380: Then I threw ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 18 begins
In Which Herb and Lorna Are Saved by the Art of Love
THEN I THREW A PARTY at Herb and Lorna’s house, and at that party Mark Dorset fell in love with the Glynn twins, and, therefore, everything turned out all right, eventually.
I had grown up while Studebaker had declined, and at about the time when the Avanti and the first transistorized electronic calculators appeared, I met the love of my life, a girl named Albertine, an exotic, beautiful, intriguing girl, of whom I spoke to my friends so often and in such tedious detail that they had begun to sidle off when they saw me approaching, slinking off to the grease pit so that they wouldn’t have to hear about her again. None of my friends knew her, since she went to a private school and lived on the east side of the Bolotomy River, in a part of Babbington separate from the rest of the town, a remote and unfamiliar region, a place unto itself. I wanted Albertine to meet my friends, and I wanted them to meet her. So I decided to throw a party. Like most people at sixteen, I was embarrassed by my parents, so I didn’t want to have the party at home. I wanted to have it at Herb and Lorna’s. They were delighted when I told them and consented at once.
Among the people I invited was Mark Dorset, a new friend, a newcomer to Babbington. He accepted, but with mixed feelings, since he was one of those high school students for whom a party meant, primarily, the possibility of romance, a possibility sweet in anticipation, but which too often vanished as soon as the party began.
I knew how he felt. I had sometimes felt that way myself, before I met Albertine. In the hours before a party, while I was deciding what clothes, what look, what attitude to wear to this affair, the party as it might be would run through my mind again and again, a wonderful scampering thing, elusive and attractive, darting from possibility to possibility. With whom would I fall in love? Who would fall in love with me?
Ahhh, but the parties in fact never equaled the parties in anticipation. For a few early moments, really only the first few moments after I had walked through the door, the pleasure of possibility remained, but soon the possible began a slow dissolve into the actual, and toward the end of the evening the actual was likely to take a form something like this (and at one party it took a form exactly like this): the girl with whom I had fallen in love, to whom I had confided some of my most cherished hopes and dreams, who had listened so wide-eyed while I was confiding those hopes and dreams, whose wide eyes had inspired me to some quite spine-tingling turns of phrase, who had held my hand during the if-only-the-world-were-just part, who had kissed me quickly and shyly in the hall and again, slowly and thoroughly, while we sat on the porch, left suddenly (squeal of tires, smell of rubber, cloud of smoke) in a battered convertible driven by a guy who had quit school the year before and now installed linoleum flooring, left laughing, leaving me behind, grinning like an idiot to hide my disappointment that this girl for whom I had had such hopes, to whom I had said so much, could have fallen at the last minute for muscles and a ragtop.
Mark was often one of those people who were still hanging around after a party, when it was time to clean up, one of those who, having nothing better to do, would scramble around, trying to find all the bottles and glasses, trying to reconstruct vases, to wash beer stains from the rugs and upholstery, trying to hide from the parents any evidence that a party had been thrown in their house.
The party I threw for Albertine was different. Mark came with small hopes, but it turned out to be a wonderful evening. He fell in love, doubly in love, with the Glynn twins, Margot and Martha. By the time Herb and Lorna returned home in the small hours, Mark was euphoric, happily befuddled, drunk on love, adolescent love. He was learning how pleasant desire could be, how unlike the desperate longing he had known, when it wasn’t hopeless, and he was experiencing a sweet torture from the feeling that he was going to have to choose between those identical beauties, that he couldn’t have them both. Better than all these feelings, though, was his feeling that Margot and Martha loved him. He could see in their eyes, in their grins (“You look like the Grin Twins,” he said), that they weren’t going to run off in a convertible with a linoleum-installer, but would leave with him.
[to be continued on Friday, November 11, 2022]
In Topical Guide 380, Mark Dorset considers Foreshadowing; Studebakers: The Avanti; Gadgets: Electronic Calculators; and Love: Young, Moonstruck, Perdurable from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.