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Michelle was my dorm’s RA my freshman year at Hofstra University. She was a senior and felt to me like a competent older sister, whose attention, I could sense, was already turning to life after school. If I had a question, I could find her in her special, RA apartment, with its own living room and a little kitchen, and she would answer my question patiently. I appreciated her knowledge and calm. There was much that was new and unknown that year, and it was good to have someone available who seemed to have been through it all.
I also thought she was pretty, though in a very grownup way. The rest of us, the ones who weren’t RA’s, always seemed to be on display for one another, on the lookout, sizing up all the possible partners. Not Michelle. Somehow, that was over for her in a way that I was only used to seeing in my friends’ parents.
I did go running with her once. We went down to a nearby track and ran a few miles together. At that time, I was still trying to stay in my high school sprinter’s shape, and so after our miles, I ran a few 200-meter dashes. Then we sat on the grass and talked about school and running, and I complained that I didn’t think I’d be able to stay as fit as I’d once been in. “I don’t know,” she said, her head down. “You seem like you’re in pretty good shape to me.”
There was something odd and sad about how she’d said it. It was as if she was comparing herself unfavorably to me. I couldn’t understand at first why she’d do that, but I noticed something about her then that I hadn’t before: she wasn’t happy. I got the feeling her unhappiness had something to do with what she saw when she looked at life beyond school. Though I was drawn to troubled girls, found them more interesting than the happy ones, her troubles, I knew, were beyond my eighteen-year-olds ken.
A few weeks later I poked my head into her apartment with another question. There was a large man sitting at the little table in her living room. He didn’t look up at me, didn’t so much as a shift in his chair. He had a double-chin and a face I couldn’t imagine smiling. Michelle appeared from the kitchen with a sizzling frying pan and began ladling chicken onto the man’s plate. He accepted the food without looking at her, just sat staring ahead as if there was no one else in the room. It was like she was his servant.
“I’ll be with you in a little bit,” she said to me. “Is that okay?”
“Fine, fine,” I said and backed out of the room as quickly as I could.
I soon learned that the man was from Saudi Arabia and was some kind of prince. I disliked him now on many levels. I thought he was ugly, deeply ugly, personally ugly, and that he did not deserve Michelle. He should go for a run and then thank her for the goddamned chicken. When I saw him around campus, I wanted to remind him that he was in a democracy, not a monarchy. I had vague fantasies of saving Michelle from life with this man, but I could feel already how bound together they were as if some complicated contract had been signed.
That winter my Western Civilization class took a field trip to New York City to see a play. On the bus ride in I sat with three other freshman, all girls, two of whom lived in my dorm. I mentioned Michelle and her boyfriend. “What the hell is up with that?” I asked. “Have you seen the guy? Have you met him? It doesn’t make any sense.”
The girls all exchanged glances.
“What?” I said.
“Well,” said the one next to me, “there’s the money.”
“The money? What, you mean because he’s a prince or whatever?”
They all shrugged. “Of course,” said another. “It’s a lot of money.”
“But what about love? You can’t make a choice like that because of money. That’s crazy.”
They all shrugged again. I collapsed into my seat, profoundly disillusioned. It was 1983, and I thought feminism had ended all that. I couldn’t come to grips with her making this choice and with my classmates so easily understanding why she would. It stayed on my mind throughout all five acts of The Rivals. Plays like this were often filled people marrying for money or position–but that was fiction. In real life, you keep living after the curtain goes down, after the wedding night, after you’ve bought the new house. In real life, you have to keep living and living and living.
I would like to give this story a happy ending, but I have no idea whatever happened to Michelle and the prince. I can tell you that when I married Jen, my wife, money did not enter into our thinking. For one, neither of us had much of it. We have more of it now, which is nice, but the more I live and live and live, the more I learn that there a million ways to make money, but there is still only one Jen.
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