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  “That would be great, thanks so much.” I stand to go. “It was really nice talking to you.” We shake hands and I head toward the elevator. A few months later Peter will tell me that the moment I left the room, he stood up and shouted, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry!” and everyone told him to shut up; some threw rolled-up balls of paper at him.

  The elevator door opens, and as I step inside I hear someone else running to catch it, so I hold it open. It’s Peter, out of breath, clutching his suit jacket. “Hey,” he says, squeezing in as the doors close. “Would you like to have lunch?”

  I am dumbstruck. I hardly even know this guy, I’m not going to have lunch with him. But before I can answer he adds, “It’s my birthday today.”

  Right, I think. It’s his birthday. “Really?” I say.

  “Yeah, really. I’m twenty-three.”

  “I’m twenty-three too,” I say.

  “I know,” Peter says. “You put your birthdate on your application.”

  We stare at the descending floor numbers. “I can’t, I’m sorry. I already have plans to meet a friend at Hunter College.” I remember that Hunter College was a stop on the subway I took to get here.

  “Oh, no problem,” Peter says, smiling. “Maybe next time.” I exit the elevator with such urgency, it’s as if this lunch appointment is the most pressing of my life.

  The following week I interview with the Junior League. It’s a secretarial job. In fact, all the interviews Peter arranges for me are jobs with titles that are euphemisms for secretary. Typing fast is apparently my most marketable skill, so I’m ready to just bite the bullet and take whatever is offered to me next. Then Peter calls to tell me he’s leaving Adam Personnel and has a career plan of his own. He is moving home, to upstate New York, in preparation for graduate school. He had decided to get a master’s degree in chemistry. Peter also tells me that a friend of his from college called to say the law firm where she works is looking to hire legal assistants. She asked if he was interested. “I’m not,” Peter told her, “but I have a friend that might be.” That friend is me. I interview and get the job, deciding to give it a try. Who knows? I think. Maybe I will love it and really want to go to law school.

  A few weeks later Peter leaves New York City and enrolls at the state university in some prerequisite courses he needs in order to apply to graduate programs. “Why chemistry?” I ask.

  “I like chemistry,” he says, matter-of-fact. “Chemistry is life.”

  Over the next two years Peter and I are in touch regularly, and we get to know a lot about each other’s lives. I learn he was adopted as a baby and that his parents are evangelical Christians. His first philosophy of science course at Cornell made him question everything he believed about the way the world worked; since then he’s been a devout atheist, a shift that deeply wounded his parents. Peter’s father, a white man and a pastor, leads a largely African American congregation at a local church. His parents’ inner city neighborhood is poor and the crack epidemic has hit hard. Addicts often knock on their front door looking for money or food, Peter says, and his mother and father always open it.

  “They are good people, but they also take the Bible literally. I mean l-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y,” he says, stretching out the word to magnify its meaning. “Like the earth was ‘created’ in a week. One week. They really believe that.”

  Much later, when we are well into our relationship, I will learn that Peter lived in foster care for about four months before being adopted. His mother will tell me that he hadn’t been held much as a baby because there were several other young children in that home. The lack of early bonding with a parent likely has something to do with why Peter often feels ill at ease socially. He will tell me that as a kid, he never felt he really fit into—or could truly navigate—the social landscape. The psychologist Erik Erikson, known both for his theory of psychosocial development and the concept of an “identity crisis,” said that those who learn to trust caregivers in infancy are more likely to form trusting relationships with others throughout their lives.

  Decades later, when I am familiar with Peter’s insatiable need for affirmation and acceptance, for validation and gratitude, I will wonder if his adoption had anything to do with this struggle to define and believe in himself. We develop our individual identities in adolescence, and that is much more complicated for someone who has been adopted because of the issues it raises—for instance, the reason a child was given up in the first place. And being adopted is not an attribute in the same way something like gender or ethnicity is. It doesn’t help the adoptee figure out their identity; in fact, it makes it more difficult. A number of studies have found that adoptees score lower on measures of self-esteem and self-confidence; a U.S. government report on the impacts of adoption suggested one reason could be that “adopted persons may view themselves as different, out-of-place, unwelcome, or rejected.”

  I find my job as legal assistant at the firm in the World Trade Center boring. I’m working with lawyers in the tax department, in an area of the law that deals almost exclusively with retirement plans. I have the Internal Revenue Code on my bookshelf, a series of thick books with pages thin as tissue paper, full of byzantine rules and regulations. The language is so obtuse it seems expressly created to perpetuate the need for tax lawyers.

  On Friday evenings when the senior partner in the large office across the hall leaves to catch the early train home, a few of us grab leftover cans of soda from the conference room and sit on the velvety couches in his office watching the sun set over the financial district. The waters of New York Harbor sparkle in the orange light, intensified by its reflection off the glass facades of surrounding skyscrapers. The Statue of Liberty looks so small it doesn’t seem real; even the cruise ships in the harbor look like toys. With a view like this, I think, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine you own the world.

  I am part of a large group of legal assistants about my age at the firm, so there is plenty of collegial socializing. We all seem to be using these jobs as way stations between our lives now and whatever comes next, be it graduate school, marriage, or something we haven’t yet figured out. I alternate between being so busy I’m driven home in a corporate sedan at two in the morning, and days where I struggle to find something to do. The quiet days I write short stories, look for editorial jobs, and fill pages of yellow legal pads with letters to Peter. We’ve become good friends and talk on the phone every few weeks about work, school, the dates we’ve had, books we’ve read.

  Peter keeps inviting me to Ithaca, where he is living with a few other guys, all of them in a band together. He has started graduate school for chemistry at SUNY Binghamton. I know he’s interested in me in ways that I’m not interested in him, so I keep making excuses. A year and a half into my stint as a legal assistant, I quit and move to Philadelphia for an editor’s job at Scan, a small arts magazine that is barely afloat and will likely fold. Still, I tell myself, it’s writing, at least for a while. And that summer, I finally run out of excuses not to visit Peter, so I drive up to Ithaca to see his band, LD50, play at a party.

  The house where he lives is in Danby, a small town just south of Ithaca, on a big piece of land with a spectacular view of Cayuga Lake’s deep blue water. The band has set up in the garage with the door open, instruments and speakers and tangled wires half inside and half out. Guns N’ Roses is blasting through outdoor speakers and although it’s only five P.M., everyone seems to be drunk, stoned, or tripping. Peter is a bit toasted himself, as he’s been drinking all day and doing lines of coke. I’m uncomfortable at first, mostly because everyone has been partying for hours and I am stone cold sober. I don’t do coke or drop acid or even like smoking pot very much, so I’m used to feeling like an outsider when it comes to people around me getting high.

  I grab a beer and sit on the grass. As soon as the band starts to play and I see Peter on bass, with his long, curly hair and all his fr
iends around, something changes for me. I never thought of him as boyfriend material, but now, I think, well…maybe. After the first set he makes his way over to me and asks what I thought of the music. “You guys sounded great,” I say. He takes my hand and introduces me to his bandmates (one of whom is also his housemate). We both know I will have to spend the night, as it’s a four-hour drive back to Philly. Peter’s room is small, a curtain separating the desk area from his twin bed, which is tucked beneath some wood shelving filled with books and record albums. He has draped a red bandana over the bedside lamp to diffuse and soften the light. That night we do, finally, sleep together, but it’s mostly awkward, because we hadn’t even kissed yet and suddenly we are having sex. And because Peter has done an awful lot of blow.

  The next morning, as I leave to drive back to Philly, our goodbye feels different than usual. “Maybe I can come down to you next weekend and you can show me Philly?” Peter says, leaning into the driver’s window of my battered ’74 Chevy Nova.

  Do I give this another shot? I wonder.

  “Yeah, sure. I had a good time,” I say, and give his forearm a squeeze. Peter leans in to kiss me. “Me too. I’ll call you this week.”

  The next weekend he drives his red Chevette to my apartment in Philadelphia, and we go see the new Bruce Weber documentary Let’s Get Lost, about the jazz musician Chet Baker. We spend most of the rest of the weekend in bed, talking, eating ice cream out of the container, and having sex—intimate, tender, non-cocaine-addled sex. And that, as they say, is that. It has taken two years for me to see Peter as more than a friend, but when I finally fall for him, I fall hard. Being around him makes me feel steady inside, grounded. I love his dewy, almond-shaped eyes, his long, curly hair, his strong arms and soothing voice. I love that he knows the world in a way I don’t, knows it physically and understands the mechanics and processes underlying it. I can spend hours telling him stories about the people I work with, my writing, books I’ve read, my family, and he never loses interest. He doesn’t laugh often, but when he does it’s wonderful—a big spreading smile, a deep satisfying laugh. I love that when we lie in bed together at night, he will put the perfect album on the turntable, old Isley Brothers or Chick Corea.

  In August, I leave my job in Philadelphia to be an editorial assistant at Glamour magazine in New York City, and that fall, I travel upstate to meet Peter’s family for the first time. I am there for Thanksgiving dinner. Before the meal begins, we join hands and his father thanks Lord Jesus for our health and well-being, for the food before us, and then asks him to have mercy on homosexuals, currently being punished by the deadly AIDS virus. With bowed head, I look sideways at Peter, who just squeezes my hand.

  We leave the next morning after a brief visit to the church, arriving late enough to see only his father’s sermon (much to the chagrin of Peter’s mother). After the service, an army of older women—grandmothers and great-grandmothers—come up to Peter and tenderly touch his hands, hold his face, or hug him. He grew up in front of them, in this church, and they adore him. He bends down a little to let each of them hug him, and he speaks loudly, leaning into their ears. His hair is gathered into a ponytail that hangs down his back and he’s wearing the only collared shirt he owns.

  Being three hours’ drive apart is hard for both of us, and I feel like I’m spending my weeks waiting for the weekend, when we can see each other. On Valentine’s Day, Peter drives to New York City with a dozen long-stemmed red roses he can’t afford and surprises me at Glamour’s offices. Some of the girls I work with are peeking into the reception area and giggling. Betty, the receptionist, calls me and says, “Your boyfriend is here. He’s cute!” And there he is, standing in the reception area with his big bouquet, sincere and sweet and a little embarrassed, unsure how to handle all the attention he’s getting.

  A few months later I quit my job at the magazine—I’ve been there barely a year—and move in with Peter. He is still in graduate school, and I am tired of answering phones for editors. Peter and I live in a two-room cottage in tiny Marathon, New York, with dairy farmers for neighbors. He spends a lot of his time in Binghamton, about thirty minutes’ drive south, in the university’s chemistry lab finishing the research for his master’s thesis. I have a thirty-minute commute to the small city of Cortland, where I am now a reporter for the Cortland Standard newspaper, earning $6.25 an hour. It’s the kind of small-town newspaper where finished stories are sent via pneumatic tubes across the floor and down two flights to the folks in layout. My beats are education (there is a branch of the state university here) and dairy farming, and my editor’s name is Skip. Working there is like being in a movie about a small-town newspaper, one in which I have an important role, the beat reporter. And that feels good.

  Although it’s a big adjustment, it’s also springtime in upstate New York and surreally beautiful. My drive to work at sunrise is breathtaking, the sky pinking up as I head north. All around me are undulating green hillsides dotted with clusters of cows nibbling on grass and alfalfa, fields of wild daisies, brown-eyed Susans, yellow honeysuckle, and dense bushes of white aster and milkweed.

  A few weeks into my new reporting job, while interviewing a local farmer about his expansion plans, I get the chance to milk a cow for the first time. The farmer gives me a pair of too-big rubber boots in which to wade through barn muck, and then sits me down on an upside-down metal bucket—just as I imagined he would—and shows me how to hold the cow’s udder. The trick to getting the milk to come out, he tells me, is to pull somewhere between too gently and too hard.

  Seven months later it’s November, and the dark and cold are starting to get to me. I’m feeling low and missing New York City, thinking maybe I made a mistake leaving my job at Glamour. Maybe if I had just stuck it out, I would have moved beyond the world of editorial assistants and it would have gotten better. Since Peter and I moved into this little cottage in Marathon something has changed in our relationship, something subtle but significant, and I’m not sure what it is. All I know is I’m alone an awful lot, and Peter spends more and more time in his lab at school in Binghamton.

  I get home from my newspaper job around three-thirty in the afternoon, because the paper comes out at one P.M. and my day starts at six-fifteen in the morning. Often Peter doesn’t get home until eight or nine in the evening. I’m no longer sure why I rushed to be here with him, since I barely see him. Then again, I do know. I was afraid our relationship wouldn’t last, that whatever it was about me Peter had fallen for wouldn’t be enough to keep his long-distance interest. I was insecure and anxious and didn’t like our being apart, didn’t find the phone an adequate substitute for the flesh-and-blood man. But now, when we are together, Peter is so exhausted he’s sleeping most of the time. We had more intimacy when we were 300 miles apart, I keep thinking. I’m lonely. I have developed an irrational crush on a very attractive and very married city official and I’m often stuck in my own head, lamenting how far I’ve come, from a job in the Manhattan high-rise offices of a national magazine to writing about dairy parades and zoning board meetings.

  When I get like this, I remind myself that I am, finally, writing for a living, interesting small-town stories like the one about a cult-like church trying to proselytize the town’s teens, and some very passionate opposition to a proposal to bury low-level radioactive waste near here. And even though Peter works a lot, we do find time to have fun in between the demands of graduate school and newspaper reporting.

  In late spring he invites some of the students from his lab over for a potluck dinner. Most of them are Polish and Russian, and it turns into a raucous Eastern European–themed party with plenty of vodka and kielbasa and someone’s Shostakovich album on the turntable. In June we go to the Cortland County Dairy Parade and watch the newly crowned Dairy Princess wave to us from atop her float. It is a warm day, and after the parade and lunch we drive to Buttermilk Falls State Park in Ithaca and hike a few of the t
rails, water tumbling down the rocks beside us. In August we visit Peter’s grandparents in the tiny town of Bellefontaine, Ohio, about an hour northwest of Columbus. On the drive there, the starter in Peter’s Chevette dies, so we can’t turn off the engine until we reach his grandparents’ house. Peter and his grandfather, Melrose, who is in his eighties, go to the auto parts store in town and then work together, slowly, to take apart the insides of the car and replace its starter. Peter is relaxed and patient with his grandfather, clearly enjoying the discussion of cables to be disconnected, the bolts, brackets, and battery that need to be removed in order to get to the car’s broken starter. I can hear the two of them chatting about other things too, graduate school, me, Peter’s parents.

  While they work on the car, his grandmother Grace takes me on a tour of the senior center, where she and her husband are active members, and she introduces me to every person there. Then it is off to the market, where we buy some things for dinner. She is like a storybook grandmother, gentle and sweet, always smiling and saying things like “Well now, let’s sit here and visit for a while.” My own maternal grandmother couldn’t be more different. She came to New York City in the 1920s, a Jewish refugee fleeing Russian pogroms in Poland. She is serious, speaks in heavily accented English, and throws salt superstitiously over her shoulder. Grace and Melrose tool around town on a bicycle built for two and Grace cooks things like chicken and biscuits and puts green Jell-O in her salads. My grandmother has never owned a bicycle; she feeds us kosher brisket and matzoh ball soup.

  After dinner, Peter’s grandparents take out photo albums and show me photos of Peter as a little boy, an orange life jacket around his shoulders, fishing with his grandfather and proudly holding up his catch, which is dripping wet and still connected to the hook at the end of the line.

  It snowed last week, the first week of November, the farms and hillsides around us covered in a white so bright that even when it’s not sunny, I have to shield my eyes or they burn and tear. Now and then we spend the evening with another couple, both of them also graduate students in the chemistry department. The four of us go to dive bars deep in the country, the kind that still have jukeboxes with music from the 1950s and large wooden shuffleboard tables. On Sundays, the one morning Peter and I usually sleep in, he runs downstairs in his sweatpants to start a fire in the wood-burning stove and then races back up to me, jumping into the bed with a howl from the cold. We burrow under the covers to keep warm, talking and laughing until the cottage heats up.