Chapter 2

New Haven, Connecticut

September 2003

It was not exactly love at first sight. In fact, in the beginning, I got Dave Levy all wrong.

We met for the first time in the early autumn of our freshman year. “Camp Yale” is what it is called, a manic and fabulous time right before classes begin, when everyone on the freshman quad is buzzing about, wide-eyed and name-tagged, working hard to set course schedules and learn building names. All interactions in those first few weeks unfold around valiant efforts to find commonalities, exploratory questions to sniff one another out, efforts to gauge whether initial and tenuous points of connection might potentially bloom into genuine friendship.

Oh, you’re from Annapolis? My roommate is from Baltimore! Do you know her?

Oh, you’re interested in ancient Greek philosophy? I loved My Big Fat Greek Wedding!

Oh, you’re on the field hockey team? I am seriously considering intramural Ultimate Frisbee.

And so it goes.

I was out with a big group of people on a Thursday night. It was a quintessential college bar called Old Blue, attached to the lobby of a New Haven hotel, with green carpeting and a big wooden bar in the center with cheesy gold accents. We were freshmen, only eighteen at the time, and so we were not exactly permitted to walk in through the front door of this bar. Our way in came instead from sneaking down the adjacent alley, hopping a chain-link fence, and slipping through the back door of the hotel. From there, after a discreet amount of time (spent hiding in the hotel lobby bathroom), we would slide our way through the lobby and into the bar, hopefully without catching the attention of the doorman on the other side. It was not a sure thing; Thursday nights at Old Blue were notoriously risky, made all the more fun by these thrilling elements of adventure and mischief and, if successful, triumph.

That night, our attempt was successful, and my friend Marya and I slipped giddily into the bar. Very quickly, Marya became engaged in a chummy conversation with a guy I had not yet met. Marya played on the women’s lacrosse team, and I quickly gathered that this guy, Dave, was on the men’s lacrosse team, and that the two of them already had mutual friends and experiences in common.

As I stood there, the unathletic odd one out, I observed Dave. I noted his fit, well-built physique, his quick quips and easy laughter. His interest in a friendly chat with Marya. His apparent lack of interest in talking with me. At one point he turned to me and asked: “Where do you go to college?”

I stared at him in silence, taken aback. I went to the same college he did. The college whose campus literally enfolded the bar in which we stood. The college after which this bar, Old Blue, was named. Had he really just asked me that?

Who is this guy, I wondered? “Meathead” was the common campus vernacular that came to my mind in that moment. I took him to be a pompous frat boy. You see, Dave had the strapping good looks of a hearty Midwesterner and a loud and contagious laugh, and he was generally accompanied by a cadre of other jocular, self-assured, boisterous alpha males. I, too, was outgoing and willing to chat up strangers both male and female, eager to make friends in those early days of college. So when I tried to strike up a friendly conversation with Dave Levy at the bar and he brushed it off without much interest, I assumed it was because he thought himself too cool. It never occurred to me that a seemingly gregarious guy with as much going for him as Dave Levy had ignored me, coming off as cold and aloof, because he was, well, shy.

Our paths did not cross again until the following year. Sophomore fall we were both enrolled in “The History of Art and Architecture” with the beloved professor and art historian Vincent Scully. It was to be Professor Scully’s final year teaching the course after a storied career of almost half a century, so enrollment in the already popular class had swelled. In a massive lecture hall filled with hundreds of students, Dave Levy and I found ourselves seated next to each other.

There was an assignment early that semester in which we had to analyze a piece of furniture, a large wooden armoire, and write an essay on it. Dave and I had several mutual friends, and so we went to the art museum at the same time on a Sunday afternoon to study the armoire. Dave stood there, his face serious as he jotted down some notes, and then he used the word “looming” to describe the wardrobe. I turned to him, head cocked to the side as I thought: Good word.

It sounds so silly, but that was the moment when I realized two things. The first: Dave was smart; he was not some broad-shouldered beef-head who cared about his sports team but not his studies. The second: I had judged him unfairly. And I had pegged him completely wrong.

Dave’s brain—not only his brain, his curiosity—took me by surprise. I am an insatiably curious person, and so are the people I love most. I find it to be one of the most irresistible character traits because it carries this promise: continued learning; constant questioning; an antidote to boredom or passivity.

And the more we got to know each other that fall, the more we talked, the more I saw that Dave possessed this curiosity, this interestedness, this drive to improve his mind. True, Dave was also fun. There was one night on campus, after a party at a New Haven bowling alley, when someone pointed out the fact that Dave bore a resemblance to the Olympic gymnast Paul Hamm. Just then, Dave began to perform a series of cartwheels across the lawn. His ad-libbed routine ended with him diving, headfirst, into a nearby hammock. When I think back to that night, I remember contagious midnight laughter. I remember a lightness around Dave, and my wanting to be near that joy.

But Dave was more than just fun. I was especially surprised when I found out that Dave was on the premed track. My two roommates were premed, and I knew how hard they worked, how heavy their course loads were. Dave shrugged and told me that physics and chemistry came naturally to him. I knew that he also enjoyed history, since we were in the art history class together. And then I found out that he was taking an advanced course on John Milton—a class that I, an English major, had steered clear of because I found it intimidating. This guy had depth; Dave Levy was definitely not the self-involved, beer-swilling jock I had presumed him to be.

A couple of weeks later a few of us from the art history class were studying together for the midterm. Because Professor Scully was very much of the old-school way of doing things, he taped physical prints of all of the paintings and structures to a wall in a building on campus rather than digitizing them for easy dorm-room studying. The only way to study, therefore, was to go to this building, stand before the wall, and try your best to memorize each image. It was all very collaborative and old-fashioned, and you can imagine my delight when I found Dave there night after night that week.

I tried to play it cool. I tried to focus on the sprawling display of temples and churches and statues, scribbling notes and attempting to commit an endless procession of dates to memory. But, naturally, my eyes would slide around the room, aware that Dave was somewhere nearby. Studying for this midterm had gotten very exciting, and it had nothing to do with the temples or statues.

I found Dave, on the final night of that week, standing in a group before the medieval cathedrals. Someone was stumped as to how to determine the differences between Romanesque and Gothic. Dave explained how to identify the lightness and the height that differentiated later Gothic from its predecessor, Romanesque. He rattled off a few significant dates and locations that marked turning points in the architectural trends. We all looked at him. “Whoa, that guy is smart,” some fellow student muttered under his breath. Yeah, I thought, I guess he is.

A few of us gathered that Friday night after the midterm in the dorm room of our mutual friend Peter. We played cards and drank beer and celebrated the fact that the big test was behind us. Dave had a lacrosse scrimmage on Sunday, so he was on a forty-eight-hour rule of no alcohol and could not drink that night. He hung around with the rest of us for hours, laughing and joking. At the end of the night, when he asked if he could see me safely back to my dorm building across campus, I did not play it cool. I gladly accepted his escort as well as the accompanying good-night kiss.

What took me by surprise from the very beginning of our college courtship was just how much I admired and respected Dave. I had never known someone so staunch and unwavering in his commitment to excellence. I had done well in school my whole life; I knew that I was a curious and conscientious person, someone who worked hard and did well, but he made me want to kick it up a notch.

Not only did I admire Dave, but I really liked him; when I spoke to Dave, I felt that he understood what I was saying. He understood me. It was as if we had always been the best of friends—a feeling of being known and a feeling of comfort that comes from speaking honestly and being heard. We laughed at the same jokes, we played off each other, and we quickly developed that ease of exchange that comes from a natural and mutual understanding.

By the end of the semester, as Dave and I were each wrapping up the English papers that were due in our respective classes, it was clear to me that he was a better grammarian than I was. “Would you have time to proofread my paper?” I asked him one day toward the end of the term. He agreed, taking the care to provide thoughtful and thorough notes on how he felt I might improve my paper. When he handed it back to me I stared at my paper, his comments, and then at Dave.

“What?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Are the edits terrible?”

“No,” I answered. “They’re really good.”

“Oh,” he said, sitting up. “Well, good.”

“I’m supposed to be the English major here, and you are correcting my English paper.”

“Yeah?” He shrugged.

What riotously unfair genetic contest did you win to get so good at so many things? I wanted to demand. But instead, I said: “I’m just…impressed. You know, sometimes when people are recruited because they’re really good at a sport, as you are with lacrosse, then that is their priority. And schoolwork is sort of…I don’t know…secondary. You manage to do all of this, and do it well.”

“You know I wasn’t recruited to play lacrosse, right?” he asked.

“What? No, I didn’t know that.”

“I tried out for the lacrosse team,” he said.

“You’re a walk-on?” I asked. “But…but you’re a starter. As a sophomore. I figured lacrosse was your life. Or, at least, your priority.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I almost didn’t make it at all. I was terrible freshman year. Coming from the Midwest? I had no stick skills, compared to these guys who grew up in the lacrosse cultures of Maryland and Long Island, playing in travel leagues since they were young. I knew nothing. Coach just liked me because of how hard I worked and how fast I could run.”

“Really?” I asked, my whole idea of Dave Levy shifting before me.

“Really,” he said. “Freshman fall, Coach had to cut a handful of people. I was surprised every time I made it through a round of cuts. Finally, we’re getting to the final round of cuts, and just a few of us walk-ons are still around, vying for the last spots. One morning we have a timed run out at the fields. The run is going to be no problem.” I nodded as he continued. “So the morning of the run, my roommate turns off my alarm clock without telling me, and I sleep through the run. I wake up, see the time, and panic. All my teammates have already left campus for the fields. I have no ride out to the track. I have no way to make it to the run. I am going to get cut.”

“But”—I bristled at the unfairness of it all—“couldn’t you explain to your coach that your roommate turned off your alarm?”

Dave looked at me with an indulgent smirk. “Blame it on my roommate? You really think he’d go for that?”

“But it was the truth!”

“No excuses,” Dave said. “You miss something as important as a timed run, you’re out.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I hitchhiked, begged a stranger for a ride out to the fields. When I got there, the last group of guys was getting ready to do their run around the track. I hopped the fence and fell in with the second heat of runners when Coach’s back was to me. I smoked the run. Coach never would have known I almost missed the entire thing.”

“Phew,” I said.

“But then I decided to tell him,” Dave said. “I told Coach everything. I admitted that I had been late and had missed the start of the run. I figured he would probably cut me, but I didn’t want to lie to him.”

“So what happened?”

“A few weeks later, I made the team. Coach told me that he really appreciated my honesty.”

I let this sink in. The whole story. I felt such a sense of injustice—his roommate had turned off his alarm clock! I probably would have run straight to the coach and tried to plead and explain and talk through it. But Dave had not treated it as some sob story. He hadn’t wrung his hands at the unfairness. Instead he’d just gotten himself out to the field, and he’d put his head down to work hard and overcome the setback. I admired that so much. Not to mention his integrity in how he spoke the truth to his coach, even when there was little to be gained by doing so.

It all seemed to come into a clearer focus: the bits of Dave that did not quite jibe with the stereotype of the jock—his studiousness, the way he was always just a teensy bit outside the campus lacrosse clique. So many of the things I liked so much about him. It was because Dave Levy was a geek, after all, just like the rest of us! “So, then, you did get in for your grades,” I reasoned.

“I was actually recruited here for football,” he answered. “But I decided to try out for lacrosse instead. I knew that I had more room to improve in that sport.”

A part of me wondered if perhaps all of this was a bit too good to be true.