We woke up in the early morning, which is what always happens when you're camping. There's a kind of freshness that rolls over the world with the dawn that wakes up all of the birds and all of the campers out in tents. Since it was ridiculously cold in the early morning of a fall day, no one got up right away. But eventually Daniel got out of his sleeping bag and started the only sensible activity possible at that time, which was to build a fire. Soon Donna was up out there with him, and I got up, not to be left out, and we began packing up for the long trek home.
We had camped that one night up on a rise just west of the north side of the long low bridge that crosses the Coralville reservoir up at its north end. At that point the main body of the reservoir spills west under the bridge into a watery wasteland punctuated by the black torsos of dead trees. It's obvious that the high water killed off the trees, and you always wonder why that decision was made as you gaze out over a hundred former leaf-bearers spread over a few square miles of shallow water. And every year fewer remain standing.
Still, there was a kind of beauty about the place, and when we got down to the level of the road that we were going to hike out on, our vision fell mostly on the fall grasses and reeds and the occasional pheasant rushing across the road.
But there was something funny in the air. It was like I was left out of some joke. There was Donna, Daniel, and me. But somehow things were different than when we walked in the night before. I hate that, not knowing what's going on, but feeling it. And not knowing what to say.
But it wasn't the first time that I didn't have control of the situation around Donna. This is the same Donna that I described in the chapter on Interstate 80. Yes, the one I had a crush on, and ended up in bed with, but sleeping the sleep of the dead, and then driving the drive of the dead to get her back to her job in Des Moines. That Donna.
Somehow I had never been the "real" boyfriend for Donna, but I continued to hang around her, almost like a court follower hangs around the queen. To understand this, you have to understand what Donna was like. It ain't easy to describe, but if you can imagine the provocative energy of Mae West combined with the delicate sensibilities of a deer plus the intelligence of a Mensa member, you have some of the picture.
She was fascinating, attractive, contradictory, elusive, sensual, and yet very selective. Let's just say that I adored her and had no idea how to get her interested in me. I do think that she liked me, but I'm afraid that she thought of me more as a project or a stray cat that she was taking care of. Yes, let's face it, I was really just some kind of pet.
So, I hung around, lapping up milk and an occasional kiss, and watched while she dated the real guys. Most of them seemed like egotistical losers to me, but go figure. Not Daniel, of course. He really was great.
But there was that other guy, and that other night.
I had been in Chicago for the summer, and got really built up and strong by working in a steel warehouse. Of course, to the guys in the warehouse I was known as "Hip," which was short for hippie, simply because my hair was beyond my collar and I had wire-rimmed glasses. But coming back to Iowa City, I had lost the skinny body typical of any hippie and enjoyed a few weeks of muscular shape.
I think Donna must have liked that, too, because we were deeply involved in a discussion on her couch that was quickly acquiring the depth of meaning that only two sets of lips and two very warm bodies can acquire. Yes, we were "making out," pretty intently, and, who knows? Anything could happen. Again.
To get the flavor for this moment you have to understand that every relationship has its own essential character. Every person is unique in some way, and every relationship between two people has its own quality as well. So, even though I have dated many people, and even married a few since I gave up on the Donna project, there has never been another, and never will be another, quite like the special feeling between Donna and Paul.
It was a feeling of infinite delicacy, of tender, sensitive sensuality, backed by hidden, unimaginable and unexplored passions. It's an unfulfilled love, and yet one that was so full of fulfillment, that the lack of a classic conclusion to the romantic behavior should not necessarily negate the immensity of the feelings. In other words, we never "made love" in the euphemistic sense of that phrase, but we made a beautiful love, with what we did, whatever it was.
But then the phone rang, and I gallantly jumped up to answer it. A fateful moment. Because it was one of the egotists, just arrived in town on the bus, here for only a few days, and "could I talk to Donna?" Well, that was it for that evening, since the heavy cruiser was invited on over, and old PT boat 108 wandered on home.
There's a kind of "teaser" horse that they use in horse breeding to get the filly all ready to go, and then they lead off the first horse and bring in the real stallion. I guess you could say that I was the teaser horse for Donna a few times.
This was made even clearer about twenty years later, when I talked to Donna about the events surrounding the Cou Falls camp-out plus that night on the couch.
But first, let's talk about those twenty years.
I obviously didn't end married to Donna. That was Daniel's lot. At least they were married for a while. I ran through wives A and B (see Chapter on Fairfield), while Donna moved to Arizona, got a great job, and kept breaking hearts. But I stayed in touch. Occasionally I would get a letter from her, and then I would fire off a long missive in reply. I would send a Valentine's Day card, plus a birthday card. And call her now and then.
I always asked specific questions in my letters, but she would never answer them. Her letters were always on some exceptional stationery, and they were ruminations on minor happenings in her life, often just impressions, no real news. But I hung on to them like gems.
Finally I sent her a collection of about thirty poems that I had written about her or that were at least inspired by her memory, her energy, and by the special sensibility that we shared. Most notable in the collection were the following zen-like romantic gems:
Donna
head resting against the curled
fingers of my hand,
hair on the side of my face
pushed upward,
I think of you.
The Picture of You
The sun is on the screen
behind your shoulder
This pastel blouse
striped red, blue
That little arm, barely
visible
And, mouth parted slightly
there's a subtle shade of
pink on your cheek
You may not believe in God
but, you are everything divine
to me.
I had it all bound up and sent off to her. And I heard nothing for a long time. Finally a terse note arrived which explained in a stilted tone that she felt that probably I shouldn't be sending her these poems since she was in a major relationship and I was married, and it didn't seem right.
I was stung, devastated, ashamed, angry and confused, all at the same time. Of course, she was right. It's obvious that I was languishing in the last few months of an oppressive marriage and I should have been focusing on finishing that out, not on mooning on about her. Plus there was her relationship to consider. Oh, and of course there was that one other poem in the book. The one that goes a little farther.
She had some little boys who lived in her neighborhood when she was in high school named Perry and Bart. She kind of adopted them, made them cookies and things, and they amused her in the way that all children amuse, by being childlike. It's their job, and they generally do it quite well. These two were pros.
Their names were Perry and Bart, and I combined their names into one imaginary child in the following opus, which was included in the volume that I had sent:
Perry&bart
I've made this
imaginary child
Perry&bart
with you
via transcendental
insemination.
We have this family
in thought.
You are one woman
I wanted to have children with
and now it's done
in the timeless world
of immaculate
conception.
Now there's a poem guaranteed to offend not only various conservative factions whose terminologies have been played with, but also almost any boyfriend in the world who stands reading it over his girlfriend's shoulder.
So my theory is that her boyfriend got one look at this bound volume of poems and went through the clay tile roof and came down with an order that she write back and set me straight. My theory acquires further support from the fact that her letter was stilted, and really didn't sound like her. It lacked her normally detached tone. It resembled more closely the forced confessions to imperialist activities squeezed out of captive American military men by revolutionary tribunals and jailers all over the world.
Plus the fact that she told me later that that guy was one of the most possessive people that she ever escaped from. But hey, the attention that Donna gets could make almost anybody jealous. And maybe I was somewhat off in writing a whole book about her.
Either way, I delayed writing back for a long time, and then delivered a long, blistering diatribe on how I had really been there for her for so many years and why didn't she ever take me seriously and most of her boyfriends were dopes anyway and ended up with the dramatic statement that I wouldn't bother her, write to her or call her unless I heard back from her first. What a letter.
But I didn't hear back. Not in a week, not in a month. Not in a year. Not in ten or even fourteen years. Not a peep.
At first I was chastised, and felt that she obviously meant what she had said. Then I was angry, because our relationship was obviously expendable to her. Finally I was just sad, that I really had to face life without any hope of interacting with her.
And then one day I just did the imaginary lover thing. What that means is that I just sat there with my eyes closed and imagined how I would have felt if my relationship with her had worked out, if she had fallen for me like I had dreamed that she someday would, and I felt, deep inside, what that would have been like.
It felt good, too. I imagined being married to her, with her ga-ga about me for once. In essence, I gave myself the feeling that she could have given me, if it had been right for her to do so. And in a way, I didn't need her anymore, and my obsession with her was ended.
It may sound bizarre, but I believe that you really don't need other people to give you things in order to be happy. You have to become an expert in giving yourself what you want. And if someone else can join in to give you what you need, all the merrier. But you have to start the ball rolling by discovering and fulfilling your own needs as much as possible. So I did.
And then I broke a promise and just called her up on the phone. I guess my pride and a little vindictiveness had kept me from doing it earlier. Plus thinking that she really didn't want to hear from me.
But, wouldn't you know it, she was happy to hear from me, and most amazingly, didn't even remember my letter to her or my promise not to make contact. There's even a chance that she never even saw my letter, that Mr. Possessive from fifteen years ago had just torn it up without giving it to her.
So, all those years of wondering, self-recrimination, and letting go, were simply a drama in my own head. But, what else is new?
And of course, here we are, years later and all of the stories come out in the clear light of day, because she told me recently that that night when we all camped out in the forest was the first night that Donna and Daniel made love. Yes, right there in the tent in a kind of Japanese paper walls silence, while I snoozed away snuggled down as far from the cold as I could get. Which explains the peculiar new and indecipherable energy in the air on the way home the next morning.
Plus Donna told me that she and I had almost ended up in bed together, and not just sleeping, on the night that our moments on the couch were interrupted by a phone call. She said that that was the closest that we had gotten to leaving the strictly platonic behind. Women always know, too, long before the guy has a clue.
Even so, I've let go of my obsession with Donna, the one who got away, and am left with my own world in which I know who I am and what I deserve. And now the poems are not just these long-range, reaching, hopelessly romantic dream songs. Some of them even celebrate me. See, for example the poem "Anima" in the appendix, which, if you know what the title means, is clearly about a woman more close to me than any "real" woman.
One other thing that I learned recently, that is, over twenty years after that camp-out, is where we were camping. And that's because, looking at the Iowa map in preparation for this chapter, I noted that we had camped just a mile or two from the little town of Cou Falls. I didn't know there was such a place, and I didn't know we were near it. But that wasn't the only thing I didn't know.
Still, even though I didn't know that Donna and Daniel made love that night, and even though I never ended up in bed with the girl, at least awake, I can always lie on my back at night, reach over with my left arm, and find the distance not two feet away where Donna at least made love near me. And that's a distinction that very few people share. And believe it or not, it means something to me. even though it wasn't me in that sleeping bag with her.
And we were lovers, in our hearts anyway. And she has at least the distinction of being the one that got away. But not away from the clear blue night sky of poetic imagination. Under that cover, we're a happy couple, somewhere in Oregon, watching our oldest girl get married and then going home, crawling into bed and trying, with some success, not to spill the hot chocolate.
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Next Chapter, #8. The Bridge Over the
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