There was one time when he and I took the car out of the city. We were going to visit friends at another college in the sticks, people we had recently met. It was an overnight drive, and he was going outrageously fast. The car was black, the night black, the trees dark. All I could hear was the sound of the tires against the road, and the engine.
“It’s strange to be out here in the country,” I ventured, in part to take my mind off the speedometer.
“Yeah,” he said. I think he understood what I was getting at. I was feeling philosophical.
“If we were to die here, it might be a long time before someone came by.”
“It could be hours,” he said. I was glad he was willing to indulge. And then he was quiet for a while. We listened to the soothing sounds of a good car at high speed.
“There is a certain thing I want from life,” he said at last. “You know that. It’s hard to put into words. It’s not…I don’t know…it’s like being able to live a full life. To enjoy all the things you want to enjoy and not having to compromise.” I knew what he meant. Or rather, I had my own sense of what he meant.
“What about you?” he then asked.
“The same things, I suppose.”
“Sometime,” he went on, “I worry that nothing will happen. Like, that I’ll go to school and then I’ll get a job and that’ll be it. And I’ll have a wife and kids, maybe, only I can’t think right now about them specifically, because I don’t know who they will be. And that’ll be it. It will just be…satisfactory. Nothing more.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said, trying to encourage him.
“I know,” he said, “but what if it is that way, Greens?”
“So what if it’s that way?”
“I don’t know. That might not be any good.”
“Are you happy or sad in that life?” I asked.
“I’m nothing,” he said. “I just am. It’s not enough.”
“What would be enough?”
He thought about this. It seemed as if we were traveling faster than was mechanically possible. Finally, he said, “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
We did not talk seriously for the rest of the night. We drove on, past fields dotted with giant bales of wheat, almost indistinguishable in the dark. Even as fast as we were going, it was comfortable in the car.
When I talk about “dating,” I have to clarify that I was going out with other girls recreationally, not for romance. Sue did not, as I had expected, drift away when I went off to college. In fact, our bond became stronger. She would come to visit me in the city, and those visits were frantic and passionate. She would stay in one of the dumpy rooms at the Hotel Paris on West End Avenue at 97th Street. The rooms were like prison cells, the beds like slabs of concrete. The neighboring guests often emitted violent noises. We made the best of it.
I would take Sue out with my college friends and introduce her around, although I always felt a nagging impulse to be alone with her. She and Arthur hit it off—he loved her because he loved me and knew she made me happy. It was the same with Jerry. We would go on double or triple dates, taking the girls out for drinks and dinner at the West End Grill, although Arthur and I could barely afford it. Sue would ask me about the girl Artie was with, what she was like, where she went to school. Often, I did not have the details; he dated, like the rest of us, but no one girl for long. Dating was not something that drove him. It did drive Jerry, however. Sue and I would marvel at the procession of women he was able to take out: beautiful women, pleasant and well educated.
When Sue was back home, my fevered thoughts and emotions would find expression in letters that ran something like this:
As I suspected, you did go out on a date with another guy. An engineering student at the U. of Buffalo. Your letter sounded like a goodbye letter, and it is only this that is sad for me. Not the idea of your going out with another man—though I can’t say that pleases me. Will you be thinking of me every moment when you’re with him? That is what you’re saying, but can it be true? Will there be a moment when you think of him—think him nice, think him handsome, think him decent—the formulary a woman uses to find herself a good man?”
How Sue bore up under the weight of such insecurity on my part is beyond me. Her letters, by contrast, buoyed me up in a way that nothing else could match. This one, by way of example, was written after she had visited me at Columbia:
My Dearest Sweetie:
Well honey, this is the end of a wonderful two weeks; perhaps the most wonderful I have ever spent. I want to thank you for making me so happy during this time and also, and maybe more important, for being you. Sandy, I think you know what I am going to say now and I will continue to say it until I die. Sandy, I love you. The reason I love you is because you’re you. Sandy, I want you to know that you are all I have ever wanted in anyone. When I think about spending the rest of my life with you,
