The heartbreak kid

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Essayist Margaret Renkl recently recalled a question she posed to her great-grandmother about her great-grandfather, who had died some thirty years before. To Renkl’s surprise, great-grandmother barely remembered the man to whom she’d been married for three decades. She told Renkl, “It’s almost like it happened in a dream.”

This anecdote captured for me the capriciousness of human memory, because it brought to mind a girl named Toni, whom I hardly knew. Although she and I were sweethearts, of sorts, for just a few weeks in the winter of 1964, Toni has haunted me — in vivid recall — ever since. She should have come and gone, “almost in a dream,” but she has lingered.

Toni was a freshmen then at a neighboring high school. One evening at CCD — weekly religious classes required of Catholic students who attended public schools— she burst into my orbit. She was petite and lissom, with short dark hair, pretty in that catlike way Audrey Hepburn was pretty — and bubbling with vivacity. Why she spoke to me I can neither recall nor believe. Although only fourteen, she had already been spotted, targeted and courted by the upperclassmen at MG High. Casanovas in cars regularly pulled over, flirted with her and invited her for a “ride.” She was used to this sort of attention. She had already developed a technique for brushing them off sweetly and sending the boys emptyhanded on their way.

Toni’s rejects were guys older, smoother, handsomer, richer and cooler than me. So her willingness to consort with me, rather than all those quarterbacks and BMOCs was a mystery I never fathomed. I was undersized, unkempt and — as far as I could judge — unattractive. I was at least a year from having a driver’s license, couldn’t imagine ever owning an actual car, and I lived two miles away from Toni.
But there I was, sitting beside Toni in a corridor at Immaculate Heart School, walking her home from CCD, looking into her eyes and asking for a date. And here she was, bouncing on her feet, smiling and saying yes.

To me.

I could ever forget a moment like that?

That first date required a bus ride to downtown Madison. I’ve forgotten the movie and whether the theater was the Orpheum or the Capitol. But I remember our footprints in the snow, holding hands, walking her afterward from the bus stop to her front door. I thought about kissing her. Looking back, I realize she expected the kiss and probably wanted it. All those guys with cars had kissed her. But I didn’t try and somehow, that worked. I was different from the other ones.

Little did I know that more than three years would pass before I ever would ever again get so close to kissing a girl who wanted me to kiss her.

In retrospect, I suspect that Toni — who had become by necessity one of the more boy-savvy girls at MG High — regarded me as a sort of experiment. I was more complicated that the typical high-school male whose single objective in life was to get into her — or any girl’s — jeans. I wasn’t like those boys and this made her curious.

Toni possessed a sort of “smart” that I sensed but didn’t understand. So, of course, I underestimated her. Although in tenth grade I didn’t know much and still regularly confused my ass and my elbow, I was a know-it-all. So, I contrived to rescue Toni. I was going to enlighten, mold and teach her.

Teach her what? I had no idea, but I started to talk. I’ve forgotten what I said, but I’m pretty sure most of it was self-indulgent crapola — which was my tenth-grade forté. I spent hours on the phone with Toni not listening, not appreciating the bubbly wonder of her but trying to save her. I poured out sophomore wisdom, guiding, correcting and belittling her.

I didn’t have to be so intense. Toni, who wore her feelings on her sleeve and enjoyed them, would have liked me anyway. But I didn’t want her to just like me. I couldn’t settle for mere teenage romance. I wanted to be madly, brilliantly, James Dean-Natalie Wood in love. Since Toni, through trial and repeated, humiliating error, I’ve managed to trace to my parents this hair-trigger hunger for head-over-heels. Sometime in the latter 1940s, Mom and Dad ignited a scorching high-school romance that almost burned Tomah High School to the ground. The result was a shotgun wedding and eight predictable years of torrid passion, excruciating heartache, jealousy, infidelity, crying, yelling, drunken rage and broken furniture, climaxing finally in a rupture that left three confused kids still hoping to be in love someday but not like that.

Toni, I dreamed, was destined to fall in love with me, after which together we would stroll hand-in-hand down Lover’s Lane correcting all the mistakes my mom and dad had made. Ridiculous yes, but I was fifteen and poorly in tune with my subconscious. Still, we might have lasted longer and had fun (and I would’ve gotten that kiss) if only I had left Toni to her own spontaneous devices.

But I granted Toni’s intelligence, personality and uniqueness no more respect than the predators who contrived to inveigle her into the back seat. To them, she was a piece of ass. To me, she was Galatea.

So, one night on the phone, as I was haranguing Toni, adjusting her outlook and getting her mind right, she stopped me cold — I remember the moment — and said “That’s enough. That’s it. I can’t stand this anymore.”

She hung up. I never spoke to her again. She disappeared.

It was my fault. I’d ruined everything and I knew it immediately. There was no going back. There was no running through the night, climbing her balcony and begging her forgiveness. When Toni was finished, she was finished. At least I knew her that well.

I was crushed with regret. As soon as she was gone, I remembered everything good, joyous and adorable about Toni — her smile and her touch, her curiosity and her fizzy, uninhibited affection. Had I just shut up for a few minutes, she would have tumbled into my arms, grabbed my idiot face and drowned me in kisses. But I just kept talking and talking, defining love in terms that left her out of my romantic formula and piling up words between our young, electric bodies.

All my life, I’ve wished I had that moment back. Perhaps I remember so clearly because my time with Toni was so brief. Maybe it hurts a little, even now, because I’m certain Toni, within the week, shrugged off our entire flirtation, forgot me forever and took up with a football player. Mine is the only memory that remembers us.

Toni kissed me off without a kiss, and came away unscathed. After our sudden goodbye, all the hurt was on my side — which is fit and meet. No matter how briefly it lasted and how long ago, I can’t forget because Toni was my first lost love. She introduced me to a truth it has taken me much of a lifetime to fully absorb.

Most of the time, it isn’t someone else who breaks your heart.

You do it to yourself.