Amy had been with her husband for four years. They were married for three. I did not tell her that I thought it was objectively stupid to marry someone you’d known for one year, age twenty-seven, even though that is how I felt. Amy was beautiful and small and very, very mad. Her fury radiated off her in nearly visible lines, like bad smells in cartoons.
“It’s fucking ridiculous,” she said. “He’s such a fucking loser.”
Amy’s husband had left her for a younger woman, which was the kind of thing she thought didn’t happen until you were, like, actually old. His new girlfriend was twenty-one, and taught Pilates with one of those machines that look like they’re for sex but are really for thin women to pulse on. Amy had considered taking one of her classes but assumed her ex’s new girlfriend knew what she looked like, because of social media and because of Toronto. Instead she had started going to a different Pilates studio, waking up at five to take the six and seven a.m. classes back-to-back.
“You sort of need to do two hours to feel any impact,” she said, which I suspected would not be true in my case. Amy felt washed up now, at thirty.
I envied the clarity of Amy’s anger. Deciding your ex was a villain seemed like an easier way to go through a breakup. I flip-flopped hourly between hating Jon and wanting to go easy on him. After all, he had not done anything terrifically wrong; his major crime was not fighting me when I suggested the marriage was not working, and I couldn’t blame him for that （ . . . could I?）。
“I think he freaked out because we got married and he realized that was it, no new puss till he died,” Amy said. “He got weird as soon as we got back from our honeymoon. I don’t get it. Being married didn’t feel any different to me.”
The night before our wedding, Jon had wondered aloud whether something would change, if we would feel different as man and wife. After the ceremony, I asked him if he did.
“Not really,” he said. “Still love you a lot like normal.”
Then he said, “my waiiiife,” in the Borat voice and ran off after a server holding a tray of chicken sliders. I felt different, though: calmer, safer. Buckled in.
Amy said she would not go back to her husband in “more than a billion years.” She said my ex was a definite idiot with a probable small penis. She suggested I put on a sexy dress, go somewhere I knew he would be, and “show him what he’s missing.”
Jon and I had been together almost ten years, I told her. He could draw what he was missing from memory. Plus, he didn’t seem to be missing it that much. I confessed that he hadn’t responded to my text messages in nearly a month.
“That’s actually so toxic. It’s harassment,” said Amy, pouring us another glass each of natural wine.
I felt like a persistent lack of contact was, if anything, the opposite of harassment, but stayed quiet and sipped my drink, the sourness of it stinging my throat. When the server first dropped off the wine list, Amy had asked him to “challenge her.” I told her that Jon had once told me he considered all wine bourgeois. Amy’s mouth dropped open: “So he’s a fucking asshole.” She loved it.
Amy was fun. She swore a lot and went to the corner store to buy cigarettes after we finished our first bottle of challenging wine. Amy talked such merciless shit on her ex-husband I felt free to think about how annoying Jon was during election seasons, how he acted like it was reasonable to spend nine hours on the toilet （an approximate figure, but still）， how he sometimes acted like working in advertising was a noble higher calling. Hadn’t I chosen to cut him loose? I felt again the euphoric freedom that washed over me when Calvin had laughed and said, “That guy is never coming back.” Maybe this was not a life-defining tragedy. Maybe I was a smart woman who knew her worth, or at least knew she deserved more than being shredded to death by a junior executive’s gnarled toenails every night. Amy said she’d never felt better, on days when she didn’t feel the worst she ever had.
Still, she couldn’t get over the fact that one day her ex-husband would die, and she would have no idea. “I was supposed to be at that funeral,” she said with a hiccup. “Or I guess also dead, but like, nearby.”
I thought about Jon dying one day, an old man with millions of newly accumulated experiences, none of which would have anything to do with me, darkly sweet death prank long forgotten. In the scope of his life, the near decade we’d spent together wasn’t much. I’d occupy a space in his mind similar to elementary school: a thing that happened, from which few memories remained. What would stay? Would he remember our first apartment, the shower you couldn’t stand up in, the vintage posters we were weirdly proud of, the time we got locked out in the dead of winter, the look on the landlord’s son’s face when he came to rescue us at two a.m.? Would he remember that we’d loved each other, changed each other; how we’d compromised on bedroom decor and gone halfsies on a mattress that was cooling for his night sweats and rock hard for my back problems? He’d learned to handle a kitchen knife at a cooking class I’d bought him for our anniversary. Would he think of me when he chopped garlic, at least?
“This is bumming me out,” Amy said. “Let’s get nachos.”
We moved bars and ate melted processed cheese under a neon tiger as Amy told me about her dating life. She was seeing three different people, all of whom she had met “on the apps.” The most exciting was a twenty-four-year-old aspiring actor who was already famous in certain corners of the internet for stunt videos where he climbed improbably tall, out-of-the-way buildings. We watched a few. They were stressful and impressive. Amy said he was amazing in bed and that he “specialized in divorcées,” because he traveled a lot and didn’t have time to settle down. Also, because he was mature for his age.
Amy said that lots of men were into divorced women: “The damage makes you kind of sexy, so they’re more likely to stick around instead of ghosting or having sex with your friend to prove it’s casual.”
I countered that Amy’s great bod and fun attitude were probably what made her appealing to men.
She grabbed my phone, held it up to my face to unlock it, and said, “No, it’s divorce,” while downloading Tinder.
I told her about the incident with Calvin, how I didn’t feel ready to meet anyone yet.
Amy clicked her tongue: “You don’t have to marry the guy. Plus, it’s so cool that you fucked his friend, like . . . burn.”
I tried to explain that we hadn’t fucked, just platonically shared a bed in which my boob had slipped out of my sleeping tank only once, but she was no longer listening. As she swiped through my photos, not even blinking at the dozens of mortifying sadness selfies I’d amassed, I felt pleasantly powerless.
Amy settled on a three-year-old picture of me smiling with friends on a patio in Collingwood, before saying, without malice, “You should maybe grow out your bangs.” She paused for a moment, then cropped a conspicuously attractive friend out of the picture and made it my profile image.
“You’ll like dating,” she said. “Everyone eats ass now.”
Amy and I workshopped opening lines as couples started to pack it in around us, established pairs walking out holding hands, newer ones politely hugging and heading in separate directions or exchanging too much eye contact before coyly agreeing to share a cab. I looked them over: how many of these people were happy, how many were unhappy and didn’t know it, how many were pretending to be happy even though they knew damn well they were miserable . . . and when would they be single, if so? I tried to imagine myself joining them. The last time I had been available, dating meant putting on a Going-Out Top and sneaking Smirnoff Ices into a movie theater. I thought about the jolt of one knee purposefully touching another, lingering in the street after last call, two bodies making excuses to move closer. I probably still had one of those tops somewhere.