First Love (original) (raw)

People started seeing us around campus together. “I’m warning you,” a friend told me. “He’s weird with girls. I’ve never known him to kiss anyone more than once.” I didn’t really care. Everything I said made him laugh. He took notes in a tiny brown notebook. I took note of every one of his wonderful inconsistencies.

Our campus held a drag ball every April. The event was notorious: Students cross-dressed. They fucked while cross-dressed. Guys from our small and stunted football team stumbled home at dawn in nothing but sports bras and Juicy sweatpants. I avoided the event—I’ve hated dressing like a boy ever since theatre camp—and Noah wasn’t interested, either. We stayed in my room and listened to Leonard Cohen, like real originals, and our hands crept toward one another at that glacial pace you see only in French films and twee music videos. Then we were kissing. It was raining outside, and on the way over he’d gotten his pants and long johns soaked. He took them off and hung them on my collapsible hamper to dry. So he was naked. But we only kissed. I told him I’d rather not have a sleepover. He put on his pants but left his long johns. After he went back to his dorm, I sat on the tiles in the public shower and tried to decide whether I loved him or hated him.

Overnight, his long johns dried into a crunchy, twisted shape, like that bog man they found in Ireland, all hard and brown, millennia after his death. I announced to my friends that he made too many appreciative kissing noises and had a cereal-box-shaped head, like James Van Der Beek from “Dawson’s Creek.” But the next day, when he walked into the computer lab, the feeling in my gut was just stupid happy.

I can draw a very clear diagram of the sixteen months that followed. At first, he liked me more than I liked him, but then, suddenly, I loved him. Which is a word he thought implied ownership and all kinds of hetero-normative things that smart people avoid, but it was what I felt. I would watch his strong back as he rose from bed to get a Mason jar of water and think, That’s mine. He graduated but stuck around our college town, though he swore it wasn’t because of me. I started wearing clogs and baking a lot of gluten-free foods for him—gluten made him feel slow and sad, he said—and stopped speaking to most of my friends. All my explanations for this behavior are purely conjecture at this point, because, four years later, it’s so hard for me to tap into the well of desperate emotion the relationship unleashed in me. I’d spent my entire life getting my kicks from various esoteric hobbies (fashion illustration! Shrinky Dinks!) and quality time with my nuclear family, but here he was. My only pleasure. I told him I hoped we would die at the same time in the mouth of a lion.

Relationships often change people, but this was a weird one, because I was the same before and after it, but very different during. Aside from the obvious clogs, which I now sported daily, I was wildly supportive of pursuits I would normally parody. For instance, he told me that he was applying to a graduate program in Internet studies; he was interested in hypertext and the psychology of linking. During the coldest months of winter, he spent most of his time updating a blog he kept set to private.

When I graduated, we’d been together for more than a year. I have a few photographs of me with my diploma and my father at graduation, but even more of Noah looking forlorn on the lawn as he waited for me to enter the adult world. He’d spent Christmas with my family, and Passover, too. We took mushrooms together twice and Ecstasy once. The first time we “shroomed,” we stayed in his room and I saw exactly what he’d look like as an old man.

After graduation, we took a two-week trip to Mexico. I made reservations at an eco-resort with no electricity or Internet access. He didn’t bring any books, because, he said, he wanted to meditate, but when we got there he was just bored. Also, I had no idea it was a nudist resort: suburban couples frolicking nude and then eating nachos—still nude. Noah wore a hat and a long-sleeved shirt with S.P.F. built into it. At night, I lay in bed full of fear that he might not be the man I’d marry, even though he’d already told me, in no uncertain terms, he didn’t plan on marrying me, at least not until he’d had “a long period of solitary seeking.”

We moved to Brooklyn to house-sit for my high-school voice teacher. The apartment was plastered with posters of all the great divas and was home to three cats. Noah was, of course, horribly allergic to cats. But he had never known that, because people who put butter in their eyes usually don’t let their kids have cats. I went to work as an intern for a socially conscious documentary filmmaker, and did a lousy job of sorting footage of a lesbian detective, while Noah sat at home updating his invisible blog. He mostly ate canned beans and basmati rice that he prepared in a rice cooker. We almost never had sex. He got into Internet college and decided not to go.

I took a trip with my parents, and he stayed behind with the cats he couldn’t touch. I read “Eat, Pray, Love,” and it seemed applicable somehow to my life. I called him all the time. I called him, crying, from a rocky beach in Greece and a balcony in Rome and an airport in Chicago. I spent about a thousand dollars calling him. When I got home, we went to see an Argentinian acrobatics show, and he told me that he was moving back to his parents’ house, in Arizona, on August 17th. Two years to the day before Nancy unfriended me.

Noah remained interested in hallucinogenic drugs. The night before he left New York, he went to an ayahuasca ceremony in Williamsburg, where he met more cultural anthropologists than I knew Brooklyn could hold. He phoned me at four in the morning. The ceremony was over, and I called a car service and picked him up. He said that the drugs hadn’t really worked. We lay in bed clutching each other, and the next morning he kissed me goodbye and wheeled his suitcase out into the hall. I ran to the elevator just as it was closing, and cried even more at the injustice of this. I called him, crying, every day for a month. Often, Nancy picked up. Noah said I needed to accept that the relationship was over. I moved in with my parents and developed a crush on a rude guy in a fedora at my menial job and rekindled my old friendships. I started to relax.

One morning in October, I awoke at eleven to see Noah standing above me. My parents, who are artists, were out of town, I was asleep in their bed, and my mom’s studio assistant had buzzed him inside. He was wearing a parka and carrying a bag of rice and beans and a bunch of daisies dyed purple, the kind you find in finer Korean delis. He had moved back to New York, he said. He missed me. I found everything about him revolting.

“Maybe it’s because you’re hurt,” my therapist said. “Sometimes hurt manifests itself as anger when you love someone a lot and try very hard and they don’t accept that love.” I refused this analysis. For months, he wrote me heartbroken e-mails. He was living five miles away, in Brooklyn, but I wouldn’t see him.

Later, I found out that he was involved with a man, and I threw up. He came to a screening of a movie I’d made, and he had an asymmetrical haircut and the kind of cool shoes I had given up to be with him.

In a strange twist of fate, I now live across the hall from the voice teacher. Every night I come home and open the door directly opposite the one we shared, and step into the apartment where I live happily alone. I don’t think about it very often, but occasionally there’s a smell—a whiff of cat, of stale air-conditioner, of a frozen gluten-free pizza warming—that is so purely ours that I could resume being a woman who cries dolefully every fifteen minutes at some perceived slight. One night recently, as I headed out to the corner store, my voice teacher popped his head out at me. “Oh, hey,” he said. “I have your boyfriend’s rice cooker.” ♦