Boyfriends from yesteryear

“I have a question I need to ask you.”

He looks up at me from across the table, midway through a sip of his beer. There is silence. He has a look of surprise on his face, anticipation.

What do I need to know almost thirty years after we were lovers?

He had emailed me out of the blue, and here we are, having lunch. I haven’t seen him since the last time I waved goodbye as his girlfriend. He lives on the other side of the country, is married, and has two grown children. But he was coming through town, and thought it might be  fun to meet. He had come back this way for a reunion at his high school, so maybe he was in nostalgia mode. We had dated when we were at university – for eight months.

The semester after we met, I transferred away to another university. He tried to keep it going with me. He visited – once. Anxious to get on with my new life in my new university, where I was deeply ensconsed in the academics, I dumped him.

But I had a vague recollection that I did it callously; that I hurt him. When he had visited me at the university I had transferred to, I remember wishing that he hadn’t come. The courses at this new school were hard, and I was terribly distracted. But I didn’t know how to just say, ‘Don’t come. We really can’t continue this long-distance relationship. I have too much going on.’ So I figure I did the old passive-aggressive thing – and made it clear, through my behaviour, and not my words – that I didn’t want him, anymore.I had been a coward.

Thirty years later, over beer and a light lunch, I found the words to ask. I wanted to know if I had been mean to him.

“Yes, you were,” he says sweetly, smiling at me gently.

“I’m sorry,” I reply. “I just didn’t know how to break up with someone.”

We went over what happened. He had driven a long distance to see me. “You didn’t want me there. It was obvious,” he says. All I had talked about, apparently, were the courses I was taking. “It was all very intense,” he recalls, referring to the academic rigour of the school, as he resumed eating his lunch.

What a jerk I must have been, I thought. We then talked about how he had tried his best to please me  – he had driven me out into the countryside to see the colourful trees of fall, to help me relax. We had gone to some amusement park. We had laughed. We had slept together.

(Just prior to seeing him this week, he had scanned an old photograph he had of me, taken in my dorm room, on that weekend he visited almost thirty years, and sent it to me via email, as a lark. I looked pensive and studious at my desk, reading in my bathrobe.)

“I really loved you,” he suddenly blurts. He puts his hand over his heart and pats it gently.  “You broke my heart.”

“I did?”

I am shocked. I didn’t know. I didn’t think of that relationship as a big, deeply felt one. (I didn’t have many boyfriends. I was a rather serious young woman – about education and writing and life. And while I do remember the relationship fondly, its ending never broke my heart.)

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I say again, looking into his calm, blue eyes.

“It’s okay. I’m over it. No worries,” he laughs.

A beat of silence and pasta-eating.

“You were so beautiful, and you were more sophisticated that I was,” he says suddenly. “I just thought I was the luckiest guy that you would want to go out with me.” He shrugs slightly. He met his future-wife shortly after, and they have been together all this time, happily. He says he has had an amazingly blessed life.

“You are such a good guy,” I say. “I was just confused.”

He reddens slightly, smiles, and looks down at his plate. “You just knew what you wanted,” he counters. “You had found your place at that school. I was still floundering. I don’t blame you,” he continues sweetly.

What we didn’t discuss was more ruthless behaviour on my part. We broke up that fall, but that following summer, I returned to the small town, where we had gone to school, and where he still was, along with some of my friends, whom I wanted to see. I saw him again.

And we slept together. It was my little experiment; my shamefully vain experiment in female power. I wanted to see how I would feel being with him again. I wanted him to want me, which I knew he would.  I knew he still liked me; was besotted with me. It was lovely, but nothing special, and I was sort of watching myself, there in bed with him, as if my mind was up on the ceiling, looking down, ‘Oh there you are, having sex with an old boyfriend,” my head told me. He talked about how much he missed me. He had a file of photographs of me, kept in a drawer. It was his Gracie collection, he said.

I never saw him again. I went home. I returned to university the following September. I had a new boyfriend. When I graduated, I left for Europe and lived there for a couple of years. His life went in another direction, too.

I look at him across the table, and it is amazing to me how thirty years can pass, and so much can change, and yet, still, here is someone who was once in my life completely, and suddenly, just by looking at him, it all comes back. I look at his neck, at a scar he has there, and I remember touching it, when I first got to know him, asking about it, kissing it. I remember his touch, his laugh, his expressions. Suddenly, I remember his penis.

We spend the afternoon together, talking about our lives, and how we love our children and our careers. He asks about my failed marriage. (I was never attracted to the good guys. I liked the dangerous, charming ones.) He says he is sorry that it didn’t work out for me.

He is what my girlfriends call a “sweet guy,” and I do begin thinking about what it would have been like if we hadn’t broken up. (I got married about three years after we broke up.)  All that’s under the bridge, of course. But, boy, what a lovely man. We talked for hours, as if it were thirty years ago. It is so much easier to be yourself when you know yourself. And I could immediately see why we had been attracted to each other. And with all the angst of life – who am I, will I marry? will I have kids? what am I meant to with my life? – gone or at least passed, because we had lived it and resolved it, we could just get on with being curious and kind and friendly with each other.

Then, late in the lunch, he added this. “You know after I left you that fall, and it was clear it wasn’t going to work between us, I was heartbroken for months. You probably don’t remember, but you used some kind of after-shower powder.” I shake my head no: I don’t remember what I had used. “Well, I went out and bought some, and for months, I used it every day.”

He looks at me again, smiling about that lost love.

“Oh, ” I say again. “I am sorry.”

And I mean it. He is just the sort of loyal, sweet husband any girl would want.