2018-08-25 Cincinnati
Happy Anniversary Part 6
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Our Romance Part II: Courtship, beginning 19 August 1977
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August 19, 1977
Lawson had planned to leave work early – he was a research assistant in a lab at UC – by 2:00, 3 at the latest, and hitchhike to Cleveland in time for a late dinner, depending on his luck with rides. (Nowadays, the length of a trip depends “on traffic,” not on the magnanimity of drivers’ hearts.)
As it turned out, he had pretty good luck. He made the 260-mile trip in about 6 hours, calling me from the Terminal Tower around 9 pm. I was calm heading to Public Square to pick him up. I drove my parents’ pea-green Dodge Dart, 3-on-the-tree, one of the cheapest cars you could buy in the mid-70s. You might think I would be giddy with anticipation, but I was Very Much In Control.
How did I do it? How did I keep from being ga-ga over Lawson Wulsin, Dreamboat & mountain man, Poet and do-gooder, Scientist and philosopher, about to arrive and spend the weekend with me? I kept imagining him as a mini-Mac Jameson type. Maxwell Jameson (the III), was a classmate in med school. He was a few years older, because he had volunteered for the Peace Corps in Niger after college (Princeton) and before med school. Mac was tall and good-looking, athletic and obviously smart, nice and thoughtful, and why wouldn’t I have a crush on him?
Because he was Dull as a Doornail. Dishwater dull. Oh, he could talk about African politics, and rowing on the Olympic crew team, and he could even host our frequent potlucks at his apartment occasionally and play James Taylor on his stereo. But he was devoid of fire. Maybe he had never been challenged. He seemed like a life-sized cardboard cutout of a Mr. Perfect – white, preppy, all the requirements checked. Safe – check. Predictable – check. Handsome – check. Interesting – no check. Someone I would fall for? Never.
So I kept channeling “Mac” as I thought about Lawson hitching north, as I made French onion soup and baked banana nut bread. I remembered our conversations over the past 6 years and pretended they had not been remarkable, pretended they were merely sophomoric grandstanding (“Be here now,” for god sakes). I tried thinking of Lawson as “Rules’ Fool,” a concept that became a poem to a would-be lover, decades later. Would he step-out? Mac wouldn’t. Duh. Would he “look on tempests and be never shaken?” Mac wouldn’t. Duh. Would he take a chance? Mac wouldn’t. Duh. Why should Lawson?
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Lawson was sunshine. On a gritty Cleveland street, he radiated warmth, gold, purity, joy, animal heat and magnetism. He wore crimson bell-bottoms and a yellow and orange Hawaiian shirt that complemented his amber twinkling eyes and his messy blond mane and his red beard – his barba rosa. As I pulled up to the curb, this very-real-man haloed by a shimmering haze, smiled and started towards me. His form was indistinct, his outlines blurry. He was enveloped in a cloud of energy – a rosy solar areola. Lawson’s radiance is the most real sense of “aura” that I have ever experienced.
Lawson’s aura is of genuine, wholesome, and whole-hearted goodness, with rays of visionary idealism, insight, imagination, pushing the envelope, and fomenting fun. He was not a ball of fire. More like a whole sun, tiny, and surprisingly safe, considering its proximity. A sun, radiating adventure and curiosity, loyalty and love, strength and vulnerability.
I drove us to Juniper Road where I worked as the Resident Advisor for the undergraduates living in Norton House. School hadn’t started yet, so we had the whole dorm to ourselves.
We ate my French onion soup and homemade bread and chocolate chip cookies for dessert. We drank his Liebfraumilch with ice, the bottle having considerably warmed on its trip north. We showed each other pictures of our trips to Africa. But mostly, we just talked and talked. We talked until our throats were raw, and it was past 2 a.m. and we needed to sleep.
Still not equating sharing a bed with sex, I invited Lawson to sleep with me in the double bed in my bedroom/study. As he hesitated, I told him the daybed in the kitchen/ dining room/ living room was already made up and he could sleep there.
“Vicky,” he looked me straight in the eye, his arms encircling my waist, “I love you. I am sure. And that makes me want to be careful – full-of-care – for you and with you. I want to take care of you. That means that tonight I sleep in the living room.”
His kiss convinced me of his love and his caringness. This was no rejection. This was pacing. We had time. We were beyond time. We can sleep separately. Joy had already infiltrated the walls, and the floor’s cracks, and the very air we shared, as well as my hair and clothes and skin and pores. I was oozing fire too.
Stephen Jay Gould thought that “the anticipation of happiness is the pinnacle of happiness.” In our individual beds, both Lawson and I anticipated, glowed, peaked. As they say in Japan of happy sleeping, “We slept like mud.”
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To be continued…
VicWulsin 