I met Kimball during the go-go '80s, a time of gaudy ego and reckless consumption, of stockbroker as rock star; how common it was to see bands of those raucous, self-satisfied moneymen in their striped power ties pouring out of bars after yet another world-beating bell-ringer of a day downtown.
Occasionally, I got caught up in it — we all did — dancing with boys in suits at cavernous fantasia clubs, choking down flavored vodka. But at heart, none of that was really me. The daughter of self-deprecating lefties, I knew I was little more than a tourist of the decade.
Kimball, whom I'd repeatedly glimpsed on campus during graduate school and finally met years later at a book party, was much more my type. Apart from his good looks (lean, with coat-hanger shoulders, a fetchingly craggy face, eyebrows that looked like they'd been woven from horsehair), he had deep knowledge about esoteric things like bookbinding, marine fossils, and Beat poetry; for our first date, he took me to see the Gutenberg Bible at New York's Morgan Library. He wore cool thrift-store suit jackets over sweaters with zippers; down the road, he calligraphed me love notes on handmade paper. Unlike the overstuffed, red-faced financial dudes who wore their ambitions so garishly, Kimball had mystique.
What he didn't have, however, was bank. Armed with that license to print money, a master's degree in library science, he worked as a rare-book expert at one of the big auction houses. And I loved and admired him for the expertise, the connoisseurship it took to do that job. But, as the '80s became the '90s and the tech-stock boom threatened to turn everyone around us into millionaires, Kimball's boho worldview was, for me, losing some of its allure. In truth, I wanted to live like a grown-up someday, with chairs and couches I hadn't hauled in from the sidewalk; I hoped to graduate, eventually, from a futon to a bed. Working long hours as an assistant at a magazine, frequently eating popcorn for dinner, I indulged in the archaic, sexist fantasy of a guy swooping in one day and taking me away from all that.
Was Kimball the guy to do it? The son of a man who compulsively switched off lights around the house and ground out a living by repossessing the TVs, couches, and cars of folks who couldn't pay their bills, Kimball had no appetite for the aggressive pursuit of a buck. Instead, he rid himself of the dirty stuff the moment he got his hands on some, always picking up the bar tab when out with friends — never mind that the tab might constitute a fair chunk of his salary. Kimball was the sort of guy who'd sooner gouge out his own eyeballs with a fork than publicly split a check and figure out the tax. As for the unseemly settling up one is expected to do each month with utility and credit-card companies, Kimball found it to be such an unremitting buzzkill, he tended those relationships haphazardly.
Of course, I brought fiscal baggage of my own to the relationship, growing up modestly in small-town Connecticut. Although my father held a day job at a publishing company for many years, he was really a frustrated novelist, and the deferral of his literary dreams was a source of constant, low-grade stress in the family. Although I revered him totally and grew up valuing the unmercenary, cultured pursuit, I also feared it; I knew how that kind of rarefied idealism could betray you. So much hinges on one's ability to earn — especially if one is a man. I simply wasn't eager to take on the disappointments and failings of yet another purist.
Occasionally, I got caught up in it — we all did — dancing with boys in suits at cavernous fantasia clubs, choking down flavored vodka. But at heart, none of that was really me. The daughter of self-deprecating lefties, I knew I was little more than a tourist of the decade.
Kimball, whom I'd repeatedly glimpsed on campus during graduate school and finally met years later at a book party, was much more my type. Apart from his good looks (lean, with coat-hanger shoulders, a fetchingly craggy face, eyebrows that looked like they'd been woven from horsehair), he had deep knowledge about esoteric things like bookbinding, marine fossils, and Beat poetry; for our first date, he took me to see the Gutenberg Bible at New York's Morgan Library. He wore cool thrift-store suit jackets over sweaters with zippers; down the road, he calligraphed me love notes on handmade paper. Unlike the overstuffed, red-faced financial dudes who wore their ambitions so garishly, Kimball had mystique.
What he didn't have, however, was bank. Armed with that license to print money, a master's degree in library science, he worked as a rare-book expert at one of the big auction houses. And I loved and admired him for the expertise, the connoisseurship it took to do that job. But, as the '80s became the '90s and the tech-stock boom threatened to turn everyone around us into millionaires, Kimball's boho worldview was, for me, losing some of its allure. In truth, I wanted to live like a grown-up someday, with chairs and couches I hadn't hauled in from the sidewalk; I hoped to graduate, eventually, from a futon to a bed. Working long hours as an assistant at a magazine, frequently eating popcorn for dinner, I indulged in the archaic, sexist fantasy of a guy swooping in one day and taking me away from all that.
Was Kimball the guy to do it? The son of a man who compulsively switched off lights around the house and ground out a living by repossessing the TVs, couches, and cars of folks who couldn't pay their bills, Kimball had no appetite for the aggressive pursuit of a buck. Instead, he rid himself of the dirty stuff the moment he got his hands on some, always picking up the bar tab when out with friends — never mind that the tab might constitute a fair chunk of his salary. Kimball was the sort of guy who'd sooner gouge out his own eyeballs with a fork than publicly split a check and figure out the tax. As for the unseemly settling up one is expected to do each month with utility and credit-card companies, Kimball found it to be such an unremitting buzzkill, he tended those relationships haphazardly.
Of course, I brought fiscal baggage of my own to the relationship, growing up modestly in small-town Connecticut. Although my father held a day job at a publishing company for many years, he was really a frustrated novelist, and the deferral of his literary dreams was a source of constant, low-grade stress in the family. Although I revered him totally and grew up valuing the unmercenary, cultured pursuit, I also feared it; I knew how that kind of rarefied idealism could betray you. So much hinges on one's ability to earn — especially if one is a man. I simply wasn't eager to take on the disappointments and failings of yet another purist.
