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By Root 773 0

far as diners were concerned: “Please, really, have a great, great day today, okay? Okay? Please?” she told some customers with dreadful urgency, or so she claimed. She was determined to succeed as a stage actress and so was waiting tables, modeling a little, and, later, working as an “exotic dancer.” She came home her first night from that with five times the tips she’d ever made as a waitress. She didn’t mind the work, she told me, but threatened to quit if I ever set foot in the place. She began to call herself a “sex worker” because she liked the exploited proletarian sound of it, although she only ever danced and stripped. Always a Brown graduate in women’s studies, she referred to the club’s owners as sex industrialists or captains of sexual commerce.

We alternated the bedroom and the living room futon couch, a week at a turn. Of course, if either one of us brought someone home, then the bedroom was the prize. When she wasn’t working late or preparing for an audition, we used to go out together, sometimes with friends, but sometimes the two of us would simply feel the same urge at the same time. “Mmmm, you know what I really want to do tonight?” she might ask at the very moment when I was noticing the growling crescendo of my own identical appetite.

I drank more than she did. I say this not as a memoirist’s excuse, but only to report accurately the way we lived in those happy years, in many ways the happiest of our lives. We were far from the parents, back in each other’s daily influence. We were in love with the idea of ourselves. We were sure something great was coming or, at least, that what we had and what we were would roll forever on. Shot free of the rhythms of college schedules, we were suddenly in an eternal now, with no worries that it would ever end, or that it should.

Dana probably felt otherwise, obviously. I casually threw around those “we”s in the last paragraph. My recurrent obtuseness about those nearest to me has never really been cured (even in those days when I was trying to write fiction late at night, examining the feelings of imaginary people). When I look more carefully at those New York years, I have to admit that what I saw as a paradise of good feeling and absence of anxiety was possibly something else for her, and so her later relationships likely meant more to her than I may have realized. (“May have.” How easily the memoirist can make himself seem a little innocent, a little lovable, endlessly extenuating his own guilt, nibble by nibble.)

But I cannot help it: my own memory seems strong and accurate enough; the recollection of my feelings in those days overwhelms all quibbling. I was happy, and, I will insist, she was happy. Retrospective thoughtfulness can make the past too bleak, as if one is gazing backward through welder’s glasses.

So I say that it was good. We used to go out together, would dare the other to talk to this or that woman in a bar. We shared an appreciation for the female form. “Well, there is a divinity that shaped her end, that’s for damn sure,” I recall Dana exulting over one possible love. By then her eye for likely targets was nearly infallible, far better than mine.

Which was good, because I could absorb rejection after rejection like a fat man taking body shots. Dana, however, had not been toughened up by her summer of sorrow. She was still Dana—impassioned, engaging, lovely, willing to be open and vulnerable—and she took rejections hard.

That said, she was also much more of a man in these matters than I was. She seemed a perfect gentleman in how she treated the women who would pass me on the couch—once in the darkest night, the toilet belching in gratitude for their visit, and once again in the morning, fiddling with the locks and apologizing as I groaned and peeled a resistant eye. In those years, Dana was the sort of man I wished I could be: effortless, honest without hurting anyone, open to others’ feelings and needs without bearing responsibility for their assumptions. My one-night stands ended with pained awkwardness; hers left satisfied.

When I think