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  If I was offering Isaac an opportunity to formally reveal his gayness, he declined it. He laughed and said, “I bet Noah himself agrees with you.”

  * * *

  —

  As the weeks passed, Rae became increasingly concerned that Noah was hooking up with a girl in his class whose name I secretly loved: Clementine Meriwether. In mid-October, Rae decided to pay Noah a visit, which would entail taking the hour-and-a-half bus ride from Hanover to Manchester, then borrowing her mother’s car to make the forty-minute drive to Exeter. She invited both Isaac and me to go with her and stay at her mother’s house for the weekend; Isaac said he couldn’t, but I accepted.

  The night before we left, Rae had cramps and asked if I’d pick up dinner for her. As I was leaving the dining hall, carrying a tray with two plates of steaming lasagna and two goblets of vanilla pudding, I pushed open the door to the outside with my back and when I turned around, I was face-to-face with Rae’s freshman roommate, Sally Alexander. Sally, who was accompanied by another girl, glanced at the tray and said, in a voice that was more friendly than snotty, though the sentiment seemed snotty, “You’re hungry!”

  “It’s not just for me,” I said. “It’s for Rae, too.”

  Sally’s eyes narrowed. “Are you friends with her?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and though I felt a swelling of pride, it was short-lived.

  “You don’t find her annoying?” Sally said.

  Taken aback, I simply said, “No.”

  Sally shrugged. “She’s so self-centered, but I think it’s because she’s an only child.”

  * * *

  —

  Rae’s mother’s boyfriend picked us up at the bus station in Manchester, after Rae had placed three calls to her mother on a pay phone, and he was fifty minutes late and seemed irritated by our arrival. At her mother’s house, which was one story, very small, and brown shingled, he let us off without coming in, then drove on to the office building where he apparently worked nights on the janitorial staff. Rae’s mother was a private-duty nurse and wasn’t yet finished with her shift. When she did come home, a little after six, wearing pale pink scrubs, she hugged Rae, then hugged me, too, and said how beautiful my eyes were (I’m brown-eyed, and this was a compliment I had never received). She added that she could tell I was an old soul, then asked where I was from and how I liked Dartmouth. She had a thick New Hampshire accent, and both she and the house smelled like cigarette smoke, though the house was generally clean and tidy. We were in Rae’s mother’s presence for no more than ten minutes before Rae asked her for the car keys.

  With an expression of good-natured disappointment, Rae’s mother said, “She can’t stay away from that boy, can she?” She made me miss my own parents, and it occurred to me to stay there while Rae went to see Noah. I was hungry, and I envisioned eating, say, chicken pot pie with Rae’s mother, then perhaps watching Family Matters or Unsolved Mysteries together before going to bed at ten P.M. But this would be a redux of GFU night, which had set me back God only knew how many months. Thus, reluctantly, I joined Rae in her mother’s Honda Civic.

  The car was a standard, and I could feel how my earlier self would have been impressed by Rae’s casual ability to drive it, seeing her possession of a skill I lacked as in keeping with her general aura of coolness. But there was more and more evidence—starting with the discovery that she was dating someone younger, then reinforced by Sally’s comments outside the dining hall—that I’d invented my original idea of Rae, that really, the only person who perceived Rae as cool at all was me. And she hadn’t pretended; I had misconstrued. I also, of course, hadn’t understood until seeing her mother’s house that Rae didn’t come from a rich family. Her boarding school degree and her New Englandishly hippie clothes had confused me, because I was easily confused. I realized that, presumably, by Rae’s standards if not by my own, I came from a rich family; after all, I had taken out no college loans and was receiving no financial assistance. The decor of my parents’ house in Des Moines wasn’t that different from the decor of Rae’s mother’s house—wall-to-wall carpet, faded sofas and chairs, shiny walnut tables—but my parents’ house was much bigger.

  Rae slipped a cassette into the dashboard tape deck before backing out of the driveway, and the Indigo Girls’ song “Joking” erupted into the car; when it ended, she said, “Can you rewind it?” At her request, I did this so many times as we drove east on 101 that I soon knew precisely how long to hold down the button in order to get back to the song’s start. “Joking” was on an album I’d heard in Rae’s room, and though I wasn’t certain what made this song a personal anthem for her—it started with intense guitar strumming—I understood the impulse behind it, the craving.

  We’d been driving for twenty minutes when Rae slapped her right hand against the steering wheel and said, “Fuck!”

  I glanced across the front seat.

  “I forgot the pot,” Rae said. “And Noah reminded me, like, three times.”

  I did not feel optimistic about Rae’s reunion with Noah, or about my own ability to comfort her if the reunion was unsuccessful. “Do you want to turn back?”

  She thought for a few seconds, then said, “There’s not time. He has choir practice at eight.”

  Hot, pot-smoking Noah Bishop was in the choir?

  I had been intrigued by the prospect of visiting an elite boarding school, but I couldn’t see much as we arrived under darkness at what seemed to be the back side of a vast concrete gym. A boy in a down vest, a plaid flannel shirt, khaki pants, and sneakers was standing with his back to the gym, under a light, and Rae unrolled her window and wolf-whistled at him.

  “Do you have it?” he asked.

  “Fuck you,” she said out the window. “That’s not how you greet me.”

  She parked in an otherwise empty lot, and we both climbed from the car. Gratifyingly, Noah Bishop was even handsomer than he looked in photographs. She approached him, placed both hands on his shoulders, and kissed him on the mouth. When she pulled away, she said, “That’s how you greet me.”

  He gestured toward me. “Who’s that?”

  “My friend Dana,” Rae said.

  Noah nodded once and said, “Yo, my friend Dana.”

  I knew that when Noah ejaculated, he made a whimpering noise, like a baby; that when Rae gave him hand jobs, he liked her to use Jergens lotion; that the first woman he’d ever masturbated to had been Kelly LeBrock, after he saw the movie Weird Science; and that his father had been investigated by the SEC and found innocent of wrongdoing, though Noah himself suspected that his father was guilty. I also knew that sometimes Rae knelt on the floor of her Dartmouth dorm room, clasped her hands together, and, addressing the phone on her desk, said, “Call me, Noah. Just please fucking call me right now.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Did you get the key?” Rae asked Noah, and he said, “Yeah. Did you get the weed?”

  “There were complications,” she said.

  I cleared my throat. “Is town that way? Maybe I’ll go eat dinner. I should be back by, what, eight, Rae? Or eight-fifteen?”

  “Sure,” she said, and I could tell she was barely paying attention.

  * * *

  —

  Even though I made a couple of wrong turns, I reached the town of Exeter within fifteen minutes and kept walking until I found a place where I could buy a meatball sub and a Diet Coke. A handful of kids who looked like students came in, and I reminded myself that the unease I felt about eating alone at Dartmouth was irrelevant here. When I finished, I walked along Water Street, not entirely sure what to do. I had no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremony.

  The stores, most of which were closed, were brick, with awnings or quaint wood
en signs outside. I entered a pharmacy. When I found myself in the “family planning” aisle, I decided, just as an experiment, to buy a pack of condoms. Would I plausibly seem to the cashier like a person who was having sex? The wide array—lubricated and ribbed and ultra-thin—bewildered me, so I went with what was cheapest. I also picked up a bag of Twizzlers and some lip balm, for camouflage. My heart was beating quickly as I waited to pay, but when it was my turn, the cashier seemed as uninterested in me as Noah had. By then, it was almost eight, so I walked back to the gym swinging the plastic bag with my purchases in it.

  At first, I thought my timing was perfect, because as I approached the gym, Rae was pulling the Honda out of its parking space. Then I realized she was pulling out alarmingly quickly; her tires squealed in a way I had rarely heard in real life. When the front of the car was pointed toward the road, she revved the gas and almost ran me over as she sped past. “Rae!” I yelled. “Rae!”

  But the car didn’t stop, and its taillights had soon disappeared.

  “I guess you’re screwed,” someone said, and I turned and saw that Noah stood about twenty feet away, smirking.

  I walked toward him. “Where’s she going?”

  He shrugged.

  “Is she coming back?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Did she say she was going to find me?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Did you guys have a fight?” This was a nosier question than I’d have asked under normal circumstances, especially of a good-looking guy, but he was still in high school. Plus, Rae was or had been his girlfriend, and she wasn’t prettier than I was. And then I understood, with a weird revelatory kind of internal kick, what had drawn me to Rae in the post office. Since arriving at Dartmouth, I’d felt my own lack of prettiness as a humming, low-level failure. I wasn’t singularly unattractive, my existence wasn’t a crime. But I also wasn’t, in an environment of youth and affluence, fulfilling my part of the social contract—the thing it mattered the most if I was, I wasn’t. And yet Rae wasn’t really fulfilling it, either; Rae wasn’t beautiful or blond or thin or charming, and she didn’t seem apologetic. Even having lost some of my original respect for her, I still envied her confidence.

  Noah said, “She’s pissed because I didn’t want to fuck her.”

  I blinked, then said, “Why not?”

  Did I think there was useful information to be gleaned here, sexual or romantic lessons, or was I already scheming? Looking back, I’m still not sure.

  Shrugging again, he said, “She’s on the rag.” He grinned as he added, “I told her she could still blow me.”

  I hesitated, and my heart abruptly began to pound at double or triple time. But I spoke slowly. I said, “I’m not on the rag.” Although this wasn’t a locution I generally used, there was much about the moment that was out of character.

  If I’d been hoping that some transporting lust would seize both of us, I would have been disappointed. The expression on Noah’s face was a surprised and faintly amused sort of curiosity, as if he was wondering if I’d farted. He raised his eyebrows and said, “Yeah?”

  We were, at that point, only about four feet apart. “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t know what to do next, and I thought of turning and sprinting away. But I again recalled the GFU night, my failure of nerve. Presumably, I needed to touch him, but how? The two times in Des Moines when I’d kissed boys, they’d both initiated it.

  The most logical place to make contact with Noah seemed to be the crotch of his pants, but that was too aggressive even for the person I was pretending to be. And kissing him seemed logistically complicated—he was well over six feet, significantly taller than I was, and I wondered how Rae had made it look easy.

  From somewhere far away, I heard bells ringing—the eight o’clock bells, followed by the distant, cheerful-sounding, intermittent shouts and cries of teenagers. Instead of having sex with me, was Noah about to depart for choir practice? With both my arms, I reached for his right hand, brought it to my chest, and held it against my left breast, on top of my navy blue sweater. This, apparently, was all I needed to do. There were a few seconds when I thought he was pulling his hand away, which he was, but before my humiliation could be fully activated, he slid the hand back under my sweater and T-shirt, over my bra, and before long he’d slipped his thumb beneath the bra. Then he did kiss me. In spite of his handsomeness, I remained completely unaroused. My lack of arousal did not, however, prevent me from saying, after a minute or two, “Is there somewhere we can go?”

  He grabbed my hand and led me inside an unlocked door of the gym and through a corridor. Outside another door, this one maroon, he looked in either direction down the hall before pulling a key from his pocket. The room was windowless and contained soccer balls in vast net bags, bats, stacks of orange traffic cones, and other kinds of athletic equipment. There wasn’t much open space on the polished concrete floor, but there was enough for a girl who was five foot four to lie down and for a boy who was a foot taller to lie on top of her. We used one of the condoms I’d just bought at the pharmacy—had any condom purchased outside the heat of passion ever been used so efficiently?—and the whole encounter lasted less than ten minutes, maybe closer to five. None of it was physically enjoyable for me, except when he held my hand to lead me inside the gym; that had been the kind of thing I’d pictured a boyfriend doing. About thirty seconds after coming (as advertised, he did so with a whimper), he said, “I need to go to choir practice,” and he rose up off me. We’d both kept our shirts on and hadn’t entirely removed our pants. We refastened them, and I smoothed my hair. He opened the door carefully, looked into the hallway, then motioned for me to follow him. Outside the door, he locked it, glanced at me, smirked, and said, “See you around.” Then he headed in one direction and, retracing our route in from the parking lot, I headed in the other.

  * * *

  —

  After college, I was a research assistant in a lab in Boston for two years before attending medical school at Johns Hopkins. I matched to my first-choice residency, which was at the University of Iowa, and I was a year into it when I received a phone call from Isaac. I later learned that he had called information in Des Moines to get my parents’ phone number, then asked my mother for my number. He was driving cross-country because he was about to start an English PhD program at Berkeley and wanted to know if I’d like to have dinner when he passed through Iowa City the following week. I was working twenty-four-hour shifts, so we met instead for breakfast, at a diner. From the minute I entered the restaurant and saw him sitting in the booth—when we made eye contact, he smiled, waved, and stood—I understood that Isaac was not gay. My heart thudded as we hugged, though I felt more excited than nervous. I was by then almost thirty, and I’d had a few boyfriends and a few additional sexual partners, but I’d never before been able to tell for certain that someone else was as happy to be in my presence as I was to be in his.

  In medical school, I’d studied by relistening to first- and second-year class lectures on tape, and I would speed up the lectures, making the professors sound like cartoon chipmunks, in order to get through them as fast as possible. In the diner, I wished I could increase the speed of my conversation with Isaac, not because I wanted to get it over with but because I wanted both of us to cram in the maximum amount of words before I started my shift, because I felt we had such an enormous amount to say to each other.

  The great luck of my entire life is that twelve years have passed since Isaac and I had breakfast, and I still feel that way. We live outside Columbus, Ohio, where he is an English professor and I practice internal medicine at a clinic that serves uninsured immigrants. We have a daughter who is now ten and a son who’s seven. When we can, we like to go for family walks after dinner in our suburban neighborhood; often our children dart ahead of us, or discuss their own matters with each other, and when Isaac and I chat a
bout our days, or the news, or movies we probably won’t end up seeing, I am filled with gratitude at the astonishing fact of being married to someone I enjoy talking to, someone with whom I can’t imagine ever running out of things to say.

  Isaac claims that he always had a crush on me and that was the reason he hung out in Rae’s room, even though he never much liked her. When I told Isaac that I’d believed he was gay, he was amused and asked why, and when I tried to pinpoint it, the best I could come up with was that he’d used gel in his hair, he’d buttoned the top button of his shirts, and I hadn’t been uncomfortable around him. He was amused by all of this, too.

  It would be easy for me to be horrified by who I was more than twenty years ago, how ignorant, but I don’t see what purpose it would serve. I’m relieved to have aged out of that visceral sense that my primary obligation is to be pretty, relieved to work at a job that allows me to feel useful. Did I used to think being pretty was my primary obligation because I was in some way delusional? Or was it that I’d absorbed the messages I was meant to absorb with the same diligence with which I studied? As the mother of a daughter, I hope she won’t judge herself as harshly as I judged myself, but her personality is so unlike mine—she is boisterous and outspoken—that I’m not inordinately concerned.

  Isaac, as I didn’t know back in college, was also a virgin when I met him. It was in sophomore spring that he got together with his first girlfriend, which is to say he had sex after I did but, I trust, more thoroughly. Presumably, the campus of Dartmouth in the early nineties—like college campuses in every decade, like towns and cities everywhere—was home to many other virgins, average-looking girls and boys and also grown-ups afraid that they were too ugly to be loved, convinced that this private shame was theirs alone.