I set a record for crying in the most time zones on that trip home. A nice
lady seated next to me on the trans-Atlantic flight kept me supplied with
Kleenex, made me eat, and didn't insist on hearing all the details. Not
that I could have told her much anyway. I was just beginning to realize
that I was not going to be able to talk about what had happened. If I told
anyone what Paul had done, even my friends, there was a good chance of the
story leaking. Stories like this spread in ordinary situations, and any
situation involving a Beatle was not ordinary. All it would take would be
some reporter hearing a hint of it, and Paul and the rest of the world
would be reading about us in the papers. Aside from the obvious fact that I
didn't want the whole world speculating about what went on and my
reputation ruined, it would be more bad publicity for the Beatles. I didn't
want to hurt the others. In fact, I had no desire to hurt Paul. I didn't
want revenge nearly as much as I just wanted to forget. Besides, it was a
way to prove that I was a better person than Paul—I kept my word, I didn't
tell lies. The strongest motivation of all was the simple fact that I felt
like a fool. I didn't want my friends to know how stupid I had been. Of all
the predictable, trite, hackneyed stories. Simple country girl falls for a
handsome star, lets him have his way with her only to find out she is just
another conquest for him. John had called this one right. It was just a
twentieth-century version of Thomas Hardy's “Tess of the D'Urbervilles.”
New York was a blur of exhaustion. The businessman sitting next to me on
the flight to Chicago tried hard not to notice that my eyes kept leaking.
When we landed he asked if anyone was meeting me. When I said I was
catching a flight to Minneapolis, he went out of his way to find a skycap
to make sure I got to my next plane.
I wasn't so lucky on the last leg of the trip. The woman next to me wasn't
satisfied until I admitted I had just broken up with a guy and then spent
the rest of the flight telling me what creeps men are and that I was better
off without him.
I hadn't called anyone back home. Brenda had gone home to spend a week with
her family before school started, and Sandy was up at her family's lake
cottage north of the Twin Cities. It was late at night when I got home and
I simply put my suitcases down and crawled into bed, emotionally and
physically exhausted.
It was daylight and stiflingly hot in the apartment when I awoke. I
stumbled to open the windows, turned on the fan, and went into the
bathroom. I stood in the shower crying in big gasping sobs. Out of the
shower, I went straight back to bed and fell into restless, dream-plagued
sleep. It was the middle of the night again when I woke up, sobbing again.
I pulled the sheets over my head and cried until my throat was raw. If I
hadn't needed to go to the bathroom, God knows when I would have ever
gotten out of bed. I certainly didn't want to.
I sat up, dizzy and with a throbbing headache from not eating since ... I
couldn't remember when I had eaten last. Something on the plane I guess.
Back to the bathroom, then into the kitchen. Fixing anything to eat was
beyond me. I ate ice cream right out the carton until I figured I wouldn't
faint from hunger and then sat in the dark kitchen, tears silently sliding
down my face, until dawn. I went back to bed, trying to hide in sleep.
Sleep wouldn't come and I wouldn't let myself be fully awake. I just lay
there for hours with my eyes closed, my mind gratefully numb. Jet lag and a
broken heart are a killer combination. I finally drifted off into a
betraying sleep. It opened the door to the memories I had been blocking
out. I was seeing his face, hearing his voice, feeling the love in his
touch once again.
I woke up to the sound of my own moaning and lay there for a moment, heart
pounding. That is when I decided that this was all a mistake. John was
right. I should have waited to face Paul! He loved me, I knew he loved me,
and I should have stayed to fight for him! I got up and rummaged
frantically through my suitcases for the paper with his phone number on it.
I ran to the phone in the kitchen, heart pounding, and grabbed the
receiver. As I started to dial, I caught sight of the calendar on the wall
out of the corner of my eye. I froze when I realized that it was already
Tuesday. Noon on Tuesday. By Sunday afternoon Paul would have known I was
gone. He'd had two full days to try to reach me. John and Cyn had this
number as well as my parents' number, but the phone hadn't rung. He hadn't
even tried to get me back.
I hung up the phone.
I stared blankly out the window at nothing and thought about going back to
bed and pulling the sheet over my head again but I knew I would just lie
there and think of what a fool I'd been. It was time to do something
constructive. I took another shower, this time actually using soap and
shampoo. Then I went through my suitcases, sorting out Brenda and Sandy's
clothes and then stared at the clothes Paul had bought me, the mementos I
had brought home. I dumped a box of my winter clothes out on the bed and
transferred all reminders of Paul into that box. I realized I would have to
keep some trip souvenirs out to show everyone, so I left out the tourist
brochures from London and Stonehenge, some pictures Julian had drawn for
me, my plane ticket stubs, anything that wasn’t too painfully Paul. I
wanted to shove my drafts of the magazine articles away but knew people
would want to see them. My original notes and the tapes of the interviews
went in. I didn’t own anything as new-fangled as a tape player anyway and
even if I had, I knew I could not possibly stand listening to his voice,
not when it was recorded on that day of all days. In went the clothes he
bought me, a rose from the cottage in Scotland, some Polaroid snapshots he
had taken of us, a napkin on which he had doodled my name, all the tourist
brochures from Scotland.
Finally, I ripped the Beatles poster off my
bedroom wall, rolled it up, shoved it in the box and pushed the whole
miserable package to the back of the closet. Constructive deed
accomplished, I allowed the rest of the afternoon to go by in a fog.
By evening I was cried out, or so I told myself. I shook myself and tried
to find something to occupy my time, to break out of this self-pitying
idiocy. It was a half-successful effort. Did you know you can cry for three
days in a row even while carrying out normal daily activities? Wake up with
a wet pillow, sort laundry, read mail, go to the bank, the Laundromat, the
grocery store, do the ironing, all with tears slowly and persistently
sliding down your cheeks? Did you know you can sit for hours staring at the
TV and seeing nothing but a face that isn't there? That is what I did for
those first three days.
That and go on praying that the phone would ring and praying that it
wouldn't. All day I rehearsed the cold, hard words I would say if he
called, and every night I rehearsed what I was going to say when I broke
down and called him. I sat in the dark next to the phone, knowing I could
call him, hear his voice, tell him I was sorry I left. And knowing there
was no point in it. If he didn't try to reach me, then he didn't want me
back and I shouldn't want him back anyway. It was over.
When I finally began to dehydrate, I spent the evening with ice packs on my
eyes and made plans to rejoin the world. I called my mom and told her I was
home and I'd be down the next day. I packed a bag, gathered up the
souvenirs I had brought back and went to the drug store to pick up a small
fortune in photographs I had gotten developed. I didn't want to look at
them, but people would be expecting to see them and I would have to show
them. It was every bit as bad as I thought it would be. I wasn't nearly
dehydrated enough to stop the river that flowed as I sat on the floor
surrounded by Kodak moments. I put away the worst ones in my stashed box of
too painful mementos and practiced going through the rest telling amusing
little anecdotes about life with the Beatles and how fascinating England
was. By morning it was time for ice packs again. After lunch on Friday, I
left a note for my roommates and headed to my parents.
I faked a hearty “it's so good to be home” and it worked on my sisters who
were a lot more interested in hearing about the Beatles than noticing that
my hand shook when I showed them pictures. When Mom got home from work she
saw through it right away of course, but she pitched in to help me fake it.
She knew right away that her eldest daughter had gotten her heart broke big
time and did not want the details discussed in front of her younger
daughters. I gave out souvenirs, showed pictures like any tourist and
generally managed to hold on. When Dad got home from work, he didn't catch
on as quickly, but by bedtime, he and Mom were exchanging meaningful looks.
In a carefully choreographed dance of family dynamics, I turned in early,
before the last of the impressionable siblings could be dismissed for the
night thereby leaving the coast clear for talking. In my family, no one
pushed for sharing confidences and direct confrontation was simply not
done. Opening up just happened as we did dishes, sat up for the late news,
or waited out on the screened porch for the house to cool off at night. If
you avoided those moments, you gave a clear message that you did not want
to talk. So that is what I did. It worked well with Mom and Dad, but I had
to sleep with my sister Anne.
She was seventeen and so excited about the whole Beatles business she was
fairly oblivious to what was so clear to Mom. In a very Beatle mood, she
followed a ritual we had observed every night when I lived at home and
shared the bedroom with her. She stacked the whole collection of Beatles
albums on the record player and jumped into bed. I had the pillow over my
head and was choking back sobs before the first song was over. Anne once
kept me awake at night insisting she could hear me blink, so there was no
way she could miss this. She waited patiently until I settled down to a
sniffling misery.
“John?” she asked, knowing my favorite.
“No,” I said, and my resolve to never tell anyone was outweighed by sheer
misery. “Paul,” I sobbed.
Under the cover of the music, I told her what had happened, how I fell for
him from the first minute, how we talked for hours until he found out about
the deal with Tony, how confused I was when he kissed me one day and
ignored me the next. Carefully editing out that we had ended up in bed, I
explained that once the articles were written we were together every day. I
told her I loved him and that he said he loved me. I even told her about
trying to get into school in England and how we had made plans to be
together whenever we could until I finished school here. I never told her I
had slept with him. It just wasn't the kind of thing I felt I should tell a
seventeen-year-old sister, but I figured she suspected. I skipped the part
about going to Scotland with him, just saying that he was supposed to be in
Liverpool for the weekend, and told her about seeing him with another girl.
Like any good sister, she was indignant for me but wasn't reluctant to tell
me I had been an idiot. “Geez. Terry, He's got girls crawling all over him.
How could you think he would want some girl from Minnesota for anything
more than—you know!” Her assessment of his motives was pretty wise for a
star-struck seventeen-year-old. Much wiser than her sophisticated big
sister who, after all, had spent two years living in the big city.
For the first time, I felt glad to be home. Just being able to talk about
it was a way of sorting it out, putting it in perspective, letting it go. I
knew I was taking a big chance telling her, but she swore she wouldn't
tell. I tried to explain how easily the story would spread, and how
humiliated I would be if it hit the gossip columns, but she said, “Don't
forget, I am the one who has to live in this house with Mom and Dad. The
whole time you were gone, they were having a cow about what people might
think, you associating with 'that kind of people.' If junk starts showing
up in magazines about you and Paul, oh geez. There would be no living with
them.”
She was dead serious, and she was not going to tell anyone. Even so, after
she fell asleep, I lay awake having second thoughts about telling her. It
was just too much to ask another person not to talk about, and I realized
then that I was not even going to be able to tell my roommates. Brenda
could probably be trusted not to tell, but Sandy was not good at keeping
secrets. She was so outgoing and talkative, and worse yet, she trusted
everyone. If she didn't accidentally blurt something out, she would tell
anyone who expressed concern about me if they promised not to tell. There
was no way I could confide in Brenda and not in Sandy. If Sandy found out
that Brenda knew she would be hurt. I lay awake for a long time that night,
thinking about what to tell them. They were going to know something was
seriously wrong, but I was worn out and would think about that later.
The rest of the weekend went by smoothly. I even managed to get past my
brother and sister-in-law when they came over on Sunday. Mom didn't push
even though I could see worry and maybe a little “I told you so” on her
face. Right before I left, I decided I had to tell her something. It was
the grown-up, responsible thing to do. I took her aside and thanked her for
not questioning me.
“You were right that going to England was dangerous, but for the wrong
reasons. I managed to fall in love with someone who was ... unsuitable.”
Through the tears that were filling my eyes, I laughed at the old fashioned
word, but it seemed to fit. “When I realized that I left and it is over. I
just need a little time."
She started to ask questions, but I stopped her. I hadn't decided on the
story I was going to tell my roommates so I just told her, “I would tell
you if there was any point in it, but there isn't. It is over. I'm home
again, a little older and a lot wiser, and I don't want to talk about it.”
Nice grown-up talk when all I wanted to do is cry and have Mommy make it
all better, but, when you screw up like a grown up, Mommy can't. Mommies
sew torn ears back on teddy bears but sewing up lacerated hearts is
something they can't do.
Driving back to the city, I wrestled again with what to tell my roommates.
I had no illusions about getting past them as I had some members of my
family. They would be as aware as my mother that something had gone wrong.
I finally decided to tell them that I had fallen in love, thought he loved
me and then found out he was involved with someone else all along. I would
tell them the truth. Almost. Name changed to protect the guilty. I didn't
think I could pull off creating someone out of thin air. I needed the
reality of a face to conjure up and keep me on track with the story I was
going to tell. So Terry, perfectly wonderful, kind, fun Terry, became the
dastardly villain.
Back at the apartment, Brenda and Sandy were waiting to hear all about my
trip. It took them less than seven minutes and a handful of photographs to
sense that something besides sightseeing had gone on. Luckily the photos
included a couple of Terry and when tears started leaking again, I simply
handed them one of the pictures with him in it and spun my tale of love and
betrayal. The tale might have been riddled with lies, but the pain in
telling it was real. “It hurts, it really hurts,” I bawled onto Brenda's
shoulder.
Sandy cried with me, Brenda tried to calm us both, but we all ended up in
tears. Finally, I was able to finish my deception with a request. “I want
you to promise that you won't tell anyone,” I explained that I expected the
press to remain interested in me for a little while, hoping for more inside
information on the Beatles and even though Terry was simply an employee of
Brian's, the press might find the story interesting. “I don't want anyone
to know how stupid I was, I just wanted to forget it ever happened,” was my
story. Truth was, I couldn't risk any of the story getting back to anyone
in England where the truth would come out when a very bewildered and
indignant Terry was confronted.
Brenda and Sandy agreed to keep it quiet and did their best to be
supportive of me, a lump of a roommate who moved through the next couple of
days like a zombie and cried until falling asleep every night. They
encouraged me, well, forced me, to call the hospital and let them know I
was back and available for work, and generally took care of me. They
pitched in to keep me occupied, nagged me to eat and all but dressed me the
first evening I had to work. I didn't want to face the world and the
questions from friends and acquaintances. Going to work helped though. The
familiar routines and simply having a chance to take care of someone else
got me moving again, thinking of things other than Paul and feeling like I
could possibly go on.
My roommates noted the improvement and, more in tune with the world around
me, I noted the speculative looks Brenda was giving me. Knowing that the
more I said, the deeper I was digging myself and poor Terry into this lie,
I pretended not to notice. The next day I walked in on a whispered exchange
between the two of them that I could hardly pretend not to have heard.
“What's up?” I asked.
They looked at each other and then Brenda said, “That is what we are
wondering.”
“What do you mean?”
Another look passed between them, then, bluntly, Brenda asked, “If it was
Terry you fell in love with, why did you take down the Beatles poster over
your bed? Why do you leave the room whenever a Beatles song comes on?”
“I don't want any reminders of England,” I said.
“England is not the problem,” Sandy said. “You can talk about England
without crying.”
“So what really happened?” Brenda pressed on. “We don't believe it was
Terry. You wouldn't feel like you had to keep that secret. It is like you
are protecting someone.”
“A Beatle someone,” Sandy clarified.
I stared at them. Caught. I should have known they would see through it.
They were my best friends, closer than anyone other than perhaps Anne. We
had roomed together for a year and shared every event in that time. Well,
almost every event. We talked a lot about how we felt about the various
boys we dated, but for some reason never revealed in any great detail just
how far we had gone with them. We talked a lot about kissing and in general
terms about making out, but certainly never bragged about how far we had
gone. “Nice girls don't” was so ingrained in us that whatever we did, we
kept it to ourselves. That was part of my reluctance now. Had I thought
either of them had even come close to having sex, I would have loved to
talk to them about the experience, but neither of my roommates ever implied
they had gone beyond letting a guy get a little free with his hands. In
England, with Paul, what we had done hadn't seemed all that bad. Surrounded
by women who considered sex to be a common part of dating and men who
considered it a fun game, it hadn't seemed so immoral. Home again, I
reverted to Midwestern morals and didn't want them to know.
I was considering telling them an edited version of what had happened but
as I looked at their waiting faces I saw what in just a week at home was
becoming a familiar look. I had seen it on friends, co-workers, the “Ooh,
she knows the Beatles!” look of anticipation, eager excitement. I knew they
were concerned about me but that look also said they were eager to hear
about the Beatle involved, the inside scoop. Paul's voice came back to me.
“ ... most of them seem to think that buying a record or buying a ticket
means they bought us.”
I could not tell them, not even an edited version. If I couldn't keep it
private, how could I expect my roommates to? What Paul had done was rotten
but it didn't give me the right to talk about him and risk his personal
life becoming even less his own. Any other guy would have been fair game,
but not one of them. Fans had no right to this information.
“I can't,” I told my roommates. “I can't discuss this. You know I fell hard
for someone and I have to respect his privacy. I know you would promise not
to tell, but I can't risk it.”
They questioned, begged, and argued but I remained silent. This was such a
crappy thing to say to my best friends and I felt so bad, but I couldn't do
it. When they saw I was about to cry, they gave in and agreed to let me
keep my secrets. That didn't prevent them from speculating, guessing,
watching my reactions to a photo or song or the drop of a name, but they
didn't seem angry as I feared they would be. I'm not sure why they weren't.
Maybe because they thought it noble or loyal or romantic that I was
protecting “HIM”—That's the way they referred to whoever it was I wouldn't
tell them about. Audible capital letters.—or because they could see how bad
off I was and knew I couldn't take anymore.
The first week of school was tough. Everyone knew about my summer vacation
and wanted to hear all about it. They expected to hear all about it since I
owed them. When reporters had first come snooping around, looking for
John's nurse, they found dead ends. The school and the hospital would not
release names of any students or employees so they approached other
students who were working at the hospital over summer vacation. Brenda told
all our classmates that I did not want to be identified and they went along
with it, banding together and refusing to talk. Since our phone was listed
under Sandy's name, not mine or Brenda's, they couldn't track me that way.
The reporters didn't know yet that I was back, and, hopefully, had lost
interest. Brenda hung close during those first few days and got me through.
Usually quiet Brenda became Chatty Cathy. She jumped in and helped me over
the rough spots, coaching me as I told the story and flashed the photos.
Things settled back into a routine. I woke up every morning and experienced
the pain of remembering all over again every day. I didn't want to get out
of bed, didn't want to do anything but pull the blankets over my head and
disappear, but part of me was observing the goings-on with clinical
detachment. So this is what a broken heart feels like? Well, never again.
Never, ever again. This detached observer pulled me up and out of bed to
work and school and study. Work went fine and the clinical part of school
was fine. When I was working with patients I was involved and active and
could forget. In a classroom or trying to study, my mind drifted. I was
back in England, I was with Paul. I couldn't concentrate and at the end of
two weeks, when we had the first tests, my grades showed it. The next week
I was called into the Dean of Nursing's office for a discussion of my
nearly flunked tests.
Tony Barrow saved me. I had just gotten a letter from him explaining that
my first story had been published and had gotten such a good response, that
they had requests from other magazines in England and other countries for
rights to reprint the articles. The fan club magazine was only available to
club members, not on the newsstands, and Tony was inundated with demands
for copies. He didn't want to shortchange club members by having another
lot of magazines printed for one time sales, but wanted to satisfy the fans
and selling the article was the easiest way. Ordinarily, a contract between
contributing authors and a magazine spelled out that all rights to the
articles went to the magazine upon payment to the author, but since I had
no written contract, the solicitors wanted my written permission. Tony had
negotiated a deal that would get me some additional money from each
magazine the article was sold to. All I had to do was sign the enclosed
contract and he would assure that the money was deposited to my bank
account as we had done with my other payments. He was currently dealing
with offers from the States, Germany, and Australia. I signed the contract
and mailed it back immediately with a note thanking him.
So, when faced with questions about my drastic drop in scholastic abilities
since last semester, I was able to assure the adviser that I would be able
to greatly reduce my work hours and concentrate on my studies, which I did.
I studied three times as much as I had in the past and managed to get back
on track.
John didn't call and although disappointed, I was not surprised. I did not
doubt that he had confronted Paul about his treatment of me, but Paul was
an old friend whose ties to him were strong and deep. John would have
cussed him out, called him a bastard, and then listened to Paul's side, be
it an explanation or apology or denial. They would still be friends, closer
than I had been to either of them. They would go on with the business of
being demi-gods and forget about the girl who had been part of their lives
for a few weeks.
September slipped away. I was surviving in school. My mother called
repeatedly, wanting me to come home for a weekend and I begged off saying I
had to work or study. I knew she was worried about me, but I just couldn't
face any questions. My roommates continued to accept my silence, even those
mornings when I showed up for breakfast with eyes swollen from crying. I
wasn't sleeping well, had no appetite and looked god-awful. Brenda and
Sandy no longer had to remind me to eat, go to bed, and so on, but that was
as far as it went. Nothing felt good, nothing tasted good, nothing was
funny, nothing was interesting, and there was no future, only memories of
Paul.
I had swung back and forth from being furious with Paul for being such a
bastard to anger with myself for being such a fool. In between, I just
hurt. Now all feeling seemed to be drained from me. I wasn't angry, and the
hurting was a constant ache that was just part of me, not really a feeling.
I was empty. There was no black cloud over my head, it was inside of me.
Sandy and Brenda took care of me, keeping me moving, telling me it would
get better.
The only thing I did for myself was to make a doctor's appointment for
whatever tests were necessary to be sure I didn't have VD. I had no
symptoms, but it was pretty obvious Paul could have given me more than an
education. I was trying to be a responsible adult, and that included facing
all the facts. While I was there, I was going to try to get a birth control
pill prescription. I'd had sex, and I liked it, and one of these days I
would want to do it again. This time I would be prepared. I knew that you
could get a prescription by telling the doctor you were getting married in
a few months and wanted to be safely on the pill and adjusted to it before
the wedding, but I didn't have the energy to lie or the engagement ring to
give credence to the lies. If I couldn’t get a prescription without the
lies, I would go back in a month or so armed with a fake ring and wedding
plans.
On the day of my appointment, I went directly from the hospital to the
clinic. I feared an embarrassing visit, but the clinic was near the U. of
M. campus. No one even raised an eyebrow. The place was packed with girls
my age and younger, and I left with a pill prescription and the feeling
that premarital sex among young people was a lot more common than I had
thought.
When I got home a couple of hours later, Brenda and Sandy were in a tizzy
worrying about me. I apologized and they demanded to know where I had been.
They had a right to be upset. I had been a zombie for three weeks, then
disappeared for hours. So I told them I had a doctor's appointment.
“Oh, no!” said Sandy. “She's pregnant!”
I tried to tell them I wasn't, but they were having a hard time believing
me. Why else would I go to the doctor? So I told them I went for a
prescription for birth control pills. That left them looking at each other
in bewilderment. Why now?
They eyed me with growing horror. I could read their minds. They thought
“She's done it, and now, even though HE isn't here, she is going to keep on
doing it. Our roommate is turning into a nymphomaniac!”
I was no nymphomaniac but there was some truth to the rest of that, at
least enough that I had gotten the pill prescription. I could hardly tell
them that. I didn't want to confirm their suspicions about how far things
had gone with HIM. Besides, the way I felt now, it would be a long time
before I could care enough about anyone. I had no intention of sleeping
with someone just for sex but when the time came I wanted to be ready. I
wasn't a naive girl anymore.
It was a carefully worded explanation I gave them. “I never again want to
want someone that badly and not be able to do it.” It was true but
misleading. It steered them back to assuming I had not had sex with HIM.
Days went by and I began to feel a little better or at least got a little
better at faking it. I smiled, I talked, I stopped crying every night but I
was far from over him. I still went through the days with an endless
emptiness inside. The sight of a couple holding hands or a love song on the
radio bottomed me out. It didn't have to be the sad story of
Eleanor Rigby sung by a voice that alternately took razor blades to my heart and
sent aching desire through it. I cried when the Supremes said “My World Is
Empty Without You” and agreed wholeheartedly when Johnny Mathis reminded us
that “A song of love is a sad song, hi lili, hi lili, hi lo.” Hell, I cried
over every love song and every song with any British connections. I was
probably the only person in America that cried over “Winchester Cathedral.”
I slept poorly, and when I dreamed, it was of being held and kissed,
and I awoke in tears. The dreams left hangovers of misery for hours. I
couldn't shake the intense feelings of wanting and hurt and anger and
bewildered loss. Then, when the hangover lifted, I was left feeling
humiliated. The dreams were always about sex, and that seemed to mean that
all that Paul and I had together was a sexual relationship. The doctor's
office called and said my tests were negative, and that was kind of a
marker that the episode was over and it was time to close the book on it
and move on.
I tried. I was beginning to be aware of the world around me again. That
should have helped, but in some ways, it was worse. It meant more ways to
miss him. I'd find myself wanting to talk to him. I wanted to know what he
thought about a movie, a book, a new song on the radio. I wanted to hear
him laugh at a TV show, tease me about my uniform, encourage me when I was
worried about a test. I would see two little boys playing together and
think of the stories he had told me about when he and Mike were little. I
missed his smile, his laugh, his sense of humor, his ambition, his love for
music, the way he listened when I talked, his ability to put others at
ease, his ability to laugh at himself “the cute Beatle”, his quiet
confidence in himself. I missed the way he dressed. He always looked so
neat and well dressed but the bedroom and bathroom he left behind would be
a disaster. I missed how he could be right at home as one of the World
Famous, Filthy Rich, Fab Four one minute, then go home and fix his own
breakfast and clean up after Martha.
I missed a lot more than having sex with him. What we had was much more
than that. Sex was so new and incredible to me, it had seemed like all
there was, but as the days went by, I came to believe that even if I had
never had sex with him, I would still be walking around in a world that
felt empty. That was reassuring to my fragile ego and pride, but I still
hurt.
I tried to look at the situation dispassionately. I was young and
inexperienced and I had made a mistake, but it certainly could have been
worse. Jane had invested years in loving him. I had spent only a matter of
weeks with him and only a few days building a dream of a future with him in
it. I had been with him long enough to get a toxic dose of the McCartney
charm, but it wasn't going to be fatal. I would survive.
By the end of the month, I was making it through a day, even two or three,
without tears. Pain and anger eased to acceptance of the fact that I had
walked into it knowing what the odds were, knowing what his reputation was.
I went on believing that he probably did love me as much as he could. Being
a Beatle and having girls and women treat him like either a god or a trophy
had to have screwed up his perception of what he was supposed to contribute
to a relationship.
It was easier to forgive him than it was to forgive myself for being such a
fool.
That sounds a little crazy, forgiving a guy who had flat out used me
but remember that I was of the generation that just months before had
listened to Lou Christie sing "Lightning Strikes” and thought it was true,
that men simply had different physical needs and therefore were entitled to
a different morality than women. So, forgive him I did, but forgive myself?
That would take time. I wasn't sure when I would be able to trust my
feelings and judgment again, but overall I began to believe that someday I
would feel better and someday I would be interested in dating again and
someday I might even fall in love again. Not for a long while, but someday,
and when I did, I would never fall that hard and that fast again. I would
be wiser, more careful, more cynical.
The next and biggest step in picking up the pieces came one night the last
week in September. Mom called yet again, and this time she asked bluntly if
I could be pregnant. By that time I had gotten my period again, proof of
the pill's effectiveness, and was able to reassure her. I didn't bother
protesting that it wasn't possible. I simply said no and let her think
whatever she wanted. I was too busy fighting back tears because saying it
aloud was so painful. I hated myself for the idiocy of what I had been
hoping in some unreasonable corner of my heart. It wasn't the idea that if
I had been pregnant I would have had a reason to call him, a reason for him
to want me back. That was not at all how I wanted things to be. No, it was
just the image of a little boy, my little boy, looking up at me with Paul's
eyes, Paul's smile. I guess the pathetic ridiculousness of that kind of
thinking jarred what I had left of common sense. Enough was enough. I had
spent six weeks in his company. OK, forty-five days. Forty-six if you
counted the last day when he put me on the train to London early in the
morning.. I could have counted out the hours we were together, separated
them into time with others and time alone, time before we had sex and time
after, time before he said he loved me and time after. It had been nearly
that long since I left England. The statute of limitations on hurting
should not exceed the time invested. It was time to let it go.
I forced myself to go out after that. “ ... She goes out. She says that
long ago she knew someone but now he's gone. She doesn't need him.” I had
gone to a movie with Brenda and Sandy, but it was time for a social life. I
went out for pizza with a bunch of friends and the next weekend I went to a
party. I would not agree to the date Sandy wanted to set up for me, though.
Blind dates were horrors under the best of situations and I was pushing it
to think I could get through one, but it was a start.