Ed, it turns out, is gaga for you. When he comes to pick you up at our house for your second date, I can tell he has spent hours picking out his clothes because he’s wearing a nice pair of pressed slacks, Gucci loafers, a checked button-down shirt, and a crewneck sweater. Ed comes to pick you up and he sits down with us and he’s all pink in the face, can’t stop smiling, like the girlfriend sweepstakes has come to his door with a bouquet of balloons and you wearing a prom dress, a tiara, and a sash. Ed is richer than Croesus and takes you to Windows on the World on your first official date, and you talk about school, where you might go to college. He’s applying to Ivy League schools, but you wouldn’t get into any of those, which is fine, you don’t care all that much, and he says it’s not that important even though he’s not so sure that’s true; all he cares about for the time being is making you happy. At any given moment he will say or do whatever he thinks might accomplish that goal. You don’t look at him much on this date; even though the conversation is good, you aren’t very good at eye contact, and also he has to compete with the view. Ed maybe didn’t fully think through his choice of restaurant, because you are given to dreaming, but he wouldn’t know that, and when you look out those windows, uptown, you may as well be floating right out of them and over the city, looking at water towers and rooftops and cornices; you could do an aerial tour just looking at cornices alone, wonder who made them, what went into cornice-making, was that a job, cornice-maker, when did beautiful cornices go out of fashion, what happened to all the cornice-makers when that happened; or you could take a turn west and tour your life here so far, you could go up and down streets and note the ones you’ve walked on and the ones you haven’t, noting how very many you haven’t, wondering how there could be so many people on this small island, just like you did when you were six, whose idea was that, wasn’t there ever a time when anyone, planners or whoever, stopped to say Hey, guys, this island isn’t all that big, had some kind of city-planning meeting, a bunch of round men in old-timey three-piece suits, smoking fat cigars, We’ll just keep going uptown, they say, a lone skinny man says It’s not infinite, the round men say, The sky is!; you float back out, wonder what happened to the skinny man, fly over to the East Side, swoop down over a Fifth Avenue penthouse, railings and trees wrapped in lights, imagine a future with Ed, your future in general seems so far away, but it’s hard to picture yourself in a life this nice, like, there’s a nice life for you out there, you’re pretty sure, less swanky probably, and you wonder what really is to come, where your place is. You want to ask him if he thinks about those things too, you imagine that rich kids might not really wonder about anything, that they don’t have to, that a certain course is already set for them, which may or may not be true; what may be just as true is that, either way, Ed would like to take your hand and join you out there above the city, and talk about other lifetimes when it was the Brooklyn Bridge that towered over everything, or a time when bums on the Bowery still wore suits and ties and hats, or when your entire family together could barely afford your nine-dollar-a-month rent, but there was still something about these times, a certain type of shared experience that you know doesn’t exist now. But these don’t seem like first-date conversations, which is too bad, because Ed would pretty much spend the rest of his life listening to whatever you had to say; you could be that couple that meets in high school and stays together forever, if you wanted to be; he would always love you like this if you let him, would entertain any romantic notion you put forward, would absolutely take you back to any one of those eras if he could. Instead, you talk about movies you like, and music, and you talk about Nina, and her boyfriend, how they’re the perfect couple. (She’s wealthy, too, and also boys are paying more attention to her than to you, not because she’s more beautiful, yes, she’s beautiful, but because she’s warmer and more open and friendly than you are. That’s just the truth.) About twenty times during dinner he wants to tell you how pretty you are, but he never says it, even once, because he doesn’t want to scare you, and also because he figures you hear it all the time. He doesn’t know yet that at this point you haven’t heard it from anyone besides your mother; this is your first date with anyone, not just him. He takes you home in a taxi and gets out to kiss you good-night on the cheek, and the next day you tell us It was nice, but that’s all we can get out of you, pretty much all we ever hear about it for the duration, even though you date him for the next few months, though you’ve known since the aerial tour of the city that there was something else ahead for you, even if you didn’t know what just yet. He tries again and again to get you to do anything beyond kissing, but when given the choice between saying you’re not ready for more and swatting his hand away, you’re willing to swat for the length of time that you’re together rather than actually talk about it.
Victor and I find out you’ve broken up with him around two months after the fact, maybe a month after we first asked why we hadn’t seen him lately. You’d mentioned that he was going to Gstaad or someplace with his family, but that was a while ago. Also during this time we never have to pry the phone out of your hands to make a call, or if we do it’s because Nina’s on the other end. Eventually you tell us that you and Ed broke up months ago, that you don’t want to talk about it. What? Oh no, honey, I’m so sorry, I say, and you say I broke up with him, it’s fine. It’s not really fine, you liked Ed a lot, and you very much wanted a boyfriend, you just didn’t think Ed was the one. Later on, I find out from Nina that Ed was pretty crushed about it; you know how Nina sometimes lets things slip.
— Am I right?
— Well, I’d tell you now, but I don’t want to spoil your idea of me.
Like Paris
You first meet Frederick in your freshman year at Iowa, second semester. The University of Iowa, about an hour from Muscatine, seems like Paris to you at this time. You share a dorm room with a gal named Joyce from Cedar Rapids who strikes you as positively cosmopolitan, who has actually been to Paris and is happy to talk about it all the day long. Joyce has a navy gabardine dress with impeccable seaming that she bought in Paris, a dress with Madame de Something-or-Other on the giant label on the back of neck, in the most elegant cursive you’ve ever seen. Your first thought is that you and Mother could sew a dress just like it, but something about that label conjures entire worlds; it’s practically the size of a dance card, finely stitched aubergine letters slanted against an ivory background, with the word PARIS in a boldly serifed font below. (You don’t know what a serif is yet, but you can tell class when you see it.) You major in music, to some concern of Mother and Daddy, who aren’t sure what one does with such a degree (you explain that you can be a music teacher, which is true, but not at all what you have in mind — not that you’re altogether sure what you do have in mind just yet, something vaguely—bigger), but their real hope is that you’ll meet a nice young man to marry and create a family with sometime after graduation. It will not displease them when you meet this goal well before graduation.