her arm, I did no such thing: I nodded, I smiled, I downed the dregs of my coffee, and as I placed my cup noisily in the sink, I said, “Well, au travail!” using her words, if not her gestures, for the first time.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I was in love with her—which I was—but in a romantic way—which I was not. You’re thinking, how would I know whether I was romantically in love, I whose apparently nonexistent love life would suggest a prudish vacancy, uterus shriveled like a corn husk and withered dugs for breasts? You’re thinking that whatever else she does, the Woman Upstairs with her cats and her pots of tea and her Sex and the City reruns and her goddamn Garnet Hill catalog, the woman with her class of third graders and her carefully pearly smile—whatever else she manages, she doesn’t have a love life to speak of.
Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is it that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you to tell me that I don’t know what love is?
My indifference to Alf’s slobbering first clinch in the Manchester High School darkroom, and my inability to see the point of a husband when I was sixteen, were not, perhaps, an auspicious beginning. But, reader, in my time, I almost married. I can’t quite believe it myself, looking back.
In college, I had boyfriends, yes, in the way that girls who are chiefly popular with girls have boyfriends. For long stretches, I would pine, religiously, monastically even, for someone unrealistic and inappropriate. Then, in between the ranks of the unloving and the ranks of the unloved slipped the stragglers and wanderers against whom I had no defenses. These were my early lovers, the there-and-gone: the Englishman visiting for a semester with his talk of Wittgenstein and his crazed quiff of black hair; my roommate’s brother’s friend Nate up from Harvard for a long weekend, blinking behind his glasses and swigging in the cold from his hip flask of bourbon; or Avi, Joanne Goldstein’s boyfriend from Israel, fresh out of the army, dark-skinned, hairy and muscled, who kicked around Middlebury for the better part of a season, smoking lots of dope and having sex with whomever he felt like, while Joanne was in class or at the gym or wherever she was and apparently not noticing.
In the summer after senior year, by which time I thought I’d never know love, I met Ben. It was August, and hot. We met on Martha’s Vineyard, where I was staying with my friend Susie at her parents’ house, at a picnic on Aquinnah beach, playing volleyball, the sand frying our soles, and he stood out not only because he was tall and lean but because he had about him from the first an air of patient sweetness that he never lost, something almost childlike. He asked me to dinner in Edgartown and picked me up on a borrowed moped, and winding back to Susie’s along South Road after supper, with the high moon and the gnarled fairy-tale trees overhanging the road, I felt with him both safe and capable of adventure. When we came to the open field beyond which you see the sea for the first time, and it was lit by the pewter moonlight and by hundreds of fireflies, like dotted fairy lanterns, he stopped the bike and we perched on the knobbly stone wall, just looking for a while in silence—it was, actually, breathtaking—and then we kissed. I remember sighing, with both pleasure and a sort of resignation, and thinking, “Well, that’s that then.”
Ben was fresh out of college also, from Northern California originally, but moving to New York, so I hopped on the bandwagon and moved to New York too, where I rented an apartment with Susie and another girl from college named Lola, in a greasy tenement at 102nd and Amsterdam, which was not then a particularly pleasant place to live.
Ben lived in Alphabet City, and in the evenings he played in a band. He worked, days, the first year, as a mover, and he got very strong, and I worked as a waitress, and for a while it was all fun, in the way life is fun when