Your parents are New Yorkers and raise you a theater kid. They take you to see The King and I and Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera and Cats and Rent but nothing, nothing makes you feel the way The Fantasticks does. You see the show three times, and each time, it floors you. It’s the longest-running musical in the world. For forty-two years, a person could walk off of the street and into the perfect, timeless moment of the little Sullivan Street Playhouse, with the curtain on a clothesline and the paper moon and the enormous costume trunk and the piano and the harp.
The third and last time you see The Fantasticks, you go with the boy. The one who’d always liked the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The one who was first in every way that could matter. First love, first sex, first wounds. First time you thought the way you were in love was special, different, something no one else could ever possibly understand.
Do you remember one of the first things The Girl in The Fantasticks says? It’s this:
I’m sixteen years old, and every day something happens to me….
Oh, ohhhh, ohhhhh! I hug myself till my arms turn blue, and then I close my eyes, and I cry and cry until the tears come down and I can taste them. I love to taste my tears. I am special. I am special! Please, God, please, don’t let me be normal.
Can you remember how you were back then?
You are a senior in high school. It is Connecticut, and it is fall, and you are walking the hallways between classes. Your high school is always under construction and so the ceiling panels are opened to exposed wire and the lighting is sort of dim and flickery but the floor is clean and well waxed because the janitor, Sandro, takes waxing very seriously. He sings operatically as he tends the floors at night. You know this because you are always lingering at the school at night for some activity or play or club, in theory. In practice you are usually sitting on a desk with chairs turned upside down on top of it, listening to Sandro sing.
He calls you his Bella. The floor-waxing apparatus gets strapped to his back and he uses a wand with a fuzzy blade to apply it. The machine makes an enormous sound and Sandro sings loudly, against the noise. He sings in Italian. You think of what he sings as opera but it could have been anything in Italian and you would have said that.
For reasons that are hard to explain, you write your college admissions essay about Sandro. It doesn’t matter what prompt the college gives you, to each school you send this weird little vignette about how nice it is when Sandro sings in Italian at night and how he calls you Bella and how very beautiful the floors of the school are when properly waxed. It seems obvious to you now that this was not a great move. That this was, maybe, at least part of the reason why your dreams of going to college at Pomona to study with David Foster Wallace were crushed.[*] Why almost none of the schools you applied to let you in. Because, honestly, they probably thought you were sleeping with Sandro. Or, still not great, thought your only extracurricular activity was shooting the shit with the janitor. Or, also bad, that your essay was a kind of virtue-signaling about how, sure, you were applying to their fancy school but you weren’t like that really; some of my best friends are janitors. Or, more likely, most egregiously, the Sandro vignette told them you had too big an ego to follow a prompt or instructions. Was proof that you couldn’t swallow your desire to write whatever the hell you wanted for even one minute because you were privileged enough to think of an assignment as restricting your creativity. To think the rules somehow didn’t apply to you.
But of course, it turned out, they did. They always do.
The point is you remember how beautifully waxed the floors were that day, because as a classmate goes running down the otherwise empty hallway toward you, his reflection stretches out in front of him, across the shiny floors. He is quite tall to begin with, and now this long, stretched-out version of him is in the floor, reaching toward you, as he flaps his arms and sort of skips down the hallway shouting in a comically performative voice, “A plane hit the towers, a plane hit the towers!” He isn’t telling you specifically. He isn’t noticing or speaking to you. But this is how you hear about the attack. He doesn’t even understand what he is saying yet, you’re pretty sure. He just knows he is in possession of some kind of dramatic news and is trumpeting it. And that’s what you’ll always think about when you think about 9/11: the way this classmate seemed to stretch out forever as he was reflected in Sandro’s perfectly waxed floors.
This isn’t a 9/11 story. But it matters that it was just after 9/11, because after the attacks a lot of Broadway was struggling, since tourists were too scared to go into the city. Your former-New Yorker parents definitely thought George Bush could shove his capitalist jingoism right up his butt when he said that the best thing Americans could do in response to the tragedy was shop, but also, the highest form of patriotism they could think of was donating blood and then buying a lot of theater tickets to save Broadway and making reservations at Sardi’s. Was going into the city and acting like New Yorkers immediately. Let’s call it Patriotic Thespianism.
You see a lot of shows that season.
In December, the boy comes home from college for Christmas. Is he still your boyfriend? You’ve decided to keep dating long-distance, and you talk on the phone all the time, but when you think about it now, it’s clear he was fucking other people and you were not. But you believe he is your boyfriend hard enough to reject the advances of the boys at school, who are probably infinitely better choices, but do any of them want to take the train into the recently attacked city to see a musical with you over winter break? No, they do not. And so they don’t stand a chance.
You want to see The Fantasticks with the boy because he is also a theater kid. Had been, in fact, the king of the theater kids. The first time you’d ever properly seen him was before you even started dating, when he played Harold Hill in the middle-school production of The Music Man, and right away you loved him so fucking much.
The boy has never seen The Fantasticks and you think of it as terribly romantic, and so you get tickets. The lights go down in the little theater, a moment that never doesn’t thrill you, and the overture plays. It gives you goose bumps.
You know all the lyrics to the show by heart, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but when the narrator eventually starts singing the musical’s most famous song, you hadn’t seen it coming:
Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow
Try to remember and if you remember
Then follow…
You cry, and the boy cries, and the whole audience and most of the cast and even the harpist cries. The song hasn’t changed, but everything around it has.
The Fantasticks is a musical in two parts. The first act consists of an entire happy love story, at the end of which the cast assembles into an intricate blocking arrangement resembling a family portrait, and from these poses, they conclude a great, swelling number called “Happy Ending.” When the lights come up on Act Two, the cast appears frozen in these same postures. As if you had left them there all intermission. Several ominous minor keys are played as they fidget and grimace and attempt to hold together their tableau. Then, The Girl picks an imaginary plum from a tree in her father’s garden.
She bites it and says, “This plum is too ripe.”
The Girl and The Boy split up and go out to see the world. “I’d like to be not evil, but a little worldly wise,” the girl sings. They suffer, they learn, they return home. And they are different now, but they fall in love again.
After the show, you and the boy leave the playhouse, and walk around the village holding hands and looking at all the Christmas lights and you feel very worldly and grown-up. Then the boy realizes he’s lost his wallet. You turn back toward the playhouse to look for it. It’s hard to describe why this lost wallet feels like such an emergency but that’s how fragile your happiness seemed back then. A lost wallet was the sort of thing that could sour the mood and ruin the whole day. You try to trace your steps back to the places you’ve been.
You walk all the way back to the theater and still have not found the wallet, but they are nice enough to let you go inside and look. All the houselights are up, which makes the stage look a little sad and stripped of its magic and there is an old man sweeping the floors. The boy starts looking for his wallet, but you decide to ask the old man, perhaps because, as we’ve established, you believe in the powers of janitors.
You tell him why you are there and he asks where you were sitting. You rattle off your seat numbers and he moves to the row without having to look at any of the labels; he knows the theater’s coordinates by heart. He lifts the boy’s wallet from the floor and you both thank him, for finding the wallet, for saving your day, saving the mood, saving the moment—just all of it. You leave the theater arm in arm, almost skipping.
Imagine how sweet the plum still was.
The planes hit the towers in September, and by January The Fantasticks is gone. Your mother is watching the news in the kitchen and she yells out to you, “The Sullivan Street Playhouse is closing!” You rush in and there, on TV, is the man who’d been sweeping the floor and gave you back the wallet. It’s Lore Noto. The producer who’d put up the show in the first place. Who ran the Sullivan Street Playhouse all those years. Lore Noto gave you back the day by finding the wallet.
You call the boy at college and tell him about the playhouse closing. About Noto. And he also freaks out over the sadness and magic of it all. This is such a satisfying reaction that you are sure, all over again, that the two of you will last forever. Because he gets it. He understands about things like The Fantasticks, and Sandro’s singing, and your classmate’s reflection, and every painful-beautiful bit of the world you are convinced no one else understands because whenever you try to explain how keenly you feel it all, people look at you funny (I am special! I am special!).
It is infinitely preferable to believe that you and the boy are special than to accept that going around feeling lonely and misunderstood and out of sync with other people is just what it feels like to be a person. To be alive. That this is what life is like for everyone.
To this day, listening to The Fantasticks overture on a pair of headphones is enough to seize your arms with gooseflesh. But most of the time, when you tell people about The Fantasticks they’ve never heard of it. Even people who like theater. And this mystifies you because it seemed like they were always there, conjuring magic every night on Sullivan Street. But things can disappear just like that. Even the longest-running musical in the world.
The boy is your longest-running relationship. The person who appeared and reappeared and mattered for the longest stretch of your life.
Did you take the boy to that show to prove to him that you and he, like the second-act Fantasticks, could be separated and then find each other again? Did you imagine that the rules of the world, all its Septembers and buildings fallen down, didn’t apply to you? You did. It never occurred to you that when you tried to return to the theater where you and the boy put on your best shows, it would be gone. That the two of you could change so much that you wouldn’t be able to trace your steps back to the kids you once were.
* Yes, you hear yourself, but the loss of this alternate future, even now, gives you the howling fantods.