Bookmarker tag: inspo/meet-cute (8 notes)

I moved my leg slightly, the slimmest fraction of an inch, and Carol and I were touching. She sat absolutely still as Austin continued to speak. I moved again and we were touching now thigh to knee. The occasion was one of infinite subtlety. She may not have noticed the scant pressure of my leg; she may have noticed but thought nothing of it; or she may have known all along what I was doing. I edged my arm toward hers. Austin kept talking. Now our forearms were touching, the faintest inshore breeze of our bare flesh barely in contact, flesh resting on points of almost invisible silver hair. Still she was motionless, no sign either way. I waited several minutes. Then I moved my right hand across my lap and let it rest above my right knee. Carol was looking straight ahead. I was extremely nervous. The next few seconds would tell whether or not she knew and how she saw fit to respond to the knowledge. I did not want to be disappointed. It was important that she give me the right sign. I let my hand slide very slowly into the crease formed by our two legs. I let it rest there. We were both looking straight ahead. Then I felt a slight pressure from her thigh, a slight and pleasant heat on the tips of my fingers, the slightest suggestion of shifting weight, a muscle tensing, her body not moving and yet expressing movement, finding a new balance, shifting inside itself, shifting toward me. I returned the pressure and then moved several inches away. Austin kept talking and I began to relax. Carol and I looked straight ahead. It was my first ego-moment since New York.

I sat at the bar and had a scotch. The ashtray in front of me was full of pared fingernails. I was on the third drink when she arrived. The way she walked made her skirt sway lightly across her legs and I felt lucky and full of improvisation, a nice loose music in my head, and I knew the auto mechanics were watching her but not with sludge and crankcase lust; rather with a small joy, I thought, a tiny leap of flesh, the light lucky feeling of seeing a pretty girl with bare legs walking across a room behind a smile that says she likes being a woman being watched. I tried not to look so pleased. She glanced at my drink and asked for the same.

In the early eighties, not long after she wrote those words, my mom fell in love with my dad, Stanley Aronowitz, in precisely this beat-the-system way. A political organizer and socialist professor, Stanley had read a book review of Ellen’s and was so impressed that he asked Rosalyn Baxandall, a radical feminist and a mutual friend, for her number. They had a tentative first lunch, and things went quickly from there. My mom’s cousin Judy remembers the night when Ellen brought her new boyfriend over to Judy’s house for dinner. She had never seen Ellen be so unapologetically immersed in someone else, like there was a “glass globe” over them. Throughout the evening, the couple fluttered their eyes at each other. He caressed her wrists; she pushed his black curly hair out of his denim-blue eyes. Around this time, Ellen remarked to Judy, “What a big fish I’ve pulled in.”

Stanley was a husky hedonist who was often forgiven for his arrogance because of his formidable intellect and the twinkle in his eye and because, surprisingly, he was an excellent listener. He had a reputation as a bed hopper and had trouble managing his often concurrent love affairs. A prolific writer with working-class roots and a gift for public speaking, he was a larger-than-life figure within a certain socialist-leftist crowd. But I suspect Ellen wasn’t referring to any of this when she called my dad a “big fish.” Instead, she felt she had finally found a man with whom she could fuse commitment and passion, without that “stifling dependence or low-level static” she’d observed in others’ partnerships.

Amanda grew up smack in the heart of the heartland. You met her in a bar and couldn’t believe your luck. You never would have worked up the hair to hit on her, but she came right up and started talking to you. As you talked you thought: She looks like a goddamned model and she doesn’t even know it. You thought of this ingenuousness as being typical of the heartland. You pictured her backlit by a sunset, knee-deep in amber waves of grain. Her lanky, awkward grace put you in mind of a newborn foal. Her hair was the color of wheat, or so you imagined; after two months in Kansas you had yet to see any wheat. You spent most of your time at zoning-board meetings duly reporting on variances for shopping malls and perc tests for new housing developments. At night, because your apartment was too quiet, you went to bars with a book.

[...] On this particular occasion, I was aware of an intense aura emanating from someone whom I had never seen before, an intense, sexual aura, aimed precisely and accurately at my vacant being. “A man,” I wondered, “could there be a man in this meeting?” He looked weather-beaten, his flat, lined faced suffused with a self-consciously alert intelligence and a knowledge of sensual power. I had no idea who he was, and did not pursue the matter.

One lunch hour, as I was hurrying purposelessly across campus, sine ira ac studio, without anger or enthusiasm, the perfect legal-rational bureaucrat according to Max Weber, oblivious to my surroundings, a student importuned me on behalf of someone who stood motionless a few feet away and who required my attention. As we shook hands, Father Dr Patrick Gorman and the man in the meeting merged alarmingly into the same person.

Does “love at first sight” mean that you fall in love the instant you meet someone, or does the first sight occur when you suddenly fall in love with someone you may have met or known for any amount of time?

I first met Jim in New York in August 1970. I had been in New York for three days. He invited me to go to a concert with him in Central Park to hear Alicia de Larrocha play Liszt and Ravel. It was a dramatic pause in my first few days of furious tourism.

The skyscrapers of the city rise in mammoth terraces all around the steaming, wide open ground. The tiny hand-span of the lady playing the grand piano in the park belies the immensity of the sound which, beyond nature and technē, soars into the empyrean. In the intervals, Jim tells me about his work on Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. I feel the stirrings again of my original passion for philosophy, which three years at Oxford have almost completely expunged. Instead of staying in New York for the three weeks planned, I decide to stay for a year.

It was my Lehrjahr, my real apprenticeship, after the borniert complacencies of my undergraduate education. What did I discover in that year? Jim, continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger), the Second Vienna School (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg), Abstract Expressionism (Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Morris Louis), cooking (out of Craig Claiborne and Alice B. Toklas), hashish, LSD, popular music (Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones—yes, in New York!), homosexuality, Jim, Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, the German language, Harlem (where I taught black teenage delinquents to read, two afternoons a week), Adorno, Jim.

First sighting: tall, proud, shapely, with very black hair and a white dress; suave, elegant, warm and educated. Accompanied by a tall, proud, athletic, elegant and educated man. They came into the place where I worked, in the period following the episode with the green-eyed girl – the period of films, books, alcohol and prostitutes. We talked for a while, and after they left, my business partner and I fell silent, looking at the place where she’d stood. My business partner was having a mild attack of asthma. As the minutes went by, the invisible pedestal holding her aloft grew higher and higher without us noticing. After a while, my business partner and I dared to exchange a glance. Then we looked up and down but with our chins tilted a little to the right, somewhere between nodding and shaking our heads, our lower lips pushed slightly forward to simulate disappointment. What a shame, we were trying to say to each other, that a woman like that could never be ours. In the days that followed, we began to reminisce about her out loud. My business partner, who was very observant, or had an overactive imagination, always added some new detail I’d overlooked or forgotten: the tasteful patterning on her embossed belt, how well the strip of white wool peeping over the top of her dainty leather boots suited her, or the lock of jet-black hair nestling behind her left ear. And after a few more days we’d forgotten her, at least to a certain extent.

How can we say whether anything’s good or bad for us? Are we capable of judging an ordinary event, sure of not being mistaken? [...]

Martha and I had met in college. I was studying civil engineering at a small school in northern Utah. I’d gone there for the skiing. I was going to learn how to build roads into the forest. I was eighteen years old; what did I know better?

Martha was eighteen. She explained to me that what I was doing was bad, that road building in the West destroyed the last pieces of wilderness, fragmented the last sanctuaries where the wild things —the bears and the wolverines, caribou and great gray owls—holed up and hid out from man’s hungry, clumsy, stupid ways.

She told me that we had too many roads already; that the mountains and all wilderness were disappearing beneath concrete, and that what I needed to be learning to do instead was to tear up old roads and plant trees in their place.

It took me about two weeks to change my major. And I have to say it probably wasn’t her passionate defense of centuries-old forests falling to bulldozers, or soil sloughing into pristine brooks. It was her ass that converted me.

But it’s not like I followed her like a puppy; I steered clear of her wildlife science classes, her ecofeminist curriculum. I changed to literature. When she went out on her wolf howlings (thirty fucking below, in January), I usually stayed in town, at the library. I would read a life, while she lived one.

This isn’t to say we weren’t in love. We were; as much as any two young people are capable of, which is to say, a lot. Our differences — the way she was so outgoing, the way her energy poured out of her, like water over a spillway, and the way I held mine all in —these differences formed a lock on us, the way deer and wolves fit together in the woods: one’s movements always affecting the other’s.