It was actually through another Columbia friend, Alex Hale, that I knew this Askandar. Alex Hale came from another interesting family; again, memory may well be embellishing, but I think he was descended from Nathan Hale (“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”), and I know for certain that his father was Robert Beverley Hale, a curator of American art at the Met and a famous instructor of anatomy at the Art Students League. It’s so long ago, and I regret my behavior and decisions as a college freshman — my misspent mid-1980s are one of my few life regrets — but sometimes, nevertheless, I still replay scenes from that brief freshman year when I thought myself so worldly (I had read Ezra Pound! I could speak French with a decent accent!) but was, indeed, just a self-conscious and freckle-cheeked country girl with no game whatsoever and a tendency to blush.
Askandar’s girlfriend was a willowy model, a catalog model, not a runway one. I think she may have been at Cambridge with him? I may be wrong. It’s a cliché to say “willowy,” but that’s all I remember about her, her bendable, long, lean silhouette and long, light-brown hair that swung like a willow whip — who once took me with her on rounds around SoHo to visit various photographers, one of whom said to me: "Who are you? I'd photograph you. Are you a model?" Naturally, I'd remember this most notable remark: My otherwise troubled freshman year at Columbia was my personal pinnacle of physical attractiveness. I wish I could remember this girlfriend's name. She was taller than Askandar. I think.
That November, I took Askandar and his forgotten-name model girlfriend home with me to East Hampton for Thanksgiving. The annual Thanksgiving festivity was, in those years, a big deal at our house: We served between 18 and 30 guests, many of them drunk as skunks, and roasted many dozens of oysters with our special sorrel and Pernod sauce, and the wine merchant delivered red wine by the case, and the guest list always included a few fascinating personalities known to the readers of "Commentary" magazine in the mid-20th century: among them, Barney Rosset, who at Grove Press had published an unexpurgated edition of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" or — I swear to God, I'm not making this part up — Alger Hiss. The grown-ups whispered that he had indeed done it. Been a spy.
I remember Askandar asking me on the journey — this must have been on the Jitney, drinking the little glass bottles of Perrier and eating the smoked almonds the hostess provided back in the 1980s — if our house in East Hampton was big.
I pondered and answered: "Kind of big? I think, yes, our house is big."
We got off the Jitney and walked south down Main Street, over the brown crunch of fallen chestnut leaves, kicking the glossy November chestnuts with the toes of our very 1980s Beatle boots (what we now call "Chelsea" boots), and then turned up Edwards Lane. When our squat house with a few hydrangeas out front came into view, Askandar laughed out loud. Our house is not big, it is small and it is modest, especially from the outside. He wasn't mean about it (I think?), just surprised.
What Askandar had meant by the question "Is your house big?" was: "Do you live in a grand high-society mansion, like Minden in Bridgehampton or Dragon's Head in Southampton?" I hadn't understood him until I heard his laugh.
Being naive, I'd answered the question by making a mental calculation of the relative size of my own family home and those of my former classmates from East Hampton High School, some of whom lived in midcentury houses with three or four bedrooms and a wraparound deck, others of whom lived in ranch houses, a few in actual trailers on Oakview Highway. In comparison with the then-East Hampton average, yes, our lil' shambling cottage on Edwards Lane was medium-big. But, looking at it with fresh eyes on Thanksgiving 1985, I realized how small it really was: It has very low ceilings and, aside from one larger bedroom off the living room (which was once a silversmith shop), the four poky bedrooms upstairs are not much bigger than sleeping quarters on a ship.
There really were only three kinds of houses out here at this time, the mid-1980s. There were the humble ranch houses or small, traditional capes in which lived the working-class plumber, electrician, or yard man. There were the middle class abodes that seemed regular to me (whether an angular 1960s-era modernist house in Northwest Woods or an old saltbox). And then there were the actual mansions south of the highway. This was before the dawn of the McMansion, long before Farrell Builders normalized the metastasized mega-McMansion in which lonely inhabitants have to call one another on the cellphone if they want to say something, their ring tones echoing in the vast, white halls of sheetrock, pinging off the stainless-steel appliances and the automated pet-food dispenser.
Well, of course, our satisfaction with our station in life, like our perception of how much we have — is it big? — shrinks or expands according to experience, expectation, but also expediency.
I once chanced to read a letter my grandmother Jeannette Edwards Rattray left for her three children to read on the occasion of her death (which came in 1973), explaining her decisions about inheritance. She left the Edwards Lane house to my father, not to his sister or brother, and her justification for this preference made me chuckle, in turn, because she downplayed the gift quite shamelessly by describing the house — with obvious exaggeration, or should I say minimization? — as "little more than a small country cottage," as if it were the wee, unplumbed two-room accommodation for a Scottish shepherd.
I haven't seen Askandar Samad since around 1987. I believe he was studying to become a solicitor. I wonder if he married his model girlfriend (who probably was as interesting as he was, and I missed it). Once, maybe five years after the Thanksgiving episode, I thought I saw him on St. Mark's Place, half a block ahead of me, waiting to cross Third Avenue in the direction of Tony Rosenthal's "Cube" sculpture in Astor Place. I ran up and stopped him before the "Don't Walk" sign changed to "Walk," but when he turned to face me, it was another man with shoulder-length black hair.