Turn Around Bright Eyes (19 page)

We headed back to the hotel to meet her friend Marisa. They were having a girls’ weekend in New York, which I was now shamelessly crashing. We went out bar-hopping on the Lower East Side, as I listened to them tell stories about the Catholic high school they had gone to back in Rhode Island. They discussed the locker they shared at St. Mary Academy–Bay View, the Sisters of Mercy who taught them there, and how the nuns influenced their fondness for the band Sisters of Mercy. They discussed the current whereabouts of their Catholic school uniforms. (I somehow waited over an hour to ask, which I was proud of.) They recalled their high school band Mary Tard Lincoln, which specialized in obscene parodies inspired by U2, like “Where the Sheets Have No Stain,” “Straddle and Come,” and “I Will Swallow.”

I met up with them again the next night and whisked them off to Brooklyn for a late-night electroclash after-party. (Give me a break—it was 2003.) We went to the “Berliniamsburg” party at Club Luxx on Grand Street, with a live performance by the synth-chick sex-robot trio W.I.T. I got to dance with Ally for the first time, to New Order’s “Blue Monday.” Since she’d been so bemused by how much I loved the Pet Shop Boys, I gave her a mix CD of their finest songs, with a hidden Erasure track at the end, “Oh L’Amour.” Back in Charlottesville, she made me a mix CD of her favorite Depeche Mode deep cuts. She put “Dreaming of Me” on that mix, because she knew it was my favorite song of theirs. But she also had a hidden track at the end, the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

She came back to town a couple of weeks later for a job interview at NASA, and this time it was just the two of us. We went to a Ladytron DJ gig in the basement of the Tribeca Grand hotel. We leaned against the wall and our heads were close and it was time for our first kiss except I suddenly had a sense that for our first kiss, we should be all alone. So I took her hand and we raced upstairs, into a cab, where we somehow managed not to kiss, either, until we were safely back in my apartment. I was nervous, so I put on side one of
More of the Monkees
. Davy Jones started singing “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow).”

“I really want to kiss you, Ally,” I said.

She nodded. “I think you’d better, then.”

Waiting for that moment had been a good idea. Everything about this night had been a good idea. The next few days were overflowing with good ideas, and they just got better. Things were looking up for me. It was obvious.

1:12 a.m.:

“So am I overdoing?” I asked my friend Melissa, as we walked down Mercer Street after dinner. We were on our way to the after-hours basement karaoke place in Little Italy, a walk we’d done many nights before. We knew that when we got there, we would sing “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” Melissa loves to sing the Stevie Nicks songs, and this one is a duet, so I already knew I was getting drafted into Tom Petty duty. But there were a few other things I needed to know first.

“Why are you giving her shoes?”

“It’s her birthday next week.”

“You’ve kissed her, but you haven’t slept together?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Oh, man. That’s the
best
phase. All that anticipation.”

“No, it’s
not
the best phase. If it were that phase.”

“But it is, right?”

“I am not presently disposed to discuss such a situation, if it did exist. Besides, you know I would still buy shoes for her in other phases.”

“I know you would. I know you will.”

Melissa knew a lot about shoes. She worked at the John Fluevog store on Mulberry Street. I had met her years and years earlier, when she was working at the Fluevog store in Boston, on Newbury Street. She was married to the drummer she was dating back then. She knows a lot about everything.

“We were walking around window-shopping and we went to Kate Spade. I saw her pick up these patent leather Mary Janes. She kind of sighed. It was hot.”

“She likes those shoes.”

“So am I overdoing?”

“It’s not the shoes. It’s you noticing. She wants to know if you know how to notice a girl looking at something.”

“I know her shoe size, too. It’s seven and a half.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked in her shoes while she was in the shower.”

“Don’t tell her that, okay?
That’s
kind of overdoing.”

“But the patent leather Mary Janes are okay?”

“You should pair them up with some fishnets. That would be hot. But save the receipt, all right?”

“Thanks.”

“And don’t say how you got her shoe size. She’ll like it if you ask her for that direct.”

“Thanks.”

“You up for some ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around?’”

Like I said, Melissa knows about everything.

ALLY WAS ONE COOL CUCUMBER.
She was not given to dramatics. Things had been going really well for a few months. She had taken the job at NASA, so she was moving to New York at the end of the summer. We were going to be living in the same city. I thought this probably meant I was her boyfriend. But I was trying to take it slow and play everything as cool as Ally was playing it.

That was a challenge for me. I had no experience taking things slow. Like I said, I had never acquired any boyfriend game, so I had everything to learn. I was new at this, but I knew I wasn’t going to blow it. I was not letting this woman drift away. I would master this whole dating operation. Wait—were we “dating” or “going out”? Did people even say “going out” anymore? I had no idea what the kids were into these days.

I called in all my female confidantes for emergency coaching sessions. I had put in so many late-night hours of listening to them complain about the guys they were seeing, giving them my perspective on things, following along with their DTR (Define That Relationship) discussions. Now I was asking them to return the favor. I needed a crash course in the basics. Like, the really
basic
basics.

My friend Niki spent an entire dinner patiently explaining the difference between “dating,” “seeing,” and “going out.” It turns out I had it all backwards—“dating” was actually a commitment level way beyond “going out.” Going out meant everything was so casual it was practically “seeing.” Trying to learn the lingo was like trying to figure out the four bases.

“You aren’t ‘going out’ anymore,” Niki told me. “She is moving to New York, so then you can be a couple. You’re lucky you met her before she got here.”

“I know.”

“Really lucky. She would have dates by the time she got through baggage claim.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“Don’t be nervous. Is she your Friendster yet?”

Ally had indeed accepted my invitation to start a Friendster profile, but like everyone else in the summer of 2003, she had set her relationship status to “Open Marriage.” There was no resisting the comedy value of the “Open Marriage” setting.

“Relax,” Niki told me. “She just needs a little time to play it cool while she figures out if you’re for real or not. You’re not like other guys. So she needs time to make sure it’s not an act. She’s a smart girl. She will figure it out.”

“Thanks. She
is
a smart girl. Have I mentioned what she told me about the earth crashing into the sun in a few billion years?”

“Why, yes. You have.”

I knew how much I had to learn. Meeting Ally made me want to learn. She made my head buzz with curiosity and a little courage to go with it. She filled my brain with things I had to know. How to make her smile, what numbers to dial—burning questions like that. I was not going to scare her away with overdoing or bore her with underdoing. I was going to get some love technique.

We had known each other just a few months, but she was a new experience for me. She did not want to have DTR conversations. She never asked loaded questions like “What are you thinking?” or “Where is this going?” She did not seem to have any “We need to talk” crises. She never wanted to spend our time together analyzing the relationship or questioning the relationship. In fact, she didn’t talk about the relationship at all. This made me wonder whether we were even having a relationship.

She had her own scientific method of dealing with emotional glitches. When she wanted something she wasn’t getting, she approached it rationally. One night, when we were sitting around reading, she told me, “I would actually like to have a little more of your attention right now, if you have any more attention to give. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the level of attention you
are
paying me tonight. If you want to continue at that level of attention, that’s fine. But if you do have some more, I would love to receive that.”

Believe me, after that she had my
full
attention. I had never heard anyone express their emotional needs so efficiently before. I mean, I was definitely used to various people in my life expressing that same desire for attention. But I was used to people (including me) expressing it in the traditional, old-fashioned ways, like crying in the bathroom or smashing a bottle or pretending to be mad about something that happened six months ago. Ally’s way seemed dangerously attractive. So this was how adults did it? Exotic!

While I was waiting for her to move to New York, I came down with a case of mono. That meant that instead of hanging out in sleazy punk rock bars till 4 a.m., watching my friends defy the brand-new smoking ban, I was spending my nights comatose on the couch, sending her a lot of incoherent fever-headed emails. I listened to WTJU online every Friday afternoon as DJ Astrogrrl did her weekly radio show, and she dedicated get-well songs to me like Depeche Mode’s “Shake the Disease” and X-Ray Spex’s “Germfree Adolescents.” In my state of delirium, I mused about this girl and wondered how she could possibly be as cool as she seemed.

Every time she visited, she noticed all kinds of things about my life I’d missed. I must have walked down my sidewalk hundreds of times before Ally pointed out the graffiti somebody had written in the cement—the logo for the band Twisted Sister. This graffiti had to date back to the late summer or early fall of 1984; there was a very narrow window of time when Twisted Sister could have inspired that level of devotion. All these years, this message of love had been there on Eckford Street, beneath everyone’s feet, all our shoes scuffling over it without noticing. When Ally pointed it out to me, I felt like Twisted Sister themselves had blessed our bond.

That summer, right before she made the big move to the city, I realized we were a bona fide couple. It was the first time the cops showed up for us. I guess there’s always something romantic about that, right? The first time the cops bust you for making out, you’re officially a couple.

It wasn’t much of a bust, to tell the truth, but it was enough. I was visiting her down in Charlottesville. She invited me to see the telescope where she worked, in the woods of Observatory Hill. I was tingling with excitement just being in the laboratory, as she slowly opened the dome. It was just like
Young Frankenstein
. She sat at the telescope, adjusting the lens, so she could show me the sky, the way she saw it. She would find a star or a constellation, focus the lens on it, and let me take the seat. All of this was new to me. I was used to looking up at the sky, but not with the sense that I knew what I was looking for. She was showing me patterns that I had walked underneath for years; finding me new points to focus on, new ways to see the entire universe.

After a couple of hours at the telescope, we had the urge to step out into the night air and look up at the stars. We stretched out in the tall grass on the side of the hill, as she pointed out the same galactic patterns she had shown me with the telescope. We took a fresh look at them with the naked eye. Fortunately, that’s all that was naked when the cops came. Not real cops, just university police, but they still seemed disappointed we weren’t nude tripping teen runaways. We couldn’t stop giggling as they gave us the flashlight. We were so happy to be together tonight, it seemed comically strange to remember that other people even existed.

The idea of going to jail together seemed romantic, but since this was university property, all they really wanted was to see some university ID. I thought it would be funny to pull out my old grad school card, which I still had in my wallet. Ally grabbed the card from my hand as the cops drove off—she’d never seen a photo of me at such a tender age. We studied it together. Damn, I was young in this picture. I was twenty-three. My first day of grad school. A mere boy, with my whole life ahead of me. And here I was now, a full-grown man, in love with this full-grown woman. We were a couple. Anyone could see that. But there was nobody else watching on Observatory Hill now, nobody but us. So we ran inside and sat back down at the telescope. We had the rest of our night wide open, with an entire sky to explore.

SHE LOVED THE KATE SPADE
patent leather Mary Janes. I wasn’t overdoing, after all. Once I gave them to her for her birthday, she wore them the rest of the summer. She was wearing them the night of the aforementioned Lower East Side karaoke loft party, the one where somebody allegedly brought the vial of liquid mescaline. The room was full of aspiring musicians, aspiring actors, aspiring designers, aspiring models aspiring to bang the aspiring rock stars, and so on. I assumed I was especially fascinating at this party, since everybody I chatted with stared intensely into my pupils and nodded. One of the aspiring actresses kept gushing, “You are
fancy
!”