Riding with Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Love Story
by Ross Kenneth Urken
The Paris
Review – First Person
February
14, 2013
Three Fourth of July weekends ago, on a crowded
Hampton Jitney, beach bag strategically placed so no one could take the seat
next to me, I watched a flustered blonde board and sit down directly
across the aisle. Think Marilyn Monroe gone boho in the East End swelter. The
LIRR had broken down, and she had spent several frustrating hours in the
humidity of Westhampton waiting for a train that wouldn’t be fixed.
By contrast, I was cool and composed, having spent the
day at a painter friend’s vernissage. At the time, I was a lowly
twenty-three-year-old magazine intern and had met the artist while covering an
event. Now I was craving some solitude. Slouched and brooding, knees
tucked up into the seat before me, I closed myself off. Coupled with my
tote-bag force field, I hoped my general vibe said, “No conversation please.”
As she threw down the bag slung over her shoulder, I
saw she was clutching a faded pink hardcover, a book of collected poems by Edna
St. Vincent Millay. I caught her looking at me—a glance I interpreted as one of
contempt. People who take up two seats... But when she had settled in
and we began to furtively study each other through the half-light, I realized
my misappraisal: she was more curious than anything. We tested the limits of
our peripheral vision like elementary school pupils.
The captivity of a bus—coupled with the urgency of a
short trip—blends with the spontaneity of bus reservations (compared, say, to
planes booked in advance) to make chance encounters inevitable and last minute
shifts in fate possible. Millay’s poem “Travel,” in retrospect, seems freakily
appropriate for the cancelled LIRR and the day’s noisy disruption: “The
railroad track is miles away, / And the day is loud with voices speaking, / Yet
there isn’t a train goes by all day / But I hear its whistle shrieking.”
She would later tell me she was struck by how
relaxed I appeared when she, by contrast, had undergone such an ordeal. How
composed my body language, how casual my unbuttoned shirt (truth be told, what
she interpreted as Zen was really just exhaustion).
I decided to say hello first, and we started to talk;
the memory of the exact exchange is hazy, imbued as the moment was with the
fluttering nerves and saccharine rush of a first encounter your subconscious
recognizes as significant before you truly do.
She was an actress who nannied in the Hamptons between
roles. Judging by my madras shorts and boat shoes, she assumed I was some kind
of pool boy. Not quite, but I was
probably one of the few on our bus without a family home somewhere between
Quogue and Montauk. We playfully guessed each other’s names.
“Vanessa?” I said. (What, does he think I’m some kind of bitch?)
“Joshua?” she tried. (Is it that obvious I’m Jewish?)
Tiffan, as it turned out she was called, told me she
specialized in musical theater and that she was from Oklahoma. I told her I was
a writer from New Jersey.
“Of poetry?” she asked, indicating the Millay.
“No, no,” I said. I told her I wrote journalism and
was working on a novel. I was brazen enough to have a business card at the time
that read, “Ross Kenneth Urken–Belletrist.”
As Millay continues in “Travel” (and would it be
insane to assume this poem dictated the very course of our actions?), “All
night there isn’t a train goes by, / Though the night is still for sleep and
dreaming, / But I see its cinders red on the sky, / And hear its engine
steaming.”
Our conversation was interrupted. We had pulled into a
rest stop to funnel two half-filled buses into one Manhattan-bound coach.
Tiffan handed me her MacBook, cushioned in a pink case, and went into the
Starbucks. It was a moment of trust but also of collateral—guaranteeing that
she’d see me and continue our acquaintanceship. As we reboarded some minutes
later, I handed the laptop back to her. But I lingered too long: the only seat
available was next to a lady with a yappy dog in the three-seat back row next
to the bathroom.
At tight turns I would peer over the seats and down
the bus’s nave to catch a glimpse of her. She would later tell me she resisted
the urge to look back.
Back in the city I got off before Tiffan, but I said
goodbye in the aisle and we exchanged cards. Millay ends “Travel” with a focus
on the cordiality of new figures and the spontaneity and excitement of
travel—something that evening surely provided: “My heart is warm with friends I
make, / And better friends I’ll not be know; / Yet there isn’t a train I
wouldn’t take, / No matter where it’s going.”
I try to pretend that I wrote her some two weeks
later, but the truth is I messaged her on Facebook the next morning. She, for
one, was alarmed that we had no mutual friends (this fact would scare me later:
had I not gotten on the Jitney that evening, had I decided to come back
earlier, had I not covered the party where I met my painter friend whose
invitation catalyzed this new trajectory, had the LIRR not broken down...).
We finally managed to meet some ten days later at
Giovanna’s, a little place on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. On
the restaurant’s sign, there is a picture of a cloaked woman in sunglasses.
That woman in the logo was walking around the sidewalk of the restaurant that
evening in real life—stooped and shuffling. Tiffan asked me in a stage whisper
what she could possibly be doing. We were suspicious. Both of us are now
convinced she was probably casting a love spell on us: we have been back to
Giovanna’s numerous times and haven’t seen her since.
When we stood from the table, we gravitated toward
each other magnetically for a kiss. The waiters cheered, and we floated west,
pausing for extended teenage make-outs against the brick walls of Little Italy.
A half dozen cabs drove by and beeped at us, viewing us as an easy target to
bring to a homestead. It was two lovers and a self-replenishing stream of
yellow taxis, blaring insistently.
A car with Jersey plates passed. The driver rolled
down his window. “When’s the wedding?”
I had planned to move to Berlin. But love was an
overpowering force, and this was not just a summer fling. I had decided to
stay—found it impossible to leave her.
“Can I keep you?” she asked me.
I moved to Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, to write,
while tutoring and publishing articles to pay the bills. Tiffan was performing
in off-Broadway productions and regional theater.
There are those defining moments in life that
demarcate a clear before and after. In Yiddish, bashert describes the person you
are fated to meet, your soul mate. In Oklahoma, this is what’s called “a
keeper.”
The first time I visited her family that Christmas,
that’s what her father called me. I still had my fear of flying and took a
cross-country train trip to Colorado, where her family has three rustic cabins.
My fifty-hour trip impressed him, especially the frightening Greyhound leg from
Denver. I wore a ten-gallon hat, a rugged leather jacket, and a John Wayne
belt buckle. If you’d seen me, you’d think I spoke in clipped Cormac McCarthy
dialogue and swilled straight bourbon.
When we got back to Oklahoma City, crossing the
desolate panhandle, Tiffan implored me to ask her father about his classic
Pontiac GTO (“the Goat”). I knew nothing about cars at the time and evaded the
subject. But the next Christmas, over that GTO I would ask for Tiffan’s hand in
marriage.
Tiffan and I marched around the Upper West Side after
that Christmas and found what we would make a beautiful home with brightly
colored walls, antique wooden adornments, tag sale finds. The railroad style
apartment has a loft bed built solidly into the structure, with his-and-hers
closets beneath and glow-in-the-dark stars above. There’s a keyboard Tiffan
uses before rehearsals or auditions, and there’s an L. C. Smith & Corona
typewriter I use occasionally to pound out pieces. We had built together the
beginning of a new life. In our loft bed, we dream the dreams New York couples
dream. Of children’s names. Of a house upstate. Of artistic success.
That summer, I bought a canary diamond and come Labor
Day, we escaped to the Berkshires, where Steepletop, Millay’s old estate, is
preserved. There is a poetry trail with her verse on placards nailed onto
trees, a mossy path through the enchanting woodland. We had brought a picnic of
Lunchables and Capri Sun and sat on a bench toward the end of the trail. I
fumbled in my pocket for the ring case, and told her I wanted to love her, poetically,
forever.
Millay is buried farther down the trail, and we lit a
candle, placing it on the rock that marks her grave—offering our appreciation.
Down a ways by her old homestead, there is a defunct natatorium and structure
that used to be a bar. The sultry poet would host Prohibition-era parties there
with one major policy: clothes by the bar, no clothes by the pool. In honor of
this tradition and owing to the weekend deserted of people at Steepletop, we
divested ourselves—it’s the rules, after all—and celebrated with our
patron poet.
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/02/14/riding-with-edna-st-vincent-millay-a-love-story/
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