I loved you very much—that is to say, often, and a great deal. Your arm raised to the side of your face, a backward glance, standing at the top of the stairs. I never met the man who took you to Italy. That came much later.

You showed me the Old World: style, sensuality, betrayal. You gave me the first taste of manhood, or at least a distant image of it. A confidence I had never had before. You did not always give me pleasure, but something more enduring: a ranking of things, how to value them, how to choose.

At the fingertips of my memory: the rivers, steam rising from basement rooms, the gated parks, the faces both young and old, the warm stench of the subway—and most of all, the doormen, sentinels in earmuffs and mittens, like sleigh drivers on a Russian estate.

Mornings in New York. The air astonishingly full of life, nourishing like food. The city’s elegance and famous streets, its always staggering price. The sound of early traffic. The sky above the buildings blemishless and wide. Somewhere in the gallery of love—where the many pictures hang in dusty gold frames, where light and divinity and rumpled beds reveal something eternal—there is one for me, an utterly intimate glimpse. A naked arm fallen from the bed, like Marat’s.

For years after, whenever I visited Manhattan, I thought I saw your face in the crowds, in bookstores or outside theaters, prepared at every moment for the unexpected encounter, the impossible conversation. Wishing and fearing it at the same time.

Once I thought I saw you on the avenue under a blazing midday sun, the streets empty of people. Two blocks ahead. I tried to catch up, but you slipped around a corner or vanished through a doorway.

Visiting Manhattan now, the place is a storehouse of memories. We do not change as we get older, we only collect past selves.

Certain things I remember exactly. They have only been worn slightly by time, like coins in the pocket of an old suit. Most of the details have been rearranged—distorted to make others more vivid. Some of this story is counterfeit, but no less important. One alters the past to make the future.

There was innocence and immaturity. I remember listening to you play “Ashokan Farewell” on the violin, your head bowed, the notes clear and sorrowful above the sound of traffic. We traded Shakespeare quotations like secret codes—I was your patient log man, a bearer of Tazo tea and cheddar bunnies, always arriving with an offering in hand. Unlike me, you always spoke so precisely, a kind of drawing room English. I was the careless one. Once, you told me I’d made you cry at your favorite Vietnamese restaurant, and I understood, even then, that I had broken something without meaning to.

Dinners in Greenwich Village, walks along the lake in Central Park past rhododendron bushes heavy with rain. The piercing blue of your eyes. I called you from a bench in Union Square while you were in Moscow with a symphony orchestra.

Standing with you in Penn Station waiting for a train I felt for the first time that something precious and rare had been entrusted to me, like a lady’s glove. One remembers the happiness. They were not diamonds, they were sapphires perhaps or opals, but in them a shining star.

Later that year, we visited the city on a weekend in October with another couple. The air was filled with the bite of autumn, tingling. We rode the train down from Connecticut with that final stop in Harlem before the dive into darkness and the emergence into Grand Central’s golden air. We walked the few blocks to Bryant Park. The wind whipping across the flagstones of the Public Library. There was the sound of women’s heels.

The other couple broke up a few months after we did. I was sitting on a beach on Cape Cod when he called me. He was blindsided and confused. It was both of our first true heartbreaks. I paced the sand for two hours, offering grand theories about love. We’ve stayed close. He is a tall, lanky Irishman with a charming disorder about him. The women are still friends, too. Some things survive. Some don’t.

***

There were early Manhattans, in the beginning—cold studio apartments in SoHo with soft light and blue carpets. The city felt unscalable then: endless rainy walks, coffee handed down from carts, skipped meals. You were a visitor with little money, no sense of direction, and a few addresses scribbled on paper. This was before iPhones. The city was heavy and substantial: subway turnstiles pushed with the hips, cab doors that clunked satisfyingly shut.

My first memories of New York are as a boy. I dance on the floor piano at F.A.O. Schwartz. My mother tells me to stand still for a photo in Battery Park. We ride the Staten Island Ferry through the rain.

Years later, my father picks me up from boarding school and we drive down for the weekend. Clear October skies over Brooklyn Heights. On our first day, we walk across the bridge into the Financial District. Occupy Wall Street is in full swing. A stiff wind lifts the posters and blows through the drum circles. Men with matted hair in neon green jackets crowd around us. We visit the World Trade Center site. I stare down into the vast hole where the South Tower once stood: a black pool, solemn and cold, its surface rippling like snakeskin in the wind.

It has always been a great city but can quickly become a small one, populated by only a few of one’s acquaintances, faces you begin to see again and again at parties or in subway cars or momentarily from across the street. The real inhabitants of New York—the other several million of them—seem to take up no space at all. Eventually you might come to know a few of them but often in an imperfect way. Their customs and histories are their own, and with it their whole conception of life.

Eventually, everything dissolves, the palaces, the cloud-capped towers.

Initially, after the breakup, visiting New York alone for the first time, the days felt strewn about, organized no longer around some central point. I had achieved nothing. I had a new life, yes, but it was not the life I had dreamed for myself. If only I had turned back and entered the ring again. Risked everything. Instead, I had decided to preserve something of myself. I had hoarded my life. When I finally moved on from New York and its endless possibilities, I realized that I needed finally to make a choice, to become an actuality. 

The thing New York finally offers is an education, not the lessons of school but something more elevated, a view of existence: how to have leisure, food, and conversation, how to look at nakedness, architecture, clothing, all new and seeking to be thought of in a different way. Yet for all it reveals, New York is no place to build a life, raise a family. Something in the island’s soil repels the establishment of deep roots. It can teach you to name all the different kinds of love, but it cannot show you how to do it. For that, you must seek fresh woods and pastures new.

***

New York taught me how to love, but it took leaving to find the woman I would marry. In her gentle brown eyes, the soft declivities of her collarbone and neck, her damp hair stepping out of a shower, I found some deep and inexpressible peace. The decision to ask for her hand in marriage later presented itself as the most terrifying—yet also the clearest, easiest—choice I had ever made.

In this, our second year of marriage but sixth together, she has accepted the challenge of our new life with her whole self: some new perspective awaits us at the top of the next hill, something beautiful hangs in the balance like dew in a spider’s web, something faintly felt is waiting to take fuller shape.

One Saturday afternoon this summer, we visit the Frick Museum. Walking in the shade of the trees along the park, I look at her and would rather look at her than all the portraits in the world. We are going together for the first time. Turner’s sea storms and the light from Vermeer’s big Dutch windows. Surrounded by such awesome beauty, I am only looking for her slender fingers to entwine with mine.

I have come to see that loving is not a matter of calculating and choosing, but of maintaining a kind of openness, a state of perpetual receptivity into which love may enter and expand. You must be surprised by joy. Your heart must be stretched, a process both natural and exquisitely painful—after all, this is what hearts are made for.

The first time we came to New York, I wanted to show her everything. We stood quietly before Klimt at the Neue Galerie, hunted for rare books at the Argosy Bookstore, took the train to Asbury Park and danced on the boardwalk late into the night. She helped me see New York as if for the first time; the scales had fallen from my eyes and like a pilgrim I could see the place in all its holy grime, its hidden splendor.

***

Visiting Manhattan now, neither native nor acolyte—a married man, a tourist. New memories, new rhythms. I am not trying to prove my worth and can finally take the city as it comes. I no longer try to catch my own gaze while walking past shop windows. I know that Manhattan is an optical illusion. A trick mirror. I am old enough not to be deluded by the visions the city throws up in my face. But as I get out of a car or push open a door, I can still hear its siren song in my ears calling: more, more. Like Odysseus, I must tie myself to the mast each time I pass through.

There are houses by rivers in small New England towns. That’s where I imagine us settled one day. The kitchen window looks out onto a bed of flowers and a wrought-iron bench in thick grass. A tree bends in the wind; soft rain flattens the water. 

This is the world of marriage, too. Men are less important here—or at least they will never fully understand such tranquility. It belongs to a different order of existence than the one offered up by Manhattan. It deals not in surface but in substance—an opened Pomegranate, a bloody chicken, cold coffee grounds and fresh soap. This love is not something one can compete for or buy, not something one can obtain through effort. It is divine love, and can only be accepted, like a broken cup or a baby’s hand.

My wife and I catch the train to Boston on Sunday. Disembarking at Back Bay, the specter of Manhattan somewhere behind us on the tracks, we ascend into the dusty old station. My arm around her now. There is the feeling, finally, of courage. Great desire to live on.