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By Daniel Mendelsohn

June 3, 1999 | The first time I ever had the experience of desiring another man who I knew also desired me was when I was in college, and I walked aimlessly for many hours one day a long time ago, following him. We were both 19, and I never knew his name. He was waiting at the farthest edge of the university cemetery, a spot where the graves become indistinguishable from the woods.

This was at a college in the South; these woods were thick, choked with creepers and dense with trees you won't find in the suburbs of Long Island. It was a strange place for someone like me to have ended up. I'd come here, to the university nested in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, because in high school I'd loved a boy who'd come from this state, a boy who shunned me when he realized I wanted him; I thought that by going here, to the place where he was from, I could recuperate him somehow, have a part of him. I thought that being in this place, with its hills and horse farms and the smoky blue spine that was the mountain range in the distance, would let me experience him, finally. My choice of universities had struck people I grew up with as strange; no one else in my graduating high school class of 500 had even applied here; the South, it was felt, was hostile to Jews. On Long Island, the South required some explanation. Of course I would not tell them that I was going there because of a boy with shiny yellow hair, and so I would observe that the university I'd chosen had a renowned English department. It was always assumed that I would be an English major, and this seemed to satisfy people.

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But whatever I told them, and myself, I soon felt at home here, against all expectations. Here I would go to the parties attended by fair-haired boys so attenuated that their khakis and pink Oxford-cloth button-down shirts would flap about their bodies like flags as they talked about the places they came from, places familiar to each other but strange and beautiful-sounding to me, who grew up in a place that had not existed until the month before I was born. They talked about towns where their families had lived for 10 generations. I visited their houses, houses that had family cemeteries on the grounds, saw over the mantels the portraits of handsome dead soldiers wearing the uniforms of a defeated nation, understood that for the women (whom I did not desire but whose carefully tended beauty still had some effect on me) the elaborate standards for beauty and social comportment that they applied only slightly more harshly to others than to themselves were not detachable from the rest of their lives, but were, like their houses and the family names they kept passing on, the means by which they asserted who they were, what culture and history they belonged to. Here was a culture I could understand, one that had created a great romance out of a great defeat, a civilization that had been able to endure loss and real privation because it believed in its own myth of lost beauty, the possession of which, however brief and however long ago, elevated the lovely and effete vanquished far above the crass, practical victors. This was a fable I had heard before, at my grandfather's knee, as he told me about his family, a family of delicate beauties victimized by war, by unexpected poverty, by the cynical maneuverings of more practical, less genteel relatives; and it was one I would unconsciously seek out again, here at college, in studying the Greeks, another defeated nation that clung, through misery, to the belief that she was superior to her victor. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes / intulit agresti Latio, the Roman poet Horace wrote: "Captive Greece conquered her savage captor, and brought the arts into wild Italy." Southern culture, I found, made sense to me.

So here I stood in this cemetery by the thick wood, staring at this boy. I had seen him before. Around campus, in classrooms, at parties, he would appear like an optical trick, or a symptom of some strange new disease of the eye, seeming to exist only at the periphery of my own field of vision, edging his way out of a lecture hall just as I entered, or unfolding himself from a narrow plastic library chair precisely at the moment I'd pass by, making my way silently through the stacks as if the thing I was looking for was a book. It was in the library that I'd see him most often, and whenever I did pass him there, only to see him leave moments later, I'd be careful to express ostentatious disappointment at not having found the volume I was supposed to have been looking for -- just enough to convince anyone who might be watching that it was, after all, merely a book I wanted. I'd gesture impatiently at an imaginary space on a stack, or shake my head as if confounded by the incompetence of the staff. At the time all this took place, when I was 19 and 20 and then 21, I may have convinced myself that all this show was meant to fool other people -- people who might have some sly, secret knowledge all their own (upperclassmen? faculty?) and who were sure to have guessed at the motives for my furtive movements through these many miles of books. But now I am not so sure.

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