After I attained my BA in Political Science (with its emphasis on International Studies), a graduate’s egotism lead me, naively, to assume some government agency would rush forward with the offer of a Foreign Service posting. When none did, there followed a decade of drift.

I worked in a bar and lived in the “tail section” of a subdivided airplane bungalow in grittily chic Midtown. I told myself and other disinterested listeners about my plans for graduate studies. Settling into a self-indulgent lifestyle, I was content to play volleyball and Frisbee in the park, get high with my similarly ambition-deferred pals, take road trips to music festivals, et cetera.

And Women.

Even though I was no longer in school, I continued to pursue girls with ties to higher education. But within that demographic—sorority sisters, dean’s list grinds, husband hunters, cheerleaders, post-docs, freshman freshmeat, associate professors, party girls, student councilwomen, jocks—it was anything goes.

Besides paying the rent, bartending afforded me access to women as a renewable resource. My workplace was a venerated hangout situated more or less equidistantly between a sprawling urban university and a college of art. Like a crossroads grocery store, geography was on my side.

Eventually I narrowed it down to lit majors—your modern-day bluestockings—as my favorite feminine collegiate type. I found them to be idealistic, politically iconoclastic, self-mockingly pretentious, and honest. And while not necessarily more promiscuous than the others, they were the most sexually imaginative. Why was this? I wondered. Masturbatory examinations of the Kama Sutra during preadolescence? A worn copy of Sade’s Justine passed among high school girlfriends like classroom note? Camille Paglia?

I couldn’t figure it out, and they weren’t saying. But what mattered was that an imaginative woman wants an imaginative man. And as a practiced dissembler, a long-time shader of the truth, and, when cornered, an out-and-out liar, I reasoned that my sex-purposed imagination would suffice.

Anastasia Sappenfield was flapper bangs fluttering above tortoise-shell glasses, adequate cleavage, and legs—despite their library pallor— to rival Tina Turner’s. Her demeanor was reserved-until-stimulated, which, to me, lent the spontaneity of her expressions, especially her laughter, more veracity. She was writing a paper on the evolution of American epitaphs and wanted to visit Elmwood Cemetery, a city landmark on the National Register of Historic Places. She invited me to choose a wine; she’d bring toast points and cheese.

An arched wrought-iron entry gate opened onto Elmwood’s eighty peacefully rolling acres of marble headstones and granite slabs, family mausoleums with bronze doors, praying angels, hovering cherubs, obelisks, crosses, shrouded columns, draped urns; and trees, everywhere trees—a few of the standing oaks were saplings when this corner of western Tennessee was still part of the Chickasaw Nation. Crape myrtles lined Elmwood’s winding lanes. After Ana had photographed sixty or seventy epitaphs, we picnicked on a beach towel among the weathered tombstones of the Confederate Soldiers Rest, where, shaded by a knurled magnolia, we had each other for dessert.

The leathery leaves of the southern magnolia fall year round and, unlike the dead leaves of deciduous trees, they become hard and brittle. Crunching beneath us as we thrashed about, they were the al fresco equivalent of a squeaky brass bed—like fucking in a bowl of cornflakes.

As befitting a lit major, she climaxed hyperbolically, clawing my back and calling me dirty, flattering names. But the most compelling facet of her ecstasy was that she kept her eyes flashbulb open—as if in a state of rapture (or extremis)—and fixed toward the May sun which glinted through the magnolia boughs overhead. Though her performance made me feel stallionesque, the part with the eyes was somewhat unnerving.

After we’d adjusted our breathing, and she found her glasses, she wanted to talk about her experience, which, in a trance of wistfulness she did:

When we started, she said, I was hesitant about having sex here in this place of reflection, even sadness, but then the irreverence of it turned me on, you and me naked and doing it here among the dead. Then I pictured us through their eyes—not like ghosts were actually looking at us—but as if we were being acknowledged by a veiled consciousness, as though our ancestors were giving witness to the human act that put them here on earth and that extends their collective lineage into the future. And in the convulsions of my own petite mort (she blushed), I felt their approval, their overwhelming approval, as if the ground beneath me was electrified and pulsing with their applause.

She wanted to know if I had felt it, too.

It was a closed-ended question to which only a fool would answer no.

She cried a bit and fell pensive for the rest of the day.

I was in love.

Afterward, Ana and I saw a lot of each other. Our thing progressed to the point of apartment hunting until one evening when she caught me in a parking lot quickie with a waitress with whom I worked. Ana’s sexual imagination did not extend this far. She quit me. After I gave her what I thought was enough time to cool off, I went to her place to beg her back, but her roommate would only tell me that Ana had moved to the West Coast. Her address was not to be given out.

*****

I continued to drift. Sink, actually. I was drinking more. In the following years, I took more girls to Elmwood, each believing that the excursion was a first for the both of us. I got points for originality.

Then, like eating candy for every meal, I tired of it all.

Suddenly, inexplicably, I fell for a nursing student. Weeks later, we married. I took a straight job to help her finish school. She ran off with a doctor less than a year later.

Karmic payback, perhaps.

I lost the new job due to tardiness and absenteeism. My bed had become the hog wallow of my self-pity. This was my low dark ebb; I stayed in it for a period of blankness. I moved into a boarding house and swept local parking lots for beer money.

I had not seen or heard from Ana in seven years, and then, quite by chance, I ran into her at a convenience store. In retrospect, it was my good fortune that our encounter occurred at mid-morning—the only time of day in which I was sober and not covered in dust. Again it was luck when she took the apology I’d carried for seven years as genuine contrition and not some self-serving concoction by the cheap lothario I had once been.

She’d been back in town for about a year and had also seen black days— the result, she told me, of her own youthful actions. But she had avoided the morass that I had made for myself.

She had fortitude.

Enough fortitude to go around.

She agreed to see me again. I was saved.

She was now a librarian at a branch of the public library. With her backing, I bought a used pickup and a mower and started a landscaping service. I hired a Mexican off of a street corner, then his brother, then his cousin. My business grew to two trucks and five mowers in eighteen months. I held my drinking to a moderate two per day.

Ana and I bought an average house in a middle class neighborhood and led blissfully and statistically normal lives. Quiet was okay.

*****

In February, an anomaly in the atmosphere’s jet stream pushed the icy fury of an Alberta Clipper into our latitudes where it blitzed the upper edge of a high-pressure area laden with moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting storm glazed us with an inch of ice. Headed into the backyard to replenish our bird feeder, Ana slipped on the steps.

Until something like this happens, we only think we understand loss.

It was still blustery at the graveside service. The cemetery was no Elmwood but a newly-developed, treeless tract near the county line, which her sister, as legal next of kin, had, for reasons of her own, insisted upon. With its flat, easy-to-mow-over grave markers, it looked like a golf course. I sat next to the sister and her husband and some of Ana’s work friends. As the red-faced minister read from the Psalms, the winds whipped his hair around like anemone tentacles. I could hear her sister’s teeth chattering.

Numb with shock up until this moment, I was seized by what I thought might have been Ana’s final sensations as she vaulted backwards. Pelting sleet from a silver sky. A lights-out blow to the back of her head. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I began to shake and I realized that I was about to lose control.

I needed to cry. But, due to concepts of masculinity held over from my childhood, I have never been able to do so in front of others. The anodyne tears were there but wouldn’t fall. Now they backwashed into in my psyche like a poisonous foam. I lunged from my chair and ran toward my truck.

I held on to the tailgate while I vomited myself dizzy.

I thought I might pass out. But then I concentrated on a memory. How the sun had streamed down on us through those magnolia leaves on that day in Elmwood. Oh, Ana. I still draw on this vision whenever I start to think too much about anything.

A poet named Hoffenstein once said: “The heart’s dead are never buried.”

To this day I know that to be true.