Your mission, should you choose to accept it
By Is to successfully identify the source material. Is it:
(a) A passage from David Lodge’s new novel
(b) The result of a CIA black ops experiment that involved LSD, Martha Stewart, and an IPad.
(c) Something from the New York Times’ Lifestyle Section
(d) Pure evil from the 8th dimension
(e) Other (please specify)
ALEXANDRA SAGE MEHTA and Michael Robinson do not seem to belong to the Facebook generation that expresses itself in sentence fragments. In conversation, their sentences are grammatical and lovely and often sound as if previously written, if not rewritten. Both are writers and care deeply about words as well as opera, cooking, stick-shift cars, modern design and swimming in cold water.
Ms. Mehta, 27, who grew up on the Upper East Side, is working on a memoir and a novel, and is not easily typecast. She prefers writing in the darkest corner of the quietest library she can find, yet she’s also social and vivacious.
“Sage is alarmingly bright and disarmingly warm,” said Hilary Cooper, a friend.
She is slightly built, graceful and soft-spoken. Yet she has also been known, when cross-country skiing with friends who are falling behind, to shout, “Buck up!”
Mr. Robinson, 31, grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., loving cars and French literature. He manages real estate investments for a family in New York and is writing a biography of Robert Cordier, a French filmmaker and theater director. He likes modern chairs and couches, partly because they are often uncomfortable and keep him from falling asleep while reading.
The two met in Paris in the summer of 2001. She was on a summer-abroad program for high school students; he was a counselor. For her, he was an anomaly: a boy she could talk to, for hours.
Most of her education had been in girls schools. “I just found boys terrifying and alien,” she said. Months later, she mailed him a long handwritten letter on her personal stationery. “I’d just hate to lose you, oh that was an awful blah line,” she wrote. And: “Now I’m 17, which seems so awfully old.”
He wasn’t sure whether it was a love letter or not. At any rate, he didn’t know how to respond, so he didn’t.
Years passed. She graduated from Princeton, then lived in Mumbai, India, studying yoga and writing. He graduated from Yale, then got a master’s degree in modern and medieval languages at Cambridge University, then moved to Paris to write.
By November 2009, both were living in Manhattan. They ran into each other at a “huge party given by three very popular Princeton girls,” she said. He recalls thinking that Ms. Mehta had grown up to be astoundingly beautiful, tall and lithe in a bright orange dress. She remembers wondering why she didn’t feel more of a spark. Nevertheless, they made a plan to have dinner and catch up.
They met at Lucien, a French restaurant downtown. He arrived on a black Bianchi bicycle, and this time she felt sparks. They talked about writing, bicycles and their fathers. Her father is Ved Mehta, the prolific, blind Indian writer who lives in New York; his father, E. Steven Robinson, owns a commodities trading company in Michigan.
“It turns out he grew up helping his father, who had rheumatoid arthritis and walks with a cane,” Ms. Mehta said. “We both grew up with fathers who needed our help.”
At one point during dinner, she asked him if he enjoyed swimming in very cold water. Growing up, Ms. Mehta spent summers at her family’s house on an island off Maine and swam in the frigid sea every day. “I was really asking if he jumped into things,” she said. “It’s about bravery to me. Unconsciously, I was asking him if he’d jump into a relationship with me, whether he’d just go for something.”
Though she learned that he swam in Lake Michigan as a child and dives into cold water without a problem, he was not a person who leaped into relationships easily, especially serious ones. “I very much didn’t want to be in a committed relationship,” he said.
That changed by the end of dinner with Ms. Mehta. “I was really quite captivated by Sage,” he said.
A few days later, he e-mailed her and asked, “Do you want to have dinner Monday or Tuesday?” She wrote back, “Both!” Then, she worried he might think she was too enthusiastic or intense. “I always thought I’d be too much for someone, and with Michael, nothing I said or wrote was ever too much,” she said.
She soon bought her own bicycle, a black one with orange wheels (Princeton colors), and they began taking long rides around the city. “What really struck me about Sage was her ability to describe the world, not only her thoughts but our activities together,” he said. “I think that comes from describing things to her father. She allows me to see things differently and amplifies everything we do.”
Without exactly discussing it, they began living together. “It wasn’t a conscious decision to move in together or live together,” he said. “We wanted to be together so much that to not live together would be weird.”
She moved into his tiny studio on the Lower East Side, which at that time had three pieces of furniture: a large desk with a glass top, an uncomfortable modern chair and an uncomfortable bed. Yet she was perfectly comfortable there. “He has the most amazing, joyful way of going through life,” she said. “He sings and dances and laughs and runs the shower too long before he gets in.”
They even write together at the desk, which becomes the dinner table when they cook for friends, which is often. “They managed to live in this tiny room and create a marvelous social life together,” said Katrina Cary, an aunt of Ms. Mehta. “Sage would come back and say, ‘Oh, we just had this huge gang of friends over.’ ”
One of those friends, Eliza Gray, an assistant editor at The New Republic magazine, said: “You can always count on them to talk about something interesting, whether it’s yoga or an artist or something in history or a place or a song or even politics. They’re never dull. They’re both unique.”
Months after they moved in together, they went swimming in Maine. She sat on the dock deliberating and stalling, as is her way, while he dived right in.
He proposed in Paris last summer, 10 years after they met there. He did not kneel, but stood so that they could be on equal footing and he could look straight into her eyes. He said he wanted their marriage to be “a continuous, personal, intimate alliance between our inner voices.”
On the evening of May 19, they were married in New York at the Century Association, chosen because it is one of Mr. Mehta’s favorite places; he knows where every piece of furniture is and walks around there like a person with sight. It was a Jewish ceremony with Hindu and Episcopalian elements performed by Rabbi James Ponet, the Jewish chaplain at Yale.
“I have never been so sure about anything in my life as wanting to marry Michael,” the bride said in a short speech before the 215 guests. “It is rare in life to be sure. Most of my feelings are the opposite, little inklings that with proper care and attention grow into more definite emotions and desires.”
Ms. Mehta and Mr. Robinson have read and reread all the epic love stories in literature, yet their own view of love and marriage is pretty simple. “You have to keep making these choices to love and turn toward the person you love,” she said. “It’s a daily practice, a good habit.”