May 1992: The last of my coursework had been completed. I was to graduate summa cum laude; offers of generous graduate fellowships had come my way. MIT, Columbia, Princeton, Rice. Harvard, which had decided it had not seen the last of me if I cared to stay on. It was the obvious choice, one I felt bound to make in the end, though I had not committed, preferring to savor the possibilities for as long as I could. Jonas would be going back to Tanzania for the summer, then heading to the University of Chicago to start his doctoral work; Liz would be going to Berkeley for her master’s in Renaissance literature; Stephanie was returning to Washington to work for a political consulting firm. The graduation ceremony itself would not happen until the first week of June. We had entered a nether time, a caesura between what our lives had been and what they would become.
In the meanwhile, there were parties—lots of them. Roiling keggers, black-tie balls, a garden fete where everyone drank mint juleps and all the girls wore hats. In my trusty battle tux and pink tie—wearing it had become a trademark—I danced the Lindy, the Electric Slide, the Hokey Pokey, and the Bump; at any given hour of the day, I was either drunk or hungover. An hour of triumph, but it came at a cost. For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.
The week before graduation, Jonas, Liz, Stephanie, and I drove down to the Cape, to Liz’s house. No one was talking about it, but it seemed unlikely that the four of us would be together again for some time. Liz’s parents were there, having just opened the house for the season. I had met them before, in Connecticut. Her mother, Patty, came across as a bit of a society doyenne, with a brisk, somewhat phony graciousness and a lock-jawed accent, but her father was one of the most likable and easygoing people I’d ever met. A tall, bespectacled man (Liz had gotten his vision) with an earnest face, Oscar Macomb had been a banker, retired early, and now, in his words, spent his days “noodling around with money.” He worshipped his daughter—that was plain to anyone with eyes; less apparent, though undeniable, was that he vastly preferred her to his wife, whom he regarded with the bemused affection one might give to an overbred poodle. With Liz, the man was all smiles—the two of them would frequently chatter away in French—and his warmth extended to anybody in her circle, including me, whom he had nicknamed “Ohio Tim.”
The house, in a town called Osterville, stood on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound. It was enormous, room upon room, with a wide back lawn and rickety stairs to the beach. No doubt it was worth many millions of dollars, just for the land alone, though in those days I had no ability to calculate such things. Despite its size, it had a homey, unfussy feel. Most of the furniture looked like you could pick it up for pennies at a yard sale; in the afternoons, when the wind swung around, it tore through the house like the offensive line of the New York Giants. The ocean was still too cold for swimming, and because it was so early in the season, the town was mostly deserted. We spent our days lying on the beach, pretending not to be freezing, or lazing around on the porch, playing cards and reading, until evening arrived and the drinks came out. My father might have had a beer before dinner while he watched the news on television, but that was the extent of it; my mother never drank at all. In the Macomb household, cocktail hour was religion. At six o’clock everyone would gather in the living room or, if the evening was pleasant, on the porch, whereupon Liz’s father would present us with a silver tray of the evening’s concoction—whiskey old-fashioneds, Tom Collinses, vodka martinis in chilled glasses with olives on sticks—accompanied by dainty porcelain cups of nuts warmed in the oven. This was followed by ample quantities of wine with dinner and sometimes whiskey or port afterward. I had hoped our days on the Cape would give my liver a chance to recuperate; there was no chance of that.