Page 38 of Twice
As I read this over, Boss, I realize how chaste it seems. Young people today think nothing of jumping into bed the first time they meet. All those movie scenes where the couple bursts through the apartment door and slams against the wall, undressing each other in mad abandon. I’m sure it happened back in the ’70s, too. But not to me. Not when I was nineteen, anyhow. Things went slower. And deep down, I sensed that when it came to Gianna, her affection would need to be earned, deliberately, meritoriously. Maybe I was just too scared to go faster.
In any case, summer came and we both went home, me to Philadelphia and Gianna to San Francisco, her father’s latest transfer. But we spoke on the phone a few times, and after a month she told me she was coming to visit her roommate, who, lucky for me, lived in New Jersey, just over the bridge.
“Maybe we can hang out?” I said.
“Yeah, that would be cool,” she replied.
The week she arrived, we agreed to meet on a Saturdayafternoon and go to the Philadelphia Zoo. I figured that was innocent enough. And zoos seemed to work for us.
I borrowed my father’s Plymouth and picked her up at her roommate’s house. I can still remember the way she bounded out the front door, in a backless blue denim dress with a white bandanna in her hair, her omnipresent camera around her neck. She smiled before she even reached the car, as if happiness were her default mode.
“Hey, stranger,” she said, pulling open the door.
“Hey,” I replied.
“Let’s go see some elephants.”
We spent the early afternoon wandering through the exhibits, eating ice cream, and giving the animals names. Gianna snapped pictures, and I asked questions about cameras, lenses, anything to keep her talking. I loved the cadence of her voice when she got excited, and her bursts of knowledge, which left me bedeviled. “Did you know llamas hum when they’re happy?” “Did you know cheetahs can see three miles away?”She was so full of facts that I adopted a standard response—“I didn’t know that”—until I said it so often, she started mimicking me.
“I didn’t know that... I didn’t know that,” she said, deepening her voice and crossing her eyes like a broken toy. I laughed.
“You should know more things, Alfie Logan.”
“I know that.”
“Ha ha.”
Of course, one thing I did know that Gianna did not washow many miscues I had erased from her memory. Times I did something embarrassing or mumbled something out of jealousy. She once said to me, “Don’t you ever mess up, Alfie?” and I wanted to answer,You have no idea.Instead, I hid my flaws, afraid they would cost me her affection.
That would prove to be a mistake, and my first lesson in The Truth About True Love: what we yearn for, deep down, is a heart that will embrace usafterwe make a fool of ourselves.
?
We stayed at the zoo until just past sunset, when the animals, having had their final feedings, began crawling off to sleep.
“We should go, I guess,” I said.
She looked disappointed.
“But we’re having fun.”
“Yeah, we are.”
“You know what my favorite time of day was in Africa, Alfie?”
“What?”
“Just after sundown, when you started to hear the noises. The insects chirping. The cuckoos and the other birds, the nightjars, the owls. Sometimes you’d hear the zebras barking.”
“Why did you like that?”
“I don’t know. I guess it made me feel less alone.”
“You felt alone in Africa?”
She looked at me as if considering a secret.
“I feel alone most of the time.”
