Erica Russo
The Summer I Loved Will
That was the summer I loved Will.
Ten years create distortions in the memory, even for people like me, who pride themselves on recalling minutiae that others don’t remember even sharing with me. When I glance through the photos of that summer, memories leap forth with immense clarity, although I know that, in at least one instance, my mind is lying to me.
The first appearance Will makes in my photos is in the Frankfurt airport.
He’s just beginning All the Pretty Horses; you can’t see the title because he folded the cover over, but he spent all summer working through the dense and fervent imagery of McCarthy’s writing. I didn’t know Will yet and just intended to capture the boredom of our layover, but he glanced up at the last second. His expression conveys a small bewilderment that someone would waste film in an airport.
Rachel and Liesl and I had vowed to take as many pictures as possible, however, and to share them when we returned to Orlando. So we continued with our snapshots, irritating the other students by the time we reached our dorm in Saint Petersburg near the Smolny Institute. I had just graduated from Florida State, and they were both seniors—our willingness to annoy came in no small measure from our feeling of superiority as the most advanced students on the trip. Oh, sure, there was Chepozha, who claimed to be a CIA agent now under deep cover at the university, and Richard, the teaching assistant, but we remained self-assured of our high status.
Along the way these people appear in my photo album, consigned to the margins. There’s Katherine, a plain girl whose kindness and Zen approach to life resulted in one beautiful close-up in Moscow. There’s Paul, whose drunkenness resulted in more than one public urination, including one in the hallway outside our dorm suite. Liz, who Will had dated the previous semester. I try to block the knowledge that Will’s reason for breaking up with her involved her weight. “No more fat chicks,” he declared, which rankled Rachel and Liesl to no end.
I find the next picture of Will about a week-and-a-half into the trip.
We three planned on attending a production of Faust in the north end of the
city, and he tagged along on what we later dubbed “the worst production of anything,
ever.” This Faust, as it turned out, was a community production,
with a variety of over-eager chorus women shoving each other in their efforts to
get to the front of the stage, and a Mephistopheles wearing what looked to be an old
speed-skating uniform. It might have flattered a younger man, but was downright
offensive on a fifty-something bass. We fled the theatre after the first act,
and to this day, I don’t actually know how Faust ends. I’ve never been
able to bring myself to see it again.
When we returned to the dorm, Rachel and Liesl went off somewhere to
play euchre, and Will and I stayed in my room, listening to The Soul Cages
and talking for hours in the summer’s eternal twilight. We fell asleep with our arms around each other, draped in my Harvard sweatshirt, and that set the tone for the rest of the summer.
Rachel and Liesl might not have needed prints from five rolls of film with an overwhelming number of Wills, but they didn’t complain to me later. He’s with me at school, at Pushkin and Pavlova, and on the Moscow boat ride. He’s there at Lake Ladoga and at the Hermitage.
My memory of Red Square is the one instance in which I know without a doubt that my mind is cheating me. Will used my camera for a photo of the three roommates under the “Krasnaia Ploshad” street sign, and then Liesl took another one of our backs as we walked towards St. Basil’s Cathedral. Two years earlier, with a different group of students and a shy Russian boyfriend, I had crossed the square in the opposite direction. But these memories have conflated, and in spite of the empirical evidence demonstrating otherwise, to this day I think fondly of Will—not Dima—clasping my hand and pulling me closer to him as we walked from the cathedral to the museum by the department store.
So I question other memories. Did he jump into the freezing Ladoga to impress me or to show off for his buddies? Did he hold my hand in Novgorod merely to warm his own? Did his eyes mist over when we said goodbye in Frankfurt because he was exhausted from jet lag or because he would miss me?
I’m inclined to be cynical, because that’s just the way I am. But I would like to think that he enjoyed the jump in the lake and that it made him happy that I cared enough to bring him a sun-warmed towel. I would like to think he held my hand because it comforted him to feel my small fingers firmly within his larger ones.
Yet I do have one extraordinarily lucid recollection, and a postcard, which reassure me in these things.
One night he took me to dinner at the Hotel Europa. In those days just following the collapse of Communism, the Europa was Saint Petersburg’s sole concession to European haute cuisine. However, its menu belied this lofty ambition, with a potpourri of traditional American dishes and more stereotypically French dishes, like cassoulet. I would have preferred eating at our usual hang, the Café Baghdad, which offered Middle Eastern dishes of inexpensive prices and increasing mystery—often, by the time we arrived, we could only guess which items might still remain on the evening’s menu. But Will insisted on Europa.
“I owe this to you,” he said.
(Owed me for what, cries the cynical brain.)
“I want us to have a real date.”
That second statement always relieves my addled mind. Off we went, to enjoy a night of authentic French jazz and pizza. He had the chicken a la rouge (l’orange? We wondered…) Its stringy consistency and angular construction reminded us both of the Queen Alien while its flavor reminded us of convenience store fried chicken. But we were silly with wine and the enthusiastic sounds of the French Dixieland band on the lounge floor, and the quality of the food remained a secondary consideration.
The next morning we finished packing and drove to the airport. After arriving in Frankfurt, Rachel and I would head to a small hotel with Philip for a couple of days, Liesl would trek to Yugoslavia (Hungary?) to meet distant relatives, and Will would depart for Spain with Paul and Katherine. Next to the baggage claim, he grabbed me in a rough embrace and mumbled, “Goodbye, girl.” I pulled away from him and looked up at the cerulean eyes I had come to adore, seeing their blue beneath a watery layer. He quickly glanced away and, resting his hand against my cheek briefly, was gone.
We had a predictably good time in Frankfurt, visiting a farmer’s market one day and discovering the German take on pizza the next. Upon reaching Orlando again, the three of us parted ways. Multiple copies of film worked their way around the state, but missed me until after I had moved to Michigan for graduate school. My dad mailed me a heavy box containing some odds and ends, some unforwarded mail, and roughly 250 photographs from Rachel and Liesl. I heard later that Liesl had stayed in Yugoslavia (Hungary?) and married a third cousin, and that Rachel was running a chamber of commerce somewhere in Montana. I’ve heard nothing of Will since then, but I keep his postcard in a place where I know my little twins and their puppy won’t get to it.
He mailed it from Spain, and my dad passed it on to me in that huge box. Will wrote a few simple things, mostly noting that his Russian was much better now that he was in a country where he couldn’t use it, but ended, “I miss you more than you thought I would. Love, Will.”
My heart doesn’t skip a beat at reading this anymore, but it does when I look at the address. He’d addressed it just to “Sarah,” and as I do each time I see the card, I remember that I never knew his last name, either.
©2007 by Erica Russo
