It was on one of those fall men’s college weekends that I first met her. I did not know then that the course of a life could change forever, in the briefest of instants, though the change didn’t become fact until many years later.
The light from the sun came at sharp angles, making long shadows ahead as I walked toward my new friend’s dormitory room. His name was Konstantine, but he was called Kosta by friends and family, and he insisted there was someone I had to meet. As I passed under the archway leading into the courtyard, the rowdiness and the blaring music got louder and more insistent. Through the entryway and up the stairs, I could barely hear myself think, ‘It’s only ten in the morning, for crissakes’. College weekends. Girls came in from everywhere, while half the boys went elsewhere.
I walked into Kosta’s dorm room, pushing the unclosed door with a couple of silent knocks…and there she was, sitting quietly on the far side of the unmade bed, her long dark hair just covering her face, as she closed the two sides of her blouse over her bare chest. Her long, slender fingers ran over the buttons on her blouse. Sensing my presence, she looked up, smiled, a delicious slightly askew smile, and reached for her cigarette in the big, heavy ashtray. The bright autumn sun blazed through the leaded glass windows, making a saintly halo of her hair, while also giving form to the cigarette smoke billowing softly around the room. The smell of the tobacco combined with the odor of her lovemaking. A profound sadness came over me
Just then I hit the bedframe with my shin, a direct hit; my face must have been contorted in agony, but I didn’t let out a sound. She smiled again, not noticing my anguish, dragged on her cigarette, and said, “Hi, I’m Manya”, a formulation that she would use for the rest of her life.
I managed to gargle out a “Hiya, doll,” since I had just finished a whole week of Humphrey Bogart films at the film society, and was feeling some adrenalin as the pain reached the top of my head. Luckily, ugly male sounds from the bathroom down the hall echoed loudly into the room, and distracted us from that delicate moment. Kosta appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a towel, as energetically happy as he was the night we met, when he squirted a group of us through our window with a water pistol, as we played cards inside, Hearts. I could feel my shin bleeding now, down into my sock, as I looked from one to the other. Manya stood and Kosta grabbed her around the waist, kissing her wetly, loudly on the mouth.
“Let’s eat”, he said as he dropped the towel and proceeded to dress, as though he were all alone in the whole wide world of his room. I could now feel the blood pooling in my shoe, the pain only slightly less acute.
Manya put an arm under one of mine, I don’t remember which, and said, “Let’s”, leading me out of the room, down the stairs and out into the sunlight. By now, delirious, all I could think was that someday I’ll have a girl like Manya too. But I knew that this was not the time to propose it. I just hummed to myself, “Get me some Manya too,” paraphrasing an old song from another generation.
She said, puzzled, “You’re limping.”
