My First Objectivist

When she was aroused, she smelled like the ocean.  Now, when I am at the ocean I think of her; and I when I come out of the water, I smell her on my skin.  She wore her honey brown hair in a long bob. Hanging straight, it did not quite touch her shoulders.  When she curled it, her neck was exposed.  She had long legs and a short torso.  She usually wore chinos and in the summer cut-offs, but I liked her best in pleated plaid skirts.  She said they made her look frumpy and she would wear a straight skirt or A-line instead.  She was indifferent to style and it is impossible to describe her blouses because they were so plain. Simple, straight, unadorned in white or pastel green, pink, yellow, or blue, just enough color to be not-white and yet, for all intents, just that: colorless.  It made her face stand out all the more.  Simple, clear, pan-European features, completely proportional and in that, unremarkable, except for her lips and her eyes.  She wore a friendly smirk, as if bemused by the obvious and what lay unrevealed beneath it.  Her eyes were bright blue, very blue because her pupils were always contracted.  Later, I learned that this is a sign of disapproval: she did not like what she saw.  I could understand that about the wider world, but she looked at me that way, too -- though not in the dark.  In my bed, I fell into those bottomless pupils seeking the person within... and finding only questions.  She had the audacious openness and perfect confidence of a kitten, though, colloquially, there was nothing kittenish about her.  She was an honors student.  In those days, we called it "Major Work.'  Later, looking into another girl's eyes, I heard it called "the Cleveland system."  She did all the math and science and lent me her mathematics monthly magazines, but her passion was music: she played the violin. 
 
When I met her, I was reading The Fountainhead and I gave her Anthem to read.  We read all of Ayn Rand's books together.  We played Rachmaninoff when we began necking and petting and eventually did "it." When my family moved to the high rises on the Gold Coast, I took her to parties with my new friends, not so that she could meet them, but so that we could stand at the penthouse windows and look out at Cleveland.  From the Lake, we knew where to find the industrial fires.  We watched ore ships making the Cuyahoga.  The cars on the Shoreway were pearls flowing to the Terminal Tower with its caverns and trains.  When we rode downtown on the Rapid, the blast of motion sweeping us under the city, we looked deep into those sanctified spaces, knowing that in there was a Motor.  We came out of the Terminal Tower, past the shops, past the cigarette stand with the old man (too bad we did not smoke yet), and into the streets of the second or third greatest city in the history of mankind, the home of Rockefeller, Michelson & Morley, Winton and Stouffer... and the Patrick Henry University.