ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part One, Chapter 36: Love Gone Missing
Ernie’s memoir is in three parts, but he decides to try to publish only Part One, stories of his childhood, because “parts two and three, so painful to write. Too painful to read.”
I read all sixteen chapters of Part One, including The Two Faces of Love.
Ernie and Kenny are riding bikes one June morning when Kenny spots a new girl to the neighborhood sitting on the front steps of a yellow-brick apartment building. He goes up to her, finds out her name is Jo Anne, and invites her to go with him and Ernie to the drugstore for a cherry Coke.
While we were sipping our cherry Cokes at the soda fountain, I happened to look into the mirror behind the counter, and my eyes met Jo Anne’s. A feeling unlike any other I’d ever felt swept through me. My soul sang. My body tingled. I felt as light as a butterfly. I wanted only one thing: to be alone with her.
Marvel of marvels, Jo Anne chooses shy Ernie over the bigger, swaggering Kenny. That summer, Ernie and Jo Anne go roller-skating together, go to the movies together, take a streetcar to Fontaine Ferry Park to ride the roller-coaster together and to laugh at their distorted images in the Funhouse mirror. At summer’s end, she goes back to her mountain home in Blackey, Kentucky, and they write each other. Then she stops answering his letters.
The Louisville winter was severe that year — lots of snow and gloom. I pined for just a note from her. Finally, in the spring, the Dearest Ernie letter came. She had met an older guy. She was sorry.
I was heartbroken. I sulked for days, snapped at my mother, picked fights at school.
Later, I realized I’d seen the two faces of love: the fiery, consuming one that takes away all common sense and lifts you into the clouds, and the other face, which, when it dies, leaves a hole in your heart deeper and darker than any other.
Days later, in the middle of making our bed, I suddenly think: Ernie and I haven’t made love in . . . how long? I can’t even remember. I haven’t missed it, which is even more telling.
Has Ernie? I don’t ask him.
