I was interviewed for admission by a young alumna who, I realize now, must have been experiencing that naked insecurity common to recent graduates, that feeling of having been cast out, that ironic nostalgia for a place one couldn't wait to leave. She sat me down in her spare studio apartment, made me a cup of tea, and told me two things about Princeton that I would think of frequently. Remember, she said, you're not going there to play homecoming princess, but to get educated. Then, too, she told me that one thing she recalled vividly from her Princeton years was the sound of men's voices carried on the warm night across the courtyard beyond her window.
It's a funny thing, coeducation. Everyone knows about the early controversies surrounding it, for they bear on the life of the institution. As for those other things that happen between men and women-rapture, love, and loyalty unto death-they are the merely personal blessings that grow up like weeds in any garden. Still, it is a delightful irony that in so many cases Princeton's tender spring grass, its wisteria tumbling like a waterfall purple and fragrant, its graceful echoing courtyards, become remembrances, like madeleines melting on the tongue, not just of youth but of youthful love. I like to think of the men who now, when asked to recall their college days, turn to their children with a warm look and say, "Ah, Princeton. That's where I met your mother."
My own years there were taken up with the everyday demands and anxieties of participation in a complicated institution. But when I look back today, my thoughts are often of Princeton as just a place, and in particular of one springtime when this place drew its sheltering curtain of green around a pair of lovers not yet 20 years old. I remember the dappled light of long, easy afternoons and nights blooming raucously like moonflowers, unhinged from all necessity.
It's nice to fall in love in the springtime when you're 19 and have no thought of the future, and Princeton is a sublime place to do it. I had noticed David around Forbes College, where we both lived, months before we met. I remember watching him in the computer room, noticing the dusky color of an afternoon shadow against pallid cheeks, the funny way he typed-like a brown bear would, I thought, elbows out to the side. Later that spring, David's complexion grew florid with the sun. We would sit at the edge of the golf course watching the daffodils nod in the breeze, then I would traipse languidly to my political-philosophy class, where a sweet grad-uate student tried very hard to engage the uninterested and the unread. This was my chance to let the world go by, for once, and I was going to take it.
That summer, I read F. Scott Fitzgerald '17's This Side of Paradise and was moved to find how well this man of the 1920s had captured the Princeton I knew in the 1980s-"lazy and goodlooking and aristocratic," yes, but also strangely heartrending. The massive, elegant buildings of foregone generations exalted our youth but mocked it, too, for all around us were the ghosts of the young, and the old men who came back to remember them. "As an endless dream it went on," wrote Fitzgerald, "the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation . . ." We were supposed to give flesh to this dream, to serve but for a moment as its beating heart. At this powerful command we seized up, breathless in our inexperience, outdone. But in love we reclaimed our youth for our own purposes and made Princeton its foil. At least we did what youth does best, with little care for time or tradition. We sunk our teeth into what was ours and, grinning stupidly, let the juice run down our chins.
One spring not long ago I, too, went back to Princeton; everywhere I saw my young David. In the courtyard of the Forbes addition, I almost wept to remember him leaping from my secondfloor window at dawn to avoid my roommates in the living room, or calling up to me one sunny morning to say that he liked my new haircut. I visited the quint, and the single within that quint, where I once lived-amazing it was, that squat, ugly little cinderblock cell where I had lain in his arms and been so drunk with happiness. I remembered him under a particular shade tree on a particular rise in the golf course, where we each had found words for the first tentative colors of love. On the door to the room in Pyne where I lived as a senior I found a few words felttipped in a familiar hand, a missive from my own past: "K, I'm at 2D - D."
K and D married five years ago this May. We in turn have had the pleasure of attending the weddings of other couples who were friends of ours at Princeton, when marriage was the furthest thing from our minds. Together again, we marveled to discover that all along there had been substance in the lightest of things, the things we did years ago in that great and luxurious garden for no other reason than that it pleased us to do them. Princeton, for all its arrogance, will always be to me and David the beloved place where we came of age, where we were children, and then, suddenly, not children, where he became a man and I became a woman, where together we set course for the future.