Chapter 2
Growing up, I never had flying dreams or dreams of being onstage. I wanted to ride horses on an empty coast. I wanted to be Sappho, or invisible, or the circus queen who ran off with the daring young man on the flying trapeze.
I loved art, ballet, horses, and dogs. I had skinned knees and braces on my teeth, but there were writers like Chekhov and Shaw on a shelf in the room where I had to take naps. I never slept but sat on the windowsill reading. My heroes were Mowgli and Scarlett O’Hara. Later, there were poets—Virgil, Tennyson, Edna St. Vincent Millay. I loved to dance but didn’t care for dancing school. By the time I was twelve, I was taller than most of the boys. Clumsy and dull, they could never keep rhythm, too fast on the waltz, too slow on the foxtrot. I kept my back straight, eyes over their heads, keeping time with the circling walls. And as those rooms spun, I dreamed of France. I wanted to grow up to write stories in a garret apartment in Paris; I wanted to smoke rolled cigarettes, date artists and aristocrats, drink grasshoppers, and dance in clubs on the West Bank until midnight.
I wanted to walk home alone by the Seine and be no one.
That was the future I’d marked off for myself. I could see it, almost breathe it. That was the edge of life I was standing on when I was twenty-one, the night I met you at the Bartletts’.
You were not part of that future. But that night there was something in you that I recognized—something hurtling, disparate—the ranging curiosity, incisive intellect. You were good-looking, of course. Your golden swagger could bend a room. I eschewed that. It smacked of arrogance. That night, though, there was something else in you I saw: something deeper, more fugitive and fragile, a kind of curious hunger to break on the world like a star.
You were not my kind of adventure. Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy. Too much about politics and new money.
Your life, I told myself, was not the life I was looking for.