Despite my misgivings, Robert and I became the house cute couple. When a group of fellow residents went around the house distributing cookies and condoms at Halloween, they took one look at us sitting in the hallway holding hands and gave us cookies. Robert, whose last significant relationship had been in high school, enjoyed the attention. But sometimes it made my toes curl.

The truth was that I had no idea where Robert belonged in my life. The previous spring, I had been admitted to graduate school at the University of Michigan and had deferred one year to finish a thesis I had stumbled into doing. When I left, Robert would be in his last year. Everyone I talked to who had been in similar situations said the same thing: it won’t last. Ellen told me about a long-distance episode in her own life. “We both started seeing other people. It was a mess.”

Then there was the whole sex problem. While other students worried about a new STD called AIDS, I worried that I wouldn’t know what to do if Robert tried to kiss me. Stop breathing and faint? Run away, maybe? I’d already done that once when I walked into a surprise party he’d planned with Ellen for my twenty-second birthday, complete with streamers, balloons and gifts wrapped in tissue paper and ribbons that didn’t include coconuts with Magic Marker faces.

Outwardly, Robert seemed to deal with the uncertainty—and my neuroses about it—better than I did. “You’re not going right away, so we can enjoy the moment, right?” And while I tried, I often could not. Sometimes I would find myself more upset by his presence than gladdened by it. From the time we acknowledged we were a couple, the emotions I had learned to conceal while I was still living with a mother who couldn’t control hers had risen to the surface. A word, a look or even a thought was enough to set me off. My inability to control what I was feeling sometimes made me think I was losing my mind and becoming the mother I wanted to disown.

One December afternoon, I found myself particularly inconsolable. My thesis had been a disaster. I’d discovered too late that medieval literature was about as fascinating as watching Professor Menard stroke his crotch in class. It had interested me for a moment, but then no more. Now I worried about graduate school. Was I really making the right choice? And more disturbingly, had it even really been mine? Before I met Professor Menard, I’d had vague ideas about going on. But he had been the one to urge me forward by nominating me for a prestigious national fellowship.

I wandered down the hall to Robert’s room and sat down on his floor. He walked from his desk and plopped down next to me. My tears began to fall: more than anything, I didn’t want face what lay ahead.

I looked at him hard. “Are you real?” I asked.

He chuckled. “I’m just as real as you are.”

Robert arms encircled me at the waist. Then, as I worried myself into a quiet frenzy about the future, he gently pulled my face to his and did the one thing that on any other day would have induced a full-blown panic attack.

“How was that?” Robert asked after he’d kissed me.

“OK?” I was too surprised to say anything else.

 

The January after we returned from Christmas vacation, Robert and I were walking through the North Berkeley hills when he pointed to a house with a magnificent view of the San Francisco Bay. He put his arm around my shoulder, cleared his throat and said, “Can you imagine it?”

Rather than follow him into a dream about a future life together, I felt the unquiet stirrings of envy instead. Robert would never have to worry about making a living and doing or buying the things he wanted; my future was much less assured. And although I couldn’t say exactly where I was going, I knew this much: I didn’t want anyone to take care of me, as Robert seemed bent on proving he could do.

I would be reminded of that walk at a cocktail party we attended in early spring at the Claremont Hotel in the Berkeley hills. “It’s where my grandparents spent their honeymoon,” Robert told me. He had just begun a well-paid internship at a small software company located just above the Waldenbooks store where I worked part-time on Shattuck Avenue. Eager to impress his supervisors, he wanted to go— preferably, with a date.

Before we left, he had his roommate take pictures of us. He was dressed in a suit and tie while I was wearing the white sheathe dress I’d bought to attend an end-of-year ball at Trinity College the year before. It felt like we were going to the prom rather than out for cocktails. Robert caught me smirking at the camera.

“Please don’t,” he said. “I want this to be a good memory for us both.”

Mild as it was, his protest struck me as odd. Where was the sense of humor he sometimes told me I didn’t have?

When we arrived in the Toyota he had borrowed from his parents, he immediately began chatting with fellow interns about office projects. I tried to keep from shifting my weight too often, but it wasn’t long before I began to feel like a bored ornament in hot pink heels. About an hour-and-a-half later, I told him I wanted to leave. Excusing himself, Robert walked me back to parking lot.

“I really did want to stay.”

“All I was doing was standing around hanging from your arm. What could I have said to them? I’m a literature major.” Then I added, “You can go back if you want.”

A cloud passed over Robert’s face. “I thought you knew how important all of this was for me.”

Suddenly I understood. It wasn’t about attending. It was about appearance. Worse still, I hadn’t supported him the way he had thought I should have. Before that evening, our relationship had been about enjoying each other’s company freely, though in the shadow of my eventual departure. Now Robert seemed to want to put me—and it—into a box that was as foursquare as he was.