{"id":46828,"date":"2013-02-14T15:10:16","date_gmt":"2013-02-14T20:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=46828"},"modified":"2014-08-19T17:25:32","modified_gmt":"2014-08-19T21:25:32","slug":"riding-with-edna-st-vincent-millay-a-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/02\/14\/riding-with-edna-st-vincent-millay-a-love-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Riding with Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Love Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"edna-st-vincent-millay\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u00a0board 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\u2019t be fixed.<\/p>\n

By contrast, I was cool and composed, having spent the day at a painter friend\u2019s 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,\u00a0knees tucked up into the seat before me, I closed myself off. Coupled with my tote-bag force field, I hoped my general vibe said, \u201cNo conversation please.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014a glance I interpreted as one of contempt. People who take up two seats… <\/i>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.<\/p>\n

The captivity of a bus\u2014coupled with the urgency of a short trip\u2014blends 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\u2019s poem \u201cTravel,\u201d in retrospect, seems freakily appropriate for the cancelled LIRR and the day\u2019s noisy disruption: \u201cThe railroad track is miles away, \/ And the day is loud with voices speaking, \/ Yet there isn\u2019t a train goes by all day \/ But I hear its whistle shrieking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0She 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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> probably one of the few on our bus without a family home somewhere between Quogue and Montauk. We playfully guessed each other\u2019s names.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cVanessa?\u201d I said. (What, does he think I\u2019m some kind of bitch?<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\u201cJoshua?\u201d she tried. (Is it that obvious I\u2019m Jewish?<\/em>) <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf poetry?\u201d she asked, indicating the Millay.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, no,\u201d 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, \u201cRoss Kenneth Urken\u2013Belletrist.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Millay continues in \u201cTravel\u201d (and would it be insane to assume this poem dictated the very course of our actions?), \u201cAll night there isn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014guaranteeing that she\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

At tight turns I would peer over the seats and down the bus\u2019s nave to catch a glimpse of her. She would later tell me she resisted the urge to look back.<\/p>\n

Back in the city I got off before Tiffan, but I said goodbye in the aisle and we exchanged cards. Millay ends \u201cTravel\u201d with a focus on the cordiality of new figures and the spontaneity and excitement of travel\u2014something that evening surely provided: \u201cMy heart is warm with friends I make, \/ And better friends I\u2019ll not be knowing; \/ Yet there isn\u2019t a train I wouldn\u2019t take, \/ No matter where it\u2019s going.\u201d<\/p>\n

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…).<\/p>\n

We finally managed to meet some ten days later at Giovanna\u2019s, a little place on Mulberry Street in Manhattan\u2019s Little Italy. On the restaurant\u2019s 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\u2014stooped 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\u2019s numerous times and haven\u2019t seen her since.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A car with Jersey plates passed. The driver rolled down his window. \u201cWhen\u2019s the wedding?\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014found it impossible to leave her.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan I keep you?\u201d she asked me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n

There are those defining moments in life that demarcate a clear before and after. In Yiddish, bashert<\/em> describes the person you are fated to meet, your soul mate. In Oklahoma, this is what\u2019s called \u201ca keeper.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first time I visited her family that Christmas, that\u2019s 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.\u00a0I wore a ten-gallon hat, a rugged leather jacket, and a John Wayne belt buckle. If you\u2019d seen me, you\u2019d think I spoke in clipped Cormac McCarthy dialogue and swilled straight bourbon.<\/p>\n

When we got back to Oklahoma City, crossing the desolate panhandle, Tiffan implored me to ask her father about his classic Pontiac GTO (\u201cthe Goat\u201d). I knew nothing about cars at the time and evaded the subject. But the next Christmas, over that GTO I would ask for Tiffan\u2019s hand in marriage.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a keyboard Tiffan uses before rehearsals or auditions, and there\u2019s an L.\u2009C. 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\u2019s names. Of a house upstate. Of artistic success.<\/p>\n

That summer, I bought a canary diamond and come Labor Day, we escaped to the Berkshires, where Steepletop, Millay\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Millay is buried farther down the trail, and we lit a candle, placing it on the rock that marks her grave\u2014offering 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\u2014it\u2019s the rules, after all\u2014and\u00a0 celebrated with our patron poet.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0board 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":407,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[7625,2111,3988],"class_list":["post-46828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-edna-st-vincent-millay","tag-love","tag-romance"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRiding with Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Love Story by Ross Kenneth Urken<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 14, 2013 \u2013 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\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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