Best Intentions Read Online Free PDF Page A

walking the streets, perhaps eating in the same restaurants. I could feel him sometimes just around a corner, though by chance or design we never actually bumped into each other.
    I thought of him more often than I cared to admit. It had been so easy at first between us. It seemed to be always fall then, the sloppy, cozy messiness, the warmth of our hands sliding beneath sweaters as we lay together on dank campus lawns, the musty smell of books as we sat in the library, our legs sneaking up against each other until neither of us could see the words, make sense of anything but each other, late nights spent confiding the nooks and crannies of our lives, skin, most of all skin, discovering the curves of my own body beneath his touch so that later, alone, I would retrace his path with my fingertips. I had made love with only one boy before—and that was not borne out of passion, but simply my desire not to be a virgin when I went to college—so in every way that mattered Sam was my first. We were both so porous, so unguarded in our love. Maybe that can truly happen only once, that unbruised optimism, that total lack of reserve or doubt. I still have, someplace, the notes he used to slip in my backpack, under my door, in my coat pocket when I wasn’tlooking, adorning them with quirky little line drawings and proclamations of love, unembarrassed, fearless. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.
    Sometimes in the beginning, we would lie in whatever narrow dorm bed we could appropriate and indulge in a luxurious worry about that very ease, wondering if it—we—could be real. But we were just playing with the concern from the self-congratulatory distance of requited love, deep down we believed we were invulnerable. After almost two years together, though, we both began to test, to stretch the skin of our bond. Because it was the only serious relationship either of us had been in, it was normal, I suppose, for some curiosity to fester, if only so we could reassure ourselves that we truly did belong together. But trying to prove a negative when it comes to love is a dangerous proposition. In London for a semester during my senior year (which, thankfully, my scholarship covered) I made the mistake of sharing a snippet of uncertainty in a letter to Sam, whose response was to embark on a brief and, he later insisted, thoroughly meaningless affair.
    When I returned, there were teary confessions, though Sam refused to tell me who the girl was other than that she was a junior majoring in philosophy, of all ridiculous things. For years I’ve pictured a spindly, neurasthenic girl in a moth-eaten sweater talking about Kierkegaard while she fucked my future husband. I admitted to a single night with a Moroccan exchange student I met in a Muswell Hill pub. (In fact, I had run out on him before anything really happened, but I was angry with Sam and wanted to even the score.) In the end, we decided to forgive each other’s transgressions and pick up where we left off, but it wasn’t that simple. The difference between what we had been and what we were now, flawed, suspicious, resentful, proved too jarring. We moved to Manhattan within weeks of each other, but by then we were no longer speaking.
    Within a couple of years, I grew weary of the single life, trying on personalities, trying on men, the bass player in an eighties band making an all-too-brief comeback, the corporate lawyer who taught me to play poker with his friends but pouted like a spoiled two-year-old when he lost, the restaurant owner who brought me massive amounts of leftover food every night that I threw out as soon as he left—no one seemed to fit. What had at first seemed a landscape of infinite possibility came to feel aimless and disorienting. The city constantly shape-shifted around me; there were so many potential groups of friends, alliances, neighborhoods, so many people you could be. Deirdre was better at it than I was. After a