Driving over to Atlantic City that day to meet Barney the thought that this was the last thing I needed to be doing was foremost on my mind.
With the endless phone calls from Dennis with orders on things that needed to be done, building the new stupid house and trying to stay busy so I did not have to think had left me pretty well an emotional wreck. Some how I had to manage to keep it together.
Walking down the Boardwalk towards the Golden Nugget and listening to the waves gently rolling in on the beach actually started to make me forget all that had been going on in the last few months. Seeing Barney sitting on the bench on front of the hotel/casino with that smile I knew so well, made every care seem to float away. I should not have been surprised as he had had that effect on me since the day I met him nineteen years before.
We sat on the bench much in the same way we used to curl up together like the way we did when we would study together back in college. Not really talking a lot but just enjoying being together, watching the other people strolling on the boardwalk and taking in all the sights and the sounds of the ocean. He was going to have a busy two days in Atlantic City and finally said he wanted to see everything. Both of us were probably thinking we better go for a long walk instead of a short ride up to his room.
The boardwalk was sixty feet wide and four miles long making it the longest in the world. It had changed at lot in the four years I had been going there and was much different from the way it was back in it's heyday. The advent of the casinos in the late seventies had changed it from the quaint beach front town into the glitz and glamour of casino gambling. Some of the original seaside attractions were gone but there were enough left so that you could still get an idea of the way it had been. There was still a lot of cute places making salt-water taffy and shops that sold everything made from seashells.
My favorite were the boardwalk games, much like a carnival or fair. I introduced Barney to his first time to play Skee Ball which I beat him at and the fortune telling machine which was too close to reality for both of us. Maybe we were too old for the Merry-Go-Round on the Steel Pier but who cares. We popped in and out of the glitzy casinos as we walked by them. Each had it's own catchy theme and maybe my favorite was the one with the Playboy Bunnies. Barney got a real laugh when I told him I was fascinated by the women walking around in those costumes. Not only the bunnies but female impersonators and strippers were also fascinating because I could never understand how they could do that. He bent over in laughter when I said that and told me I was intrigued by them as that was so not like me. What could I say?
When he asked me if I was hungry I gave him his choice of the over priced food in the hotels, New York dogs on the boardwalk or a quiet Italian place that had been around for fifty years. He made a good choice in the Italian place a block off of the boardwalk. New York was good for Jewish Deli's but New Jersey was the best place for Italian.
We slid into a booth at the restaurant where the waiter barely spoke English. It wasn't easy to pick out something on the menu which was all in Italian but we decided to take our chances and just guess at something. After we ordered Barney took my hand and asked me if it was the test on Saturday I was so upset about. I was a little surprised and asked him why he thought I was upset. Maybe I was not as good as I thought I was in staying upbeat during our phone calls as he told me he could tell from my voice for the last few months something was wrong.
Maybe I knew it was time to tell him about the upcoming move but did not know how to start until he asked. Fighting back the tears I told him the whole story about Dennis being transferred to Detroit, the horrible house he decided to build, how I loved Riverton and had made it a home, how I wanted to go to school there and raise the boys there. I did not tell him before now because I wanted to tell him in person but I did leave out the part about thinking I might not make the move myself.
He kissed away the one tear that managed to fall and was silent for a few minutes. The he said he would always regret not marrying me in 1966 and that he had loved me since the day we met and would love me until the day he died. That I was the most beautiful person he had ever met as well as the smartest and the most talented. Where I lived did not matter but the only thing that mattered was that I did not stop loving him. When things were not going well in his life he would pick up the phone just to hear my voice or just think about me.
I think when he said all that my heart stopped beating or I stopped breathing or both happened at the same time. People only say things like that in movies or in a song. Maybe guys said things like that to get a girl to have sex with them but in our complicated situation and early sixties values it didn't wasn't one of those things we did. Do I just tell him that I feel the same way about him or that no one in my life had ever done anything but put me down until he came along? I mumbled something about that was the way I had always felt about him about the same time the waiter showed up and broke the moment.
Whatever it was we ordered for lunch was wonderful and Barney gave me a lecture on putting everything out of my mind for the medical school test on Saturday. After lunch we took off our shoes and walked back up the beach to where I had parked the car. The beach was pretty much deserted since it was the middle of the week and the busy season would not really start for another month. As we walked I caught him up on Cathie and Pam from college. He loved the crazy stories about Cathie and her antics. I told him she was the only one who knew we were still seeing each other and that she highly approved.
Pam was still single and the world traveler. He thought it was interesting that the three of us, each so different, had managed to stay friends all these years. I admitted that I had the same thought but somehow we had connected for life that year at Stephens.
When we got to my car he gave me a pep talk about the test, told me he would be thinking about me all day on Saturday and to find a phone as soon as the test was over so I could call him collect and let him know how it went. His arranging to come to New Jersey to bolster my confidence before taking the test certainly worked. The last thing he said to me before I left was that he meant everything he said to me at lunch and nothing would ever change that.
For some reason everything looked brighter and more beautiful on the drive home. There would be many times in the next few years when what that beautiful human being said to me that gave me the strength to keep going.
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