What We Lose. Zinzi Clemmons

      “I didn’t think you were interested,” I’d say.

      “Of course I’m not interested,” she’d say.

      Our friendship ended in the same place it started: in Africana Studies class. We all did oral presentations: Devonne spoke on Marcus Garvey, advancing her thesis that he should be treated in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini. It was bold but with noticeable gaps in thinking. I did a short presentation on Toni Cade Bambara, including an analysis of her role as the editor of notable anthologies of women’s writing. After class, the professor approached me.

      “Nice work,” he said.

      I looked around for Devonne, but she had already left. She wasn’t in the hallway, or outside in the parking lot, where we normally had a cigarette after class. She wasn’t in the library that day either.

      When I saw her the next week, she told me that she’d slept with one of the boys we’d met outside the library who had looked at me. Though she’d feigned disinterest at first, she’d actually slept with him several times. She said she was in love.

      “What a jerk,” I exclaimed.

      Devonne stared at me, as if she was trying to decode something inside me.

      “Yeah,” she said slowly. She flicked her cigarette and turned briskly without her normal air kiss or sarcastic comment, and, for all intents and purposes, she was gone.

      My first love was Dean, a philosophy student who played guitar with a band from the local art school on the weekends. He was half Spanish, with pouty pink lips and freckles, impossibly. We met at a concert downtown, and at the end of the night he stroked my face and asked me out for coffee the next week. We went, and halfway into my coffee, I felt myself sinking into the vinyl booth. I knew that whatever happened after this point would be irrevocably different. Before long I was spending whole weekends at his apartment downtown, mornings fucking on his dirty red sheets, afternoons sleepily plodding through our reading assignments. He gave me Sartre and Proust and the Velvet Underground and Bobby “Blue” Bland. He taught me how to blow smoke rings from his Marlboro Reds.

      Early on I felt I had nothing to offer Dean except my body. He was a full person and I knew that I wasn’t yet, that I was still growing, that he and our relationship were shunting me into being. I made myself available to him all the time, and it wasn’t long before he’d used me all up, grown bored, decided he needed more.

      I grew restless. I could barely focus in class, so I spent most of the day catching up on lessons, and then I stayed up through the night completing my assignments. I saw Dean at the library, smoking his Marlboros on the steps. At first he nodded hello to me with a manner that could be mistaken as warm, but the enthusiasm of those acknowledgments waned as the months went by, and eventually he didn’t acknowledge me at all. He just let his eyes flit over me like I was a piece of stone in the library wall or some other student he hadn’t known, like he hadn’t once breathed, I could love you, you know, on my neck.

      Then one day there was a girl—a thin girl whom I’d seen studying in the visual arts library. She had papery skin and a severe brown bob that framed cheekbones like snow-capped hills. She wore vintage dresses that I never could have squeezed into and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. She looked designed to attract men like Dean, and it sunk in when I saw them together on the steps of the library that this was who he should be with, not me. It was never me.

      I had no reference point for heartbreak. My insides felt emptied out, and there was no need for food, no need for sleep. At first I couldn’t work—couldn’t even focus enough to read a chapter without dissolving into tears. Later, work was all I could do to keep the swirling thoughts from coming in, the images of her in my spot on his bed, her eating oatmeal across from him at his kitchen table.

      My parents grew into a very comfortable life in their middle age. After I left for college, they sold their house in the suburbs and bought a two-bedroom apartment in an upscale Philadelphia apartment complex designed by I. M. Pei in the 1960s. The three apartment towers overlook the Delaware River and decaying, bullet-ridden Camden, an aging beacon of the city’s relative wealth.

      They used the rest of the money from the sale to buy a vacation home outside Johannesburg and a VW Jetta that they kept in the garage. At least once a year, we flew to Johannesburg, and for at least two weeks, we stayed in the house, a modern stucco home with terra cotta tile on the roof. My father employed domestic workers to clean the windows and sweep the driveway while we were away, and to wash our laundry and mop the floors while we were there.

      The vacation house sat atop a hill full of other posh, neatly kept homes to the northwest of the city. Within a half hour we could drive to the dusty three-room house my mother grew up in, where my grandfather still lived. The vacation house’s huge picture windows looked off a cliff to the valley of Johannesburg below. From there, you could see the turquoise of the mansions that surrounded us, where my aunts and uncles lived, and, farther away, the red dirt and tin roofs of the townships clustered closely together. This was where my mother came from, and where my grandfather journeyed from to visit us, to spend a peaceful hour outside in his high socks and straw hat, sunning himself on the deck of our infinity pool.

      My lover is kind. He is not quick to anger. He is measured and good-natured. Like a child, but not lacking in experience or knowledge. In the circuit of my life, he is the ground. He balances me, allows me to flow at an even rate.

      He has red hair and he is not particularly broad or strong, like I had always imagined my one true love would be. My lover is definitely skinny. Try as he might to eat every carbohydrate and piece of red meat in his path, he can never put on any weight.

      Yes, as much as I hate to admit it, I always imagined that I would have one true love, who in my later days would define me as much as my career or my personality. He would be a part of me, and we would come together and make another part. The picture wavered slightly over the years—at times I convinced myself that I would be okay alone, or with several partners; for some periods my husband was a wife. But it always came back to this picture: one partner, for the rest of my life.