You’re a tease, Jack Sigg. Okay, game on. I edged away. His hands tightened. He kissed me again, this time hard, pressing in. He pulled away ever so slowly, and I nibbled at his lip. We kissed until my pulse was racing. “And I thought the fairy-tale castle and storybook town were spectacular.” I spread my fingers on his chest. “You, my far-more-than-friend, have made this day unforgettable. How can I ever sleep?”
“Come to my room. I’ll rock you to sleep.”
“Sounds tempting. But terribly dangerous, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’ll protect you, I—”
“From what? Your all-too-obvious desires?” Or my own?
He reddened. “You’re right. I’m not the one to protect you from me, am I?” He held both hands up. “Good night, my dearest.” He pivoted like a cadet on the parade grounds and raced off.
He left me zinging, like I had been after Terry’s kisses turned friendship into a romance.
Oh, what about Terry? What was I going to tell him? But worse, what was I going to tell Jack about Terry? And when?
I woke up Saturday relishing Jack’s good-night kisses. So far, he had exceeded my wildest hopes. Item one: He honored my wishes at the door last night with respect and grace. Item two: He knew so much about Europe, history, music. Item three: He made great choices. Where to go? Neuschwanstein, Linderhof, and Füssen. How to make me feel special? A strawberry tart.
A tapping at my door crept into my reverie, followed by a stage whisper. “Fräulein? Sun’s up. It begs you to help light up my world.” Oh, yes, Item four: He thinks like a poet.
“Be right there. Don’t run off.” I dressed in three minutes and creaked the door open.
He was leaning against the wall, cradling a handful of wild strawberries. “For you, my dear. They flagged me down on my morning run and said, ‘Take me to your lover.’ Who knew strawberries could talk?” He popped a couple into my mouth.
I kissed his fingers. “Ah, tasty. And fresh as a mountain morning!”
After breakfast we hiked into the hills along a stream to a narrow spot with protruding rocks. Jack leaped across and offered his hand. I found secure footing on an angular rock and swung toward a small boulder. The rock rolled. Jack yanked me in a hair-raising flight over the stream and caught me in both arms. Grinning, he swung me around and set me down triumphantly.
We darted off, in and out among the trees, discovering mushrooms and spying on rabbits and squirrels. At a wooden footbridge we crossed to a meadow, a riot of dainty white flowers strewn on a green carpet.
“Look! Is this edelweiss?” I fell to my knees, drawing in the scent of the Alps.
He knelt beside me. “With these guys, the magic is in the details. Each bloom is a cluster of miniature flowers. And notice its hairy stem—extra insulation against the icy air. They thrive in the mountains.”
Just like Jack. And Terry. Both thrived in the mountains. I wanted to snatch them up, plant them in my imaginary highland retreat, and revel in the joy each gave me. But the rain clouds of my impending confession to Jack threatened. How could I spoil such an idyllic morning? I promised myself I would tell him later.
Back in Landshut Saturday night, Helmut, the graying proprietor of a hole-in-the-wall café, welcomed us as if Jack were a lost son returned from the Foreign Legion. Ogling me as if I were a chorus-line dancer, the man pulled me protectively to his side and seemed to lay out boundaries for Jack’s behavior, supported by finger wagging and head shaking. Jack sputtered, denying whatever suggestive breeches Helmut had implied. I edged away. They keeled over in back-slapping merriment.
Helmut caught his breath. “I welcome you to my little Gasthaus, Fräulein,” he boomed. “Jack is a good boy.” He ushered us into a small dining room and bowed deeply. “Fräulein, excuse me. I must speak Deutsch to my friend Jack.” After their brief exchange, Jack and I were alone, face-to-face across the table. He settled into the booth as if he were at home in his favorite easy chair. There would never be a better time. “Jack, I want—”
“I’ve already ordered. Helmut makes the best goulash that will ever pass your lips.”
I offered a sick smile and took a deep breath. “Jack, I—”
“You know, if things don’t work out in the army, we could settle in some little burg in Pennsylvania, open Helmut’s first branch in the US, and serve the best goulash in America.”
He had this blissful look on his face, as if here, day four in Germany, he had proposed, I had accepted, and any moment Helmut would march in with the wedding cake. Run a goulash café? In Pennsylvania? Oh no! “Jack, there’s something we need to—”
Helmut burst in, waving a pair of wine glasses and a short, round bottle, flattened, like it had been left in the desert sun and half melted. With a flourish, he muscled out the cork, offered a sip to Jack, beamed when Jack signaled approval, and poured. As suddenly as he had appeared, this whirling dervish left us in privacy.
Now. I had to do it now. “Jack, we have to talk about—”
“I thought Germany meant beer. Wrong. Helmut swears German wines are a better drink for lovers. See this bottle—a Bocksbeutel, a Bavarian wine.” He lofted his glass. “Here’s to bright beginnings.”
We clinked glasses, and quaking innards and thick tongue be damned, I barreled ahead. “Jack, I never imagined we’d have so much to explore when I started dreaming about you two years ago. I was thrilled when—”
“Hey, this is a celebration. You’re making me nervous.”
“I’m a bit nervous myself. Things got . . . complicated before I left Boulder. I, well—”
“I knew this was too good to be true! It’s about my competitor, isn’t it? That old buddy of yours?”
“Ah, sort of. It’s so totally unexpected. Actually, I—”
“Gretchen tried to warn me. I thought she was nuts.”
Gretchen? I’d never said a word to her about Terry. I swallowed hard. “I don’t know what she told you, but let me explain. I—”
“Sure. Go ahead. Explain.” He folded his arms and pushed back in the booth.
I soldiered on. “A couple of months ago, Terry and I went for coffee. Nothing special. We’d done it dozens of times, and out of the blue, he said he’d . . . fallen for me. I—”
“Yeah, right, ‘out of the blue,’ as if—”
“Darn it, Lieutenant. Do you know how to listen? This is tearing me apart. You’re making it worse.” I couldn’t lose control or start bawling like some fluffy-headed nincompoop. I took a deep breath, crossed my arms, and returned his glare.
“Sorry. I’m listening. I really am.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Affirmative,” he said under his breath.
“So, Terry’s going on, pretending he’s some heartsick suitor. He pulls out his high school class ring, asks me to be his girlfriend. The ring still has a thick wad of tape—painted bubblegum pink—wrapped around it so it would fit some long-ago girlfriend’s finger. I’m laughing. Finally, I realize he’s serious. And, well, it got complicated after that. And now, we’re . . . we’re more than old friends.”
“Exactly Gretchen’s words, ‘more than old friends.’ I thought she made it up because . . .” A sardonic smile twisted his mouth. “Well, because she hoped she and I might get together.”
Gretchen and Jack? I stared at him. “You mean you and Gret—”
“Absolutely not. I jumped in because Bonner abandoned her. The poor girl needed help. There’s nothing between us. Never has been. I swear.”
I can be naive, but everything about him said he was telling the truth. Still, Gretchen’s betrayal threatened my resolve. I wanted to shout, She’s wrong. It’s only you I care for!
But she wasn’t wrong. Maybe she saw it before I did. After all, Terry and I had spent hours with her. But I forced myself to confine Gretchen and Bonner’s affair to a locked closet. It was Terry, not Gretchen, that Jack and I had to deal with. “Look, a four-year friendship like Terry’s and mine doesn’t do a one
-eighty overnight. I reminded him about you, about our hopes, yours and mine, not only for this summer, but for life. He’d been my greatest supporter for this trip. In fact, back in January, he urged me to make love—with you! On our first night together.”
He looked as startled as I’d hoped, but said nothing.
“If it’s any consolation, this has been heart-wrenching for us both.”
“Sure. It was that camping trip, wasn’t it? Last October. October 4! Isn’t that what your letter said . . . your oh-so-matter-of-fact letter?”
Oh no! The camping trip with Terry. Those memories flooded my mind: Indian summer. Friday afternoon. Terry had called, “Let’s go camping. Tomorrow. James Creek.”
Him and his jokes. Always on the wrong side of propriety. “Sure. And afterward, we could take your jet to New York for the Philharmonic. Shall I pack my high-heel tennies?”
“I’m serious. Bring Julie. This weather can’t hold much longer.”
“So, you’re hot for my roommate. You like tall, sexy blondes, eh?”
“Nah, it’s only an off-campus break before midterms. What better antidote to cramming for exams than a night under the stars with friends?” My resolve cracked. I said I’d think about it. Julie wasn’t a camper, but surprisingly, she bought in. I accepted.
Next morning, Julie backed out. When I called Terry with the show-stopper, he said, “So what time do we leave?”
“Go by ourselves? You and me?”
“Why not?”
Overnight alone with a man? I’d never done anything so daring. But I didn’t have a good excuse. Perfect weather. Terry was safe. Besides, my dorm mother had signed a permission slip, allowing me to be out overnight. In those days of in loco parentis, the university acted as its students’ parents, zealously guarding the virtue of its women. Coeds had to live in approved housing, with curfews and sign-out slips that detailed where and when we were going and with whom. No one ever forfeited a hard-to-earn pass to be out overnight. Go ahead Ann, be bold for once. So I went.
We hiked up James Creek to the trail’s end and kept going, ending in a small dell near a beaver pond. As the light faded, we sculpted sleeping pads on a three-inch-deep bed of pine needles and built a roaring fire, nursing it to glowing coals. Our grilled burgers were four times as thick and juicy as our normal McDonald’s fare and so delicious we sucked the drippings from our fingers.
Night fell. Within our cocoon of firelight, we settled in to a high-fidelity concert: the gurgling, cascading creek, nature’s own perpetuum mobilé, beavers on percussion, their slaps accenting the rhythm, and wind song high in the trees dictating the melody. I propped myself against a log, knees up, philosophical and content. Terry had secreted wine glasses in his backpack. We toasted each other and gloated about the poor chumps back in Boulder cloistered in the library.
By the time we crawled into our bedrolls, I was on sensory overload. The full moon casting the trees into an army of unearthly guards over our glen, the cacophony of unfamiliar sounds, the light show in the glittering sky, the discordant pungency of forest—fragrant pine and rushing virgin stream tinged with whiffs of mold, decay, humid earth, and campfire—and that pervasive Chianti-fueled warmth inside. This night oozed passion.
“How come you’re not sleeping?” Terry’s whisper was an octave lower than usual.
Hmm, so he couldn’t sleep either. “It’s too beautiful. Too overwhelming. Too scary.”
“Yeah, more than you would believe. But you’re not really scared, are you?”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s pretty isolated.” The night sounds unnerved me, yes, but what scared me was the unsettling warmth of his presence. He was my buddy, not my boyfriend. I tried to will myself asleep, but I couldn’t. I settled on trying to imagine it being Jack beside me, foot kneading mine. Luckily, Terry couldn’t read my thoughts.
I had described the campout in a letter to Jack, the outdoorsy part anyway, not the romance of it. And certainly not my shameless fantasy of wishing he was inside my bedroll.
Now, across the dinner table from me in Landshut, Germany, Jack sat bolt upright, steely eyed. Troop Commander Sigg about to lower the boom on a guilty-as-charged private. I had no inkling last October how things would change between Terry and me. Nor that Jack thought “camping” was code for “sex.” “I don’t know. It was camping. It wasn’t camping. It was lots of things. It’s complicated.”
“I’m a guy. The guy, by the way, who noticed you were a woman long before your old buddy did. It was the camping trip. I know it was.”
“Well, nothing happened on that camping trip. Nothing sexual.”
“Hard to believe. But it doesn’t matter, does it?”
“It does to me. He was my friend, for crying out loud. I told him that. But, well, little by little, my feelings kind of began to change too. I guess I—”
“So why didn’t you tell me sooner? Not lead me on like a—”
“Lead you on? And tell you what? That he offered me his high school ring? My feelings didn’t change on a dime. In fact, I still don’t know. Terry and I have so much history and—”
“So where does that leave us?”
“You and me? We’re still the same people we were before. Whatever changed between Terry and me didn’t change how I feel about you. So, here we are. I’m in Germany. With you. I plan to have a fabulous summer. Let’s make it one for the ages.”
“A few weeks together for us doesn’t exactly level the playing field, does it?”
“Okay,” I said at last. “If it makes you feel any better, he’s pretty worried about you. He figures his Ford Falcon can’t outrace your Sting Ray. And buying me a cup of coffee occasionally can’t measure up to a tour around Europe.”
Jack’s face softened. His eyes gleamed. “So bubblegum pink tape on a class ring. And rejected by a high school kid?” He snickered. “Fair enough. Let the joust begin. No-holds-barred.”
4
A Peek into the Cold War
Ann
Sunday, June 14, 1964, southern Bavaria. We took off again in the chilly predawn light, this time for the German-Czech border. We had a whole day before Jack had to check in for guard duty. Even so, he seemed to be racing to meet some unalterable deadline, as if he would be court-martialed if we arrived thirty seconds late.
“Can’t waste a minute,” he said. “You’ve got to experience the insider’s view of the border—something most Americans will never see.”
My antennae went up. “At last—the Iron Curtain. That even beats castles and quaint towns.”
“Yes, ma’am. And will you ever be surprised.”
We drove toward Passau, a town on the Danube merely a stone’s skip from Austria, but there was no time for Austria today. We veered onto a twisty back road that led to a mountain on the border.
Walter Cronkite had painted grim images of the Cold War on my mental canvas. I pictured a forbidding wall bristling with soldiers, rolls of razor wire, lookout towers to spot escapees, spotlights for nighttime surveillance, and exhaust clouds from rumbling tanks, trucks, and jeeps.
But my real anxiety had nothing to do with geopolitics. Jack and I were about to climb a mountain together, a Matterhorn, I imagined, with perilous trails along crumbling ledges. He’d take the mountain in a few strides while I wheezed behind like a little pufferbelly. I squirmed at memories of bike rides with Terry, him on his ten-speed and me on my granny bike. Over and over, he would race ahead until all I could see was an ant-size Terry scurrying up the next hill. Today’s hike promised a sorry repeat.
That was bad enough, but this proper West Point officer was also duded up like a Hollywood stereotype of a German mountaineer: deer-hide lederhosen, leather suspenders, a Bavarian white trachten shirt, a green felt hat with a feather, and sandals with white knee socks. Squelching my inner imp, I didn’t sing “Happy Wanderer.”
I had already blown it with the lederhosen. Last Christmas, he’d sent me a pair, size tiny-hiney. I tried to put them on, hopping aro
und like I was in a sack race, tugging, stuffing, grunting. Didn’t work. Not even close. When I told him, he wrote immediately for my exact measurements, an embarrassing array of them.
Wanting to impress him with my svelte figure, I stretched the tape measure so tight a pair of silk panties wouldn’t have fit between lederhosen and skin. He sent a second pair—satiny gray suede, intricately embroidered, absolutely beautiful. Close, but still too tight to button.
Over dinner the night before this hike, he’d cooed, “Be sure to wear your lederhosen.” He was absolutely beaming.
An arrow of guilt pierced me front to back. “I didn’t bring them.”
“You didn’t br—” He jolted forward, looking like I’d sucker punched him. “Why?”
“They didn’t fit. I squeezed into them, but I couldn’t breathe. Or sit down. Or walk up the stairs. Plus, they were so short my fanny hung out. I was too embarrassed to tell you.”
“I had them tailor-made so we’d look like locals, not tourists.” The corners of his mouth twitched. He burst out laughing. “Hung out, huh? Sorry. I’m enjoying the mental snapshot.”
Some miles beyond Passau, Jack edged into a grassy spot beside the road. He scooped up his daypack, and we hiked up a gently sloping, forested hillside.
“This is the way to the border?” I asked.
“Affirmative. It’s not your Colorado Rockies, but you’ll love it.”
No, it wasn’t. No rocks, ravines, or gorges. No underbrush, downed trees, or human refuse. Rather, a gathering of towering trees, politely sharing the slope. “Where’s the trail?”
“We’re on it. It’s everywhere. It doesn’t get much steeper or denser than this.”
Whew, I didn’t have to scramble over boulders or edge along narrow trails up rugged peaks. He still could have left me miles behind, even if he hopped on one leg. He didn’t. The tang of pine energized me. The cheery voices of kids on family outings warmed the air. Jack blended in, his German getup, blond hair, and demeanor.
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 6
