Return Encounter

This is actually sort of true. I actually once knew a biology major with an oriental girlfriend who separated from her for a while because he entered a distant study program, and years later I saw a photo of them together in a group at a dinner of a scientific society. So I imagined them taking up where they left off…
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When Naomi Hatara graduated from high school, she wanted to attend the University of Maryland at College Park, but her parents were urgent about getting her to discontinue the relationship with her high-school boyfriend. It may be that they felt the hulking Robert Hairston represented too great a threat to her virginity and her marriage prospects to a good Japanese boy.

Her parents, if so, did not realize that her chances on the latter were not great — and they probably never guessed that she had already given Robert the former. She was sent to San Francisco State and to live with her grandmother. Who, as it turned out, was more willing to indulge the girl in such matters than her parents were. All the old woman required was that she date decent and smart men, and she gave them a hard but unbiased screening for that.

But the pressure of studies at college and the strictness of the supervision still meant that Naomi Hatara barely dated during her first year at college. And any more physical activity was reduced to nothing.

The studying came easier, or with more assurance, in her sophomore year, and the regulation of her behavior was also somewhat relaxed. Between those two factors, she dated several fellow students, and early in the year she went all the way with one of them on a dark grassy hill at night. That was on the third date with him, and on the fourth she learned that she really did not know him as well as she thought.

But in the next year she met Lewis Bicking. He was a year or so older than her, but much more mature than the competition in most ways than the couple of years would indicate. She fell for him in a big way, and he was very good for her as well as good in bed.

The problem was, he was also very good in his specialty of ichthyology. He was offered a place at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute for his senior year and the summer before it. The only way they could avoid being parted was for her to marry him, and for several reasons that was not practical. There was no way she could maintain her class schedule while commuting to a college in that area, her parents would not pay for the transfer anyway, and if she dropped out there was no way to guarantee work near Woods Hole and he could not support her.

He suggested marriage to her anyway, while they stayed a continent apart, but Naomi was too timid and not sure that she was ready for that. She was concerned that her appetites would give her too much temptation while he was away — though she was not certain that she would find anyone else quite as tempting. Still, on their last day together she tried to store up a supply of Lewis to last a while.

So they bid farewell to each other for at least fifteen months — which then became a full twenty-four when he was given a graduate project. The letters tapered off.

During that time, Naomi dated others, and she made full love to two of them. Yet it seemed to her that no one satisfied her emotionally or even sexually nearly as well. And despite the lack of promises to Lew, she did not feel comfortable about it.

Then a matter of a week or so after her graduation, she came back from a job interview to find a note that Lew was going to be back in San Francisco soon. That and a phone conversation that night reignited all her old emotions and maybe her passions, though that she was not sure of yet. She never asked Lew if he had any women during those two years. (It seemed quite possible he did not; Woods Hole did not have many, and he tended to get intense when he worked.).

He moved back soon after, to an apartment that his brother had found for him. Lew called Naomi on the day that he arrived back in town. He told her that he would like to meet her on the next Saturday, and she agreed.

So on that Saturday, Naomi Hatara put on black chinos, a white blouse, a denim jacket, loafers, and a pair of goggles over her round glasses, and rode her bicycle across town to 1278 Strauss Street.

As she rode, she thought about the warm weekend afternoons they had spent together swimming in the pool at the college and how graceful his body had looked slipping through the water. She thought also about other afternoons and evenings they had spent together and how his graceful body felt in her arms, slipping into her.