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Private Notes
“Ours was a common and unsung friendship, that between women living in New York, single and alone, and the doormen who take care of them, acting as gatekeepers, bodyguards, confidants and father figures.”
“I tossed out one last question: ‘Have you ever been in love?’ No one, he said, had ever asked him that in an interview. ‘Yes,’ he finally answered. ‘But I didn’t realize it until it was too late.’ Then he asked me to turn off my recorder. I hit Stop."
“My personal life was another story. In love there’s no hiding: You have to let someone know who you are, but I didn’t have a clue who I was from one moment to the next.”
“We rallied, not with the adrenaline-pumping determination to win at all costs, but with the patience and control that came with not wanting it to be over: not the summer, not our son’s childhood, not this game, ever.”
“There is never a good time to fall off your couch onto a martini glass and begin losing a dangerous amount of blood, but having this happen in the middle of a promising date is an especially bad time.”
“He was very handsome. He wore gray turtleneck sweaters and smelled like mint aftershave and old books. He was 55 and recently divorced for the second time. He was my father. He wasn't really my father.”
“There was no guarantee that doing an open adoption would get us a baby any faster… in fact, our agency warned us that, as a gay male couple, we might be in for a long wait.”
“Old love is different. In our 70s and 80s, we had been through enough of life’s ups and downs to know who we were, and we had learned to compromise. The finish line was drawing closer.”
"Driving, with the top down, I’m reminded that I too can shift gears, face risk, handle inconvenience — and survive tragedy. My partner, eyes misting, says: 'You love that car. And your husband was an extraordinary man.'"
"I'm a vampire, basically — going to bed around 8 or 9 a.m. and waking around 4 or 5 p.m. First dates usually go OK because they’re in the evening, but complications quickly arise."
"We met on a train. A perfect, flirtatious, six hours. The beginning of our love story? Trusting in the power of the universe, we hadn’t exchanged mobile numbers. Sometimes, a romantic plan isn’t enough."
"He was everything a 10-year-old girl could ever hope for in a man. It was decided; I was in love. I started to wonder if the glow from my wedding dress would make him look washed-out. I began devising a plan in which he and I would end up '2gether 4ever,' as all my notebooks stated."
"In retrospect, maybe I should have known who I was the first time I went looking for a quiz called 'Am I gay?' But I didn’t."
"A few months later, I was in the psychologist’s reception room, paying for my fourth really good cry, when a woman carrying a child walked in. I didn’t recognize her at first, and then I remembered her face. 'Are you the wife of the guy my wife is having an affair with?' I asked tactlessly. 'Yeah,' she said. 'But we’re not together anymore.'"
"I don’t remember his last name. He was handsome, with a nice smile and startlingly blue eyes. The sex was good, I think. We didn’t know each other well. We never would."
"On this night, long after we had thrown in the towel on us, here we were again, crawling back into the ring. This time, though, it would be different. We just never imagined how different it would become, or how quickly."
