First love — Second love

We had just left a West Side club where we had done La Pachanga, a Spanish dance craze back then. As we walked on 72nd Street toward the uptown Lexington subway, my fiancée called me “Ralph.” In those days I went by Tony.

Granted we mistakenly call people by names other than their own. My two daughters occasionally kid me that, as children, I called them Perry, our dog’s name. But a sharper mind might have guessed her calling me “Ralph” was an omen of impending danger. I did not. The engagement was over the following week. Her reasoning succinct. “It won’t work,” she said.

I first saw her at a Kresge five-and-ten cent store on Third Avenue. It was her eyes that initially captivated me. Though of Puerto Rican parentage, she appeared to be Asian and was beautiful. Perhaps it was my past influencing me. From about the age of 7 into my later teens I had spent a great deal of my free time with a Japanese family. They lived in the same tenement building.

The pursuit began with my devising schemes to ensure our paths crossed often — which became obvious to her. We finally connected. In her parents’ kitchen we played Tony Bennett’s “Because of You” repeatedly to snuff out any chance of her mother’s hearing us from the living room. We spoke of our future together after college, believing we each had met the only person we could possibly be with forever. We had fallen under a euphoric spell, the kind that engulfs 20year-old dreamers bewitched by first love.

Several weeks after she let me go I spotted her on a Bronx train, sitting about 15 seats away from me. I had imagined scenarios with reasons for her returning to me. Was this that one magical moment as in the movies with happy endings when a chance meeting sparks a reunion?

Just when I thought we had made eye contact she looked away. Did she see me? I can’t be sure. But I knew what I felt. It was as if a dagger already bulging from my heart was driven deeper — to dial up the pain. I never saw her again.

A few years later at a Long Island beach my conversation with a young lady I had met 26 days earlier turned to marriage. How that topic came up is anyone’s guess.

Without any forethought I blurted out “What if the offer were made?”

She surprised me by responding, “It hasn’t been made.”

“Consider it made” I said.

Not to be outdone, she came back smartly: “Consider it accepted.”

We walked away from that beach speaking of everything but what we had just committed ourselves to.

Shortly after she and I first met my company was about to transfer me from its New York City office to a facility in Niagara Falls. Years later she told me that if it weren’t for that pending move I may not never have proposed. She suggested that I did not want risk leaving without someone at my side, and that love was often more about timing.

I have thought more than once about what she said. I supposed we do get stuck in the proverbial first love lost trap, clinging to the fantasy of the lone soul-mate fallacy. Hollywood is a big promoter of that. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl and searches relentlessly until he finds her again for a perfect film ending. Perhaps that pending transfer returned me to the real world.

In thinking back to those days, what I knew with certainty was that it felt right being with her. That I had gotten great pleasure from the simplest things we did together. Our jointly throwing a wine and cheese party for our summer group rental beach houses. A walkthrough Altman’s Department store with her helping me pick out a shirt. And from our counting ornaments on the Christmas tree in the window of a store in Manhattan on a frosty December day.

If I were to write a romance novel about these two loves, there would be coincidences. Both ladies went to the same college. The first relationship ended after seven months and the second one in the same time frame led to the altar. Even if I were to enhance my story with fictional subplots and fabricated timelines as it’s often done in movies, it would still end with two true sentences:

I don’t know what would have happened if my first love had stayed.

I know what thankfully happened because she left.