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 andmoved 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 it’s provisional. But what seems fun at first can get old quickly, and soon my head hurt and my feet were tired and I found my customers demanding and rude, so I bought a suit with money sent by my parents, and I started interviewing for business jobs, and to my surprise got an offer from this management consultancy, and once something like that was offered, how could I say no?
And then I must have changed. I certainly wasn’t painting any pictures. In those days, the early nineties, art seemed pointless, and it was exhilarating to have money for the first time … I can’t explain it entirely—it’s as if it happened to a different person, and I look back and see who I was then and she looks like nobody I would ever have known. But because I became this person, and because Ben was deeply accommodating and because he loved me, he felt he needed to change, too. I’d say things like, “We’re not kids anymore—it’s time to get serious,” and in time, he signed up for law school at NYU, which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you feel it’s time to get serious but have no clue what that might entail. Needless to say, he also packed in the band, which in some way he didn’t need anymore, because he had me in his free time. We were living together by then, in a tiny, dully respectable low-ceilinged postwar box east of Gramercy Park, a no-man’s-land, vibe-wise, a few blocks from the Arts Club but a million miles from any art. I barely looked at art; I thought my plan to become an artist had been a fantasy of the powerless, and that with money of my own—with power!—I had no need of it.
My office was on the thirty-fourth floor; I went everywhere by taxi; I flew on planes and sat in airports and stayed up tapping at my
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 andmoved 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 it’s provisional. But what seems fun at first can get old quickly, and soon my head hurt and my feet were tired and I found my customers demanding and rude, so I bought a suit with money sent by my parents, and I started interviewing for business jobs, and to my surprise got an offer from this management consultancy, and once something like that was offered, how could I say no?
And then I must have changed. I certainly wasn’t painting any pictures. In those days, the early nineties, art seemed pointless, and it was exhilarating to have money for the first time … I can’t explain it entirely—it’s as if it happened to a different person, and I look back and see who I was then and she looks like nobody I would ever have known. But because I became this person, and because Ben was deeply accommodating and because he loved me, he felt he needed to change, too. I’d say things like, “We’re not kids anymore—it’s time to get serious,” and in time, he signed up for law school at NYU, which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you feel it’s time to get serious but have no clue what that might entail. Needless to say, he also packed in the band, which in some way he didn’t need anymore, because he had me in his free time. We were living together by then, in a tiny, dully respectable low-ceilinged postwar box east of Gramercy Park, a no-man’s-land, vibe-wise, a few blocks from the Arts Club but a million miles from any art. I barely looked at art; I thought my plan to become an artist had been a fantasy of the powerless, and that with money of my own—with power!—I had no need of it.
My office was on the thirty-fourth floor; I went everywhere by taxi; I flew on planes and sat in airports and stayed up tapping at my
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