Fortunately, blessedly, I already knew that. (It was one of the things I had learned in youth movement.) And it was through that same best friend that I began at last to be drawn into the kind of friendship circle, the kind of floating community, for which I’d been longing for so many years. She had a friend from graduate school whose family owned a place in New England—the sweetest old house you could imagine, with a wide front porch that opened up like a grandmother’s lap and a big, cozy living room where they used to hold the dances when the place belonged to the town. The kitchen clock was stopped at 10:36—the perfect time, we used to joke, A.M. or P.M.—not too early and not too late.
The situation bore uncanny resemblances to Persuasion. The house was by the water, like Lyme. (In fact, it wasn’t far from Lyme—the one in Connecticut.) The guy whose family owned it was a sailor, with a sailor’s bluff practicality and the kind of unpretentious warmth that so delighted Anne among the people of the navy. Like the Harvilles, he invited from the heart. Like the Harvilles, he accommodated as many friends as wanted to come, and anyone who came became a friend. Like the Harvilles, in short, he made you feel at home.
On weekends when the weather was mild, his friends would be drawn to the place from all over the Northeast. I would come up from the city, my friend would drive down from New Hampshire, a few Connecticut people would stop by, and we’d spend the weekend just being lazy and silly together. The light would slant in from the water, the gulls would call and circle overhead, we’d pass the days playing ball and eating clams, the nights drinking beer, playing guitar, and talking, talking, talking. As time went on, we became as comfortable with one another as a pair of old shoes. We listened to one another’s stories, met one another’s boyfriends and girlfriends, and tolerated and even grew fond of one another’s faults.
We were all drawn there for the same reasons, all feeling that sense of loss that comes, in your early thirties, when you’ve finally separated from your parents. Some of us were already paired up in long-term relationships, some of us weren’t—it didn’t matter, in that sense. In another sense, of course, it mattered very much. So when, the autumn after I finished my Austen chapter, our host fell suddenly and deeply in love, we all came up one weekend—they were already living together, it happened so fast—to meet his girlfriend.
There were about eight of us sitting around the kitchen table that night, smacking our lips over some dessert she had made. The candles were burning low, her cats were nosing their way among our legs, someone had just cracked a joke. I leaned back, I looked around, and I thought, Yes, I’ve found my family.
Chapter 6
sense and sensibility falling in love
I had now been in Brooklyn for nearly three years, and I had a great deal to be thankful for. I had worked out a way of dealing with my father that enabled us to have a reasonably positive relationship. I no longer worried about his approval, and I had come to accept the fact that he was never going to change. Having completed my Austen chapter and written some hundred pages on Middlemarch, I was more than halfway through the dissertation and was beginning to think I might actually finish someday. And I had found my way to a real circle of friends.
But one thing was still missing. One big, huge thing. I hadn’t found anyone to be with. Not just sleep with, but be with. Not just a hookup, or a short-lived affair, or a summer fling, but a real, stable, satisfying relationship. Coming out of youth movement and college and the first few years of graduate school—sheltered spaces, all of them, that made it relatively easy to find a girlfriend—I was unprepared for the full horror of the New York dating scene. It was like entering an endless maze of stupid conversations, as confusing as the subway and equally bleak. Instead of meeting people through friends, like I always had, I was expected to endear myself to complete strangers—who knew exactly what I was trying to do—in the time it took to walk into a party or order a drink.
And this being New York, it wasn’t enough to be charming (not that I had a clue any longer about how to be charming). You had to be impressive, you had to look successful, you had to sound like a winner, especially as a man. What did you do? Who did you know? Where had you gone to school? I learned to drop the salient points of my résumé into the first five minutes of a conversation. It got so that talking to single women felt like having a job interview. Just be yourself, people would say. Be myself? Wasn’t that the whole problem?
I was spared no indignity. Blind dates. Setups. A dinner invitation from a woman who turned out to have a boyfriend and “didn’t realize this was a date.” A parade of women who liked me, but “not in that way.” “At least you’ve made a new friend!” my friends would say. “I don’t want any more goddamn friends!” I would shoot back.
One day, I struck up a conversation with a woman on the way out of exercise class—one of those miraculous situations where you’re already in the middle before you have a chance to feel nervous. She was smart, nice, interesting, pretty. When we got to the corner and seemed about to go our separate ways, we turned to each other at the same time and said, “So what’s your name?”
Her name was Pam. Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam. I thought about seeing her again all week. But the next week came, and she didn’t show up. I started to get a little desperate. Surely she would come back the following week. But she wasn’t there the following week, either. Finally, I got so distraught that I put one of those “missed connections” ads in the Village Voice: “Desperately Seeking Pam,” with the place and date and my phone number.
Here’s a tip: don’t put your number in a personal ad. First I got a call from a woman pretending to be Pam (“Of course I’m Pam”—“Okay, so what do you do for a living?”—“Oh, c’mon”). Then I got a call from a woman who admitted that she wasn’t Pam but was hoping we could get together anyway. Then I got a call from a guy in New Jersey who wanted to commiserate about how hard it was to meet women. (“Maybe you should stop going to those singles events with your richer, better-looking friend,” I suggested.) Then I got a call from a guy pretending to be Pam. (“You can call me Pam if you want to.”) And finally, late at night, I got one last call from a guy with a voice like sandpaper, who let me know that, for the right price, he’d be happy to introduce me to “Pam.”
I did have one serious relationship during those years. It all started very romantically. I met her at the wedding of an old friend. Actually, as I discovered later, it had been a setup. She had chosen me out of a whole lineup of eligible guys that my friend had laid out—literally, with pictures—upon her request. Well, a short lineup. Okay, me and another guy. But still. It made it all seem even more romantic, when she told me—like the whole thing was meant to be.
My friend arranged to have her pick me up at the airport bus, and as I climbed into the car, we felt the chemistry right away—not just sexual sparks, but an immediate feeling of ease and familiarity and kinship, as if we already knew each other and were merely resuming a conversation that had gotten briefly interrupted. We were inseparable the entire weekend, didn’t stop laughing, couldn’t believe our luck. The wedding was in Michigan (she and my friend had just finished a graduate program together at the U of M), and when she set out for Boston right after the ceremony to start a new job, a new life, she invited me along for the ride—a spur-of-the-moment dash that seemed to have all the glamour and daring of Bonnie and Clyde making a getaway.
We traded stories the whole way, spent the night at a motel in Niagara Falls, of all places (we hadn’t even realized that it was a honeymoon spot), and as I tore myself away from her a couple of days later, swore that we were committed to making the relationship succeed, even though it was going to have to be conducted long-distance. We even mentioned the M-word—as in, “Yes, I think I would be ready to get married if things work out.” That sentence actually came out of my mouth. I couldn’t believe how grown up I was being. It felt like all that Austen was paying off, and that now I was ready for a mature, adult romance.