In Riverside Park (an old essay)

“I lost my virginity to that man,” I tell my boyfriend, pointing to the snarling one in the foreground. Legs wide apart, hips jutting forward, chin down, Nathan, the lead singer, looks ravenous. I click the window closed on his laptop.

I fell in love with Nathan in Riverside Park. I was 19. Talk about ravenous! I was so stupefied that this college Marxist version of Mick Jagger was paying me the slightest attention that I projected years’ worth of accumulated fantasies onto him in a matter of weeks. He was smart. Not just smart, but well-read. His father was a professor. He’d read Freud in eighth grade, and kept a picture of him pinned on his wall next to the bed. He’d grown up on the Upper West Side and gone to Columbia Grammar. His house had walls of built-in bookcases. He was Jewish. His parents read the Times over breakfast. His little brother was a genius.

I grew up in a dilapidated stucco apartment in southern California with wall-to-wall carpeting. My mother, a postal worker, didn’t finish college. My cultural/spiritual background had more to do with Linda Goodman’s Love Signs and occasional inferences from my intuitive mother about numerology and “the universe.”

Nathan encapsulated everything I loved about the northeast: “seriousness,” “authenticity,” the way people, who were mostly, refreshingly, neither blond nor stoned, leveled their stodgy, literate gazes at you when they talked. I realize now this was only a narrow swath of privileged eastern demographic, based mostly on my exposure to college professors and their progeny, but it was so different from where I’d come from that I assumed everyone in the north Atlantic states wore tweed, knew from theorists and literature and bagels, listened to NPR, and drove Volvos. Nathan’s attention was confirmation I’d made the right choice moving 3,000 miles from home.

I printed dozens of photographs of us together, taken the weekends I went to visit him at Wesleyan, a two-hour bus ride away. They were lost years later in a fire that consumed the boxes I’d sent home after graduation.

Nathan combined his braininess with a swaggering rock-and-roll aesthetic: he was interviewed on his college radio station and referred to the “teen angst/fellatio dialectic” and described his music as “expressionist rock.” He actually swaggered when he walked, and wore square-toed Italian boots, tight pants, and little Calvin Klein t-shirts, which he neglected to launder, and I secretly loved the way they smelled, balled up in the corners of his unmade bed.

There was a moment, I believe, when he was in love with me, too. It was just before Thanksgiving; he’d clutched at me all night in my own twin bed before we drove to the city, whispering, “You’re so fucking wonderful.” He’d taken to calling on a regular basis at two a.m., and when I woke up the next morning, I was never sure if I’d dreamt the conversation. We were spending a night at his parents’ place in Westchester, and he was eager to introduce me to his mother, “who will love you,” he said. We got in after midnight, but I insisted we visit Manhattan, which I had only been to once.

He took me to Tom’s Restaurant, the one from Seinfeld, which thrilled me, though I knew enough not to admit it. We crossed Broadway and headed for Riverside Park. An actual rat flitted across my shoes, and I screamed.

It was eerily warm. It reminded me of home. I looked at him, framed in the hazy amber streetlamp glow, his forehead now, as always, faintly perspiring, forming curly tendrils at his hairline. I’d anticipated this feeling. This must be it, I thought: this wild, inexhaustible affection, this vague feeling of possession, of unimaginable privilege and luck, this coltish desire. “I think I love you,” I whispered. I don’t remember if I said it loud enough for him to hear; it sufficed that the moment passed at all. I knew I would keep it forever, that it didn’t matter if he loved me as much, or that it was all downhill from there.

We broke up over the phone in January, in a conversation that was so convoluted I had no idea what was said by the time we hung up. I was heartbroken for awhile. I never saw him again, except in weird coincidental run-ins, when we happened to move to the same Brooklyn neighborhood, or happened to work in the same building in Chelsea. I quit shortly after, for unrelated reasons, and left the city.

He still swaggers, apparently, from what I can tell in the band photo. A friend from college who lived in Brooklyn reported seeing him on the street: “He’s gained weight,” she said. His hair is thinner.

I like to think I know so much more now than I did at 19. But you can’t blame me. The night Nathan and I met—it was Halloween, and we were drunk, sitting on the steps of the dining commons at my school—he said something about his propensity for “dark, literary girls from California.” The idea that I could be construed this way—as “literary,” or “dark,” as part of classifiable, desirable genus after whom boys in bands pined—this, this was worth leaving home for.

Sightings

C stood in front of the mirror last night after dinner, examining his naked middle. “I feel skinny, white, and fat,” he said.

We’d had dinner with M at a little place across Ninth Avenue and ate a transgressive banana bread dessert that defied prior notions of both banana bread and dessert.

I hadn’t seen M in years, and the last time I saw her, it had been years since the time before that.

We went to the same high school—“like The O.C.,” she explained to C, “or, actually, Bring it On." At the time, I called my classmates “nymphets.” I was convinced they were bred on a farm and shipped to our school: so startling was their uniformity, their finicky precision with tanning and exercising, their long, straight, blonde hair. Also, like robots or zombies, they lacked manners and empathy.

This is why I liked M. She had been friends with the blondes for years, but she had none of their haughtiness. She was sardonic and whip-smart and truly pretty, not like a glazed-over Seventeen model. She was classier than I was. She had better manners. She could read people and interactions with a medical acuity, sizing up comments and cryptic notes and someone’s father's embarrassing behavior in a way that explained it all for you, and I was grateful for her inadvertent primers on the strange, privileged resort world I stumbled into when I transferred to her school.

Then we graduated, and she went to Dartmouth and I to Hampshire. She emailed brief, pithy missives: uproarious, spot-on ethnographies of the blue-blood enclave she found herself in. I have always appreciated how M talks candidly, without pretense, about money and class. I thought she was classy because of her middle-class pedigree in a San Diegan suburb. Now we were both going to college with people from prestigious boarding schools, who had actual trust funds or famous parents. She was somehow more like them than I was, but she also waited tables while she studied. I was as grateful for her perspective as ever.

The truth is, M has always dazzled me. She is fierce and charismatic and invigorating. She’s quick, and I quicken to keep pace. But her dryness and sarcasm, charming as they are, belie what I am not qualified to name but will venture nonetheless is an abject fear of burdening someone else with her business. My grandmother is like that. Stiff upper lip Yankee. M convinces me in every gesture and remark that she is fine, in fact has never been better, even when she tells me she isn’t, when her eyes glisten and her voice quivers. It may be that I don’t actually know her very well, compared with her oldest friends or her sisters; why would she let me in, of all people? I was drawn to her invulnerability—the flourish of her armor—when we were 17. I was fascinated by what she could be working so hard to protect.

When I hear from her, I remember how much I like her. I think of how good it is to have vivacious, critical girlfriends who can discuss Lindsey Lohan and the politics of the death penalty with equal fervor and intelligence. Who appreciate good jeans and quality eye shadow and the thrill of a tall man who can cook, but only as deep, discerning, smart girls do. I still feel like I have something to learn from her. I think she can do anything.

I am sure that I romanticize her as much as I ever did, probably because I don't know her much better than I did in high school. She is still larger than life, than my life. Which I hope will fall away, over the years, as we grow older and old. We’re past the age when you see the world as a giant candy store of potential friends and lovers; I find that it is harder to make friends, or even deepen the friendships I have, now, since turning 25 and 26 and 27 and becoming domesticated (an indoor cat, so to speak). But the true things still loom, still float forward from the noisy storm on the periphery. Maybe my friendship with M will stay on, will transcend the typical vagaries, the ordinary busyness that keeps you from noticing what is worth tending. I like to think so.