FROM THAT NIGHT FORWARD we were a couple. I would return home from teaching and find the red light blinking on my answering machine. (Her modesty evident in this too: she always opened her message with, “Hi, it’s Laura,” as if in the intervening twelve hours I might have forgotten the sound of her voice.) Or I’d walk straight to her one-bedroom apartment on Eighty-ninth and Columbus, to which just a few minutes earlier she’d returned from her administrative job at Lincoln Center. Often she greeted me at the door still dressed in her cold-weather work clothes: white or blue blouses and trim gray flannel pants, a navy cashmere blazer and black ankle boots. Plainly elegant, well-made things were what she liked. She had grown up with money, though most of the time she took pains not to show it. This was the locus of her private contradictions: she wasn’t vain in the least but she dutifully took excellent care of herself, as though she instinctively felt obliged to uphold the standards of appearance she’d been raised with. Once a month she went to a chic East Side salon to get her hair cut. Opalescent half-moons floated on her perfect, unpainted fingernails.
She was slender, small-boned, physically and emotionally discreet. From my adolescence ogling her down hallways and through half-closed doors, across vast rooms, I’d imagined her as a cold and willful queen. But I was wrong. Laura turned out to be gentle, kind, on occasion thoughtful to the point of passivity. It was five weeks before she would undress in front of me with a light on in the room (and then she rushed quickly into bed, like someone hurrying naked through the cold). When we made love the first time and she came, in the dark, in her own bed, her arms wrapped as far around me as they could go, her brief, poignant cry held a note of surprise or confusion, as if she’d just discovered that passion was really only another form of vertigo.
In the spring I moved in with her. I was a hermit crab, ditching my one-room apartment like a spent shell, scrabbling sideways with vigor. No crying or weeping, no memories to speak of. And my furniture, the corduroy sleeper sofa, my mother’s old chest of drawers, heavy as a yak—all this went onto Ninety-seventh Street one morning, and by nightfall was gone.
She lived, surprisingly, in one of those recently built yuppie towers, a high-rise sided in toneless brick—though otherwise chock-full of amenities, such as an in-house gym, designed to appeal to the legion of young bankers who had flocked to the neighborhood in the last few years. Still, way up on the fifteenth floor, it wasn’t so bad. Laura’s apartment faced west, and received plenty of afternoon light.
There was a comfortable sofa and a leather reading chair. There was her impressive collection of opera CDs and her books, novels by the Brontë sisters and James and Ford Maddox Ford, the stories of Chekhov and Alice Munro and William Trevor, the poems of Emily Dickinson. There was her equestrian library, still intact as I remembered it, how-tos on English riding and show jumping, an encyclopedia of equine body types, a catalogue of rare handmade saddles. On these titles and others the dust jackets had been worn from countless childhood handlings to a clothlike nap, the very feel of the past.
I added my belongings to hers. She encouraged this. She did more than make room; she opened her life wide to me. It may sound ridiculous to talk about manners in this day and age, but I believe that Laura’s manners were as important and as fine an expression of her true nature, her tender modesty and thoughtfulness of spirit, as any speech or promise she ever made. She did not tell lies, either in gesture or in word. She did not flirt or tease. There was a reason why animals, dogs and horses above all, trusted her implicitly, often would come forward from wherever they were playing or running or feeding to thrust their wet noses against the palm of her hand, or sometimes simply to lean into her.
A good person, in other words. Someone who, despite her own intrinsic reservations and fears, with courage tried to give all of herself, to love with a full heart while holding nothing back.