382: Over the next ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 18 continues
OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, while Herb and Lorna’s financial problems deepened, Mark saw them fairly often. Sometimes he would see them at my house when they were visiting. More often, though, Mark walked to their house specifically to visit them. The Glynns lived near Herb and Lorna, so Mark often headed for No Bridge Road after seeing Margot and Martha or after finding that the girls weren’t at home when he called. Unfortunately, for quite a while, especially during summers when the three of them were home from college, Margot and Martha were frequently not at home when Mark called, because the three were trying to fall out of love. They weren’t able to decide what to make of themselves, what to do with themselves, if they remained in love. When they were together in public as a trio, when they went to the beach, to the movies, to dinner, to someone’s house, or to a dance, they were friends. They weren’t pretending to be “just friends.” They were just friends, friends of a romantic and flirtatious sort, but still just friends. That’s how they felt. That’s how they thought of themselves. When they were alone, when they sat up late together in the courtyard of the old carriage house where the Glynns lived, or when they walked through town and along the docks in the evening or at night, holding hands and talking, they were lovers, but they were lovers who didn’t go to bed together. Oh, how they didn’t go to bed together! The agonies they went through during that time may have acquired an amusing and poignant flavor as time has passed, as the three of them have aged, and as mores have changed, but what agonies they were then. For the average young couple in that place and time, however much groping they might do, actually achieving coitus was like breaking a tape at the end of a hundred yards of moral, emotional, cultural, psychological, and physical hurdles. Mark and Margot and Martha were neither average nor a couple. For them, there were extra hurdles to leap. Loyalty and jealousy wouldn’t let Mark sleep with either Margot or Martha alone or let either of them sleep with him alone, and convention kept the three of them from trying to entangle themselves simultaneously (in some way that they could, to tell the truth, only begin to imagine). What they referred to as their “Situation” (and they talked and talked about their Situation on those nights, on those walks) made life confusing for all of them. Margot or Martha would date almost any other boy who asked her out alone, hoping that some night she’d fall in love with someone else, that she’d be able to leave Mark to her sister and go her separate way. That didn’t happen, and as time passed it seemed less and less likely to happen. Mark even tried to make himself fall in love with other girls. It wouldn’t work. The three were in love. They didn’t know what to do.
There is a great need, when one is having trouble with love, for a confidant, but what they felt and what they wanted seemed so bizarre and impossible that they couldn’t manage to talk about it. They wanted some kind of plan, something that would show that there was a future for them, but it was too soon for them to see it. You know how it is — when we’re young we don’t know how we want to live. We don’t even know what there is to want. We only know conventional names. We only recognize commonplace models. It takes years for us to see how many ways there are to live.
[to be continued on Tuesday, November 15, 2022]
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