Ethan left his first girl for me when we were seventeen. I'd never seen her before; she lived two hours south by train, where Ethan had lived before his father's military move brought him to my high school. I didn't know he had a girlfriend when I left the notes in his locker, so intrigued by the tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed boy who seemed to need no one, who glided through the busy halls in a long, black drover that swayed at his calves and whose thick hair fanned at the base of his neck. I usually didn't waste my time on high school boys—they weren't interesting challenges.
This one was different.
My final note to him included my name and where to meet me in the smoking area during noon break. When he showed up, I could tell right away he was new to smoking. The cigarette he bummed from me was awkward in his fingers.
Conversation came easy to us, and after a few days we started 'just happening' to show up early to school, twenty minutes prior to first bell, and our words puffed white outside in the cool dark while we smoked our before-class cigarettes, his fingers eventually molding more comfortably around the filter.
It didn't take him long to tell me about Dania, his girlfriend back home, or about his decision to break up with her before Christmas vacation. We talked about it afterward on the bench by the train tracks, tucked half in the bushes on a dead-end path behind the gas station where we'd bought our cans of Beam&Coke to drink at lunch. How she'd cried on the phone. She was heartbroken, he said and slurped from the can, but he knew he'd done the right thing because we could be together, now.
Something about his slurping bothered me. And something about the way he shook his long bangs out of his eyes bothered me. The way his arm draped over my shoulder on the walk back to school for our midterm finals bothered me, too.
He hadn't been a challenge, at all.
I broke up with him after three weeks. I'd hurt him and I knew it. He loved me. He'd said so. I avoided him in the halls, but downtown on weekends, both of us softened by a few beers, I took advantage of his affection, reveled in the attention, and flirted shamelessly—almost cruelly—with him because the way he looked at me encouraged it. His adoration empowered, and though I knew I must have been hurting him, he never complained about the company and even seemed to enjoy it. By the time the Fest came to town that spring, we'd grown comfortable enough around one another to agree to go together.
As friends, I told him.
"I know," he said.
Germany had made us seasoned drinkers, so we spent Fest time sitting with liter mugs of beer at old wood picnic tables and wearing matching AlcoholicA t-shirts we'd bought at a novelty stand. After so many lifts of the heavy mugs that bruises formed in the soft flesh between thumb and finger, and after leaning in to kiss over the table and not stopping for minutes—half an hour, because I didn't want to stop and was, had always been, addicted to his kisses—we ended up outside under a tree.
Pine needles poked my back and our lips swelled red. I remember we drank too much for too much to happen. I remember he raised my shirt to kiss my stomach before we got up to go home, and that I thought it unusual, because no one had ever kissed my stomach (and no one else ever did, after that-not just the stomach, like that, so loving). I remember forgetting all about it the following morning until I found some needles in the pocket of my blazer, and that later that day he called from his usual phone booth while walking his dog and said, "What happened last night?"
"I knew you would—it was nothing," I said. "Can't we just let it go as nothing?"
"Yeah," he said. "I kind of thought you'd say that."
He left Germany after graduation. The night before he flew, both of us were downtown the way we always were on weekends. He coaxed me out of the bar and I leaned my back against the big window. Classmates filtered through the door, coming outside for air, returning inside for the noise, the music. Ethan came close, held my face in his hands. I fingered the ankh hanging around his neck and told him to write. "I will," he said, "but only once." If I didn't write back, he said, he would stop.
Two years later, we were both living on the East Coast. Ethan diligently polished brass buttons and shined his shoes for the funeral services he performed at Arlington National Cemetery as a member of Fort Myer's Old Guard unit, and I—with my new husband Michael, a G.I. I'd met in Germany shortly after Ethan left—arranged a matching bedroom set in post housing on Fort Drum, New York. Ethan and I had been writing since his first postcard mailed from Basic Training a year and a half before. Friendly letters, most the random musings of best friends, others blatantly flirtatious. Hints of more, here and there, but only hints. In between, he wrote about the women he dated.
When Michael deployed to Haiti, I told myself it would be an adventure to drive to Virginia to visit Ethan for the weekend. I'd just earned my driver's license the month before (Germany had had wonderful public transportation) and was itching to use the car, I reasoned. To be on the safe side, I brought along a safe girlfriend. She left her toddler with the father and, having never ventured out of neighboring Watertown before, somehow got us to DC reading the wrinkled map on her knees.
And she was safe, for a little while. Too safe. Even with his hair gone, shaved into a high-and-tight, Ethan was attractive, and she noticed. She flirted with him (to my disgust), and he flirted back (to my disgust). That evening, while she snored to Pink Floyd playing low from the boom box on the floor, I stood at the window (no man can resist a woman standing at a window) and looked out at the yellow-lit parking lot.
Ethan glided behind me and circled his arms around my waist and brushed his lips on my neck. I wanted to turn around—kiss me!—but, young and newly married, I said what I was supposed to say. I said, "I shouldn't. I'm married."
I had hoped he would understand 'shouldn't' was code for 'I-will-if-you-nudge-just-a-little,' but he didn't nudge, and I went home un-kissed. On the mouth, anyway.
My friend slept the full ten hours it took us to get back to New York, and I thought about Ethan, my feelings for him, and whether they were real, this time, or grounded again in vanity. But vanity had never elicited the kind of pain that could compound with every passing mile the way my pain was compounding with every passing mile.
After three months, a slight shoulder injury brought Michael home. An Army friend of his who lived in Virginia—less than thirty miles from Ethan—offered to throw a Michael a party.
I called Ethan and invited him, then asked Michael if it would be okay if I called Ethan to invite him.
"This is the guy you write to?" he said.
"M-hm. Once in a while."
"And you don't have feelings for him?" He chewed his gum, mouth open, tongue moving the wad from one side to the other.
"Oh, no. No way. It would never work."
To be safe, Ethan said he was bringing Dania, who had also ended up living in Virginia after leaving Germany.
On the day of the party, I stood beside Michael and shook hands with strangers, watching the clock until it moved too slow, then went outside to walk the edge of the pool. Waiting, waiting. Michael waved from the patio and I waved back.
"Whatchya doin'?" he said. He winked at me. He was a very good-looking all-American, but in a way I didn't find interesting, anymore.
"Just restless, I guess." My drink was empty, so I went inside.
In the living room, halfway to the kitchen, there—his voice—his polite greetings, and my head cemented and my chest turned to air and I hurried to the kitchen and waited, waited.
He came in without Dania. He stopped in the kitchen doorway and smiled. "Hiding?" he said.
"No, I'm—this is the kitchen, so I was—" and I held up my glass.
He opened his arms. "C'mere," he said.
We hugged. A platonic, soul-bending hug.
Outside, we sat cross-legged under a tree with our drinks twisted into the grass by our knees. Music behind us, chatter around us, and he didn't know where Dania was and I didn't know where Michael was, and anything we might have talked about was lost noise. I was struck, for the first time, by his eyes, the way they grabbed me, twisted around my insides, and—I knew—loved me the way Michael couldn't. It was movie love. Book love.
"We have to go," Dania said, appearing from nowhere, and just like that, Ethan got up and wiped off the butt of his jeans and left with a quick hug and a "See ya."
On the way home, Michael said, "Everyone was laughing at me."
"Laughing at you?"
"'Who's your wife's boyfriend?' they said. You guys were out there forever."
"Oh, come on," I said. "It was nothing. You know it was nothing, right?"
Ethan and I talked on the phone almost every night after that, after Michael's breathing steadied and his nose whistled in sleep.
We said "I love you" and "I love you, too." I said, "I think we're soul mates," and he said, "I don't know if I believe in soul mates." Then he said, "Yeah, you know, I think we are."
I left Michael, watched him cry while he helped load my things into the back of a Ryder. Ethan met me at a nearby Super 8 (a friend had driven him to NY) and climbed behind the wheel. "Nervous?" he said.
"Me?" I sat in the passenger seat and got stoned and stared out the window.
Michael had cried. Maybe he did love.
Behind me, through the open door to the cargo area, my two cats meowed from their shared cage.
That was a Friday.
Friday night, Michael called and, still crying, asked me to come home. I hung up the phone and found Ethan lying on his back on the bedroom floor, hands folded on his stomach. He stared at the ceiling.
"How was the phone call?" he said.
I sat beside him and played with the carpet.
"I said, how was the phone call?"
I told him I was going home, and he called me a coward.
"If you were truly my friend," I said, grasping, "you would understand."
"Maybe you're right," he said. Then he convinced me to stay at least one day. "After what I did for you, you owe me a day."
Saturday, we watched six hours of TV movies rather than discuss his anger and my embarrassment. Near dusk, we finally got up and got out of the apartment and walked. Pumpkins were for sale in a nearby vacant lot. We bought one each and brought them back, then carved them together on the dining room table, newspapers soaking under pulp.
Sunday morning I drove back to New York, and that night I sat at a quiet dinner table with Michael. Part way through his chicken breast, he said, "How was the drive?"
I laughed until the tears came.
Within the year, Michael and I moved to Minnesota and, at the same time, separated. After a month, certain there was nothing left to salvage, we finalized our divorce. In the meantime, Ethan met a girl.
A real girl. Not one of the part-time, just-for-fun girls with a name like Cinnamon or Julie. He wrote that he actually liked this one. Her name was Kyra and she lived in a Carolina. They saw each other on weekends. When he wrote to say they were thinking about living together-she would move to be with him-I bought a plane ticket and flew to Virginia for a week.
We tried to be careful, because Ethan wanted to stay faithful. The first night, we played card games and he showed me pictures of himself at ten wielding a homemade sword and shield, and I fell more in love. The second night, halfway into a case of beer, I told him I loved him and that whatever he did, he couldn't marry her. I wanted him to marry me, some day.
He looked at his hands. "Is that why you came?" he said. "To break us up?"
"No," I said. I thought about it until I knew how to put it. "I just wanted you to know I was out there."
We kissed. "No more than this," he said.
We slept together naked, legs tangled in spooning. "But that's all," he said.
Somehow, that was all. (Mostly.)
The end of the week came, and I flew home. We discussed the possibility of living together in Minnesota while he attended a flight school over the bridge in North Dakota. Instead, he chose to stick it out with her. "There's nothing wrong with her," he said. "There's no good reason to break up."
I met and got involved with Nate, and Ethan asked Kyra to marry him. Later that year, they married under arching swords, and two months after that, Nate and I married in a hot church with a creaking floor.
Over the next few years, phone calls dwindled and letters stopped. Until September 11th, when I started a quasi-friendship with Kyra that began with a phone call to ask whether she and Ethan had heard the news. They hadn't.
Ethan, still in the Army, flew to Afghanistan, and I took full advantage of his deployment, treating it as an opportunity to write him, again.
I wrote in my third letter that Nate and I were separating.
Ethan wrote back: You're the only one Kyra's worried I would leave her for. Maybe she should be worried, though, because I do love you. Not like a sister and not like a friend, and if something happened and Kyra and I weren't together anymore....
That was the 'love' letter from Afghanistan. I saved it in a wood cigar box, read it sparingly—when Nate wasn't home—with no expectations. When Nate got curious about the envelopes bearing the return address label-made by Kyra-reading '2LT Ethan Pollard,' he asked what sort of letters my "friend" was sending. I allowed him to read one of the letters I'd had no reason to hide, a day-in-the-life-of account.
After Ethan's six-month tour, during which Nate and I divorced and I moved into a perfect one-bedroom I'd been eyeing since the first sign of trouble, Ethan redeployed to the States determined to visit the people in his life he cared about.
I was one of those people, first on the list. "As second-most-important Afghanistan correspondent," Kyra said, "you deserve it."
"Kyra will come with me," Ethan said. "She wants to meet the person she's been emailing for a year."
Fine, I thought.
"Well, we have the tickets," he said in late October of 2002. "We'll be there over Veteran's Day weekend."
Fine, fine, fine.
I waited at a small table in the airport bar, my chair facing the observation windows, and watched for their plane through several drinks and half a pack of cigarettes. An older man, also drinking, waited for the same plane. His passenger was a woman he'd met online, and he was out-smoking me with his eye on the approach path. "There it is," he said and put on his jacket. I followed him out to the receiving area, then lost track of him as the bodies started coming through the gate.
I saw Kyra first, rosy and blond and smiling. I said hello and gave her a hug while watching over her shoulder as he came closer, bag hanging from his shoulder. So tall, beautiful, no change in the past five years. I let go of Kyra when he came close and hugged him briefly, so briefly, and waited with them for their luggage before bringing them to my small apartment.
We ate dinners in, explored local museums and galleries I hadn't bothered to visit on my own, and walked at night to the downtown bars to drink and play pool. Kyra always went to bed first, and Ethan and I stayed up talking. We walked aimlessly in the freezing cold of a Midwestern winter and sat on a church stoop with a bottle of Apfelkorn between us, laughing nervously at the other times we'd met, at how wrong everything had gone. "It's because you went back to Michael that I didn't leave her," he said. "I couldn't trust you. You weren't a sure thing."
We agreed it just might be our fate to be forever separated, but with sporadic moments of emotional upheaval.
One evening, while the three of us sat at the kitchen table after dinner, Ethan let his fingers linger on mine while handing me a lighter. I pretended not to notice, the way his wife didn't notice.
She fell asleep early again that night, and so we wouldn't wake her, we closed the door quietly behind us and went down to the basement level and sat between apartments on the cold linoleum floor. He took my hand and we stayed that way. He said, "This is the most intimate thing I've ever done."
We looked at each other for a long time.
He said, "I have to go," and stood to leave.
I pulled him back down. In the dirty basement, his wife asleep upstairs, we kissed until continuing to kiss would be more wrong than we already were.
Two days later, he and his wife flew home and, nauseous, I watched their plane from the parking lot until I couldn't see it anymore.
Three weeks passed, many evenings filled with wine-drunk, secret phone calls while his wife did something inside the house or in another room or down the hall from where he sat talking to me.
Ethan left his second girl for me when we were twenty-eight.