Retroactive Special
By Michael Cocchiarale

Belinda wanted the first time to be special, but it was August, the afternoon sloppy with humidity, and they were, despite medication, sniffing and dripping from ragweed and, because of medication, languid in their lovemaking. Things got so bad at one point that Pat had to extricate himself and hop hop toward the dresser for a blow. He was gentleman enough to bring back a tissue to draw across her nose as well, a gesture that might have made the occasion special, all bodily fluids being equal.

But so much conspired against them! Not only their noses but their clothes—the recalcitrant zipper of his khaki shorts, her well wound scrunchie, the unnecessary (she thought) and hasty removal of which nearly cost Belinda her ponytail—not to mention the obnoxious roar of a neighbor’s mower, the comically incongruous soundtrack (Journey’s “Separate Ways” blaring from the dresser top TV)—and, last but not least, Pat’s brand new ankle cast, which thumped hideously against the bedpost like a club against a skull.

For awhile, for something to do, Belinda studied the white clumps of deodorant under this skinny boy’s arms. Then she turned to the TV and watched grown men badly handle invisible musical instruments. When Pat started chuffing like a train, she had to yank an ear to remind him there was someone else involved. Instantly, he became alert, solicitous; for awhile, he even seemed to be on to something. But soon he was flying solo again, and before she could regain his attention, he was babbling in tongues, eyeballs skittering around that shaggy haired head.

She wasn’t sure if he was going or coming.

Until, that is, it was over, and he stroked her shoulder for a job well done before rising from the bed, prefacing his getaway with some barely audible thank yous and one distinctly unspecial “guess I’ll see you in Trig” as he pulled up his shorts and ferreted his head back through a pinstriped polo shirt, retrieving his crutches and going, at last, with a flaccid wave of the hand that made her think about what he’d just put back in his shorts. The whole absurd episode began to dissipate with her first quiet moment alone and the next, the obligatory look in the mirror, the absentminded brush out of her hair, the long hot shower, the hours somehow filled until mushroom pizza appeared with her work harried parents and, afterward, a glass of skim milk and a few chocolate chip cookies on the nightstand, a corpulent romance in her hands instead of homework, her back against two flat pillows on that curiously untransformed bed. Hours passed into days, days that brought the new school year to some dull approximation of life, the banal routine of English and Math and History and Gym and Lunch and Yearbook afterward—that and the countless little things that made time go, including other moments with Pat, nodding at him in a crowded hallway, exchanging vapid pleasantries before class, or by banging lockers, never again seeing him in the same way as that one August afternoon, time rushing against time just past until the weeks became months and the months became prom night with other people, and graduation, both rites of passage gone in a camera flash, gone like the summer that followed sizzling on their heels; then, amazingly, another August, this at another school—a regionally prestigious university—weeks and months of surveys and seminars, of dorm room carousing and dollar drafts gulped down in sticky floored bars . . . weeks and months collecting into semesters—two, four, six, eight, and, just like that, the real world, the first big job, the years then really starting to move, filling up with locations and relocations, the making and unmaking of friends, the births of wrinkly nieces and nephews, the deaths of wrinkly grandparents—all of these things rushing against those few moments where Pat wandered between her legs, rushing, she thought more than once, like the powerful spray of that long post coital shower those many years ago, whooshing away the evidence of their—or, to be cynical, his—act, making it almost impossible for her to believe it had even happened at all.

Twenty years and it’s August once again. Belinda had experienced a fit of sneezes earlier in the morning, a smidgen of sinus pressure, but such are the vicissitudes of allergies that on this beautiful Saturday afternoon, poking around in the shopping district near the college, she can see and breathe and think without impediment. Young people abound, chatting and sipping complicated coffees under umbrellaed tables and on store front stoops. She loves this atmosphere, finds it especially restorative. It certainly beats going home, where there is simply nothing to do, unless she counts the task of fixing the brass knob to the front door of her house, which, on her way out to grab the paper this morning, came off inexplicably in her hand. A golden crystal ball, the knob revealed a lonely, pensive face floating in its surface. Masochist that she is, she forced a great big smile and examined all the gruesome evidence of age that gesture seemed happy to show.

Belinda stops in one more place—this time Heaventy Seventies (a vintage clothes and music store)—where she flips idly through old record albums she’d been crazy about as a kid. It makes her sad that nothing costs more than two dollars or three.

“Looking for something?” a voice asks, one which immediately flips some seldom used toggle switch in her brain.

Belinda looks up to find a well dressed, middle aged man standing across from her in the Ss or the Ts. It takes her several moments to remember him, because back then he was a skinny guy with black crayon scribble for hair, a thin almost hungry pie wedge of a face, and, of course, those slapstick eyeballs. Now, the hair is gone, the face filled out, and the eyes small and attentive . . . and, she has to laugh to herself, no longer slick with allergy. He’s gained a few pounds too—perhaps as many as the number of years since she’d seen him last, the evening of their high school graduation, where, finding her right before the procession, he’d looked back over his shoulder in that voluminous gown and asked if she thought he was fat. When she, laughing, told him “yes,” he turned around, put hands upon hips, and said with affected desperation, “But black’s supposed to be so slimming!”

Pat points to a sign over her head which reads: “Special: Buy Back Your Past” and in a pitch perfect, used car salesman kind of voice exclaims: “Take an additional 30 percent off everything in the store!”

“Really?” she says, laughing, surprised at how easily she’s able and ready to play along, selecting an album from the bin and playfully placing it—something by those handsome, hairy, high voiced brothers Gibb—against her chest. “Has there ever been a better deal on junk?”

Pat smiles and cruises a hand over the place where all that hair used to be. Then, abruptly, eschewing all transition, he says:

1) “It’s been a long time.”

2) “You look great.”

3) “Let’s go for a drink.”

The word “no” is a brown balloon inside Belinda’s stomach. She can see it squeezing up the windpipe, feel it bopping against the roof of her mouth. As it bangs against clenched teeth, however, the balloon punctures, quickly loses air, and a high-pitched yessing sound begins escaping through her lips. For a moment, she’s aghast. And then she pictures the alternative: returning home at four forty-five, a single bag of groceries dangling from her hand; the obscene quiet of her house just after entering, as if sofa and TV and framed pictures and paged through magazines are standing at attention, awaiting her hard to win approval; the baking of a chicken breast, the boiling of frozen broccoli; the dishes; that stupid door knob, jamming it back into the hole, trying for another hour to get it to line up with the mechanism inside the door; and maybe, if she is lucky, a half way decent rerun on cableless TV.

The more Belinda thinks about it, the more she realizes that there is no good reason to fight this yes. After all, she is in the middle of a slippery skid toward thirty eight and, clearly, as she told Anne, her one good friend, over potent drinks the night before, “The Soulmate Project” is an abject failure.

“You mean ‘The Primate Project?’ Anne had said, smirking into her Cosmo.

Belinda had made a face, but she recognized the truth behind the joke. Twenty years of dating these man shaped mammals—of brain-picking friends and family for viable candidates, of scrolling through Internet profiles, of talking haltingly for that first time on the phone, of settling on a place for the disturbing public spectacle of their date, and then, of heading out, still fretting over makeup and attire, struggling to find common ground over white clothed tables, having these men look at her as if she were a car in a showroom (which, to be fair, was—give or take a metaphor—the way she sometimes looked at them), excusing herself to restrooms for soul searching that masqueraded as primping in the mirror, and, on more than one occasion, coming this close to climbing out an especially inviting window and making a mad dash for home; of movies and museums and nature hikes, the long, dreadful process of getting to know someone, being both excited and depressed—excited because, after all, who knows, he could be the one, depressed because if he wasn’t then why was she even wasting the time? All of this energy—physical, intellectual, emotional, other types of energy for which she as yet had no name—and what does Belinda have to show? Vague memories of a couple dozen well prepared meals, a few good conversations about literature or politics; a piece of jewelry or two, a second experience of sex and a third—each of which, despite their moments, a far far far orgasmic cry from special.

But now, this relatively handsome man—this Pat, or at least the few pleasant vestiges of the Pat she still remembers—is asking her out, and since she already knows him that’s one prodigious anxiety out of the way, which, when she thinks about it, makes her feel much better about the whispered yes that has since turned into a definitive “sure!,” strolling now with him towards the register, one hand clutching the face of three old grade school heart throbs, the other brushing against stretch shirts and denim minis and stirrup pants. She pauses by a rack of stonewashed jeans. The one pair she still might be able to squeeze into looks so pale and threadbare that she fears it could very well fall apart right in her hands.

“I’m getting all my favorite CDs on vinyl,” Pat explains at the register, tapping the stack he has collected.

“Aren’t you supposed to do it the other way around?”

“Do it,” Pat says, eyebrows dancing.

She wants to whack him with her Bee Gees.

“The other way around.”

She laughs—a gulp, a snort, silly like a sixteen year old. If he’s going on eight, the least she can do is meet him halfway.

Twenty minutes later, in the smooth dark no time or place of a nearby upscale pub, they’ve laughed themselves well back into the past, slipping through even that door behind which their first meeting gathers so much dust. Remember, he says, it was in the principal’s office, where she was filing paperwork to help pay for her tuition and he shuffled into the office behind Chuckhole Chudinski, their officious and acne scarred principal, who demanded to know where the disposable razors were, as if she would know.

“You think you are a man, Mr. O’Connell,” Chudinski had said, rifling through his desk drawers while Pat made expert monkey faces at Belinda. She had to smack a manila folder against her face to keep from laughing out loud.

Suddenly, Chudinski said, “ah ha!” and plucked a razor from his coffee mug pencil holder. He put the blade up to the fluorescent light to see if it would do a good enough job before tapping it on the tip of Pat’s nose and, invoking the irrefutable power of private school policy, ordering him to shave.

“Where?” Pat asked.

“The bathroom.”

“I mean, what part of my body?”

“Don’t be smart, Mr. O’Connell. It does not become you.”

“Do I get extra credit if I shave all this?” Pat asked, pulling up his wrinkly white Oxford so the principal could see the dark hair coiling around his nipples.

Belinda sips her drink and smiles, even though she shouldn’t because, after all, that was the moment that led to what she thought had been long ago rubbed out of her mind.

“For Chuckhole,” Pat concludes, “foliation was worse than fornication.”

She laughs, and then, just like that, one of those unpredictable awkward silences ensues. At a loss for something to say, each becomes seriously preoccupied with the antics of other patrons, the long at bat in the third inning of a baseball game on TV, the black and white memorabilia posted on the wall nearby. Belinda takes a long first sip of her second drink and begins to feel disoriented. Is she really here with this man who used to be the boy who lunged on top of her? Is she really a woman now, in her late thirties, single and alone? How do such things happen, and who is responsible?

“You know,” Pat says at last, drinking deeply from his beer for courage. “Back then, that time, that one time . . .”

She knows the time. It’s coming back, spurred on by the alcohol perhaps, reappearing at any rate against her will. The dim outlines. The colors. The sounds. A sharp image of her feet in the air, framing a poster (of Rick Springfield, was it??), flits across her brain.

I have to tell you . . . I was bad.”

“Gee, you think so?” Vertiginous from the vodka, Belinda clutches the table to maintain balance. She realizes she’s starved, not having eaten since that crumbly cereal bar on the trip into town.

“Yeah, I was bad. Then, afterward, I felt bad. Then I just, you know, wanted to get out of there.”

“I wanted it to be special.”

“Special?” Pat says, clapping his hands together. “Who’s to say it won’t be?”

What a line! Belinda thinks a few or several moments later, on her unintentionally circuitous way to the bathroom. What does it mean? she thinks on her weavy way back, the answer seeming to come when she notices Pat settling with the bartender and laying down an handsome tip, as if, now that the reacquaintment (she’s not thinking clearly; is that even a word?) is out of the way, it’s on to Phase Two, which, she guesses correctly, involves going back to his place. She should be angry; she should throw someone’s beer in his face, place a pump in his presumptuous crotch. Instead, another yes just hisses through her lips, and, the next thing she knows or cares to notice, she’s in the passenger seat of his convertible, a beautiful car, she says, knowing nothing about cars herself, a realization that makes her want to laugh. The two screwdrivers have seemingly dismantled her brain, so she simply closes her eyes and allows the wind to push hair and thoughts and everything right out of the way.

Pat was not a dedicated student in high school, yet his apartment has a distinctly academic feel to it. In place of where she might have put her 25 inch TV is a telescope on a tripod, its thin white neck craning toward the sliding glass door to the balcony. On three walls there are books—ratty paperback classics, awkwardly sized hardcovers about art and architecture, reference guides for language and music and outer space.

“Look around,” he says, “I’m going to change and find us something to eat.”

He disappears down a hallway while Belinda drifts around the living room, looking for pictures, for cards, for certificates—for some evidence, in other words, of the life he’s been leading for the half a life he has been absent from hers. Finding nothing beyond an old wedding photograph of his mom and dad (so young, so beautifully black and white!) she turns to the shelves, selecting at random a book so big she must sit down to examine it. She pages through, killing time, distracted by the sounds of cupboard doors and dishes in the unseen kitchen. Her attention is arrested at last by a full page photograph of an ancient mask—a cracked wooden face with a dark, ill formed nose and eyes that seem like holes straight back to the 1173. Who might have worn such a thing? And why?

“Oh, by the way,” Pat says, his voice suddenly approaching. “I’ve just got to show you something.”

“Seen it already,” she says.

“No. Seriously.”

She looks up, expecting (and, by this point, desperately needing) a plate of cheese and crackers or, given Pat’s relentless sense of humor, a cereal bowl of microwaved pizza rolls; instead, she sees him in the doorway to the living room, in khakis and a t-shirt now, cradling some strange object—a crude husk of something, hard and white like a bone one might find on the dig she has just been reading about. The object appears to be covered by a series of colorful squiggles, which trigger something in Belinda’s brain. Putting the book down on the coffee table, she walks over to him and can’t help but burst out laughing because, sure enough, just as she thought, Pat’s holding his ankle cast from twenty years ago. And there, directly under the foot, prominent in purple, endures her garish signature.

Belinda snaps back in time and place, sashaying into her bedroom once again, buttocks tingling behind her plaid school skirt. Just a few steps behind is the sound of Pat’s impatient crutching, which thrills her beyond belief. She’d been kissed before—twice, but who was counting?; however, this moment was without precedent, a moment of pure pleasure—the giddy sense of anticipation that came with the knowledge that she had something he wanted and could determine the pace at which he acquired it. That lovely walk up the stairs and into the room—not the rushed and clunky sex that followed—had been the one truly special moment of her life. Mistakenly—and egregiously so—she had thought it was the act itself that would lift her to a higher level, out of the awkward world of adolescence into the rarified air of adulthood. She was young. She was dumb. She didn’t know that life’s extraordinary moments occur in the moments just before you expect them to, that they are forgotten when the so called “special times” slap you so cruelly in the face.

Belinda draws a finger along the cast, hard and dusty like the fossil it is. She traces her magic markered name, embarrassed by her large and flamboyant script.

“Pleistoteen era,” Pat says.

For the first time since she’s known him there’s no funny face. In fact, the lips twitch and the now glassy eyes make it look as if he might just cry. Or maybe it’s just the allergies, kicking in for the night.

Belinda likes to think that Pat still wears the cast, placing it back on at night for old times sake, just as she used to do with her dental retainer, the container for which (she suddenly recalls) she used to use as luggage for a doll she was getting too old to carry around. It thrilled her to remember that her father made a special strap for the container from a strip from one of his old belts. When the family went to the store or on a trip, Belinda made sure that the doll (Had she really named it Miss Fundella?) took the case along, made sure too that it was filled full of odd little things—a clip on earring, a penny or a nickel, a balled up list of misspelled things to do. Then, it was just something she did—the mundane idiosyncrasy of a typical suburban child. Now, however, the memory shines out at her like a tangible treasure, something to slip onto a wrist or finger.

Pat leaves her with the cast, just drops it into her held out hands as if there is far more to examine—intricacies of design, unprecedented textures, secret compartments.

“I’m boiling up some pasta,” he says, calling back from the hallway.

She hears the clatter of hard noodles pouring out of a box and remembers she is hungry, but at that moment it is not her stomach that growls but her brain, alive now, alert, ravenous for other lost moments that begin to return, one after the other, like doddering aunts at an extended family reunion. And there she is, the middle aged Belinda, hair tied back, face crouching behind makeup but legs still looking good in a dress the color of the sun, opening a door—a knobless door!—with an uncommon power which, after all these years, she’s just now learning to wield.

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