“Wow. I think of myself as a planner, but—”
When I didn’t say anything else, he said, “Am I scaring you?”
“No,” I said. “You’re impressing me. A lot of people underestimate their ability to change the status quo or they’re too lazy to try.” We had wandered over to the large bronze sculpture, and we stood next to it, facing each other. “You know what I was just thinking?”
Bill cocked his head to one side expectantly.
I said, “I was thinking that a sandy picnic with you sounds really, really nice.”
* * *
—
Unlike Mr. Gurski’s observation that I was opinionated for a girl, Bruce’s statement that I was boy-like had not been easy for me to dismiss; if anything, that it had been delivered without apparent animus made it more distressing. Even so, the lesson he offered proved to be one I needed to learn more than once. The lesson was this: You will encounter boys and men with whom you think you enjoy chemistry. A boy or man will find you funny and interesting and smart, just as you find him funny and interesting and smart. The pleasure you take in each other’s company will be obvious, but, crucially, while this pleasure will make you feel as if you’re in love with him, it will not make him feel as if he’s in love with you. He might remark on how much he likes talking to you, but there will be girls he wants to kiss, and you will not be one of them.
In high school and again in college, there were more Bruces, Bruce stand-ins. After hours or weeks or months of robust conversation, when I finally said or did something I considered overtly flirtatious—declared how handsome they were or how lucky a girl would be to date them, or when I stood or sat close enough to kiss, tilting up my face—these boys seemed surprised and uncomfortable. This happened in high school with a boy named Norman, and it happened my sophomore year at Wellesley with an MIT senior named Phil, and it happened again my senior year at Wellesley with a Harvard graduate student named Daniel.
In the meantime, in eleventh grade, I had my first kiss; I attended prom with a date; I seriously dated a different MIT student named Roy, to whom I lost my virginity. (Premarital sex held no stigma for me, though getting pregnant would have, and I’d started taking the pill in advance of our first time.) I had discovered that the key to opening the door of dating was to agree to go out with boys and men to whom I was not physically attracted. This trick, if such a defeatist stance could be considered a trick, involved a passivity I brought to no other area of my life. But choosing the guy, liking the other person first, never worked for me; dating worked only when I let them choose me. Was it because, around boys and men I wasn’t attracted to, I was freed of some heaviness of expectations I couldn’t otherwise conceal? Was it because, in the hierarchy of appearance, I liked guys who were more good-looking than I was entitled to like? (But really, they didn’t need to be extraordinarily handsome—there were so many kinds of men I could fall for, such different physical types and mannerisms and personalities, just as long as they weren’t boring or meek.) Or was I pretty enough but, per Mr. Gurski, spoke with an off-putting sharpness or surety of tone?
Roy, to whom I lost my virginity, was boring, meek, and arrogant. On our first date after we’d met at a Wellesley-MIT mixer, I steered the entire conversation, which was tiring—I inquired about his upbringing, his Judaism, and his academic studies—but before we parted, he asked if next time I’d like to go out for dinner. In the seven months we were a couple, he rarely made conversation and rarely complimented me yet seemed to take for granted my wish to be involved with him. Did he, in a way he was unable to articulate, actually like my strong will? Or did he mistake me for a typical woman, was he game to be my boyfriend not because I was Hillary and distinctly myself but because I possessed the standard feminine qualities that a college-educated man in the late 1960s might wish for? Did he not understand that I was special?
Just before I returned to Chicago at the end of my sophomore year, when Roy raised my conversion to Judaism as a precondition of our eventual marriage, I broke up with him. I had, all along, seen him as a kind of experiment, a test to determine whether ongoing involvement with a man I wasn’t initially infatuated with might create infatuation; and while a sample size of one wasn’t wholly revealing, the answer in Roy’s case was no. For a time, the novelty of sex had offset our boring conversations and lackluster physical compatibility, and then, eventually, it hadn’t.
I was soon spending time with Daniel the Harvard Divinity graduate student, whom I’d met at a Vietnam protest in Harvard Yard. Though our campuses were just sixteen miles apart, we began corresponding by letter, which progressed after a month to meeting for tea on Saturday afternoons. During these get-togethers, which occurred in either the town of Wellesley or Harvard Square, we’d discuss Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr; we once spent three hours debating all the ways the word good could be interpreted in John Wesley’s dictum “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Daniel was from Indianapolis, had attended Indiana University as an undergraduate, and was wiry and dark-haired, with black horn-rimmed glasses.
One cold day in early March, we were walking along the Charles River, and I said, “I’m not sure how you feel about undergraduate activities, but there’s a mixer coming up at Wellesley a week from Saturday, and I’m wondering if you’d like to join me for it.” I had rehearsed this language. I also had decided to pat his upper arm as I issued the invitation, but my execution of the gesture was more halting and less carefree than I’d imagined.
Daniel stopped walking and turned toward me, the river behind him. It was 4:00 P.M. and about twenty degrees, and parts of the Charles, especially near the shore, were still frozen. Really, it was a bit cold to be walking for pleasure, except that my crush on Daniel had ballooned to the point where I didn’t care about the temperature. And might not the banks of the Charles be a perfect place for our first kiss?
“Hillary, I really enjoy discussing theology with you,” Daniel said, and I knew, after those eight words, that if we ever again spent time together, it would be only to prove to one or both of us that I wasn’t ending our friendship because he didn’t reciprocate my romantic interest. There were additional words he said then, with the river behind him, the cold air, the wintry afternoon light, but they didn’t matter. How many times, I wondered, would this pattern repeat itself and still surprise me? I was twenty-one, meaning absurdly young yet old enough to consider myself newly worldly and to see my limited experiences as conclusive.
Back on the Wellesley campus, I cried while describing the conversation to my friends Nancy and Phyllis, though already it felt like the tears were for a general sense of romantic discouragement rather than a Daniel-specific lamentation. Nancy was a tall, extremely rich English major from Greenwich, Connecticut, and Phyllis was a short, working-class biology major from Baltimore, and they’d been roommates since our freshman year and were my closest friends.