There is a Light That Never Goes Out by Patricia Ann McNair

(with apologies and appreciation to Morrissey)

My father died when I was fifteen years old; I was still a virgin. I know what you are thinking: non sequitur. What does one thing have to do with the other? I know what I am thinking: everything.

When I was fifteen I hung out with a fast crowd. (Do people still say that? Fast. As in wild. As in “She was fast.” As in sexually active.) There were only two of us who had not yet gone all the way, or the euphemism our gang liked to use—who knows why? We thought it was cute, clever, cryptic (as if)—only two of us had not yet “fallen off the cherry tree.” Me—as I’ve said—and my best friend, Helen.

Not like there hadn’t been ample opportunity. Make-out parties in my other friend Jane’s finished basement where we’d turn out the lights and find corners and cubby-holes away from one another but in pairs, couples, boy/girl because those who were more inclined toward boy/boy or girl/girl hadn’t admitted it yet. Early 70s. So we’d braid together in the powder room, the utility room, on the couch (usually Jane got the couch, because it was her basement after all), behind the wet bar, under the pool table. Or we’d pair up and sneak into the backseats of our neighbors’ cars, left unlocked and parked on the streets, or—if our boyfriends were older—in the backseats of their cars in a forest preserve parking lot, windows clouded over with the heat of our want. Or we’d twine our legs over legs in the grass, stretched out under the stars on a summer night in a field behind the junior high. And there was babysitting: kids asleep and parents away and nothing but time and autonomy and forgotten homework assignments piled on the kitchen table.

So, yeah, I didn’t have to be a virgin when my dad died. But I was. The kissing was fun. The groping. The rubbing. I liked all that. But I guess I just didn’t care enough to fall (jump?) off the cherry tree. Didn’t care enough about the boy(s), about the act, about the admittance into the club of non-virgins.

Sidebar: for a long while, years, decades, I measured the time passed since my father’s death and how long since I had been a virgin in the same equation. I don’t anymore, but for the record it has been 40 years since I last saw my dad, and just a little shy of that since I last saw my virginity. That makes me 55. And coincidentally, or maybe not so, maybe this is why I have been thinking about death and sex (even more than usual) lately, why my mind trips around these things, memories and wonders and words, my dad was 55 when he died.

So once my dad died, I made it my mission to get laid, and also to do it before Helen did; I didn’t want to be the last of my friends to cross the line. I’ll spare you most of the details but these: a slightly older guy named Nick I met at the Holiday, a dark, cavernous disco that let minors onto the dance floor, but not into the bar; an immigrant from a country we used to call Yugoslavia; busboy by trade; backseat of a Ford; drive-in movie. November. My dad died in October. Did I love him? Nick, I mean, because yes, I loved my father. Nick? Absolutely not. In fact, that was essential to me, to not love the first man I slept with. Because if things didn’t work out, I did not want to be devastated by the loss. By another loss. He was cute, though, Nick was, long hair and big brown eyes. And when it was over, I was glad to know that if I were to suddenly, unexpectedly, die—say of a massive heart attack while I was shopping for groceries, like my father did—at least I would not die a virgin. I would not miss out on this big, important thing.

Death. Sex.

On the day of my first marriage, while my about-to-be-husband and I stood on a beach in the Bahamas, a planned elopement with a few strangers in attendance and the mayor of the island officiating and a flea-bitten dog at our feet, my mother, back home in Chicago on a cold March day was diagnosed with a bit of breast cancer. I say bit because that’s what it was, just a bit that they cut out of her breast, leaving a bite-sized crescent in the lump’s wake; they gave her pills and sent her home. The cancer went away. My first marriage did, too.

Marriage. Illness.

On the day of my last wedding (“last” not just because it was the most recent, but also the one I intend to be my last, we are together still, silly and kissy-faced and hand-holding and—forgive me this word—partners after more than a decade and no end—thankfully—in sight) my mother was dying from lung cancer. In our wedding photos, taken here in Chicago, our good friends and family in the frames with us celebrating our union, my mother looks happy and a little chubby-cheeked from the chemo and the steroids, knowing, like we all did, that her end was near, but she was here now, god damnit, in her pretty lavender mother-of-the-bride dress and perfect wig and proud and loving and hanging on for one last party.

Marriage. Death. Love.

You’re thinking: morbid. I’m thinking: not at all. Exquisite. These things, these wonderful (full of wonder) and awful (full of awe) things—death, sex, marriage, illness, love—are beautifully, intricately entwined. Le petit morte, the little death, the French call an orgasm. A sort of transcendence. Highpoints in the splendid whole of life. These last weeks—since my fifty-fifth birthday—I’ve been carrying a Smiths song around in my head, its title the title of this piece. Morrissey imploring a friend to take him out where there’s music and people young and alive. The song is darkness and light and love; it is wonderful and awful: “and if a double-decker bus crashes into us,” and the rest of that verse, “to die by your side” and so on. It’s a good thing.

Love. Death.

Did you know that February 14, Saint Valentine’s Day, is thought to be the anniversary of Saint Valentine’s death? And that he was tortured before he died (on February 14) in prison? That he was imprisoned for secretly marrying couples, defying an order by the emperor Claudius? Love, death, pain, torture, marriage. Celebration.

Will you be my Valentine? Will you marry me? Will you die for me?

These are the things I think about forty years after I lost my virginity in the arms of a Yugoslavian busboy in the backseat of a Ford on a warm November night at the drive-in. What movie? I can’t remember. It hurt a little. I remember that. Like love does sometimes. Like sex can. Like grief. Forty years after I called my friend Helen when I got home that night and told her, “I win.” Twelve years since I told this husband I do, I will, in a tiny chapel with a rose garden named for Shakespeare; with our mothers, our brothers, our friends and a Buddhist monk in attendance. Twelve years since my mom died three months after this last wedding, opening her eyes one final time to see me there next to her in a hospital bed set up in her living room, during the dark of night when others elsewhere slept and whispered and read and made love in their own beds. To die by your side, the song goes. Sex. Love. Death. The things I think about at the start of my fifty-fifth year. Will I live longer than my dad? Can I make it to my mom’s age when she passed? Seventy-eight. That’s a lot of years yet. And if things go my way, a lot more sex yet. More love. More of this long-living marriage I’m in.

Death and sex and marriage and illness and marriage and death and love. Let’s face it, that’s about all there is, and some of us don’t even get that much. Some of us might get just a couple of these things. We all get at least one. For the rest of us though, you know, this fast crowd I hang with, we just might get it all. I’m thinking of Morrissey again on the eve of Saint Valentine’s Day in my fifty-fifth year as I look ahead, as I look behind. That song, those words about love and death. About good stuff and bad. “Well,” he sings, and here’s the good part, “the pleasure, the privilege, is mine.”

And on this snowy February evening while teenagers cloud the windows of cars and pair off in the corners of basements somewhere, everywhere, that is precisely what I have been thinking. The pleasure, the privilege, is mine.


Patricia Ann McNair is the author of the short story collection The Temple of Air, which was named Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year in traditional fiction, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award in prose, and Society of Midland Authors Finalist Award in adult fiction. McNair’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging WritersPrime Number, Other VoicesFRiver TeethFourth GenreBrevityCreative NonfictionAir Canada’s en Route Magazine, and other publications. McNair is also published in the writing textbooks The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction; Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story; and Culture: A Reader for Writers. She is an associate professor in the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.


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