"That Was the Day I Married New York"

Photograph of the Statue of Liberty by Kevin Forest/Getty Images.

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 5

I’ve only recently discovered that my ex has found someone new. A woman with dogs. And a farm. In Wisconsin. He’s talking about moving in with her.

OK, I made up the farm part. I know Wisconsin residency doesn’t automatically entitle you to acreage, but I’m sure she has more square feet than I do now, living in Manhattan. And so here I am, looking again at my own decisions. I’m struggling with the fact he and I haven’t talked since January. And I’m also struggling with the recognition that I chose something over him: a city.

We dated for approximately eight years, or, as I like to measure it, about the entirety of the second Bush administration. We started up in St. Paul, Minn., where we both lived at the time, sometime after George and Laura walked into that hall in Texas to accept the Supreme Court decision. We broke up by phone a few days after the inaugural love-in for Obama in Washington. Sad but true: We survived the search for weapons of mass destruction but stopped short of change you can believe in.

We were an off-and-on thing and spent the last five years of our relationship in different states. We broke up often enough that whenever I called a friend to say that it was over this time, really over, she would make clucking sounds of sympathy and then ask if I still had that recipe for Roman salad, the one with the fennel in it. And did I want to go for a movie this weekend?

When a mutual friend broke the news to me, gently, with delicate hesitation on the phone—“he has a girlfriend’’—I burst out with hearty laughter, surprising us both.

Still, the details got to me—the dogs and Wisconsin and the fact that he might be moving in with her. In eight years, I couldn’t get the guy to share the same zip code, especially not after I moved to New York.

I got off the phone pretty quick. There was something in my eyes.

Our last six months had been pretty disastrous. We would make elaborate plans to get together to share holidays and vacations. I spent time at his family cabin in central Minnesota; he traveled to New York to nurse me after knee surgery. Soon enough, however, we would vex each other. Our Christmas was especially bad. We became that ugly couple you see out shopping now and then; a horror duo at the Pottery Barn, clenching their teeth and hissing at each other over scented candles.

Only it’s never about the candles. I had suggested we buy a fixer-upper in the country outside Manhattan. It never happened. He didn’t want to leave Minnesota and I, it turned out, didn’t want to leave New York.

At the end of her Manhattan Memoir’ trilogy, the late Mary Cantwell talks about the day she first arrived in New York, a portable typewriter in one hand, a suitcase of clothes in the other. The memory comes back to her when she is in a hospital bed: a picture of her younger self, standing there in Grand Central Terminal. She writes: “That was the day, I realized on the instant, that I embraced my true bridegroom. That was the day I married New York.’’

She did it when she was young. I moved here in my mid-40s, and that first year was a rough one. The truth is that I couldn’t have done it without the ex, who arrived and selflessly sawed and hammered and hung things until my apartment felt like home. I owe him that one. He had lived here before, but in a darker time, the early ’80s, and I wonder now if he didn’t think that eventually I would tire of the city and come back home.

Only I didn’t tire of it. I’m still not tired of it. I ride my bike down the lanes of the West Village and I look at the buildings with affection, as if they were friends. The people-watching alone could keep me here. Not long ago, I was eating lunch in a small restaurant on Hudson Street when an octogenarian woman walked by, her hair dyed orange to match her orange-colored little dog, her dyed orange fake eyelashes flapping with each stride.

I loved her. I loved her certainty in herself. When I was contemplating the end of my relationship with the ex, I thought about one of the home truths of writing, that you should go to whatever question scares you the most; that’s probably where the best material is. What, I wondered, if I did that with my life? What if I went after the very thing that frightened me?