Chapter 4
New Haven
Fall 2004
A few months after Dave and I started dating, an acquaintance who knew both of us raised a dark specter of doubt with an offhand comment that was not sitting right. “You and your siblings must always wonder if people are dating you for the right reasons or if they are just interested in your last name.”
Huh. No, I had not really thought about that. For the most part, I considered myself a fairly good bullshit detector. I had had my whole childhood to learn. It’s generally pretty apparent, easy to sniff out the users—they make their intentions clear with their overemphasis of your last name or the favors they ask for.
Take my first day of high school. I remember how nervous I was—I was insecure and unsure of what to expect, as are pretty much all freshmen, right? As I was walking into biology class, an attractive senior guy held the door open for me. I paused and smiled my thanks; I was so taken aback by the unsolicited act of kindness that this stranger, a senior boy, was showing me. Maybe high school would not be as intimidating as I had feared. A moment later the guy raised his hand to his mouth and, while still holding the door, shouted to the entire hallway: “Her dad is the governor! I have to hold the door open for her or she’ll have me thrown in jail!”
Countless eyes turned in my direction, stares of newfound interest and curiosity. Some sniggered, some whispered. I think my wince was noticeable; I’m certain my scorched cheeks were. I wanted to trade places with the canned worms that awaited me in the biology classroom, pickled in formaldehyde and fated for dissection. I was a nervous, skinny fourteen-year-old girl on my first day of freshman year, just trying to find my way from one classroom to the next and maybe make a friend or two. The last thing I wanted was to be singled out in the rush of the packed high school hallway, the target of some jocular senior’s joke, marked so publicly as different. But moments like this happened all the time. So I learned, at a very young age, how to carry and gird myself as the eyes fixed on me with interest and curiosity.
I fancied that I had learned how to cut through all that and had succeeded in surrounding myself with only genuine and down-to-earth friends. One of my best friends in college later confessed that she had gone weeks in the early part of freshman year thinking my roommate was the governor’s daughter. I loved that. In fact, whenever possible, I tried to go as long as I could with some new acquaintance without mentioning my last name. As a kid I had loved the anonymity of summer camp—a place where no one knew my last name and I could relish a few weeks of being just like everyone else. In fact I had lived in fear each summer of people learning my full name or asking what my father did.
But now this girl had raised this question. And she knew that I was dating Dave Levy. Did she know something about him that I did not? Was she implying something, trying to gently warn me? Dave was affable and romantic and sensitive and he got me and we laughed at the same jokes—but was it all just a really great act?
I decided to investigate. My friend Peter was, like me, an English major, and we had taken several classes together. Peter and Dave had pledged Delta Kappa Epsilon the previous year and had quickly become fast friends with their similar senses of humor and shared Chicago upbringing. Peter knew I had been seeing Dave. He was in the art history class with us. I asked Peter, point-blank, what he could tell me about Dave, and whether he thought it was a good idea that I date him.
I will never forget Peter’s response. “I’ve never known someone who so consistently strives for excellence in every area of his life. Whether it’s his academics, his athletics, his friendships, or anything else, Dave works really hard to do everything well. I have no doubt that that is how he would approach your relationship.”
I came to see that this was a defining feature of Dave’s; he worked hard—really hard—at everything he did. A large part of this, I soon learned, had been instilled in him as a young boy. Dave lost his hearing when he was a year old due to an ear infection. Doctors believed Dave would be deaf for life, but his parents decided to have him undergo an operation. The medical procedure worked and Dave recovered his hearing, but he had lost nearly a year—a critical portion of early childhood development—and had fallen far behind the level of his peers.
To compensate for this lost time, Dave had been enrolled in intensive special education as a young boy. He went to a public kindergarten in the morning and then in the afternoon rode another bus to a school for children with learning disabilities.
When Dave was older and his former school bus driver heard from Dave’s brother that Dave would be attending Yale after his high school graduation, this bus driver believed that Dave’s brother was mocking Dave. But it was the truth—the same Dave he had known as a little boy so far behind his peers had gone on to captain his sports teams, earn the title of valedictorian of his high school, and be accepted to the college of his dreams.
To overcome these odds and achieve these accolades in spite of the many factors working against him, Dave had had to work his little tail off. He’d had to harness the ability to be singularly focused, hard-charging, unrelenting—and he’d never grown out of these characteristics.
“I love…” Dave paused, “going out to dinner with you.”
It was several months after we began dating. Dave and I spent every moment together that we could. I was in love with him; I’d started falling the moment I saw him cartwheeling across the grass at midnight. I’d fallen fast and hard, which was actually very unlike me. I suspected—I hoped—that perhaps Dave loved me, too, but he had not said as much.
Instead, every time we did something together, Dave would say “I love…” and then trail off.
“I love…watching movies with you.”
“I love…studying with you.”
“I love…talking on the phone with you.”
At first I found it adorable. After a few weeks, I was beginning to find it frustrating. But what about me? I wondered. Do you love me? Or am I alone over here?
Finally, my patience expired, I brought it up. We were out at a bar one Saturday night with friends in early February. Dave said his usual thing: “I love being out with you.”
“But what about me?” I asked.
Dave looked at me for a moment, taken aback. “What?”
The bar was loud. I leaned closer so he could hear me: “You keep saying how much you love doing these things with me. But do you love me?”
Dave took my hand and steered me away from the crowd, toward a quieter section. We sat down next to each other in a stairwell. “Alli,” he said, still holding my hand. “I love you so much that I didn’t even know how to tell you. I’ve never been in love before; I don’t know what I’m doing. I didn’t know if you felt the same way. I’ve been saying these things, I love…going out to dinner with you…trying to gauge your reaction. Trying to see if you felt the same way.”
I laughed—a nervous, giddy, bracing laugh.
He continued. “I didn’t know how to make it special enough, to show you how much I love you. Next week is Valentine’s Day—I thought maybe I could tell you then?”
I squeezed his hand. “You mean to tell me you’ve been sitting on a secret this good for this long, just to wait for Valentine’s Day?”
“I just thought…I thought it should be some grand gesture…” he said. “I don’t know, I’ve never done this before.”
“I’d rather you not wait for Valentine’s Day,” I said.
“I guess now the cat’s out of the bag,” he said. “I love you. I never knew I could love someone the way I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
And so we fell. We fell hard. We were young, and we were drenched in the chemical flood of endorphins that comes from a new love and a new relationship. Dave’s parents have since confessed to me that they worried about how in love we were because they were certain that our relationship could never last through the travails of college and growing up and medical school, and that that would spell disaster for Dave. “You met too early,” they believed.
But they need not have worried. I had never known anyone like Dave. I had never seen so eye-to-eye with someone. He made me playlists on my clunky old iPod, and they were songs I already knew and loved mixed with songs I had not already known but quickly came to love. He shared my love for Elton John and Journey and Led Zeppelin, and he introduced me to the Eagles and Tim McGraw and Pink Floyd. “Great taste in music!” I exclaimed. Another notch in the plus column.
I hadn’t expected it, but I was really excited about Dave, about seeing where things could go between us. I explained to my girlfriends that it was like living on a hill; I had enjoyed a fine view, but now I realized that it was possible to climb to an even higher foothold, where the view was even better. Previous boyfriends had been good guys and we had had good relationships, some better than others. But Dave was different—more complex, more of a challenge, a partner who truly made me want to be a better version of myself. Now that I knew that this view existed, I could not imagine going back down.
Salad days. It’s an expression coined by Shakespeare. Cleopatra speaks the phrase in the play Antony and Cleopatra, commenting on her young love with Julius Caesar: “My salad days, when I was green.” The rosy period of one’s youth—the time when a person is green, raw, fresh. A time of innocence and exuberance and carelessness and, yes, naïveté. Naïveté made possible in large part because life has not yet been too long or too hard and the luck has not yet run out.
“You’re lucky,” a friend said to me that first year that Dave and I were dating. I knew it was true. I was lucky to have found Dave.