(published in the Spring 2022 issue of the literary magazine El Portal).

Thunderbird

1957 Thunderbird

Marty lost the first love of his life to the son of the district attorney of Brooklyn. At first the family chauffeur, driving a long, high-finned, brightly simonized black Cadillac limousine, brought Jere to pick Karen up at her apartment building for their dates. After his eighteenth birthday Jere drove one of the first Ford Thunderbird cars in Flatbush.

You can get the official history of the Thunderbird from the Ford Company. Just write to Dearborn or find it online. Unfortunately, their homogenized data sheets won’t help you capture the excitement of the first sexy car made in the United States you could buy with a middle-class pocketbook and could aspire to even if you were economically lower class.

Which Marty definitely was.

Shinier and slicker than an MG or a Triumph, the Thunderbird was unabashedly American in those mildly retrogressive Eisenhower years. The Corvette came out in a limited production run two years before, and General Motors might well have discontinued that proudly and unequivocally upper-class sports car if not for the unexpected clamor for the Thunderbird.

Jere’s Thunderbird was the first Marty saw on the streets, although he saw one months before at the annual automobile show at the new Columbus Circle convention center.

He and his best friends, Josh and Benny, were at the auto show for the second year in a row, ecstatic to wander around the increasingly curved, chromed, and brightly colored new cars. At the same time, they could also gape at the bathing-suit beauties extolling the glorious virtues of the gleaming DeSoto, the streamlined Studebaker, and the stubby Rambler. Marty used the whole roll of film in his Brownie camera, all twelve black-and-white shots, to capture some of the new super-duper-mobiles, but only if a tall, carefully coiffed blond was standing in front, a shiny white Ipana smile on her face, lips glistening fire-engine red, and long, smooth legs stretching up to what Marty suspected, but certainly did not know, might well be heaven. Only one-piece swimsuits then, definitely no bikinis, and not much to see of what Marty thought he could imagine. But even the white chest above which the fullness of the breasts began and the soft-butter look of the thighs were more than enough excitement for a teenage Brooklyn boy. Who, with his pals, had gone to an all- male math and sciences high school with Marty graduating at the too-young age of sixteen years and two months. The second year they went to the auto show—when he saw the Thunderbird—Marty brought an extra roll of film.

When Marty called Karen, as he had the last seven Wednesdays, to ask her to go to the movies with him Saturday evening, she chatted for a while before saying, “I’m going to be Jere’s girlfriend from now on. I can’t date you anymore.” She was decidedly unsentimental, but Marty knew she didn’t want to deliberately hurt him. He wasn’t that surprised since he had a dream anticipating the breakup after Karen took him to a party at Jere’s house two weeks before. Jere was so many of the things Marty wasn’t—slim, virile, erratic.

Wealthy.

Karen, a high school senior, a year behind Marty, enthralled him. She was the Mildred Rogers for his Philip Carey. Her dark hair and slightly slanted dark eyes, top lids more than a little full, gave her a distinctly Asian look, very much like her mother, although her parents were both first-generation Americans born of Russian immigrants. Years later Marty thought about her and wondered if a little Mongol DNA from the Great Steppe was in Karen’s gene pool. Perhaps, generations ago, some deliciously illicit Russian love affair sent an exotic gift to the America of the middle of the twentieth century.

He met Karen when he was invited to a party in her apartment by one of her girlfriends.

When Karen took his hand to dance, he experienced one of those unexpected erections that plague teenage males, usually at the most unexpected and embarrassing moment. He stepped back a little to widen the space between them, struggling to keep the one-two-three-four foxtrot steps in mind, but she just pulled him closer, her impenetrably black pupils looking right into his pale and, for the moment, slightly alarmed blue eyes. Then, as the dimple in her cheek deepened, he understood she was having fun.

And that she had danced this particular step before.

Her eyes locked to his, their noses almost touching, the corners of her mouth upturned, she said, “Do you always carry a pencil case in your pocket when you go to a party?”

He gasped as the blush exploded, the heat rushing to his cheeks, his ears, and then to the top of his head—Vesuvius poised to erupt—but there was that warm and generous grin on her face along with that deep, decidedly lusty laugh.

Marty understood then he would love her until the end of his days.

Marty lived with his parents and his eleven-year-old brother, Charlie, in a cramped Brooklyn apartment on a maple-tree-canopied street of drab brick buildings with neighborhood shops around the corner. Jere, only a half-mile away, was in a different world. His was a big Victorian house with wicker furniture on the sprawling porch, in a neighborhood of similarly large, staid homes with similar sprawling porches. His was the street where Styron had the fictional Wingo and Sophie meet. Other homes looking like his were around the corner. The closest stores were four blocks away.

Renowned guests came to dinner at the D.A.’s house. Mayor Wagner. Governor Harriman. Adlai Stevenson accompanying Eleanor Roosevelt. Marty heard that Gregory Peck had been there.

Jere had more than just a zephyr-blue-and-white Thunderbird and a big, gabled house. He played Rachmaninoff preludes on the concert Steinway

in a corner of the three-sofa living room where Roman heads silently stood watch from ebony pedestals. Jere carried a thick wad of five- and ten-dollar bills, even some twenties. Jere’s black hair was over his ears and down to his shirt collar, years before everybody else tried to copy Mick Jagger. There was no part, just an unkempt jungle above a sun-free face pierced by two dark and restless eyes. A half-smoked cigarette spasmodically jumped up and down at the edge of his full lips as he sotto voce talked about Locke and the economic forces helping China and India dominate the world, about Camus and Algeria and Indochina, about Beckett and Behan and J. Alfred Prufrock. A crowd of similarly bright, similarly literate, similarly well-to-do friends surrounded Jere.

Marty didn’t know anything about Behan or Prufrock at that stage of his life, but he recognized Beckett as the author of the Broadway play starring the cowardly lion.

Someone was shouting about a resolution in the U.N. about the Suez Canal, and Marty was sure he was the only one in the room interested in the future of the Dodgers. He imagined Jere as someone who nonchalantly emerged from some arty film noir with the requisite five o’clock shadow.

Belmondo of Brooklyn.

Walking home from that party, Marty realized something he couldn’t understand before: he was a space-holder. Karen hadn’t been in love with him and never would be.

The movie-less, date-less Saturday evening came as one of those mean, bone-chilling, late-October days with a heavy and incessant rainfall. Marty found himself drawn toward Karen’s apartment. The raindrops were as big as a Flatbush Avenue bus and flickering through the downpour were streetlights with van Gogh coronas. Sewers couldn’t keep up with the deluge, and when he slipped on a clump of wet leaves, he stepped into the center of a developing lake almost as high as the sidewalk curb. Feet completely soaked, he clomped his way up and down Lenox Avenue.

Each step made a new sloshing sound, barely heard against the constant, sharp tat-tat-tat of the torrent slapping the streets. A penetrating, whining howl of wind, accented by crashes of thunder and the smell of electricity, made Marty gird himself for some incoming bolt of lightning poised, he fervently hoped, to strike him dead.

Shivering, he stopped in front of Karen’s building and squinted up to her fourth-floor living room window. Sheila, her mother, was probably reading the latest Michener, and Phil, Sheila’s second husband, was likely watching the Perry Como show. Marty paced back and forth, chanting, “I have often walked down this street before…” from the new Broadway show “My Fair Lady.” Barely loud enough to hear his own hoarse voice through the moans of the storm, he didn’t care that he couldn’t carry the melody.

Finally, his voice scratchy and tiring of the steady stream of water running down his neck and back, he accepted that the great romance was over. He dreaded having to explain to his mother why he was drenched. By the time he was home, past 10:00, the time he would return from a date if there had been one, a feeble explanation was ready. But his parents were already asleep.

One evening three months later, Karen called. She and Jere had fought. “We’re through.”

Weeping and sobbing, she said, “I need you to take me somewhere to talk.” More sobbing. “Please.” The anger he had carefully and steadily nursed now vaporized, replaced by joy—Karen might be his again.

It was almost half-past eight and Charlie was fast asleep. Their parents, and the car, were in the Bronx, visiting relatives. Marty left a note on the foyer table and went up two flights to the Martellos. “My best friend is very sick and needs my help. Can I borrow your car for just an hour?” He was astounded when Tony said, “Sure, kid. Give me the keys in the morning.”

Tony’s new Buick was so much slicker than his father’s second-hand Packard, and Marty periodically leaned forward to admire the wraparound windshield, driving especially carefully to protect what was not his.

Karen, standing under the harsh light of the streetlamp at her corner, was crying and blowing her nose. She yanked the door open and sank into the lush front seat, smaller and more fragile than he had ever seen her.

“Take me somewhere so I won’t see anyone.”

Marty had less than three dollars in his pocket. No twenties.

“Of course. Where? Tell me.”

“What about your fraternity house? Does your fraternity have one?”

The basement apartment in a Crown Heights brownstone that served the small, local fraternity he had joined seemed even shabbier than usual as he turned on the bare ceiling light. The second-hand furniture—dull greens and scuffed browns, donated from relatives or picked up on sidewalks—sagged. Holes and poorly sewn patches vied for attention. Happily, no one was there.

The refrigerator was as empty as the rest of the house, and as usual, the trash overflowed with empty beer and Coke bottles. He brought her a glass of water and his handkerchief. The crying slowly and steadily subsided. Then she abruptly stood up and held out her hand, looking all around.

“Where’s a bed? I want you to make love to me.”

He held his breath and looked up at her.

“Let’s talk.” He gently pulled her back onto the sofa, one hand around her wrist and the other at her elbow, trying to avoid glancing at the closed but beckoning French doors ten strides in front of them.

His arm around her shoulder, desperately wanting to kiss her, he told her things really weren’t that bad. She and Jere fought before. He couldn’t take advantage of her when she was so unhappy. It wouldn’t be fair when she was so vulnerable. It wouldn’t be right. She would only be sorry later. Jere would call her. She would get over it.

When he was sixty-five, considering the things he regretted in his life, things he would change if he had the chance, always at the top of the list, far above anything else, was the fact he would not, could not, did not have sex with Karen that night. He hadn’t thought about the almost unbelievably uninformed and unworldly person he was then until a writer friend posted the comment, “Naïve is pig Latin for stupid.”

Marty was a successful Los Angeles attorney now, more than forty years after Karen, and a continent away, discussing his growing attraction to a young colleague with Morton Ewing, his Beverly Hills therapist. The young woman, Tonya, was urging Marty to meet her at a hotel. He had never cheated on his wife, but they were bickering more than ever.

Ewing said, “What would you do if it were Karen? The young woman we once discussed from back when you were in college?” It seemed to Marty like a revelation. He instantly understood he hadn’t changed. If Karen called today, he would do the same thing. He was in the twenty-first century, but he was that same boy he was fifty years ago.

Honor still mattered.