“Uncle! Let’s take a break and rustle up some lunch.” Jack pulled into a small park near the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers in Lyon. Luckily the rain had stopped, but it was long past noon, and we were at least a half day’s drive from Saint-Tropez. We made it quick—wolfed down cheese and brown bread and capped it with an apple for each of us. No time for tea. After we packed up, I held my breath for fear he would put the top down. Instead, he tossed me the keys. “You ready to drive?”
“Wow. Never thought you’d ask. At least not while you were in the car.”
“It’ll be my first time in the passenger seat. You’re that special.”
“Honor accepted.” I swung into the cockpit as if it were my second home, turned the key, shifted gears, eased onto the busy highway, and took off. I loved driving his souped-up car. Moments later, the speedometer had swept up to eighty. “Yikes, how fast does this thing go?”
Jack glanced back over his shoulder. “Test it. Teach that Citroën a lesson.” In the rearview mirror, a dinky little car was closing on us as if he were A. J. Foyt after another title.
A tiny nudge, and we shot up to a hundred. The Citroën appeared to be backing up. Sweat beaded my forehead. “Wait,” Jack said. “This isn’t the autobahn. The French actually enforce all their speed limits. Better slow down, especially so close to the city.”
I eased back to seventy and studiously ignored the Citroën when he eventually overtook us. “So why did you buy this Sting Ray? It’s so out of character.”
“Not at all. It’s speed and performance. This baby does zero to sixty in 6.1 seconds. Get that: Six. Point. One. And zero to a hundred in 14.5. That’s a quarter of a mile in only fourteen and a half seconds. Step on it and it roars.”
He showered me with details: suspension and struts, traction and cornering power, gear ratios, displacement per liter, torque and horsepower—three hundred at five thousand revs, whatever that meant. It turned out that his ’63 Sting Ray marked a once-in-a-generation breakthrough in automobile technology, an engineering marvel. Here was the analytical Jack I admired.
“But I also did it for Dad. He’s as proud of this baby as I am.” He ran his hand over the dashboard. “You know I grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, right? A steel and coal town. My folks survived the Depression on grit and wits.” He paused. “In high school, I started my own house-painting business. To help out at home.”
“Really? Who would hire a high school student to paint a house?”
“Someone who figured I’d do it cheap.” His eyes twinkled. “Or folks who liked my dad. But pretty quick it was because I did a good job. Word got around. As for the Sting Ray, it’s a statement, sure, but it also made financial sense. I’m single, no dependents.” He stopped until I glanced at him. “At least for now.”
I returned his sly smile.
“Yeah, it cost me a bundle—$4,400—but the army has a deal that let me buy it a whole lot cheaper than I could get it at home. If I want to sell it when I get back, I’ll double my money. It’s an investment—in my life style as well as my financial future.”
“Sold! Can you buy me one?”
“Don’t need to. You’ve got mine. And me.”
He said it casually, not as a pitch, but as a statement of fact, and somehow that simple comment stripped away the veil of tension that had hovered between us. As we sped through the hilly green terrain, he told me about his hopes to score well on the Foreign Service exam and eventually move into work that would call on his negotiation and problem-solving skills. Someday, he said, he’d be secretary of state. We talked on and on, and the miles melted away.
But I was still torn by my own tug of war. Here I was, dashing toward the French Riviera, with this stud of a guy radiating testosterone. Tonight we’d sleep together. Again. How long before we strayed beyond the line I had vowed not to cross?
The idea of sex with Jack electrified me—both because he really might be The One and because the prelims had given me so much pleasure. What better place than the Riviera?
But I loved Terry too, and we had gone pretty far—shockingly far. What if he were destined to be my soul mate? How could I have sex with either guy before I’d resolved that bigger issue? Jack’s tease about “sublime sex” gave me the perfect opening to lay out my concerns.
“Jack, these days together have exceeded everything I dared to hope for. But you need to know some things I haven’t told you. Let me tell you my story—about how you came to be the ‘star’ of my own fantasy.”
He bolted upright, eyes bright with anticipation. “The ‘star,’ you say? Tell me more.”
“It started when I broke up with Geoff. He wanted me to drop out of school to marry him. How offensive. I quit dating and decided that I’d marry you.”
I let him chew on that while I navigated a traffic circle. “Your letter in November opened a floodgate of letters and audiotapes. Then came your gifts. The vase was over the top. More than the vase, it was the planning and execution.”
He was grinning like crazy. He started to speak, but I cut him off. “You could have sent the vase and let it go at that—like most guys. But somehow you found a florist in Boulder, sent him the vase, and had him deliver it filled with flowers. How did you find a florist from halfway around the world?”
“I didn’t want it to get lost among the bounty from your other suitors. You see, I—”
“But that’s only half the story. The florist left it at the front desk. By the time I showed up, the buzz was that my ‘German’ boyfriend was the world’s greatest romantic. You transformed me from the vanilla mail clerk the girls cursed when their boyfriends didn’t write into a real girl with a real boyfriend. You made us both celebrities.”
“Like I’ve told you, the vase is only a deposit on my gift to you on our wedding day. The bowls are still to come.”
Our wedding day? Was this a proposal?
Fortunately, no. He danced past the idea, like in Paris, saving me from having to come up with an answer. “They’ll always be the legacy of our magical summer,” he said.
He was floating. Me too, but despite myself, I made a U-turn into the rest of the story, searching for the right words about how my friendship with Terry had changed as he and I conspired to make my European adventure with Jack unforgettable. “This . . . change happened just weeks before I left for Germany. What was I to do? I still wanted to spend my summer with you.”
Captive in the passenger seat, Jack fell silent. His Adam’s apple dipped and bobbed, as if trying to swallow some angry tirade.
Minutes passed.
“So I’m still in the game?” he finally asked. “Care to show me your scorecard?”
I gripped the wheel. “It’s not a competition. It’s a journey. Of discovery. My question is, Do I measure up to either of you? And how well are we matched—our values, our life choices, our temperaments, even our quirks and oddities?”
Those questions, and my long tale, left us wrung dry. “Need a break?” I said, pulling onto a leafy side road. “I sure do.”
He shot out of the car like a captive deer and raced up a wooded hillside.
Good. Go burn off some steam. The scent of pine and earth beckoned. I locked the car and hiked over to the Rhône, where vacationers were romping in the river below. When I came back, Jack was nowhere in sight.
Terry
Saturday, 4 July 1964, Silverton. Up at dawn, I chomped down a piece of toast slathered in peanut butter and piled into Allen’s Scout with Roger, his wife, Ann-Marie, and their friend Janet for a long-anticipated attempt to conquer Black Bear Pass, the heart-stopping back-door entry to Telluride. We planned to celebrate the Fourth where few dared to go—a grand alternative to pining for Annie. Or worrying that she and Jack were on their “Grand Tour,” whizzing along to Paris, Corvette top down, her hair flying, his hand creeping up her thigh.
A hand-carved wooden sign at the beginning of Black Bear Pass warned us: “Telluride, City of Gold, 12 miles, 2 hours.
You don’t have to be crazy to drive this road—but it helps. Jeeps Only.” We had something better—a Scout 80. We snapped photos of each other mugging the sign, declared ourselves crazy, and took off.
At times Allen crept along, skirting boulders and ruts, rather than barreling his way through. Black Bear was the perfect antidote to loneliness and jealousy: a route through streams, over rocks and shale, and around hairpin curves, all against a backdrop of snow-covered peaks and flower-studded meadows. It was 12,840 feet at the summit, with just enough snowmelt to make the trail passable. Save for minor bruises earned on the bone-jarring rough spots, the first ten miles were on par with our four-wheeling trips the previous summer.
But when we came to a slanting patch of broken shale, the Scout tilted left and skidded a foot before the tires caught. Allen stopped. “Better hang on.”
I’d already latched on like a pit bull. He inched forward a hundred yards, stopped again, and pointed directly in front of us. “Thar she is. Telluride!” The trail disappeared over a cliff into one of the puffy white clouds drifting across the royal blue canopy of sky. Telluride might have been two miles away, but all I could see was a tiny splotch thousands of feet straight down in the valley below. And no visible way to get there.
Allen anchored the fold-down windshield to the hood. “Better spot me,” he said.
All four of us jumped out before he’d finished the sentence. I told myself we were simply guiding Allen down. Frankly, I was too afraid to ride. I’d heard about jeeps that had plunged over the edge. No survivors.
Good news—the trail didn’t nosedive off the cliff. It angled onto a ledge gouged into the cliff wall, a rough, rock-strewn track with no railing and a 1,200-foot drop to kingdom come. Allen couldn’t possibly back up. We had to conquer whatever lay ahead.
Roger and Ann-Marie walked in front. Allen crawled forward, and Janet and I trailed behind. Two steps into the hike, she grabbed my hand in a death grip. “This is scary,” she whispered. I nodded. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer.
The trail widened and straightened out, and we all climbed back in. But then the ledge narrowed again, zigzagging down the cliff in switchbacks so sharp it took Allen three or four back-and-forth tries to jockey through each. At every turn, we hopped out and staked ourselves like sentinels to guide him. Allen peered over the steering wheel into the horizon. “I can’t see the damn trail. You’ve got to tell me when to stop,” he called. His voice was insistent, but not panicky. He’d done this before.
Roger and Ann-Marie posted themselves at the front of the Scout, each perched at the very edge of the cliff, waving him forward six inches, signaling stop, then reverse, sharp left, forward again, reverse again, left-forward again, keeping him at best merely a foot from the edge. Janet and I hung behind—eyes wide, just watching. Even that scared the hell out of me, and Janet dug her fingernails into my hand again. What if the Scout rolled when he shifted gears? Or the brakes failed?
Back in the Scout, we found ourselves nose to rock, nearly scraping the cliff’s wall. After the next switchback, we were hanging out into space, millimeters from free fall, the tires bumping and skidding to the very edge. Any moment, we could have been like Wile E. Coyote, realizing we’d overshot the cliff and gravity hadn’t yet kicked in. Unlike Wile E., none of us would have survived to chase again.
An hour later, we were only halfway down the towering cliff. An abandoned powerhouse atop Bridal Veil Falls hove into view like a friendly castle at the end of an arduous slog through the badlands. The trail broadened into a dirt road, wide enough for us to breathe.
Allen pulled into a wide spot and yanked on the emergency brake. I stumbled out, my legs rubbery, my nerves frayed. We hiked to the powerhouse and discovered, believe it or not, that it was both an industrial building and a palatial retreat. Allen said the powerhouse was built in 1907 to generate electricity for a mill between Telluride and the falls. The mine manager topped it off with a luxurious summer home, hiding the expense in the powerhouse construction costs.
The place was open and unguarded—no padlocks, no chains—and the five of us fanned out like Sherlock Holmes devotees, probing every niche and cubbyhole of both the manager’s getaway and its basement powerhouse. Alas, we found no stashes of gold nuggets, no jewels, no secret panels, no cooked expense ledgers, no compromising letters from a sultry mistress. Not even a yellowed newspaper.
We did marvel at what had been an elegant drawing room, its bay windows suspended above the falls—at 365 feet, the tallest in Colorado. The owner had taste: hardwood floor, crown molding, a marble mantle over a stone fireplace. Standing at the window, we hovered in the air, the falls roaring beneath our feet.
Ann-Marie discovered a passageway that led to a set of rickety steps tacked to the outside of the building. On cat’s paws, she tested each tread, tiptoed to the end of the house—beyond where it hung over the cliff—and disappeared around the corner. Roger followed.
I gasped. My God, what were they doing? Though my mind demanded that I retreat into the house, I shook off my fear—and my common sense—and ventured onto the shaky steps to join them. Moments later I was baby-stepping along a wet, slippery, eighteen-inch-wide plank perched above the falls, engulfed in a blinding mist. Ahead of me, Ann-Marie and Roger faded out of view like ghosts. I was floating in the fog, unable to even see my feet. I grabbed the rusted pipe railing and inched back along the catwalk and up the stairs to safety.
Ann-Marie and Roger reappeared ten minutes later, shooting the breeze as if they’d been on a Sunday stroll. “Who needs Niagara?” she said.
I managed a nod. After the idiocy of bumping and skidding down Black Bear and hanging in midair on a rickety old waterlogged plank, I knew I wasn’t fearless. But crazy? Apparently.
Ann
Saturday, July 4, 1964, on a leafy side road in France. I strode into the woods where Jack had disappeared. No sign of him. Hoping hunger would lure him back, I prepared a light dinner of canned ham, sliced tomatoes, bread and cheese. He puffed up just as I finished.
I sang out, “Welcome to Chez Ann, monsieur! May I show you to your seat?”
“Yes, indeed. And how about a cold beer? I need it after that run. And that talk.”
“You’re in luck, sir. We have one beer left.”
He took a long swig and finished it over dinner. After we packed up, he said, “Only one beer, but I guess you better keep driving. You mind?”
“Love to. Do you mind?” Driving his car was more than pure fun. It was an affirmation of his growing love and trust in me.
“You’re doing fine. More than fine.”
We had survived the deluge of my confession, plus dropped anchor on the aircraft carrier of sexual tension. I put my hands on his shoulders. “Remember when you said, ‘May the best man win’? I’m here to say that you’re a darn good contender, soldier.”
Saturday night, July 4, 1964, en route to Saint-Tropez. Jack had fallen asleep by the time darkness closed in. Good, he needed the rest. When I turned from the main highway onto the road to Saint-Tropez, it quickly became a skimpy, two-lane, twisty byway through scrub-brush-covered mountains, sprinkled with intermittent stands of trees. I loved whizzing around curves through a tunnel of headlights. It kept my senses on full alert.
The map had indicated a turn onto a secondary road, and I searched the darkness for road signs. Not a one. Suddenly, a cluster of white signs sailed past. I rolled to a stop. Slowly, carefully, I backed up.
Skeeeeeer-thunk! The car tilted wildly and thudded to a stop. The engine coughed and died. Total silence. Our headlights aimed squarely at the treetops. No road.
“What? Where are we?” Jack’s face lurched into view.
“I . . . I missed the turnoff.”
“We’re upside down! What the hell happened?”
We weren’t upside down, I knew that much. But the steering wheel was now above me, which wasn’t right. “I . . . I tried to read the signs, but—”
He butted his sho
ulder against the door. “The damn door’s jammed. It won’t open.”
“I was backing up, and . . . I think we’re in a ditch.”
“You dumped us into a ditch?”
“I don’t know. I missed the signs and—”
“Are you hurt?”
I hadn’t thought about that. “I’m okay. Scared, though. You all right? I didn’t realize the road dropped off.”
“Damn!” He took a deep breath, expelled it. “Let’s see if we can get out of here.”
We threw our weight against the doors and tumbled out like rag dolls. It was a ditch, dry but soft and squishy. “Not as deep as I thought. We can get it out.” Was that my squeaky voice?
I heard Jack groping his way around the back of the car. He appeared next to me, nudged me aside, and eased into the driver’s seat. When he cranked up the engine, it worked. Thank goodness. He hit the gas. The wheels showered the countryside with dirt and a thick, pungent residue of decaying leaves.
He wouldn’t get the car out doing that. As if he heard my thoughts, he tried again, this time with a bit of patience, rocking the car back and forth. His effort buried the back tires to the hubs. He stormed out. “Get in. I’ll push.”
With him behind me in the dark? “No, it’s too risky.”
“I’m not stupid. I’ll push from the doorframe.”
I was a war zone of emotions. I’d made an egregious mistake, sure, but his gunning the gas had dug us in deeper. After Dad retired and we moved to the ranch, I’d gotten stuck often enough to learn that you had to be calm and rock the car back and forth gently so the tires could grab hold. One time I buried the pickup in a bog in the northwest pasture. With patience, I wedged enough rocks and tree limbs behind the wheels to break loose. I looked like a creature from the mud fields of Flanders. Surprisingly, I didn’t get into trouble with Dad. He was pleased I had taken care of it myself.
Now this. I could do it. I eased up on the clutch, nudging it a bit. No traction.
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 16
