It was when I saw Ned actually walking up the front path to my house—my classic upper-Westchester faux-Tudor front, complete with roses surrounding the petite English garden that was really a lawn—that I realized that this might really be the reunion I had been dreaming about for years. He looked amazingly good, wearing a white polo shirt, thankfully lacking some wretched logo, and his tousled sandy locks only a bit receded in front but with his wonderfully slim frame looking as if he had just run another marathon.
Then the bell rang and I looked at myself, 39 and widowed, children away at school, feeling good enough in my forest green shirt and tweed skirt that brought out the highlights in my still red hair, with my fashionista glasses now resting oh so casually in my hair. I rose and opened the door, resisting the temptation to unlock only the top of the Dutch door. Ned grinned the way I remembered and we were in each other's arms.
Twenty years had been a long time, since he had moved to the other coast, had married and had his own family and now was split. He'd managed quite nicely and clearly had held on to some of his assets. I had seen neither his wife nor him since their wedding—Ned had chosen to go to school out there and Brenda was classic California, blonde and leggy and defiantly uneducated despite her Cal degree.
"Sal, you look just fantastic," Ned managed to say between our deep embraces.
"You're not so shabby yourself," I managed to rejoin with a grin.
We had been born so close in time that we might've been twins growing up. My mother gave in to what turned out to be silly concerns about separation anxiety and we were in the same grade all the way through school. Ned and I remained close, too, and in high school, we even shared our romantic experiences with each other late on Saturday nights.
Our bedrooms had been our own since we had been about six years old but we hadn't been shy with each other about undressing in front of one another or even chatting in the bathroom while one of us was on the toilet. I suddenly remembered how Ned used to tease me about tell-tale white streaks in my panties and how I made him promise then to show me his girlfriend Andrea's undies later that night after they had made out.
It was a fun brother-sister rapport we had, knowing each other well enough to skip all the stuff that keeps people from having real contact—spoken, I mean, not sexual. Not only had we never gone in for that but we never even did things like double-date or travel together to things like the prom with our dates. Andrea and I had never been close pals in school and Ned never could grasp what I saw in Alex, who had been my regular guy all through high school.
My dear brother had never even met my late husband because we married soon after they had moved to the coast. I was going through my stage of bewailing his departure and wouldn't have responded even if Brenda had shown any interest in maintaining any contact with me, which she hadn't. We both proceeded to have our families and now they were off at school. My two were at Dartmouth and Wesleyan and his certainly were equally well situated at Stanford and Reed.
Eventually Brenda reverted to form and acted on her resentment of Ned's long hours in Silicon Valley. She started seeing one of her surfer buddies from way back when and the split was amazingly amicable, probably because Ned had cashed in enough of his start-up shares in his several semiconductor enterprises to make things comfortable for both of them. They even agreed to sell the sprawling house in Los Altos Hills and reaped enough to go their separate ways—Brenda to a beachfront in Santa Cruz and the beach and Ned to a toasty little hideaway in Tiburon with a superb view of everyone's favorite city.
Jack had now been gone for almost a year and I had accepted a few invites to go out for dinner and...but my bedtimes were still solitary. I knew from Ned's phone calls that he had had an ongoing thing with an Asian woman he knew from his work, Gloria was her name, but he said neither of them was in any rush to tie another knot.
I smiled at Ned and told him how happy he had made me by coming east mostly to see me. He had trumped up some excuses to visit some venture capitalists in the City with whom he had been dealing for years, but I knew that coming here to Pound Ridge for the first time in two decades was not something he had just added on to his plans.
"Sal, I'm sorry it's been so long for us both," he said with that delightful sheepish grin that I had known so long ago. "Amazing what both of us are ready to do for a quick shag," he grinned and I could only laugh as I thought of how we had compared quite detailed accounts of our high school intimacies.
My face disclosed a slight tinge of fear. Ned noticed it right off and must have known that it was not the 20 years that had interrupted our closeness, but the unavoidable fact that we had never had a sexual relationship. Indeed, that was what made our intimacy possible way back when, I thought. After all, we were so involved with others and had had such a good time growing up that we both must have recognized that getting together sexually would have ruined it, or at least, made it different and probably less fun.
We teased each other unmercifully back then. Using the same bathroom meant that we were not able to hide much from each other anyway and we let ourselves be free and open without wanting to go further. Ned washed my back and noticed that my red bush complemented my hair, while I playfully teased him as he stood shaving at the sink by softly reaching up the leg of his boxers to touch that spot between the base of the scrotum and his anus that turns most men to jello.
Ned had been more than considerate compared to most boys: he always lifted the seat when he peed and even bothered to put it back down. We never had much problem peeing with the other present and I always made him laugh when he walked in as I was plugging myself with a fresh Tampax. "Still having to get off from the little tube, eh Sal?" he would tease.
We took care of each other too, because our parents were detached and focused on themselves. There were both embarrassing and tense moments we had helped each other to make it through intact. Ned could tell from my behavior when I was stressed because my period was late and I literally held his hand when he had been sure some one-night stand had left him with a dose of the clap. Thank God neither fear ever turned out to be the real thing. I guess we learned from our lucky escapes.
Ned broke our embrace and excused himself, after his long trip. While he tended to his needs in my bathroom, I fixed us both two lovely gin and tonics, carefully squeezing the limes into the fizzing glasses. He returned with that old gleam on his face as we toasted our reunion, took each other in our arms, and hugged for a long time after tasting the drinks. I couldn't repress a blush when he told me he was glad to see my Tampax box still on the top of the toilet just like when we were at home together.
"Neddy, no one has talked like that to me in ages," I tried to recover my smile but still was blushing.
"Sal, I'm still amazed that we got on so well without giving in to the urge to screw, despite our hormones," he admitted, not really seriously though.
