rock canyons. They carry the moon in their smooth running waters, they carry ghosts in their rippling depths. If you see me in Manila having a rum and Coke, you think of her dark beauty and the sadness of mountain towns.
If you see me in Los Angeles having a beer with friends, you know. She is there, on the periphery. Dark girl from a dark town.
Heavy in my sleep.
The cost of a thousand beers, a hundred thousand cocktails. The cost of nepenthe. The cost of balm. We have swum the river without ever getting wet. Ariel and I. We have been through the rapids, among the crazy tumbled rocks—down past Denver, the plains.
I wish I could sleep close to her breasts on some lonely nights.
I wish I could see her face next to me on the pillow.
I'll have a beer, bartender, and don't talk to me for a while.
I want to buy a memory.
For fifty cents a peek.
For a while.
I keep you here, my darling, in this amber fountain. I keep you here in this glass that swells like a sea. I keep you here. I keep you. Always. All ways. Darling.
Another one, bartender. Another one. Another. Keep me lonely. Keep me with the dark girl. In the St. Vrain, the moon has dark hair, is curved like a young woman dancing.
Chapter 8: The Others in Lowen
Ariel and I didn't need other people. They were around us, but we couldn't do much with them. There were her parents, Phil and Thelma, next door to us. My parents were Ralph and Bernice. She had a little sister named Janice. I had two sisters and a brother. Kit, a year younger than myself, Bob, ten years younger, and Sonya, twelve years younger.
We had a cocker spaniel named Lady Jane. Ariel had cats, Polly and Rex, calico-colored menaces that Lady Jane chased out of our rose-planted yard every time they came through the picket fence.
The other people didn't matter in the scheme of things between us, though they mattered, of course. We just couldn't tell them how much we loved each other.
On the other side of our house lived a preacher, Congregationalist, Reverend Roy P. Williams, his wife Sally. There was a kid in the neighborhood named Wilbur Dickerson, a gangly guy with a lopsided face, dark hair, simple mind.
Another guy, crude, rough, swaggering, was named Burt Blore. He was always after Ariel and all the girls liked him because he was a stud. He was a homely stud, but that didn't make any difference. There were heel marks all over the inside of his car.
There was a druggist, Herb Naylor, a town marshal named Vern Smith, and a man who owned a pawn shop and curio store named Buster Jones. Buster later gave me money to run away from home. Three dollars. Vern Smith wore a gun and was proud of his badge. He tried to keep the peace, but he was afraid of everything.
I liked Ariel's parents. They probably didn't like me. Why should they? We were always whispering and necking, giggling behind their backs. They were sweet, though.
I wonder how sweet they would be now if they knew their daughter was happily married, still in love with me, writing to me and calling me all the time? They are not that sort, and neither is Ariel.
Neither am I.
People do strange things when they're in love.
They do these things even after many years have passed between them and they've gone their separate ways.
Curse time and curse fate, but don't curse us. We can no more help ourselves than the moon can help coming up over Pinewood Lake and spilling its silver blood on the silent waters. This was the same moon that Ariel and I saw struggling through the riffles of the St. Vrain while we held each other and vowed never to let each other go.
Never.
Chapter 9: Annette