Jilted for an Apple

by David Benjamin

“Hey, sunshine
I haven’t seen you in a long time
Why don’t you show your face and bend my mind?”
―Simon & Garfunkel, “Cloudy”

MADISON, Wis.—While I was half-listening to a CD in my car, a snatch of lyrics brought her back to me in a rush. Technically, I guess, she was my first girlfriend. We were both freshmen in college. I had noticed her during orientation. She was blonde, pretty and small-town. This made her easy pickings for one of the many campus casanovas who had long since passed their sell-by date among female classmates.

So, one of them got her. It took her most of a semester to figure him out. I caught her on the rebound. We had our moments, the best of which might have been the night I had read some of my poems at the campus coffee house.

(NB: My verse was, at best, mediocre, but it got me more applause than the other purported poets among my peers. I was fierce and sardonic while my free-verse rivals tended toward life-strife and touchy-feely.)

After my recitation, we strolled hand-in-hand across campus, to a pier that overlooked a wooded valley. Beneath chilly stars in the midnight hour, we kissed. Since she’d been consort to an upperclass romeo for several months, she was a veteran in this respect. But for me, this was a breakthrough. In high school, the closest I got to a girl’s lips was a stage kiss with my female lead in a play called “Curtain Going Up.” In every rehearsal and three performances, the girl—Janet (or maybe Joan)—turned her head away in violent disgust, leaving me with a mouthful of hair.

However, that night, lucky for me, the girl—I think of her by her initials, JLR—was sufficiently impressed with my technique to keep kissing me, and going out with me. For a while. Sometime after our only off-campus date, to watch The Graduate at a movie house in Rockford, she took a trip to a neighboring college and glommed a new beau, named Apple.

Thus began my campaign.

In the decades since JLR jilted me for this Apple worm, I’ve felt a vague sense of recrimination for pursuing, with a passion disproportionate to her importance in my life, a girl who was thoroughly and irrevocably done with me.

In my defense, I can stipulate that I never physically chased, shadowed or stalked the girl. From day to day, I barely saw her. Although we shared the same campus, we had no common classes. I couldn’t bug her in the cafeteria because I worked in the college kitchen, mopping floors, filling plates and invoking the motto of every food-service everywhere: “If ya don’t like, ya don’t have to eat it.”

Hence, I crossed paths with JLR only two or three times a week. Of course, I was ready for these coincidences. On a gray and bitter day in April, she came through the door of a classroom building. She saw me there, with my friend Jody. She stopped. I seized the moment.
“There,” I said to Jody, “is the only sunshine we’re gonna see today.”

It worked. Before taking flight, she betrayed a flicker of pleasure.

Jody nudged me. “Good one,” he said.

The method of my campaign was the mail. In spare moments, I contrived messages—like inscriptions on holy cards—to my beloved. If I had time, I wrote a little poem. I stole lines from other poets—Keats, Shakespeare, Roethke, cummings, Browning. I quoted the Beatles, Donovan, Tim Buckley Ramparts magazine. Every time she opened her mailbox, a dozen of my lovelorn flyers would flutter out.

I didn’t follow her around but, if she kept her eyes peeled, she could see me wandering lonely as a cloud o’er dale and hill, whispering her name, composing stupid verses in my head, yearning unrequitedly.

I think I knew my yearning was wasted emotion. I’ve since figured her out as a serial girlfriend loath to water a withered rose, or even pluck its petals. The consolation was that I knew I’d gotten into her head. I had a spy. I’d been buddies with her roommate, Betsy, since our first days on campus. Betsy kept me informed on JLR’s dalliance with Apple. Better than that, she revealed that JLR not only read all my messages. She saved them.

The nadir of my campaign was a late spring night at Northwestern University, where Simon & Garfunkel were appearing. Before JLR had forsaken me for Apple, I had blown what was for me, in those days, a small fortune for two tickets to the concert. This occasion afforded me opportunity—sitting beside JLR on the bus to Evanston and back—to nag, beg and rag on her for hours, making the case that I would be a far better lifelong helpmeet to her than this rotten Apple person.

Simon & Garfunkel were then, of course, at their peak of popularity and creativity. The concert was sublime. I missed it all, sitting beside JLR, yearning pathetically, murmuring lame supplications, trying to somehow to breathe life into a love that was deader than Richard Cory. When we arrived back at school, we were both exhausted by my pleadings. She broke into a run as soon as the bus door opened. It was another midnight. The stars were out again. And I was desolate, partly because I’d lost her, mostly because it was dawning on me that I’d been a pain in her ass.

That feeling stuck with me—and colored my memory of JLR—until the other day in the car, when Simon & Garfunkel’s lyrics about clouds and sunshine sent me unexpectedly back. I had hounded the girl almost obsessively, but I’d also stuffed her mailbox and touched her life for weeks with bits of verse and professions of love that she could tuck into a cigar box and save forever. I had pursued her, to no avail, in a style both literary and hyperbolic, and so chaste it was almost platonic. I had sung a serenade to her beauty and allure more fulsome than she would ever again hear. For a while, I had filled her life—a life she disparaged, again and again, as dreary and provincial—with rhyme and romance.
Moreover, notwithstanding my anguished ambulations, I wasn’t heartbroken. In my torrent of messages, I was enjoying a measure of revenge. But I was also giving JLR a lesson, cribbed from poets and troubadors, of how true love looks, even if it’s not truly true. I was having fun. I’ll always wonder if it was fun for her.

When I remembered her the other day, I was surprised by how I had warped my memory. Without thinking about the girl after she disappeared from my life, I had turned a sweet and comic interlude of young love into guilt and vague remorse, as cloudy as the song. The passage of time and the clarity of hindsight have served to banish my regret. Even better, I’m reminded that all the silly things I did, said, wrote and recited, and all the wrong girls I fell for when I was young, can—when I look back—change before my mind’s eye. Meaningless then, they can mean something now. Trivial then, they become, in retrospect, significant.

I the fall, we both got back to campus. By then, I was one-and-a-half girlfriends beyond JLR. My only encounter with her was during a model United Nations in which I portrayed a sardonic delegate from the Soviet Union. She was part of a group seeking—in honor of the tragic Prague Spring—to usurp the seat reserved for Czechoslovakia. Of course, she failed. The official government of Czechoslovakia, recognized by the UN, was a Soviet vassal. The failed Czech revolution, led by Alexander Dubček, had no standing.

Nor, alas, did JLR, who’d brought a new boyfriend. I looked him over. He wasn’t Apple. He was too old to be a student. He looked adult and thirtyish …

… and not half as romantic as me.