He and I met in French class at a college in the foothills of Northern California. I thought of them as velvet hills. They were golden in the sunshine, the sky behind them ocean blue. I was just out of boarding school in England and he was a displaced New Yorker. A temporary situation for both of us, both with plans to head somewhere else in one year’s time. Both going nowhere for now.
The Nanny
He had a sporty car and a way of leaning against it as he gently tapped a cigarette out of its soft packet. This English girl thought it was cool. His eyes were blue like the sky. He wore shorts, desert boots, a polo shirt, its collar curled, a baseball cap. The age gap was six years. He loved to drive that car.
We went to San Francisco first. Up the 101 and into the city, riding the steep undulations, cold on foggy days, but on sunny days drinking in the views: Golden Gate Bridge, glimpses of ocean. Alcatraz. We drove to LA. Our first proper road trip together. We were buffeted by deliciously warm air and both got super tanned on one arm, where it hung out the car window. His left arm, my right. I photographed the highway stretching behind us in the side mirror, the velvet hills in the background, the orange groves, the ocean.
In summer we took a flight to New York and stayed with his family on the twelfth floor of a beautiful building on the Upper West Side. It was humid. In the apartment, pre-Columbian statuary gazed from alcoves and he was friends with all the doormen. On 4 July people threw fireworks down the hot streets and it was the eighties, so the city was lawless, and you didn’t make eye contact on the subway.
Weeks later we drove back to California. We bought a stack of maps and planned an indirect route. Cassettes rattled in the glove compartment. The Grateful Dead. We saw Wrigley Field on the way into Chicago, were taken up high in Oprah’s building. Lake Michigan looked vaster than I imagined. We drove on, spending days on dead-straight roads bordered by cornfields, interspersed with motel nights. The monotony was hypnotic, tiring. We saw men in pick-up trucks with rifles mounted on racks in the rear window. I photographed our car’s reflection in the shined-up wheel hubs of juggernauts as we passed them. In Colorado an ex-girlfriend of his had a room for us but it was tense. Next day’s climb into the Rocky Mountains was a relief and a feast for the eyes. A chance to breathe. In Arizona, electric storms flashed on the horizon and the desert was spectacular. In Las Vegas we spent all but our last few dollars at the blackjack tables and watched the petrol gauge all the way home on the shimmering highway.
The end of the summer. Airports. Flights back to different realities for both of us, difficult goodbyes, but my eyes had never been wider. My heart fuller.