The Last First Kiss
Praise for The Last First Kiss
“Who has not dreamed of it? The high school honey from the distant past reappears… In The Last First Kiss, she shows up to visit the septuagenarian widower at his old family beach house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Here is the story of an American generation, the ’60s, of all our lost young loves, and a brilliant meditation on the passing and relevance of time. An approaching hurricane adds increasing drama to the revelations from the past and the growing attraction between these two absolutely real and deeply drawn characters. Walter Bennett has written a compulsively readable novel that rings true all the way through.”
–Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and Dimestore: A Writer’s Life
“The question is not if The Last First Kiss is the most necessary, heartbreakingly honest, profoundly moving novel in years, but why this is so. The book has everything a good novel needs: compelling characters so real you have the sensation they are old friends, a story that is at once romantic, precise, and without one whiff of the delusional. It is a story that leads to the deepest, most human sense of recognition. The Last First Kiss is for anyone who has fallen in love when young and thought about it later and longed for a second chance. I’ve read very few books that were equal to a line from T.S. Eliot—“mixing memory and desire”—but The Last First Kiss is surely one of them. If you are grownup, you need this book now, and if you are young, you will need it soon.”
–Craig Nova, author of The Good Son and Cruisers
“The Last First Kiss is the generous-hearted story of a man and a woman in their seventies, who spend a weekend together in an old beach house, hoping to escape the confusion and pain in their pasts, looking to create something clarifying, even intimate, for the future. There are egrets and herons in these pages, ‘a large doe crossing a finger of water.’ They form the backdrop for this engaging tale about the power and pull of memory, the power and pull of love. I was totally enthralled.”
–Judy Goldman, author of A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap
“Walter Bennett’s literary range is startling. From the surefooted Leaving Tuscaloosa, a coming-of-age novel set in Civil Rights era Alabama, to this new novel, The Last First Kiss. At first blush it seems like a beach romance between old sweethearts with the menace of an impending hurricane adding tension to their reunion. But Bennett rips the covers off their comfort as they revisit the fifty-some years they did not share. He writes with utter authority.”
–Georgann Eubanks, author of Literary Trails of North Carolina and Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction
“Walter Bennett’s The Last First Kiss is a true gem of a novel, finely cut, brilliantly polished, and chosen from excellent stone. He’s taken what could have been a simple love story and imbued it with such honesty, originality, and sincerity that it rises above its genre and into rarely visited territory. Bennett ventures bravely into aspects of life—aging, regret, imperfection, doubt— that most writers glide across or avoid entirely. I admired this book greatly and enjoyed it from first page to last.”
–Roland Merullo, author of Breakfast with Buddha and A Little Love Story
The Last First Kiss
Walter Bennett
The Last First Kiss
Copyright © 2021 by Walter Bennett
All rights reserved
ISBN paperback, 978-1-7336816-9-8
ISBN ebook, 978-1-7363055-0-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020924407
The Last First Kiss is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.
Except for brief excerpts used in reviews, neither this book nor any of the contents may be reproduced in any medium or form without written permission. Please direct requests to the publisher as shown below.
Distributed by Smashwords
Author’s photo by Betsy Bennett
Ebook formatting by ebooklaunch.com
Published by Lystra Books & Literary Services, LLC
391 Lystra Estates Drive, Chapel Hill, NC 27517
lystrabooks@gmail.com
Contents
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgments
To fellow travelers on the rim of light:
eyes straight ahead, nose to the wind;
keep moving as fast as you can.
When we talk about the past,
we lie with every breath we draw.
–William Maxwell
1
Thursday evening, near dusk
Ace Sinclair dons a fleece jacket and Red Sox cap and takes his highball glass and fifth of single malt to the roof deck of his beach house overlooking the sea. Before she died, his wife, Pam, and he followed this same ritual. It provided them serenity, a day’s-end, quiet intimacy. Now it’s just him, the sea, the sky, and the darkening woods. But something from those old times with her hovers like the evening’s last gull over the sunset glow in the slow-breaking waves. It would feel like a betrayal to miss it.
His house faces northeast. A hundred years ago, his grandfather sited it in a cove on Pomeiooc Island off the North Carolina coast, where the seaward shoreline curves briefly eastward, slips around a point, and dips south again. A hiding place, his grandfather used to say, from Atlantic storms, tucked safely into its grove of yaupon and live oak. But for Ace, the main advantage is the line of sight from the deck.
When the sun sets and the ocean darkens, he can turn to face north and watch headlights of cars pop above the crest of the Crowbank Inlet Bridge two miles away. The lights flow toward him down the slope of the bridge and across the long causeway, only to wink out among the shadowy dunes that line the island shore—a ceaseless caravan headed to the hotels and condos crowding beaches to the south. If he drinks enough single malt—at his age it only takes a couple of glasses—the caravan begins to flow as if from the ancient tales his grandmother read to him as a kid, downstairs in this very house. Time swirls and blends. The woods around him, full of night sounds, and the ocean, washing the beach beyond the dunes, become the real world. The rest of his life, trapped in the shaded memories and the old furniture in his house in Raleigh, vanishes.
On nights when the moon is full and the tide is high, he swears he can feel the island move.
He pauses at the railing to pour himself a couple fingers of Scotch, then moves his chair so he can watch the slow-moving headlights. They seem brighter than usual, more urgent, the night settling around them darker than in evenings past. Out there beyond the breakers, a storm is building—or rebuilding—as it bides its time, trying to decide where to hit next after trashing Cuba and much of the Caribbean. Ace heard about it on the morning news; Freya, they call it, after the Norse goddess of love. (What idiot, for God’s sake, thought of that one?) It could go anywhere, the weather guy said. Straight this way, a voice in the back of Ace’s head whispers.
“So typical of you,” Pam would have said. “How did you get to be such a pessimist?”
“I’m a Red Sox fan,” he would answer.
“Calvinism,” she would say. “The alligator in your Scottish gene pool.”
But Freya will probably come to nothing. It’s well into October, and a lot of these late storms peter out or turn and head out to sea.
He settles into the chair, takes a deep breath, and raises his glass for a sip. The now familiar tremor hits his hand and rattles the glass rim against his bottom teeth. He lowers the glass to avoid a slosh onto his chest. Hell, he’s seventy-five—of course he has a few shakes now and then. He shifts the drink to his other hand and tries again. The aromatic warmth swells in his throat as the liquor goes down, that welcome soothing of tissue and easing of mind. Another deep breath, a sigh.
Eighteen, twenty hours, and she will be here—J’nelle Reade—flying from New York to Raleigh, where she will rent a car and drive eastward through the vast coastal plain of North Carolina to Pomeiooc Island, then turn south, and eventually cross the very inlet bridge that feeds that stream of headlights moving toward him now. Except by then, of course, it will be tomorrow afternoon, and if he loosens his mind a bit, lubricates it with enough Scotch, that can still seem very far away, almost receding.
Except that she is not receding, she is coming. And how, exactly, did he get himself into this visit, this, well, situation?
• • •
He and J’nelle have lived a couple of hour’s plane flight from each other most of their lives. Until a few months ago, they had not communicated in decades except for small talk at a few high school reunions in Layton, Alabama, and an email correspondence that flared for a while, then seemed to burn itself out. He’d begun it to express condolences when he heard her husband, Seth, had died. Actually, Seth was only presumed to have died, vanished on a solo motorcycle trip to Alaska. The search went on for months, checking motels and cafes, scouring mountain ravines. It seemed strange to Ace that a guy Seth’s age would take off alone on a long-distance motor
cycle trip. And that vanishing, that gone-to-nowhere, Ace imagined, might leave an even deeper hole than that left by certain knowledge of death. Pam had been dead several years by then, and suddenly, the clarity and certainty of that were a comfort.
So he’d been surprised a month ago when, out of the blue, she emailed what she called a “quick check-in” that wasn’t quick at all but more an internal review of her life that he’d heard only fragments of before in their previous emails about Seth: her college career (floundering at first but stellar by the end), a tour in the Peace Corps, grad school, then more Peace Corps (apparently something of a big shot, running programs in various countries), similar work for the State Department, unspecified work for a couple of international businesses (unnamed), and presently part-time consulting work (also unspecified).
He let her talk through several email exchanges and experienced a familiar feeling from their high school days of serving as an audience for a one person show. Then abruptly she switched gears. “So, how are you?” she asked. “What’s happening in your life?” The overture was one of those unexpected breezes that tickles you awake, reveals how stifling the air is around you, and hints of something you have unwittingly let slip away.
They had been sweethearts at Oneonta High School in Layton, back in the late ’50s, early ’60s, right after he, named Hamlet Horatio Sinclair by his literary parents, got the nickname “Ace” for striking out a blind kid in a summer-league baseball game.
The kid’s dad stood behind the home plate umpire and yelled a number at the kid for how high the pitch was coming: one, two, three (feet), etc., and zero for a no-swing ball, and now! for when to cut loose. Ace got the kid on a full count. It was one of his few strikeouts.
“You some kind of ace!” his good-ole-boy coach said when Ace walked back to the dugout, then gave him a teasing push with his meaty fist. The name stuck with teammates, classmates, eventually everybody except his family. Ace felt a little guilty about the strike-out until the blind kid, Felix White, got into Princeton on a full scholarship and Ace barely made the waiting list.
At the time, J’nelle said she liked the nickname. He wondered sometimes whether she was teasing too—about how good she thought he was at making out, or maybe at how not-so-good. After he left his old haunts for college and law school in Chapel Hill and became a lawyer in Raleigh, the name came in handy: “ace in the courtroom.” Nice ring to it, and certainly better than Ham or Horatio. And most of the time, he earned it.
He and J’nelle had been each other’s first true love. They parted ways when she graduated a year ahead of him and went away to college. Basically, she just moved on. It knocked him for a loop, but he eventually staggered free of his teenage trance and into the fluorescent-lit certainty that all the world lay before him and all he had to do was reach out and grab his dreams as they drifted his way.
He shies from that image of himself as a loopy, out-of-it kid every time he senses it sauntering toward him around a corner. He takes a sip of Scotch. Beyond the dunes, waves land with a slow, muffled thunder.
So that had been it with him and J’nelle until his fiftieth Oneonta High reunion eight years ago. She attended because of all the friends she had in his class. He was in a daze then too: it was the first time he’d gone anywhere since Pam died. And there J’nelle was, standing with Seth and some other people across a lawn at the reunion picnic. He did not expect her to be there—she had not been on the list of possible attendees—and at first glance, from a side angle, he assumed it was someone else. But something about the way her wine glass swung between her thumb and index finger between sips and the way her hair moved when she turned her head told him it could be no one else. She had on a sundress that revealed the top half of her back. The lean muscles of the champion swimmer she’d been still lay on her shoulders, and when she raised her arm to drink, the ridge of her shoulder blade slipped smoothly under her lightly tanned skin. Sixty-seven, sixty-eight years old. Jesus. The memories came flooding back of those times in high school when she wore a swimsuit or evening dress or when her blouse was unbuttoned and her bra undone in the back seat of his ’55 Ford, his hands nervously searching, sometimes racing over her, his breath sucked and held, his brain whirling in wonder at the bounty coming his way.
At the reunion, he tried to bring the feeling of her skin and flesh back to his fingertips, but an ache came instead, not to his fingertips, but to his chest. The longing in it measured every millimeter of distance between him and that sunlit back across the reunion lawn.
And then a couple of years later, he heard about Seth’s disappearance and sent the email of condolence. It took her some months to respond. That began a sporadic email conversation about nothing much and veered into questions of loss and how to deal with it and then into the nature of sadness. An intimation of mutuality crept in that caught him by surprise. It was like awakening in a dark room, hearing a match strike, and watching familiar fingers hold it to a candle. Their exchanges began to tiptoe as if they each sensed the presence of things still lost in the shadows. He found it strange that talking about grief and sadness could morph into such feelings of joy when he opened his email account and saw a new message from her.
Maybe she sensed his eagerness, and it scared her. Maybe she had enough grief of her own and decided she did not need to hear about his. Anyway, her responses became less frequent until finally they stopped. She was moving on. Again.
He went back to living the myth of himself as an old widowed lawyer nursing what was left of his life.
That had been six years ago, and now this latest, out-of-the-blue overture, and he was tiptoeing again. He answered politely, trying not to overdo things, all the while asking himself, Overdo what? until it became clear that it was not the glimpse of J’nelle’s bare back at the reunion that affected him so much; it was the awakened memories of their long-lost past, and the sense that there were things unsaid, unresolved. The sensation was ghostlike, came and went, darting in and out of shadows, but quickly and with such dexterity that it seemed startlingly alive.
Old dreams, old memories, all gone, he had cautioned himself, and steered the email conversation back to catch-up mode. She had a daughter named Anna, about whom she did not seem to want to say much. She was downsizing her life. She had just sold her lake house in Maine, letting go of the last property she and Seth had bought together.
“Sorry you had to let it go,” he wrote. “That seems to be the name of the game now. I’m in constant turmoil over what to do about my old family beach house on the North Carolina coast.”
She had heard about his beach house in high school, but never visited it, and wanted to know about its history, his grandfather’s vision for it, its architectural design. The house was one story, he told her, cypress clapboard, white with green shutters, wraparound porches, and front steps that split into two flights on their way down—was all he could tell her.
“Low Country,” she said.
“Pam and I added a deck on top of the roof to give us a better view.”
“What would your grandfather think of that?”
“About the same thing he would think of a profanity at the dinner table. Anyway, you’re welcome to use the house anytime you like, though I’m guessing it’s a bit below what you are used to.”
She let the subject drop until several emails later when he made the offer again, and out of politeness, he assumed, she asked more about it.
“Pomeiooc Island,” he wrote, “maybe a bit too far south for you, now that you’ve become a sophisticated Yankee. Nothing fancy. Near what used to be an old fishing town, a bit back from the beach, window AC units that work off and on, so I go mostly in the winter and fall.”
“It matches how I remember you.”
“Like an old house?”
“No, I mean the ‘nothing fancy’ part and, ‘a bit back from the beach’—authentic with a touch of shyness. Good place to retreat.”
“Yeah, if you like peace and quiet and don’t need a good restaurant.”
“I don’t need a good restaurant. And I like peace and quiet.”
“That’s funny. I don’t remember you as a peace-and-quiet sort of person.”