A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties

by Terry Marshall

  He roared to life, burrowed his face in my mop of morning hair, and zeroed in with a single kiss on my lips. “Now that’s a wake-up call, mademoiselle. Ready for round two?”

  “How long you been awake?” I asked.

  “Hours. Didn’t want to disturb you in case you turned out to be a dream.”

  “Not a chance. Dreams don’t get hungry, and I’m starving. How about breakfast?”

  He rolled us into a full-length hug that left me tingling. And him? Clearly ready for a lot more. But when I didn’t encourage him, he sighed. “Okay, I give up. Let’s eat.”

  After showers and breakfast, we headed to the Sorbonne. He had applied for an Olmsted Fellowship, and the Sorbonne was on his list of top schools. An Olmsted would pay for graduate study and cultural immersion abroad, including language classes for the scholar and his wife. How enlightened: the wife recognized as a key partner. I wanted to be that wife.

  Fortress-like, the Sorbonne sprawled over several blocks, capped by copper-topped towers aged to a pale blue. The central building was set around a long cobblestone quad. Minimal greenery. I had expected the Renaissance architecture, sure, but also expansive lawns and leafy retreats for reflection in the midst of the frenetic city. With a gesture that encompassed the quad, the dome, the spires, the cupolas, and rows and rows of windows surrounding us, Jack said, “We belong here, you and I.”

  “I’d master French first,” I said. “Then French literature. French and British lit would make a compelling resume for a teacher. Or maybe I’d go back into journalism.”

  “For me it would be sociology and history,” he said, rattling off a list of French sociologists he admired. Eyes sparkling, he fantasized that he would uncover a trunk of letters lost for centuries. He would analyze them and postulate a paradigm shift on the origins of the French Revolution.

  As he spun his fantasy of student life in Paris, I became more and more we. “We’d rent a walk-up garret on the Left Bank, put up prints at first, and buy an obscure Matisse or Cézanne until we could afford a Picasso or Dali.”

  I held my breath. But he rambled on about missing out on the Rhodes and two years at Oxford. “I thought I’d won it, I really did. I was crushed.”

  I risked an empathetic hug. He put his arm around me. Wow. Had his rigid PDA code cracked, if ever so slightly?

  Inside, we were drawn toward the library, with its brocade walls and endless rows of gleaming mahogany tables lit by individual brass lamps, all of which we could see through two-story high windows. An unsmiling guard barred our entry—no student IDs. No matter. We imagined burrowing through the dusty ancient tomes and first editions.

  At noon we stopped at a small market, loaded up with a sturdy loaf of dark bread, French cheeses, a tomato, and some apples, and ambled into the Luxembourg Gardens. We picked our way among the pools and fountains ringed by red, purple, and yellow flowers, chose a shady spot in the thick grass, and ate our simple lunch while rooting for kids piloting small boats through the water. A pair of lovers sauntered by, the girl’s hand in the guy’s rear pocket, him patting her fanny. I elbowed Jack. “Do you want to enlighten them on PDA?”

  “I know I hurt your feelings, and I’m sorry.” He ran his fingers over his stubby hair. “But this GI haircut tags me as an American soldier. Too many of us have left babies behind. Besides, I want to set an example for my men. We have to show respect for all women.”

  I was thankful he hadn’t seen me fume on my drive from the border back to Landshut. “Apology accepted,” I said. “And I apologize for embarrassing you. Though I confess you warmed my insides when you put your arm around me at the Sorbonne.”

  “No accident. The thought of going to school together heated me up. And since ass patting—pardon my French—is de rigueur here, a wayward arm seems pretty tame. See, I’m more broad-minded than you thought.”

  “And after only one day in Paris,” I said. “This place is growing on both of us.”

  He turned to me and flashed his lopsided smile. “Let’s celebrate, declare ourselves liberated. How about a swanky dinner? Treat ourselves to Paris’s world-famous cuisine.”

  “Love to. As long as we don’t spend too much.”

  “Let me worry about that,” he said.

  Later, atop the Pantheon, we lingered hand in hand. Unlike the smoggy day before, the sky was a deep blue, dotted by puffy clouds. In every direction, Paris’s landmarks jutted up in full display—Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and others we didn’t recognize. We could live in Paris for years and never run out of places to visit. Inside the Pantheon, the frescoes seemed drab compared to the bright colors of the Rubens and Vermeer paintings I’d seen in Terry’s art books. In the crypts, we silently honored the writings of Voltaire and Victor Hugo.

  Back at the hotel, I begged for a short nap. Jack went off to arrange dinner. Thoughts of Terry wormed into my sleep. I couldn’t write to him while I was with Jack, two weeks minimum. My silence would fuel his anxiety, precisely because he knew where Jack and I were. But even Terry’s vivid imagination couldn’t conjure up anything as damning as the reality—my cuddling with Jack in our shared bed and glorying in his kisses and caresses.

  But I wouldn’t have done anything differently. Not because I didn’t love Terry, but because I also loved Jack. I wanted to blame Terry for blindsiding me, but I couldn’t. He had opened my eyes to a world I wanted to explore. He loved me in spite of my naiveté, and he saw, before I did, what a fit we were. Meanwhile, Jack had read my thoughts from thousands of miles away and propelled me on this trip of a lifetime.

  How could I have fallen in love with two men at the same time? Curiously, loving one in no way diminished my love for the other. But I could give my life, my loyalty, to only one, a commitment that could mortally wound the other.

  The seventeenth-century restaurant Jack chose for dinner took my breath away—walls covered in gold leaf and a gold ceiling with intricate carvings, accentuated by a single chandelier, each light with its own tiny lampshade. A rigid maître d’ whisked us through a cluster of small circular tables to a semiprivate niche.

  I never could strut like a model, but after Jack pulled my hand into the crook of his arm, I confess I walked with a slight swish in the cocktail dress Mom had insisted on buying for me. He whispered, “Don’t look now, but every man here is wishing he were in my shoes.”

  “Really? So how does that feel?”

  “Scary. I need my sword to fend off the barbarians.”

  Ever the soldier, but tonight, I didn’t mind.

  The maître d’ seated us in cranberry-red velvet chairs with carved wooden legs. An eggshell-white linen tablecloth reached halfway to the floor, with matching napkins and an array of silver on both sides of the nested china. To our right and left and all around were eight-foot-high mirrors, each reflecting our images from different angles. “Don’t look now. We’re surrounded . . . by ourselves!” I told Jack.

  He nodded. “Classy company.”

  We delighted in course after course: onion soup, duck confit, roasted potatoes, sautéed vegetables, fruits, warm bread, and a different wine with every course—served in crystal goblets, enough to set our insides abuzz, but not so much we’d get sloshed. Between courses, we held hands across the tiny table. Openly.

  With a cheese plate, the waiter delivered a special round of wine, a tribute from an unnamed diner who had penned on a small card, “Vive l’amour! Vive la guerre!” Were love and war two horns on the same bull? We looked around. No one made eye contact. We toasted the room.

  At the end of the meal, with a flourish, our waiter presented a large plate with a chocolate soufflé for two. An elegant script, written in dark chocolate, ringed the plate’s upper rim. “Ann, Je t’aime! Jack.” On the lower rim, it read, “Ann, I love you! Jack.”

  He leaned forward, eyes eager. My breath caught. This was it. He was going to propose. Here, now, with the waitstaff bearing witness, with the entire dining room gone silent. “Now isn’
t this an interesting surprise?” he said. “What say you now, mademoiselle?”

  Would he fall on one knee? Please don’t!

  He winked and didn’t say another word.

  I waited. He smiled.

  Two could play this game. “I’m shocked, Lieutenant, but this fine script is only half the story.” I dipped my finger in the chocolate, swirled it around Ann and with arrows edited my name to the end and Jack’s to the beginning.

  “That’s better,” I said. “It’s true, by the way.” It was a game, yes, but I did love him. I wanted him to know. “If we gobble down the chocolate, what happens to the love?”

  “It grows stronger from the inside. Here, try this.” He scooped up a bite and held it out.

  One bite demanded another. And another. I seized the spoon and returned the favor. Another bite. Two more. It was as intimate as kissing. Right there in public.

  When the waiter brought the bill, I tried to peek at it, but Jack snatched it away. “No, my dear! Some things are mine alone.”

  It must have cost a fortune, probably more than fifty dollars.

  Terry

  Friday, 4 a.m., 3 July 1964, Silverton. In John Ross’s apartment, I pounded out a letter to Annie about yesterday’s trek to Silver Lake, crafted so she’d feel as if she had been with us. I was tempted to add “Sorry you weren’t here. Read this and weep,” but that would have been mean. Besides, I had a gnawing fear her adventures would dwarf mine.

  Five of us had hiked to Silver Lake, including a cousin I hadn’t seen since we were kids. Charlotte had blown into town on the narrow gauge with a college girlfriend. July 2 may have been midsummer everywhere else in America, but it was still spring in the San Juans. The switchbacks up the ridge were mountain-goat steep, made worse by a frozen avalanche as slick as hockey-rink ice. We had to chip toeholds so we could cross.

  Midway, one of the guys slipped and shot past, screaming, “Grab me! Grab me!”

  I lunged for him but missed. We all held our breath. He slid to a stop in a cluster of ice chunks thirty yards downslope. I started back down, but he sat up, called out “I’m okay, I’m okay,” and got to his feet. We waited as he worked himself slowly across to our trail of toeholds.

  “Nothing broken,” he said, his voice cracking. “But I should have brought my toboggan.”

  “Or a parachute,” one of the girls said.

  After he caught his breath, we continued across, this time each of us making sure we jammed our boots into the toeholds before we moved on.

  Silver Lake shivered in the shade of a legion of snow-covered peaks. The lake had begun to thaw, its surface cracked like a shattered mirror and too thin to walk on. We got there in the late afternoon, explored too long, and left after dark. Under a cloud-shrouded sky—no stars, no moonlight—we negotiated the ice field step by tenuous step with only two flashlights. Below the ice field, swirling winds whipped an icy mist into a prickly frenzy. It scoured our skin, chapped our lips, burned our eyes, and numbed us to the bone. The two girls had worn tennis shoes; their feet were soaked and frozen. Further down, Charlotte twisted her ankle, and I put my arm around her and helped her limp the last mile, plodding in tandem like wounded war buddies, our hips pressed together.

  Afterward, she and I sat silently at the Grand Imperial bar, downing Black Russians until we thawed—nearly an hour. We swapped tales from our junior high years. One Thanksgiving, she and I hunted jackrabbits in our southeast forty with my .22. Another time, we cornered a rattlesnake behind the barn on their farm. In our retelling, the rabbits had multiplied to dozens, and the snake had grown to the size of a python.

  We were a bit tipsy when I walked her up to her room in the Grand Imperial. We said good night and shook hands like we did in high school. Then we hugged, our first time ever. Through the night, images of my cousin ricocheted through my mind—the heat of her against me on the trail, her painful winces when I pried off her frozen tennis shoes and massaged her icy feet, and, later, her cheery laugh, her lithe frame.

  I rejected those thoughts—she was my cousin!—and imagined her to be Annie. I brought Annie down the slope with me and massaged warmth back into her frosted feet, ankles, and legs. Sipped those Black Russians with her and guided her down the street and up the stairs into this very room. Ha, no self-conscious hug from Annie. Hugging, kissing, stroking were second nature to us now. Or they had been when I last saw her. But I couldn’t keep Annie in focus. Too quickly her image faded into darkness.

  My frozen hike rekindled other memories of winter in Silverton—the bitter cold, the mountains buried in snow, desolate Greene Street. But above all else, my week with Rachael the previous Christmas.

  Oh my, Rachael: a witty, raven-haired seductress with a saunter that turned heads. I’d met her over the summer when she and her boyfriend, a CU geology grad student, were in Silverton roughing it like prospectors while he gathered data for his thesis. Rachael joined our weekend talkfests in the Grand Imperial bar. She was “Bobby’s girl.” Off-limits. Still, each Friday night I sat beside her at our table, consumed with envy at Bobby’s fortunes. One night she told me, “Living in a tent on a rocky mountainside is the pits.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “Would another Guinness ease the pain?”

  She slipped in close and stroked my arm. “Oh, it would. It sure would, hon,” she said.

  We talked for hours. I didn’t try to whisk her off to bed, as I so ached to do. Aside from that one conversation, I left Silverton for Boulder without spending a moment alone with Rachael.

  But then came Friday, November 15, 1963, Boulder. Noon, to be precise. My last class for the week. For the first time that fall, I faced a weekend alone. Sarah had booted me out six days earlier. And Saturday’s game against Kansas would be another sure loss. I stuffed my five-pound book of Shakespeare’s works into my backpack and shuffled out of the classroom.

  Across the hallway, a flashy girl in tight jeans and a pearl-button cowgirl shirt waved. She slouched against the wall like a rebel who’d sneaked out behind the barn for a snort. “Howdy, cowboy,” she called. “You headed my way?” I looked around. “Yeah, you, Marshall. Who else you think I’m waiting for?”

  My God, it was Rachael! “No Bobby here,” I said. “Geology students don’t hang out in Hellems Hall.”

  “Bobby who? I’m waiting for you, hon. And I’m hungry. I’m treating you to lunch.”

  She had broken up with Bobby, dropped out of CU, and moved back home to Denver. Running into me was no accident. She had talked the registrar’s office into giving her my class schedule.

  We ate downtown, a real lunch with wine. She scooted in beside me. Pressed against me, actually, and stroked my thigh. I squirmed. No girl had ever come on to me like that. “I could hardly restrain myself last summer,” she said. “I’ve wanted you ever since.”

  We managed to finish eating, and I took her to my one-bedroom cubbyhole in a shabby Victorian near campus. We made love twice that afternoon. Saturday, we did go to the game—Kansas 43, CU 14. But mostly, we spent the weekend like newlyweds. She pranced around my apartment in bikini panties—no blouse, no bra—and stirred up meals on my hot plate that way. When she ate across from me topless, I couldn’t say half a sentence without stuttering. I mock protested, and she waltzed into my bedroom and sauntered out in one of my T-shirts. Nothing else, absolutely nothing. “Okay, hon. Will this do it for you?”

  Rachael wasn’t ready to return to the university. She wanted to write but had no training. “What if I went to Silverton? Pitched in at the Standard and learned to write. Shoot, I’d even work for free if Allen couldn’t pay me.” What if?

  Sunday night, I delivered Rachael to her parents’ home in Denver. She called midweek. “I’ve worked it out,” she said. “I’m going to Silverton. After Thanksgiving.”

  “I’ll take you! You can meet Mom and the kids.” Pure gut reaction, no thought of what that might imply.

  Of course, I didn’t know when I blurted out the offer th
at two days later President Kennedy would be assassinated and that I would be consumed by the gut-wrenching funeral weekend that followed. Those four days left me exhausted and mentally drained. Boulder itself had become oppressive. I could hardly wait for Thanksgiving at home. A side excursion to Silverton would renew my soul, and Rachael would be a delightful bonus.

  I picked up Rachael in Denver early Wednesday afternoon and took her home to Center for Thanksgiving. Neither Mom nor the kids liked her. Not that they said anything, but Pam’s melodramatic eye rolling, the boys’ wide-eyed titters, and Mom’s under-the-breath “tscht-tscht” told me they were shocked by Rachael’s low-cut blouse and the way I enjoyed her brushing against me. They were cordial, but meals in the customarily banter-filled Marshall household were as silent as a Benedictine monastery. Each time Rachael spoke, every one of them went mute.

  She and I drove to Silverton the day after Thanksgiving. John Ross was out of town, so we bunked into the two-bedroom apartment I’d slept in over the summer. Rachael was nineteen, free-spirited, and insatiable. She expressed unfettered joy in being touched. Gentle kisses to her neck and nuzzling her hair sparked deep-throated purrs, low moans, and sighs. With her in my arms, JFK and Boulder and my family all disappeared from my consciousness.

  Sunday afternoon, I had to drag myself out of John’s apartment for the long haul back to Boulder. Rachael stayed behind.

  December pitched us into a frenetic romance by mail, three or four letters a week. At first they were filled with friendly chitchat—her settling in, events in Silverton. I critiqued her stories in the Standard and sent her a box of journalism texts, along with tales from life on campus. We began to write about us, explicit details from our two weekends together, about how much we missed each other, about what was next.

  Early Christmas Eve, Rachael hitched a ride from Silverton to Durango and caught the Trailways bus to Center. My family greeted her like a teenage jezebel, but she quickly charmed them all with her hand-painted Christmas cards and her expertise in the kitchen. She also wore a bulky sweater and comported herself like a sister rather than a lover.