Ben was friends with my freshman roommate’s older brother, who had just graduated from MIT and moved back to DC. We met when I tagged along to her family’s house over fall break. He got my number, and before long, we were talking on the phone a few nights a week. I was nineteen, and he was twenty-four. I wasn’t very worldly, and he felt decades older.
I quickly grew attached to our conversations. He was working as a data analyst for the International Monetary Fund, which made him a big fish compared to the microscopic world I came from. He read David Foster Wallace and knew everything about history and politics. He’d traveled to Egypt and Iceland and New Zealand. I’d barely been outside of Virginia.
Our first date was at an Ethiopian restaurant close to campus. It felt very culturally sophisticated. And after all the time spent on the phone, the conversation seemed effortless.
“You’ve never even been on asmallplane? Not even one of those regional ones that flies out of airports with one landing strip?”
I shook my head. “And now the thought of flying terrifies me,” I said, eyeing the platter of fermented flatbread.
“Do you have a passport?”
“Not yet,” I said, my nose tingling from the unexpected taste of vinegar. “But I’d like to get one,” I added quickly.
He leaned back and took me in, like I was a tabula rasa in the form of a girl who needed someone to make her world bigger.
“Well then, let’s book your first flight.”
There was a kindness—and a calmness—to Ben that I responded to. Despite our different upbringings, he seemed to get me. His intellectual curiosity notwithstanding, he had a profound appreciation for the simple things. He came from a tight-knit family. I had grown up with a dysfunction that made a happy family life feel just out of reach. Ben gave me the chance to build a life with someone who would quickly become the antidote to the instability I’d grown up with.
By the end of that semester, even though we were separated by distance, Ben and I were seeing each other seriously. He would drive the two hours down to UVA, and we’d spend our weekends visiting nearby wineries or camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I took a full course load during the summers so I could graduate a semester early, even though Ben wanted me to take an internship in DC to be closer to him. I was focused on the long game, still driven by the urgency that I’d felt since childhood to make something of my life.
I finished my last exam on a Friday and started a job the following Monday at a nondescript marketing agency in Arlington. We moved in together, and our lives fell into a comfortable routine. I’d found a partner.
Being with Ben grounded me in a way I’d never felt before. A year later, I told him I wanted to get married. I was so resolute, no one second-guessed me.
Chapter Four
I woke up Monday morning jittery with excitement. I’d slept with the window open, and it felt like fall inside Jessica’s fifth-floor apartment.
I threw on gym clothes and sneakers and walked to the corner bodega for coffee before walking west to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. I reached the water and stood very still, absorbing the shape of Manhattan, the only way to really take it all in, with a river in between. In a matter of hours, I’d be another person in the city, rushing to the office, on my way to making it all happen. I felt a million years away from the first time I wondered if my marriage would survive law school.
In fairness, the person Ben married hadn’t known she was actually going to law school. But the more content he became, the more restless I felt. I started to wonder what I would be doing with my life if I hadn’t gotten married when I was twenty-two.
We bought a suburban, open-concept townhouse and quickly settled into day-to-day life just outside of DC. We had our routine, our favorite restaurants, all of it. Ben made more money than me, but we were building a comfortable life. Only, the more our lives “improved,” the unhappier I felt. I didn’t have anything in common with our circle of friends, most of whom were Ben’s friends on the cusp of parenthood. I couldn’t stop thinking that I’d deserted the person I could have become.
A few years after we got married, a small art-house theater popped up close by. I started going to the movies alone while Ben watchedsports. Most of the time, I was the only person there. It became a total guilty pleasure. He joked that if he didn’t know better, he’d think I was having an affair.
I’d grown up obsessed with musicals and old movies, but I discovered a new love for independent film. It was bittersweet at first because I missed acting. I even looked up auditions for local theater productions but couldn’t bring myself to go. That ship had sailed.
Still, I felt like I’d left something on the table.
I was disarmed by the honesty and ambition of filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Lisa Cholodenko. In between dodging Ben’s TV shows and cleaning up dinner, I tucked myself away in our bedroom, researching ways to break into the film industry. I read reviews for every movie that premiered at Cannes and Sundance. I daydreamed about becoming someone who could champion emerging talent. I pored over bios of Hollywood’s most powerful agents and executives, struck by how many had gone to law school.
That was how I discovered entertainment law. For the first time since my pivot away from acting, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
A few weeks later, I came home with an LSAT prep book. I set it on the kitchen table and tried to gauge Ben’s reaction.
“What’s all this?” he asked, setting place mats down in the same spots we ate dinner every night.
“I’ve been thinking about law school,” I said, grabbing plates.
“Huh,” he responded. “Where?”
“Somewhere close by,” I answered quickly. “George Washington, or maybe Georgetown, if I do well on the LSAT.”
His face relaxed slightly.
It took six months and two tries, but I did well enough to apply to Georgetown. I was wait-listed before I got the much-anticipated admissions email three weeks before the fall semester started.
