I've never placed, nor answered, a personal ad. Never dated my boss. Never gotten drunk at the office Christmas party and snogged a coworker. Never had my heart broken by a boy who was shaving regularly. I've had plenty of other soul-testing, humiliating, heartrending experiences, but falling in love and marrying young saved me from — or, one could argue, deprived me of — these.
It was November 1986. I was fighting my way down the congested stairway at Track 10 in New York's Penn Station, heading for a southbound Amtrak train, when the hand of fate flung my future husband and me together.
He said, "This is hell, isn't it?"
I said, "Yes, it is."
In that way the die was cast.
I'd spotted him earlier in the station. I'd quickly ascertained — given his disheveled hair (the cut undeniably a home job executed under the influence), his attire (black pants, turtleneck sweater, ripped coat, high tops with safety-orange socks), and his demeanor (coolly reading a bio of Cocteau while drinking coffee) — that he was not my type.
Which isn't to say I wasn't interested in him. His type — tufted, intellectually superior hipster — was on the list. See, in the way that birders keep a life list of the species they've spotted or long to spot, I had a list, of sorts, of people I wanted to have sex with: the bearded, migratory Peace Corps worker; the native-to-NYC nice Jewish boy; the flashy European artiste; and, if the situation were right, a ruby-throated girl.
On board the train, Rob grabbed the seat across the aisle from me (cheeky of him) and began telling me how he'd dropped out of grad school in Arizona and flown to New York with nothing but the coat on his back and 50 bucks in his pocket, about how he was working in an art-postcard factory and living on Staten Island with three actors, each paying $90 a month in rent. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do — maybe start a magazine. He did know he needed to be with people who, as he said, quoting Kerouac, "burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles." A fabulous Roman candle I was not. Selling earrings at Tiffany's, eating candy bars for breakfast — let's face it, I was a cherry bomb.
He told me he was on his way to Baltimore for a two-day party. I told him I was on my way to DC to visit a friend from college. I left out the bit about the trip being fueled in part by the expectation of bedding an old boyfriend, who was confirmed to be STD-free.
Somewhere around the two-hour mark of our journey, he passed me a postcard. It was Robert Doisneau's photograph of a French couple kissing on a bridge, and I blushed. Minutes later the train broke down, and I was struck by a thought so disturbing I shuddered in horror: I am either going to marry this guy, or I'm going to kill him so no one else can have him.
It wasn't the discovery of my inner murderess that made my blood run cold. It was the idea that I wanted this man — not for the challenge or the novelty or the kicks. I wanted him to be mine. Forever. And I wasn't ready for that sort of love. It was too soon!
