My roommate was staying at her boyfriend’s and the quiet of the dorms on a Friday night felt stifling. I thought of Kevin. He was living off campus—maybe he was alone, too. He wouldn’t have given me his number if he didn’t want me to use it, I told myself.
I held my breath as the phone rang, half hoping he would be out or busy. He wasn’t.
“Hello?” he said, sounding, I couldn’t help but think, like he’d been expecting a call. Imagining Brian with that girl—someone so likable that I hated not being able to hate her—filled me with a fierce bravery. I would not sit sadly in front of my computer on AOL Instant Messenger. I would hang out with someone who, thanks to his long hair and unstylish dress and long absence from campus, was totally cool and mysterious.
“Hi.” I forced myself to smile into the receiver. “It’s Mandy?”
“Oh, hey,” he said, as if I called often.
Was he busy? I asked. Did he want to rent a movie or something? He did.
I drove to his apartment and we stopped by the video store and then Papa John’s Pizza before returning to my dorm room. Kevin wasn’t into small talk, which gave our acquaintance velocity from the moment he got into the car. I never felt relaxed in Kevin’s company those first few months, but I felt like he wanted to know me.
“So, why is someone like you free on a Friday night?” he asked. The question contained an assumption—an intuition—that I was a joiner. I was.
“Actually, I went to campus bingo,” I said, “but I just didn’t feel like sticking around.”
He nodded. “They ran out of those XXL T-shirts, huh?”
“No,” I said. “I’m pretty sure the college doubled their baggy-T-shirt budget while you were away. We can go back and win you one right now.”
He laughed.
“How about you? Why aren’t you out with those guys I always see you with on the quad?”
He said it had been hard to readjust after a year in Germany. He felt much closer to the friends he’d made there—now thousands of miles away—than the ones he’d made here.
He’d rather be alone than with people he wasn’t that into—and yet he wanted to spend time with me.
We’d rented a Jackson Pollock biography on VHS. And though I remember exactly nothing about the artist’s life, I can recall the exact tone and texture of Kevin’s hair as I held it between my fingers. “There’s a difference between a braid and a French braid,” I explained. “You’re getting French braids.” I could feel the flush on my neck as I ran a fingernail down his scalp, parting his hair.
“Do they teach you this at cheerleading camp?” he teased.
“No,” I said. “Everyone knows how to braid before they get to camp.”
There was a feeling of inevitability to the evening, as if our two lives had been slowly circling toward this late-night exchange of histories. I remember the thrill of realizing that no one knew where I was, or with whom.
After the movie ended, we lay down on my roommate’s bed, which had the best view of the TV, our heads close on her pillow. He unbuttoned his pants and threw an arm across my torso, as if these were natural things to do. He fell asleep quickly and I could feel his breath on my ear. I lay awake, noting the weight and warmth of his arm. It was a beginning, I thought. And I was sure that when I drove him home in the morning he would kiss me. But then, a few hours later, he closed the car door with only a smile.
• • •
Later that week, he called and invited me over. I paused. “I’m working on this English paper. And I’m already in my pajamas.”
“So?”
I hung up the phone and walked to my car.
“Do you like chocolate chip cookies?” he asked at the door.
“How is that a question? Who says no to cookies?”
He went into the kitchen and turned on the stove.
“When I was a kid, my mom and I always made them,” he said. I knew that his parents lived fairly close, but he’d said he didn’t visit them often, so it surprised me to hear the nostalgia in his voice, the affection. He cracked eggs into a bowl, mixing the dough with his hands. When he was done he held a sticky palm to my face. “Bite?”
I hesitated, then reached up to pull the dough from his fingertip and put it in my mouth.
This time we slept under the covers, his body pressed closer to mine. Still, he didn’t kiss me.
We kept this up for weeks. I’d bring my homework over while he made dinner—Indian food, which I’d never had before, or pasta. We’d watch an arty film and hold hands under the afghan. We’d listen to German trip-hop and he’d explain the music to me, layer by layer. I’d tell him about a short story I was writing or what I was reading in my Literature of the African Diaspora class, though once we started spending time together, I stopped finishing my reading. Two or three nights a week we climbed into his bed but we barely slept—there was too much to talk about.
• • •
Helen’s name came up some time in those first few weeks. He’d pinned snapshots from Germany above his bed—a record of the life he’d loved and left behind. He named the faces in each photo, friends from the US and Europe who’d also come to study abroad. They seemed like characters from a novel. “This is Helen,” he said. “She’s my best friend.” In the picture, taken somewhere at the Universität, their heads touched at the temples. They looked content together.
Kevin was sure that Virginia, his home by birth, was not his place in the world. It was late September, right after 9/11, and America seemed to be becoming both the best and worst of itself. “What I like about you,” he said once, “is that you never want to talk about it,” meaning the towers and the politics and the terror. Instead, we talked about other things, other places. He was studying Spanish and applying to the Peace Corps. He had a life of adventure already mapped out. I was moving to London in January, though I’d never lived anywhere other than the mountains of Virginia, never more than a short drive from my family.
Kevin dropped German words into our conversations and waited for me to intuit what they meant. He told me about late nights dancing to electronic music and riding trains and drinking dark, frothy beer, narrating a life that seemed so much more authentic than the one we were living, with its strip malls and SUVs.
Sometimes his contempt for life in America bugged me. I was in America. We’d found each other in the most mundane circumstances. But when we were together nothing was mundane: Everything felt meaningful.
We couldn’t see each other on Sunday nights because it was the night he talked to Helen on the phone. She lived in Minnesota, and I could only imagine that she understood something about his discontent that I could not. He was going to visit her for fall break. She would come to Virginia for Thanksgiving.
It took a while for me to understand that Helen was part of the story of my relationship with Kevin, weeks of staying up late with our bare legs intertwined but not quite crossing the fuzzy line of how much touching was too much touching; like ours, their relationship existed somewhere between friendship and romance, but she was the one he was kissing. I don’t think he ever told me this; it just occurred to me one day. And I was so embarrassed by my own obliviousness that I told no one.
When people—my parents, the other girls on my hall—referred to him as my boyfriend, I shrugged it off. “It’s not that serious,” I said. “Besides, I’m going to London in January and he’s joining the Peace Corps.”
But I liked being the presumed girlfriend of a soon-to-be volunteer. Agreeing to move to some undetermined spot in the developing world—and to live there, totally alone, for two full years—struck me as a particularly fearless thing to do. I was sure I would never be fearless like Kevin. But at twenty, I couldn’t yet imagine all the ways a person can be brave.
When I said I was going home for Thanksgiving, Kevin asked if I wanted to stay in town to meet Helen. “I think you’d like her,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve told her all about you.”
“All about me
?” I asked.
“Yeah, I mean, she knows we’re really close. And she knows that you stay over sometimes.” He didn’t look at me as he said this, but his tone was notably casual.
Okay, so she knew about me—but how did she feel about me? When she called while he was out with me, did she feel the way I did as he sat at my desk and wrote her an email—like a weak radio signal, crackling with static? I knew about her—that she dressed as a little girl for Halloween, and that she was addicted to fashion magazines, and that she thought it was environmentally irresponsible to drink cow’s milk. I knew that she was thin but still wanted to lose weight. I had assembled an image of her from fragments of conversation—but it was strange to consider that she might have done the same regarding me.
I reminded Kevin that the dorms were closed over Thanksgiving: “Where would I sleep if I stayed here—in the bed with you and Helen?” I laughed dryly. He didn’t answer.
That was as close as I came to complaining about our relationship.
• • •
There are lots of ways to read this story. Perhaps the easiest way is as a story about romantic deception and betrayal, with Kevin as perpetrator and either me or Helen—or both of us—as victim. But this isn’t quite right. After all, Helen and I knew about each other.
Like I said, the story of Kevin and me didn’t resemble any other story I knew. I was by then familiar with the story where the guy wants to come over after a party and then he ignores you when you see him on the quad Monday morning. And the one where your good friend wants to date you and he tells you how wonderful you are, but then he becomes kind of mean when you say you’d rather stay friends. There’s also the one about your roommate’s boyfriend’s roommate, whom you fool around with when you are both drunk at the same place and the same time. And the one about the guy you have an obvious crush on, who only calls when he wants advice about the girl he has an obvious crush on, advice you give generously in the hopes that he will one day see what a good and lovable person you are.
But I did not know the story about the guy who wants to sleep with you but not have sex, the tale of the guy who makes you cookies and gives you back rubs, offering elusive suggestions of romance but no confirmation. My desire to understand this story kept me coming back to Kevin.
• • •
In those months, I never considered asking Kevin for anything. I think I assumed that if I asked for the things I wanted—a kiss, some clarity, an honest conversation—I would push him away. Or maybe I just didn’t want an honest conversation if it meant hearing him say he loved Helen and not me. There’s no way to know how he would’ve responded to any direct interrogation, but I spent years believing that we eventually ended up together precisely because I demanded so little at the start.
At twenty, telling someone what I wanted—not what I was supposed to want, but what I really, genuinely wanted—was the most terrifying thing I could imagine.
And what I wanted then was for Kevin to acknowledge that whatever was happening between us was at least a little bit like love. Kissing seemed like the most expeditious way to do this, but it became clear that kissing was off the table. So I fixated on the other romantic conventions he offered: the secrets he shared, the meals he cooked, a particular gaze that demanded acknowledgment, the way he held my hand when we watched a movie together.
When I went out with my friends, I danced with other guys, I kissed them in dark corners. I didn’t tell Kevin about these things because he didn’t ask. These relationships, however brief, made me feel powerful and independent. On those nights, there was no sense in worrying about what Kevin did or did not offer me. I created my own secrets. I found other mouths to kiss.
If I imagined a future, it was for Kevin and Helen. They would go live in some remote corner of the developing world with two cats and a dog, while I went to graduate school and found the man I was really meant to be with. Kevin was my distraction—from Brian, and my mundane life, and the surreal aftermath of 9/11—and I was his. Our friendship was totally unforeseen and, sure, it was confusing at times, but it was too powerful to be ignored, too profound to dismiss. This is how I narrated it in my head.
Because I had no firsthand experience, my understanding of love came from The Real World and Seventeen magazine, Sunday school and Friends. I assumed that no one ever said what they really wanted in love, or what they really meant. I thought love was supposed to be confusing and complicated—at least while you were young. “Love is merely a madness,” said Romeo. Britney Spears and Beyoncé and Van Morrison and Aerosmith and Patsy Cline and even Frank Sinatra all had songs about crazy love. The more anxiety I felt about my relationship with Kevin, the surer I became that what I felt was, in fact, real love.
(This particular miscalculation would haunt me for years. Much later, I often took our frequent arguments as an indicator of love. At least we aren’t indifferent to each other, I would tell myself, as if drama and indifference were the only two options.)
What Kevin offered—his attention and his confidence—was more than anyone else had. I loved that he knew what it was like to feel out of place in the only home you’ve ever known. I loved that he never teased me about my snoring, never even mentioned it. And that he found me interesting and found my writing interesting and thought writing was a worthwhile pursuit. I loved his body against mine in the dark. Kevin had a deep appreciation for the aesthetic of any experience—the ratio of brown to white sugar in a chocolate chip cookie, the layers of music in a techno song. He wanted his experience of the world to be beautiful, and this, above all, made sense to me.
If he wanted a relationship that blurred the boundary between friendship and romance, why couldn’t I go along with it? It wasn’t like I was looking for someone to spend my life with. We could make our weird intimacy anything we wanted it to be.
If I had known my relationship with Kevin wasn’t some brief fling, that it was in fact the start of a relationship that would last another decade, I might’ve handled it all differently. I would’ve been more assertive. Or set a higher bar for open communication. At least, I like to think I would have.
I felt uncomfortable about wanting so much from someone who, as far as I could tell, owed me very little. I’d asked for nothing and he’d promised nothing.
• • •
As part of their investigation into artificial intelligence, Roger Schank and Robert Abelson try to understand how we create and store knowledge. In an essay called “Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story,” they propose a theory of scripts, which they define as “a set of expectations about what will happen next in a well-understood situation.”1 When you enter a restaurant, for example, a server will perform his script and you perform the customer script. And both of you know how to act and what to say and do without having to think very much about it. These scripts vary a little—the Burger King script is different from the French Laundry script—but most of us can more or less figure out our role after a few times. (I am thinking, for example, of the first time I realized that when I ordered a bottle of wine, I was expected to taste and approve it before the glass was poured; this was not a script I’d seen my parents use at O’Charley’s.) As long as we know which script we are a part of, we can make sense of others’ comments and actions.
One of the things that made Kevin so attractive was his refusal to follow certain scripts. I’d never met anyone who felt so little obligation to perform the role of student or friend or son or American. He was aware of what people wanted him to say or do, but he never did anything unless he wanted to. This was immediately apparent in the way he dressed—he once bought and wore a little girl’s T-shirt (red, with glittery flowers) from the Salvation Army—but also in everything he did not do. He didn’t drive to campus or eat meat or attend the vigil after the planes struck the towers. He didn’t do assignments he found pointless, or listen to pop music, or get drunk at parties.
I was drawn to this—to the possibility of just not giving a shit about m
eeting people’s expectations. But I was no good at it. I was the daughter of a football coach turned high school principal. I was good at taking directions, and I’d constructed much of my identity around pleasing authority figures.
Of course, love has its own scripts, and I’d already started thinking about all the ways these scripts can limit us. We have rigid ideas about when to call, what to say, how much interest to show. And scripts can be deceptive, too: They make it possible to offer the performance of love without much substance behind it. This was obvious to me at twenty—and it was clear that following the scripts hadn’t gotten me any closer to love—so I liked the idea of being free from them.
The problem with going off script is that you can get a bit lost. It can become uncomfortable, because you don’t really know how to be, what to say, or what to expect. I liked thinking of myself as someone who could live unburdened by the conventions of romantic love. I did not need Kevin to buy me flowers or take me out to dinner and a movie. But the longer we went without talking about the nature of our relationship, the more I wanted to understand exactly what it was. I was so worried about seeming conventional, about wanting something as ordinary as a boyfriend, that I accepted Kevin’s offer of boyfriend-approximation without protest, when what I really wanted was something so cliché I couldn’t even admit it to myself: I wanted to be chosen, to be special. And Kevin probably did think I was special—that seems obvious, in retrospect—but without a script, or the willingness to ask, I just couldn’t tell.
• • •
Kevin did not owe me a kiss or a declaration of love, but he did kiss me eventually. He did tell me he loved me. It happened late one night over Christmas break, just before I left for London. At the time, I thought it was a romantic send-off, though now I see that, by then, the stakes were lower. We were moving to separate continents—he could tell me he loved me without feeling any obligation to act on it.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 8
