01 The Love Issue · 1 of 12
When we were about to become, before henestled into my quiet, before our little world
turned hurtful and righted itself, it wasn’t his baldness, way too young, or the comb-over that never stayed put,
or the acid-blue jacket that made his face look whiskeredwhen he was clean-shaven, or the owlish black-rimmed glasses.
It was the eyes behind the glasses, night-beckoning, rimmed in green and umber tints of forest.
I could fall into the gentleness of his eyes, and the way he sat before me in the grad student lounge, leaning back a little,
chest wide-open, arms uncrossed and welcoming, ready to wrap around me, his conversation artless,
friendly and reticent at the same time, not personal, not seductive, just ordinary chat—school, professors.
When in class he read the homage he wrote to hisBoston neighborhood, its closeness, its diversity,
that terrible casualty of re-development,I had the urge to take him home.
And his wanting me was filled with so much guilt for the other woman he first had to leave to be with me.
The honorable thing to do, he said, and kept me for months his guilty secret.