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In Passing

Billie Louise Jones

    She never really fell in love, not what she thought of as love, what everyone thought of as love: a glorious losing of herself in a boy. No matter how much she liked a boy, he was never life to her. There was no one she yielded her mind to, put above herself to serve and forget all else for. Always, some part of her was detached, so she thought she never was in love. If she did not have to give up so much of herself, it might be easier to fall in love. As it was, she drew a dream man out of books, a Renaissance man like Sir Phillip Sidney. The dream was of an adventurer-scholar, a type she knew did not exist in nature.
    She had anticipated being in love with her first lover. What she thought of as love never happened. She waited, but finally her virginity became a social embarrassment and she gave it up for the experience.... Pete Blackhorse was a Comanche. He wrote poems and tales with a haunting rhythm that connected his rhetoric to some mythic race memory. So young, he already drank too much. He wore the mantle of the damned and doomed, the ruined gift, the too young dead. When he made the act of life on her bloodily, death was already on him and she knew it, though it did not happen until five more years. She embraced in him every romantic concept of the spirit too fine for grosser earth, scattering brilliance like largesse, defiant and spendthrift of itself, haunted by tragedy in the midst of joy, Byron and Keats and Shelley.
    Then she passed by a drunken Indian in a street in San Antonio and did not know him until her lover said, “Didn’t you used to go with Pete Blackhorse?” She looked back stricken, but there was no more recognition in his eyes of the Anglo woman who looked at him with open horror than if that time had never happened. She saw it register on him that the white lady was staring at him.
    Appalled as much by her own not knowing as by him as he was, she turned away and so never knew if the memory of her broke in on him....

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