Her name was Sonja, and it was as if she had drifted over the Sunrise Mountains and onto my doorstep on the final zephyr of my first spring in Las Vegas. "It doesn't matter where I'm from," she would say to me in the aftermath of our first time together, drawing me back to earth with her lioness' smile. "All that matters is that I'm here now."
It was true. She had skin like warm wheat bread, a ravenous sex, and though she was older than I, Sonja was still a woman of dandelion dreams when she knocked on my apartment door on May 22, 2001, her first day in town, looking for someone to help track down her fugitive terrier.
Several weeks later, as we sought refuge from the infernal summer sun in the oasis of her bathtub, I asked her if she believed in love at first sight. "Is there any other kind?' she said.
"But don't you forget," she added, engulfing me limb by limb. "Summer loves don't last."
I knew what she meant. My grandfather had once told me, as I travailed though an interminable puberty, that summer love never expects to survive beyond August, and so it squeezes out every drop of its sweet juices before then. And the many summer monsoons I'd experienced with girls in my first decade thereafter had confirmed it to be true.
Nevertheless, on the day Sonja vanished into the oblivion from which she came—September 4; my birthday—all I could do to keep from crying like an inconsolable widow was find a new woman. Her name was Laura, and she would keep me warm through the next two winters.
It was the passion with which he threw rocks at windows. I fell in love with Derek C. in the summer of the sixth grade as we whipped stones over the back fences of new and uninhabited homes, shattering windows with total disregard for anything but the sport of it, the rush of doing something wrong, the laughter. We were 12, and we did it with diligence: Nearly every day that summer, dozens of windows in new housing developments were broken. He was a cute, dark-headed kid with blue eyes, but mostly, he broke windows. We wrapped up the summer up by sneaking into one of those houses and having a frozen-lipped, smash-mouthed kiss that made me run home giggling, thinking, I'm growing up.
I fell in love with Alma G. in the summer of my 22nd year. She was a Latin woman with a gorgeous smile whom I met in a bar, saw at parties and who, after exchanging furtive glances for weeks, agreed to go out with me. On the hot August evening I was to pick her up, I locked myself out of my duplex. With total disregard for anything but the girl I was crazy in lust for, I grabbed a rock and smashed a panel of my bedroom window, climbed in and got my keys. The reminiscent sound of shattering glass and the heat of summer and giddiness of blossoming love made me laugh and think, thankfully, I might never grow up.
Love is almost always a bad idea. Particularly during the warm permissiveness of summer. Especially when you're 15 and don't really know what the hellyou're doing. And most assuredly when it springs itself on you at a mountain camp hundreds of miles from where either of you live.
Carrie Munsinger! Whoa, that name takes me back. Somewhere in a spider-guarded corner of my garage is a box of old photos; she's in there, a delicate blonde, not model-beautiful but girl-next-door pretty, just the way I wanted her to be. Way I remember it, we met beside a waterfall at a sumer camp for bored Presbyterian youth, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I was bookish and bored; she was shy and wearing a bikini. I'm pretty sure I did something dumb to impress her, a spazzy jump into the water, most likely. We were inseperable for the rest of the week. It was a sweet romance, really, a thing of held hands and furtive kisses, the sort of pure summer togetherness that acquires a soft-focus nostalgic glow in your memory. The mountain isolation seemed to keep every complication—untidy hormones, jealousies—at bay.
But it was a bad idea because I lived here and she lived in California and we had no way across. We spent a fortune in stamps: daily updates on our endless love, song lyrics, doodles, snapshots. We even finagled our families into a mutual Disneyland trip so we could see each other. But it couldn't last and so it didn't. For a long time I could recite passages of that letter. Broke my 15-year-old heart, I'll tell ya, but, you know, I'm over it now. I'm not the nostalgic type. Still keep the photos, though, and it'd be nice to think Carrie never really aged beyond the bouyant, uncomplicated girlishness of those images, that the winsome curve of that smile was never straightened by the ambiguities of growing up.
Every summer I renew my love affair with a man named Albert, another named Derek and another nicknamed Gonzo. My wife knows about it but doesn't entirely approve. I'm guessing when my baby daughter is old enough to understand, she won't quite get it, either. How could they, really? A grown man, shouting at a TV set, glued to a computer screen. Elated by a diving catch. Depressed after a strikeout. Yes, my annual liason with fantasy baseball is back in full swing. Maybe this will be the year the championship trophy returns my affection.