Spinster (9 page)

Kate
, I said to myself,
the only place this horrific jealousy exists is inside of you. If you stop feeling it, it will disappear
.

At the time, I was lying on my bed. I'd moved again, to the dreary outskirts of North Cambridge, and I shared an apartment with two men, both friends, all of us gleefully not keeping house. I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling and realized I'd never talked to myself this way before. Now that my mother was gone, my father subsumed by his new family, W out of the picture, I could no longer outsource my problems to intimates, and I had to learn to keep my own counsel.

It was not a pleasant realization. I felt very tired, like someone
who'd been struck mute and now had to set about learning American Sign Language.

“There's your next boyfriend,” Michael said.

It was fall, and Michael, a college friend, was in town for the weekend and wanted to see the office. We'd met our freshman year, in an early-morning class on Ancient Greek Civilization, before he'd come out. He'd introduced me to W, and then to L when I lived in Portland, and he liked to claim himself the puppet master of my romantic life.

“What? Where—?” I turned just in time to see a co-worker vanish around the corner, a flash of oxford blue and khaki. “Him? R? Preppy R?”

Michael nodded with maddening confidence. “That's the one.”

R was an editor at the magazine, two years older, handsome, compact, with a gentle manner I found incredibly calming and a face that reminded me of that famous photograph of Kafka: dark shining eyes, high cheekbones, ears that stick out just a little too far (Obama-style, as I think of it now). Once or twice a week we'd take our sandwiches to the conference room and talk as expansively as we could in an hour.

Our conversations had a limitless quality that I loved. It was a relief to embark on a simple friendship with a man, free to talk about anything we wanted, without the roller coaster of emotions and confusion over roles and expectations.

“Please,” I groaned. “The last thing I need is another relationship.” Taking his arm, I hurried Michael out of the office and down the elevator to go find lunch.

That winter I came home from the office Christmas party and devoted an entire journal entry to Phoebe-Lou Adams. It reads like something you'd see in an old society column:

D
ECEMBER
12, 1997: Phoebe-Lou Adams was a knockout tonight in a long black dress with an empire waist, a long necklace of clear glass beads wrapped around and around her neck, white hair teased, and subtle black makeup on her old eyes. She brought something called a Tipsy Cake—petite, snowy whipped-cream frosting, it looked of another era.

By now I'd been at
The Atlantic
for a year and a half, and single for six months. I continued to obsessively record everything I did and thought.

D
ECEMBER
17, 1997: Bought my first pair of “synthetic pants” (there is spandex woven into the fabric). Finished reading Joan Didion's
Play It As It Lays
and Edith Wharton's
The House of Mirth
.

D
ECEMBER
18, 1997: I feel that I could fall for R, but resist.

My connection with R had continued to be a source of great pleasure. Whenever Michael called he'd say, “So, are you seeing R yet?” and I'd growl at him to stop sullying a perfectly good friendship with his sordid romantic agendas.

How quickly the plot thickens.

D
ECEMBER
22, 1997: Feeling very fond of R, but know it's because he's a force of good, and cute. We shouldn't be together. I'd make him unhappy. I'm still too much of a wreck to be with someone else.

The next day we took a walk after work, along the twisty cobblestone streets of Boston's North End. It was dusk. R mused aloud that sometimes he felt he was getting to know me really well, and other times was “hitting up against a wall.”

A gust rushed through me—I hadn't known what I was about to say until I heard myself say it: “That's because I have a little crush on you!”

I laughed. The notion was so ridiculous that I wasn't even embarrassed to admit it.

R stopped walking and looked at me, smiling. “Me, too.”

I shook my head at the predictability. Seriously. You put a man and a woman together, and what do you get?

“Thank God all that boy-girl stuff is out of the way,” I said. “Now we can
really
be friends.”

Back home that night I was far less sanguine.

D
ECEMBER
23, 1997: The recent flirtation with R is unnerving. I am fond of him, attracted to him, he is incredibly sweet and kind, but to be involved would bring out all the impatience and resentment in me. He represents a tenor of safety I am not presently interested in. What a luxury, to be twenty-five and unattached; here's hoping I can use it.

I actually wrote that phrase, “not presently interested.”

A week later, New Year's Eve, R stopped by my desk on his way out, to say good-bye, as he usually did. I was rushing to finish some paperwork so I could get home and change; I was going to a bathtub-gin party that night with a friend. But as usual, once we started talking, I didn't feel like stopping, and then, when it really was time for him to leave and me to wrap up, and he rose from the chair, I was overcome with a sensation so powerful that I asked him to hold on a minute. He sat back down.

“I don't know what's happening,” I said.

He was concerned. “Where does it hurt? Your head? Your stomach?”

I could hardly look him in the eye, because when I did, the sensation got worse.

“It's like I'm dizzy and light-headed and moving in slow motion all at once,” I explained. “It's like I just can't bear for you to leave.”

“Do you want to come out with me tonight?”

Before I could say yes, I had to say no. Instantly I saw why: this was the last night I'd be single, and I wanted to savor it.

The next day we kissed on my sofa.

Initially we kept our relationship secret at work, but eight months later, when we decided to move in together, I figured I should tell my boss (who simply looked up from her paperwork and said, “I don't care. Just don't fuck on my desk.”).

The week before our move, I was promoted to junior editor.

My head spun with the speed of it all.

Our apartment was the top floor of a three-unit house in Somerville built in the 1910s. We turned the sunlit front room into a shared office, with desks on opposite walls. The bedroom was just big enough to hold R's queen-size bed; its substantial cherry headboard made even the act of sleeping feel grown-up. A close friend sewed us a silky rose and lavender duvet cover as a housewarming present, and I found curtains that flowed to the floor.

Much later, Michael admitted that the first time he visited he felt as if he'd stepped onto a stage set. He was particularly taken aback by a pile of empty gilded frames stacked like mousetraps in a corner—readymade templates waiting to be filled with photographic evidence of our coupledom.

Unconsciously I patterned our relationship on that of my parents. Both had grown up in traditional 1950s families, with breadwinner fathers and mothers who kept house, but by the time they married, that template was transitioning into the egalitarian model my generation inherited.

And so it was with R and me, and every other young couple we knew. I'd just turned twenty-six and he was twenty-eight, and though we weren't married, we might as well have been; we split our expenses down the middle, provided mutual emotional support, discussed every decision, spent holidays with each other's family, shared friends.

At work we kept our distance, but in the evenings, back home, we'd make a big salad or vat of pasta and talk about the day. Talking—about what we were reading, feeling, thinking—was our highest form of intimacy, and glue. He asked me questions about my mother and gave me the space to grieve her; I cried a lot, to be sure, too much. His patience was astonishing. Little by little I started to return to myself.