And that, I suppose, is why my second date with C. lasted nineteen days. We hadn’t planned to simply keep spending more and more time together, of course. But she had come north again in part because she had a series of meetings that month in New York City, and I lived an easy train ride away from Manhattan. It was late spring in the Hudson Valley. The cherry and crab apple trees down the lane were still a riot of pink and white, the stores on Main Street had their doors propped open, the season of farmers’ markets and strawberry festivals and outdoor music was just beginning. Stay, I suggested, and she did.
Incipit vita nova: in the days that followed, we moved through life together in whatever is the opposite of a haze, vivid and alert, as if we were not only new to each other but new to the world. Once, early on, we strolled through a park and along a creek until we reached the Hudson River, the afternoon light filling its thousands of blue pockets with silver and gold. Look, C. said every few minutes as we walked south alongside it, pointing out the shadow of a bluefish darting beneath a rock, a toad half-buried in the mud, a heron standing stock-still on the bank. When she was little, she told me, she had been interested in indigenous civilizations, so her father had spent hours out walking fields and shorelines with her, helping her learn to recognize pottery shards and axe-heads and mortars and arrowheads. At ten, she spent an entire summer in a makeshift archaeological dig her parents set up for her behind their house; at twelve, on a visit to the beach, she searched around in the sand and found a grateful stranger’s missing wedding ring. Maybe it was that early training that sharpened her focus, or maybe she is just naturally attentive to the world; at any rate, I soon learned that she notices everything. At a walking pace, she can spot a four-leaf clover in the grass and a praying mantis on a leaf and a clutch of eggs in a nest in the crook of a tree. Even when she is driving, which she loves to do, she points out turtles on the riverbank and hawks on the tree branches and a fox trotting daintily away across a distant field, all without ever seeming to take her eyes off the road.
That is how all of life with C. felt to me from the beginning: unusually detailed, unusually distinct. I loved to be in the world with her, to look at it alongside her and see what she saw. One day we went strolling around Storm King, that beautifully named mountain with its equally beautiful outdoor sculpture garden, getting slightly sunburned under a sky that was perfectly cloudless—the word, C. told me, that Nabokov used to describe his fifty-two-year marriage to Véra Slonim. Another day we wandered through a local contemporary art museum, which, because its exhibitions included towering stone megaliths and crumpled cars and piles of shattered glass, I jokingly described as the Museum of Fear-Based Art. I see your point, C. said, standing at my side, looking up at a nine-foot-tall spider by Louise Bourgeois; then she told me about the folk artist James Hampton’s Throne of the Third Heaven, with its injunction to “FEAR NOT.” Later, back at home, we sprawled together on the couch, watching Double Indemnity and devouring an entire pizza, indolent and satisfied as house cats. The next week we rambled together up and down the back roads of the Hudson Valley, crisscrossing creeks and admiring old farmhouses and talking about the kind of home we dreamed of someday having; and when, back at the car, she turned and stretched and smiled at me, lithe and sunlit with the first smattering of summer freckles on her cheeks, I thought about Pablo Neruda, who gave us the sweetest filthy lines of poetry ever written. “I want / to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees”: I wanted that with C., too, but of course I did. The number of things I wanted to do with her was infinite.
Poor Dante; he found love, but he never got to learn that love is also its own ongoing kind of finding. The thrill of that first moment of recognition replicates itself again and again in the early days of love, like the single gold coin glinting up from the seafloor that leads to all the varied and immeasurable treasure of a Spanish galleon. Every one of those early days with C. felt like that, filled with new discoveries—some deep and arriving in the form of deliberate disclosure, some ordinary and gleaned from mere proximity, from being beside each other while life carried on. I learned, over the course of that extended second date, that C. takes her coffee black and all day long; that she dislikes talking on the phone but regularly drops handwritten letters in the mail by the dozen; that she is close to though strikingly different from her two sisters, one of them two years older, the other six years younger; that she wakes up fully rested after five hours of sleep; that she has no sweet tooth whatsoever but much the same relationship to salt as those grand wild creatures, elephants and buffaloes and mountain goats, which will cross rivers and mountain ranges to satisfy their need for it. For her part, C. learned that I love to travel but am prone to motion sickness; that I prefer to sleep in a room as dark as a medieval village on a moonless night; that I cannot tolerate music before ten in the morning; that no matter how miserable the weather or how tired I am or how soon we have to be somewhere else, the right answer to “Should I go for a run?” is always “Yes.”
Love, like grief, has the properties of a fluid: it flows everywhere, fills any container, saturates everything. Even the most quotidian activities of that second date were flooded with it. I loved going grocery shopping with C., loved doing the dishes with her, loved being near her while doing my usual day’s work. Like me, C. is a writer; during that long second date, she mostly worked at my dining room table, surrounded by books and files, while I wrote nearby at a standing desk, which she took one laughing look at and promptly began referring to as my unicycle. On days when we needed a change of scene, I took her to a public library I liked a few towns to the south, where we sat in a little study with green-shaded lamps and grand oil portraits and armchairs that looked as if they were designed for wolfhounds to sleep beneath them. When that space was occupied, we laid claim instead to a wide wooden table in an airy atrium, where rabbits and robins had forty meals a day in the grass outside and I got distracted watching her face in the afternoon light, angled and serious with thought. Eventually I showed her, for the first time, a draft of a piece I was struggling to finish, and she showed me the opening pages of the book she was just then starting to write.
Often when we weren’t writing we were reading, sometimes for work and sometimes for pleasure, sometimes together and sometimes separately. One day she pulled James Galvin’s The Meadow off my shelves and took it to the couch and finished it in one sitting—or not a sitting, really, since she lay there on her stomach, heels kicked up behind her like a bookish kid on a rainy Sunday, too absorbed in the novel to notice how often I looked up from my work to take her in. At night, we read aloud to each other, from whatever book we were each midway through or from something we loved and wanted to share, as when I confessed that I hadn’t read much Frank O’Hara and she took a volume of his poetry up to bed. “When I am feeling depressed and anxious sullen / all you have to do is take your clothes off,” she began, her voice low and intimate and amused, and made an instant convert out of me.