19 Love Songs

by David Levithan

  We were more naked than we’d ever been, and our nakedness had a consciousness it had never had before. We didn’t have sex or even come close to having sex, but what we did was still further than either of us had ever gone before. Further into who we were. Further into who we would be. When it was over, when we were lying next to each other, limbs overlapping, traffic sending its rhythm from floors below, I felt I was allowed to float above my own life, and what I found there was an astonishingly clear peace.

  Moshe was right there with me. Until he stood up. Until he put his underwear back on, sat down on the bed, and began to cry.

  I moved next to him. I put my arms around him, held him.

  “Are you happy or sad?” I asked, because I really couldn’t tell.

  “Both,” he said. “Both.”

  * * *

  —

  We got tickets to three more Sunday matinees. We told our parents we were having dinner after, which was why we got back so late.

  I took him to see Into the Woods, and he thanked me.

  He took me to see Cats, and I forgave him.

  We found out from talking that we’d both come to a certain awareness when we’d seen photos of Mark Spitz. But Moshe was careful to make the distinction: It wasn’t just because Spitz was sexy in a Speedo. It was his expression. He was a winner and he was embracing that. We wanted to live like that, so damn sure of ourselves.

  * * *

  —

  For our fourth date, I decided we had to see The Phantom of the Opera, since it had, in its own way, brought us together. I waited for him at a kosher deli, which was much better than the kosher pizza place. When he didn’t show, I assumed he was running late. I went to the theater, and as curtain time approached, I left his ticket for him at the box office.

  Through the first act, I was much more anxious about him than I was about the falling chandelier. At intermission, I found a pay phone and called his house. The angry way his father asked “Who is this?” tipped me off that something was going on. I hung up; it didn’t sound like he was there.

  I thought maybe he’d be waiting for me in front of the theater after the show was over. I thought maybe he’d meet me in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania. I sat there for two hours, Goodbye, Columbus in my lap, unable to read or do anything else besides wait.

  I took my scheduled train. When I got to the train station at home, both of my parents were waiting. As soon as they saw me, they said we needed to talk. I wondered if Moshe had called, had left a message. But it was actually his mother who’d called, asking if I knew where he was. She said he’d announced he was going to California. She didn’t believe him.

  “Do you believe him?” my father asked.

  I nodded. And then, to my profound horror, I began to cry.

  * * *

  —

  I told my parents everything. Well, not everything. Not the details. But I told them I’d been dating Moshe. I did not tell them I’d fallen in love, but I’m sure they could hear it in my voice.

  * * *

  —

  This is not the coming-out story I tell on first dates.

  * * *

  —

  There were a couple of phone calls after, from pay phones in California. He apologized for standing me up, and said the timing hadn’t been his choice. He told me we’d catch another matinee soon, whenever he returned to New York. The word love never came up, because it would only make things feel worse—at least for me. Had there been cell phones, texting, email, we probably would have kept in touch. But there weren’t, so we didn’t. Our time together became a good dream, possibly the best dream. I never forgot it, but I remembered it less and less, as other dreams joined in.

  I’ve written about him hundreds of times, and I haven’t written about him at all until now.

  5.

  I wish I’d had the experience, the wisdom then to tell him: To me, Jewish is knowing that you can’t be asked to have pride in one part of your identity and then be told to have shame about another part. Whoever asks you to do that is wrong. To be proud as a Jew is to be proud of everything you are. I wish I’d seen him crying and had known to say: To be loved by God is to be loved for who you are. To love God is to place no boundaries on who you love. I didn’t know this then. I do now. Whether or not I believe in the God of my ancestors, I see God in everyone.

  To me, Jewish is holding on to the people you love. To me, Jewish is dancing and kissing and loving no matter who’s watching and what they might say. To me, Jewish is helping the world. To me, Jewish is helping each other. To me, Jewish is me and Moshe in that hotel room. It is who we were. It is who we’ve become.

  TRACK SEVENTEEN

  How My Parents Met

  It is indisputable that this story would not exist without Nancy Rosenberg. Nancy met my mom, Beth, when they went on a teen tour together one summer in high school, two New Jersey girls on a cross-country bus trip.

  My dad, Allen, went to high school with Nancy in Englewood, New Jersey. They had most of their classes together. They were friends.

  Both of my parents thought Nancy had a fantastic sense of humor. Sarcastic.

  They also (lucky for me) trusted her judgment.

  “She kept saying she had this best-friend guy she wanted to introduce me to,” my mother would later tell me.

  One August night, less than a month before they were all leaving for college, my mother slept over at Nancy’s house (a fifty-five-minute drive away, depending on traffic) and agreed to a double date.

  My father also agreed to a double date.

  Beth, Allen, Nancy, and Nancy’s boyfriend, Jeff, went out to the movies. The theater they went to wasn’t the one the Englewood kids usually went to. It no longer exists. But the movie? The movie absolutely exists. Because for their first date, my parents went to see A Hard Day’s Night in its opening week. (Both of them were Beatles fans.)

  It went well.

  When I ask them later what their first impressions were, my father says, “I thought Mom was special.” And my mother says, “I really liked him. I thought he was cool. I was disappointed I hadn’t met him earlier in the summer.”

  My mother was headed to California, to UCLA.

  My father was headed to Pennsylvania, to Lafayette.

  Clock ticking, they went on as many dates as they could before the summer ended. They went into Greenwich Village to see music at the Village Gate. Mom drove back up to Englewood and met my grandparents and my uncles. (My Uncle Bobby, then thirteen, shyly watched from the stairs.)

  And my grandmother had baked.

  “I think Alice gave us cheesecake that day,” my mother says, “and that was the end.”

  (The cheesecake recipe is something now passed down from Levithan to Levithan. My mother would get it soon enough.)

  When the time came to separate, my parents signed the backs of their class photos for each other.

  My father’s reads, in part: May the future be as happy and fulfilling as our past. I know that I have already decided you’re the most lovely, beautiful, and nicest person I’ve ever met. I’m sorry that my temporary loss will be U.C.L.A.’s gain. May our love be as everlasting as your loveliness. Thanks for the happiest three weeks of my life.

  As my mother says, “We only knew each other three weeks, and we decided.”

  My father’s photo is signed: Love forever.

  They went off to college on separate coasts.

  “We wrote letters every day. Even him.”

  “Not every day.”

  “Almost every day. Especially in class.”

  “That’s true. Especially world history.”

  (Sometimes my mother would send greetings to Paul Levy, who was always seated next to my father.)

  Phone calls were saved for Su
ndays, when long distance was cheaper. They saw each other at Thanksgiving. They saw each other over Christmas break—but barely. My dad had to have an operation on a chronically dislocated shoulder, and then my mom had to go away with her family on vacation. The moment she got back, Dad and his best friend, Bobby Merker, picked her up at the airport.

  “Mom had the biggest suitcase in the world,” Dad remembers. “Bobby goes to pick it up and it doesn’t move an inch.”

  “It had no wheels,” Mom says, laughing.

  When summer finally returned, they were together all the time. Dad worked at my grandfather’s restaurant, and would choose the breakfast and lunch shifts so he could make that fifty-five-minute drive down to see Mom in Short Hills, staying with his Aunt Gladys if it got too late.

  Or my mom would stay over at Nancy’s, and visit Dad in Englewood. The scene at his house was welcoming, if a bit chaotic.

  “I think they were a little bit awkward with me because they were used to boys,” Mom says now. “Grandma Alice was marooned. These boys were not considerate or helpful. She couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

  My grandmother, who came from a house with three sisters, was happy to have another woman around.

  My mother’s parents were a little harder to win over, especially my grandfather. My father hadn’t made the best first impression.

  “I would wear cutoff jeans—”

  “Cutoff like cutoff—”

  “Frayed—”

  “Before it was in style.”

  My father drove a three-on-the-column convertible Ford Falcon with a transistor radio on the dashboard that was always threatening to slide out of the window on hard turns. He wore T-shirts and three-dollar sneakers he’d buy on sale at Alexander’s. The sneakers would always wear out in the little toes, so the holes in his shoes would be in conversation with the holes in his jeans.

  This was not what my grandfather had pictured for his oldest daughter.

  Still, they had each other and they had New York. They saw The Fantasticks off-Broadway and went to more concerts in the Village. Later they’d go see Broadway shows, knowing exactly which row was the start of the cheapest seats in each theater.

  It was rough to return to their separate colleges for sophomore year—and ultimately my mother decided it was too rough. She wanted to be back on the East Coast. So she applied to Penn and got in—but Penn wouldn’t give her credit for her UCLA courses. (“And UCLA is a good school!” my mom says now, still miffed.) So she transferred to Boston University, cutting down the distance to Lafayette from 2,700 miles to 270.

  They weren’t close, per se—but they were close enough.

  Over the next two years, Mom would visit Lafayette on “party weekends”—the weekends when the whole campus of the then-all-boys school would become party central. Often, she’d drive down with three girls from other Boston schools who had boyfriends at Lafayette.

  Or my dad would go up to Boston. To save money, he’d hitchhike from the Delaware River to Newark Airport. Then he’d take the hourly shuttle—$9.60 with his student discount.

  My mother’s parents were friendly to my dad, but still not crazy about what was happening.

  Mom says, “I think they didn’t like the fact that I was dating one person, getting serious with one person, so young. That was more their argument. Because they wouldn’t dare say anything else.”

  Junior year, when the fraternity pins came in, one of my father’s friends, the (to me) amazingly named Coates Bateman, said, “You might as well just hand it to Beth.” Then Coates took it from my father’s hands and handed it to Beth on his behalf. Being pinned meant you were “engaged to be engaged”—and neither of my parents hesitated to make that step.

  The weekend before Thanksgiving my parents’ senior year, my mom visited my dad for the Lafayette-Lehigh game. Dad had applied to law schools but hadn’t heard anything yet. The future was very much up in the air.

  Mom was sleeping in the fraternity house, taking a nap. Dad put the soundtrack to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on the record player, woke her up, and proposed. She said yes.

  Next, Dad borrowed a white shirt to ask my grandfather for his permission. He also said yes.

  Later that year, when my dad got into Harvard Law School, the first person he called was my mom. When my grandmother answered the phone, he blurted out the news—and she said, “You’re kidding!”

  This has become one of our favorite family stories.

  My parents met the August after high school and married the August after college. They stayed in Boston, where my mom taught kindergarten in South Boston and my dad went to law school. They lived at 15 Everett Street, with a folding bridge table as their dining room table and two cardboard Steuben Glass boxes as their night tables. They ate lots of hot dogs and Chunky soups, sometimes splurging at the Arby’s on the corner. They had an old refrigerator with a freezer that could fit only one meal at a time. When they moved in, my dad and his friend David had to carry their king-size bed up five flights of stairs.

  “It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” my mom says now.

  Love forever?

  Yes, in fact.

  I’m writing this on the day of my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.

  My parents’ story is the love song that has played underneath my entire life. It has been the best soundtrack my brother and I could have ever asked for.

  Nancy Rosenberg had no idea what she was doing, and she knew exactly what she was doing. My parents make wonderful music alone and they make wonderful music together.

  Sometimes, when you’re eighteen, you get it right.

  Love forever.

  TRACK EIGHTEEN

  We

  “I bet this would be a great place to pick up girls,” Courtney says to me, her eyes scanning the hundreds of pussy hats pouring by Coca-Cola World on the way to the march.

  “If you say so,” I tell her. The only girls I ever pick up are friends like Courtney, who can bring a lesbian reality check to my flightier gay-boy fancies.

  “I’ve already given my heart away, like, five times,” Courtney tells me. “They just haven’t noticed yet.”

  “They’re distracted by your sign.”

  “No doubt.”

  There’s pretty strong competition for best sign here. Since we’re in Georgia, there are a lot of creative suggestions for how to put the peach into impeach. (It helps that the president’s skin is the same color as a nectarine’s.) There’s an umbrella with an angry cat face on it that threatens This pussy grabs back. Another sign has Keith Haring figures spelling out MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN.

  Courtney went full Bechdel with her poster art, cartooning famous queer women in various protest poses. Gertrude and Alice hold hands and stand their ground. Frida wears a shirt that says I’m Kahling You Out. Sweet Ellen pumps a fist and calls out, “Nasty if I wanna be!” Audre grins and holds a sign that reads The Lorde is on our side, and that is all we need. Sappho gets a speech bubble and defiantly proclaims, “I will turn your lies into fragments!”

  The problem is, it’s starting to rain, and while other people laminated their signs or covered them with clear tape, Courtney’s is entirely unprotected.

  “Shit,” she says as a few drops start to make Susan Sontag’s hair streak.

  I fumble open my umbrella as the spatter turns into a torrent. It’s not big enough to cover us both. People duck into doorways for cover; we hug the Coca-Cola World entrance, but it only gives us a partial respite.

  People continue to hurry toward the plaza outside the Center for Civil and Human Rights, where the march is set to begin. I worry if we delay too long, we’ll end up missing the speeches, including John Lewis’s kickoff. He’s the person we all want to see.

  Courtney stares down at her poster. I know she spent a lot of time m
aking it.

  “I guess I’ll keep it under my coat for now,” she says. She’s wearing a pink jacket that will barely cover the poster board.

  “Don’t do that,” a girl next to us says. She looks like she could be Alice Walker’s teenage self, and she’s put down her own tape-covered sign, which reads We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves—Audre Lorde.

  “I like your quote,” Courtney says.

  “Thanks,” the girl responds as she rummages through her bag. “Ah, here.” She plucks out a translucent square. “Take this.”

  Emergency poncho, the label reads.

  “It’s see-through,” the girl explains. “So people can still see that kick-ass sign.”

  “Don’t you need it?” Courtney asks.

  The girl gestures to her own yellow raincoat. “I’m covered.”

  “But does this really count as an emergency?” I ask. “What if this poncho is meant to save a life?”

  Courtney, who I’ve known for years, shoots me the look she deploys when something that falls out of my mouth gets relegated to Attempted Quip status without crossing the Effective Quip threshold.

  The amusing part is that the girl I’ve only known for a minute or two shoots me the exact same look. Since both of them are shooting at me, they don’t even notice their identicalism.

  “Thank you,” Courtney says, breaking away from me to look back at the girl. “I’m Courtney. This is Otis.”

  “With an O,” I chime in. (It’s just something I do.)

  “I’m C.K.,” the girl offers.