We sat down on the dusty steps of an East Village brownstone, and at 10:42 on a Tuesday night 10 years ago, he told that he loved me. As the taxis crawled by and folks began to walk in packs to Webster Hall, my insides felt like dancing, bursting to the sky. He loves me, he loves me-and not just because the song said so.
He told me this in the midst of him revealing his parents knowledge of my also being in New York for the summer. I’d followed this boy to the city after having graduated magna cum laude from a fine institution with Ivy League envy. I’d done something my mom had always told me never to do: I followed a boy.
A boy to whom I’d had no formal commitment, just really a terribly strong attraction that was mutual (for a change). He’d gotten an internship in the IT department of a top I-bank for the summer. I’d gotten a year-long fellowship to start in the fall, and I really didn’t have much to do that summer, except enjoy it. That last year of college, I’d become very good friends with a girl who lived there-among other tests of friendship, we’d broken into a frat boy’s room and drank his good champagne. I once thought she was kind of a slut, but then changed my mind—because you, see, I was kind of slut myself. Of course, not that I’d admit that to anyone else. And besides, I was only mildly slutty. So naturally, I’d wanted to also see hang out with her that summer too.
It’s a testament to my argumentative skills that my parents let me go, seeing as they knew the said boy was also going to be there. But they gave me a check to cover my expenses for my first couple of weeks, and set me on a plane to New York. I stayed with my friend for the first week, paid for coffee with the $100 bill my parents had given me (strange, I know), ate $4.95 pasta with a $30 bottle of wine, shopped for used jeans, rode the 6, and just got used to the smell of garbage on the street.
The boy arrived one week later. I met him at La Guardia, and we spent the next couple of days with our arms wrapped around each other, getting over the shock of negotiating human sidewalk traffic, buildings that extended to the sky, and steel and concrete that stretched out for miles. He was from a small, Midwestern town and so every observance was punctuated with slight disbelief.
One night, after we’d experienced the joy of waiting for a table at a trendy SoHo restaurant, we stopped on the walked back to his East Village digs. I forget what introduced the topic, we sat down on the step. “I’m pretty sure,” he began, “I love you.”
. Earlier, he’d sung “You Are My Sunshine,” faltering slightly at You’ll never know dear/how much I love you, and while I didn’t say anything, I’d wondered what he felt when he sang those words. But it was there, sitting on the dusty doorstep of someone else’s home, that I’d felt that it was worth the time and expense to indulge the expense and the risk of following.
I landed a great temporary job that tided me over for the entire summer. We discovered a format for a project that got him rock star intern status at his i-bank. We learned to rollerblade in Battery Park. I discovered that my body simply didn’t like nonoxynol-9. We discovered tiramisu in Little Italy and a small, out-of-the-way seafood café a block up from my rented room. We talked while his tightey-whites polka-danced with my cheap polyester panties in the front-loading washing machine at the Laundromat one block north from my place. We danced at Nell’s. And in the midst of it all, we had a relationship. We had fights, got jealous. We dropped off dry-cleaning, and picked it up 24 hours later. And of all things, I’d experienced my first taste of real life. Not the idealized, out-of-focus life of college (where there was always another boy to like, a class to get an A in by doing an extra project, or friends that you could substitute in and out of your life), but the basic hum-drum and rhythm of everyday work and everyday love.
We ended up going our separate ways after the summer ended-he back to school (he was a junior), and me to move forward with the rest of my life. There were many things to come, including finding the one who would actually become my husband, finding that I had space in my heart for two loves, wending my way through five years of possibly the best career I could imagine for myself, and finally coming to a place in my life where I know where I am. But yes, I was “weak” at one point in my life, and I followed a boy. But that was when I started to know what “real” life was about.