Noreen, Part II

Before I continue my tale, let me remind you that the Jeopardy/IBM Challenge shows air this Monday, Feb 14th, Tuesday the 15th and Wednesday the 16th at 7PM (6 Central) in most markets. If you don't know or remember what the heck I'm talking about check my blog post from a last month on the subject: http://joeltjohnson.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-rather-interesting-week.html

On with the story of Noreen... (unless you skipped Part I. Back you go! http://joeltjohnson.blogspot.com/2011/02/noreen-part-i.html)

Everyone else with us? Good, onward...

I had been 'in love' many times in my first twenty one years. I wasn't bent on conquests, I just adored certain girls and was able to see what made them special and wonderful.

Yeah, right; isn't every guy inherently bent on conquests?

Perhaps so on some level, but I was pretty sincere, because, at twenty-one, I had not yet had sex.

That's right, a virgin!

Like keeping an ice cube collection at the North Pole, this may have been a greater challenge if any girl had thrown themselves at me--besides that drunk chic once at a party. I had also walked away from an opportunity in high school which effectively ended the first real relationship I'd had. That was difficult but somehow I knew I wasn't ready. It just didn't feel right. I didn't understand why at the time. I just trusted my instincts and went with it... or didn't, as it were.

I wasn't waiting for an certain age or even marriage necessarily. I think I was waiting for the romantic ideal of “the one” and, on a more sub conscious level,waiting for my own maturity to catch up with me.

After Noreen and I had confessed our feelings that rainy night I was on the highest of highs. Never in my life had I devoted myself to pursue something or someone so completely and through so much emotional turmoil. I had won the heart of the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. My every step was cushioned by a six inch layer of pure air between my feet and the ground.

Noreen and I were inseparable. She was even more warm and affectionate than I'd imagined her to be when I had pursuing her without success for so long.

School had just let out for the summer so I hung out with her while she was working in the school green house--her latest work/study job. We went to an amusement park with my roommates and their girlfriends and kind-of pissed them off when Noreen and I spent most of the day off by ourselves.

Once again I was at a band practice in Avon, once again Noreen called.

Noreen had an older sister who was married and had a kid. They had been living at her in-laws' house in nearby Honeoye Falls while the in-laws were out of the country, Noreen was in-turn watching the house and pets (that would later become her profession) while her sister was on vacation. She invited me to spend the night.

Band practice was over early.

The drummer laughed and threw me a condom. The rest of the band slapped me on the back and sent me on my way.

We slept in the master bedroom. I'll never forget the alarm clock on the bed-side table. It was a novelty clock from “The Sharper Image” that projected the time on the ceiling. Appropriately enough it was the fourth of July. It was wonderful--as wonderful as a first time can be. I was probably terrible myself but Noreen said she too was a virgin so maybe I didn't seem that bad. I didn't have much trouble believing her; after all, it had taken so much for me to get close to her. Who else would have the patience to crack that safe?

I had conveniently forgotten she'd recently had another boyfriend and a relationship with her sister's brother-in-law, Greg before that.

We had great fun in those days at her sister's in-laws' and indeed anywhere we went and anything we did. I told her my stories and she told me hers. We made each other laugh. Noreen had an ethereal beauty in spirit as well as in her face. We felt like best friends as much as we did lovers. We had a lot of catching up to do in all those departments.

Sex was a particularly fascinating new toy for us. It took up most of our time.

I have always been an early riser. I lie awake for hours in the morning staring up at the ceiling at that projection clock. Noreen slept like a rock, or maybe like a rock star. Hour after hour went by till finally, when the sun was high in the sky she would arise.

Noreen was 'it' to me. She could do no wrong in my eyes. she merely had... 'quirks'.

Quirk #1: Not only did she sleep long but she could sleep anywhere. Not long before we confessed our feelings she spent a warm night on the beach without a sleeping bag or any ground cover at all. Canandaigua Lake has shale rock shores, not sand. Noreen lay down on the rocks and went to sleep.

Sober!

Quirk #2: I didn't drink at that time. Noreen was not a teetotaler but since I didn't drink she barely did either. She smoked but was so ashamed if it that I rarely even saw it. She would always smoke outside (before the laws) and she would hold her cigarette low and make sure the smoke was blowing away from anyone that might be nearby.

Quirk#3: Noreen always had a car but she had never purchased one herself. Her family and friends would give her their hand-me-down cars which she would drive until they drove no more. Then miraculously, someone else would have another last-leg vehicle for her to drive. Mercy cars, I called them.

Quirk #4: I never saw Noreen naked. I saw close-ups under the covers, but that was it. For someone as free-spirited as she was, she never so much as walked from the bed to the shower without covering up.

Quirk #5: One day we went shopping at a grocery store. Noreen tore the price label off a package of ground beef (ruining it) and placed it on a steak. The check out person didn't bat an eyelash when the steak rang in at six dollars. I could hardly believe it. I admonished her but I rationalized that maybe it was a habit from working her way through college saving money any way she could...

on, um... steak.

We met Noreen's mother at a Chinese restaurant, Noreen called her by her first name: “Cynthia”. Cynthia drank heavily during the meal and started asking me bizarre slurred questions like: was I a Jehova's Witness? And: “What's a Mennonite, is that anything like a cult?”

At the end of the meal Cynthia hid her half finished drink in her purse and walked out with it. I was about to mention this behavior to Noreen in the car after her mother left, to see if she'd noticed it. Before I could get a word out, Noreen produced a handle-less tea cup with a red dragon printed on the side from her own purse.

“Look what I got!” she said proudly.

Noreen would often liberate items of clothing in her sister's closet and their every conversation seemed to be an ongoing argument about what she'd stolen the time before. She told me tales of her teens years when she would walk out of dressing rooms with new clothes under her old.

I could go on forever with all Noreen's quirks and eccentricities. I loved her all the more for them accept maybe the smoking and the kleptomania.

Oh yeah... and one other thing: Sometimes, she would kinda disappear for a day or two.

When classes started again in the fall, she had her own place to live and I lived in the same A-frame as I did the semester before.

One evening after school I went to her place, as planned. She rented a tiny room in a double-wide trailer. When I arrived she was no where to be found. I hung out for a while but after a couple of hours decided I better try to track her down. Finally I found her by calling her sister and found that she was hanging out with them and some other family which included her old boyfriend Greg.

Um... WHAT?

The borderline panic of that lying-in-a-ditch-somewhere feeling was replaced by plain old anger.

Why hadn't she called? WTF is she doing hanging with her old boyfriend?

The sleepless night that followed was full of text book examples on how not to deal with relationship issues, especially with Noreen 'the cat'. It was one of those pathetic, twenty messages on your machine, rant and rave deliriums that I so wish I could reverse time and take back.

It was to this day one of the worst nights of my life. Not so much because of Noreen disappearing without telling me her plans but the frenzy I'd worked myself up into over it.

When she finally arrived at dawn we had a hell of a fight. Actually, i was the only one who had a hell of anything. I talked furiously while Noreen went into a passive semi catatonic state in which she said absolutely nothing (Quirk # 6). This at first infuriated me more and eventually wore me down to begging her to “say something, anything!”

I hated who I was being: one of those guys, the 'jerk' boyfriend. All the passion I felt for Noreen had a dark side. My old self-doubt began to return telling me it was because of me, some inadequacy, that she was like this. Then I also hated being the this other guy, "the begging pushover."

Eventually, we got through that incident and went back to being ridiculously happy. We had other troubles, but after that experience I didn't let myself behave so badly. Noreen disappeared less frequently.

We went on trips together, watched a lot of movies, cooked, ate, ran around like children and made love.

My grades in school weren't quite as joyous.

In the spring her parents moved to Georgia. She announced out of nowhere that she was following them at the end of the school year and attending a four-year school.

“Wha? You can't stand your parents.”

I couldn't believe it but I still had all the faith that she and I were a match made in heaven and that eight-hundred miles was no match for the love we felt. A World without our relationship was simply inconceivable.

“Inconceivable!”

“You use that word a lot..."

Noreen had a summer job as a park guide in the resort town of Helen in the north woods of Georgia. I drove my old Chevy Van nonstop from New York to Georgia to visit her.

Our time together in Georgia went back and forth between being wonderful and tumultuous.

I drove back to New York with burned-out brakes, sunburned skin and a calico kitten named Chesa with one green and one blue eye.

I didn't know it was over, but I think Noreen did. My whole visit was a goodbye.

No one told me.

She never said so, but I'm pretty sure she was seeing someone else and couldn't manage to tell me. Probably better that way, I would not have taken it well. Eventually she made our break-up official, or rather her silence on the phone did it when I insisted she tell me it wasn't over.

My heart had seen a few knocks since I'd seen her kiss that guy in the library. I didn't hit the chocolate and wallow in my room, but I wasn't exactly walking tall either.

For a long time.

I saw Noreen once or twice in the next few years when she was in town visiting her sister and her parents who had moved back to Rochester. I got the same old mixed signals again but I kept her at arms length. I was done with the roller coaster.

Eventually, I married a very sweet lovely woman who had many wonderful qualities. In retrospect, her not being Noreen or anything like her may have been the main quality I married her for.

Noreen and I remained friends exchanging letters once in a while. She showed up on our door step one day in tears. Her father had just died and she was having a really hard time. I could tell she wanted to be held and it broke my heart but I couldn't do it. I was as kind as I knew how to be but, still, at an arm's length. I was married and even if it was innocent hug I knew it would be unfair to my wife given my history with Noreen.

My wife and I moved to LA. That is, I moved and she dutifully got in the moving truck with me. It was supposed to be a temporary move of two or three years as a boost to my music career. After a year in LA, I had a terrible realization that the passion I was trying to protect myself from by marrying a sweet, mild-mannered and predicable woman was also what was missing. I loved her, but not the way I should love a life mate, not the way she deserved. It wasn't the kind of feverish love I'd had ever since I first saw Becky Hershel in first grade and the same passion I had pursued Noreen with through all that pain. My wife had been an antidote to the side of me I was running from.

I wrestled with this for months before I could even bring it up. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done.

We separated then divorced a year later. I remained in LA, she returned home to rural New York. My first wife had become “my first wife”. I couldn't believe it. I had always looked down on divorce and harshly judged those who succumbed to it instead of 'working it out'.

Now I had become one of 'those guys'. It seemed the only way I was going to stop becoming one of 'those guys' was to stop judging people, and myself.

I heard from Noreen again, out of the blue, which is typically how Noreen appeared and disappeared. She and her boyfriend were considering moving to California from Massachusetts and wanted to pay me a visit in Hollywood while they checked things out.

I know what you're thinking, but when Noreen and her boyfriend showed up and announced their engagement, I was fine with it. Really! Not the 'fine' one kids oneself with to keep one strong, but actually, truly fine with it. I was sincerely happy for them.

We had a good time. It was nice just to see a familiar face in LA. Noreen's boyfriend seemed like an okay guy, a little flaky but frankly, so was she. Noreen still looked as lovely as ever, but I looked at her beauty like a painting or a sunset, without any pangs  or lust.

It was official. I was over Noreen.

Or so I thought...

Part III, the conclusion of “Noreen” next Saturday