As I walk up the street I will know, deep within my body, that I am loved. By friends, family, and even—
Suddenly, there he is. Jon, red-eyed and tired-looking, wandering aimlessly like a person who has made many bad decisions in life, one of which haunts him in particular. I see him long before he sees me, and I think, how tragic.
It is hard to see him struggle when I am doing, in the words of our friends, acquaintances, and one surprisingly personal but nonetheless correct front-page newspaper article, “incredibly well.”
I think maybe it would be kinder to avoid him, and so I measure my pace to let him pass on ahead. I’m walking so slowly, but it is not enough. The way he’s trudging—resignedly, with devastation—means I’ve almost caught up. I’m trying to imagine the kindest way to say I’ve met someone when:
“Maggie! Maggie!”
I turn at the same time Jon does. We both see the man immediately—can’t miss him, because of the crowd that’s formed. He runs toward us in his massive, experimental trousers, smiling and waving.
“There she is,” says Harry Styles, slipping a stylish, tattooed arm around my waist.
Jon clocks it immediately: our easy intimacy, the flush in my cheeks. I feel a flicker of compassion for the man who was once my husband. I want to ask Harry Styles to be a little less familiar, to show some respect for the awkward situation. I want to say, Harry Styles, please. But I know I can’t stop him—he’s too excited, it’s all so new. Jon’s face falls, but he reaches out to shake the hand of the international superstar I met by chance on an airplane and charmed by pretending to be unfamiliar with his discography.
“Better not, mate,” says Harry Styles. “I’ve spent all morning fingering your wife.”
Chapter 10
The activities frenzy took over sometime in mid-autumn, and even I could tell it was a bad sign.
“Absolutely not,” Lauren said, after I suggested we sign up for a krav maga intensive Olivia promised would wreck us. “No adult starts a hobby from a good place.”
She was right. It didn’t matter if it was a buzzy new fitness trend or an aspirationally useful class or something fun and specific, like life drawing or an Italian conversation group—everyone involved in adult learning was running from something.
I’d learned this firsthand, having got the idea to take up a hobby from reading wikiHow’s advice for managing a divorce during a particularly pathetic dark night of the soul. The list featured eighteen tips, though the final seven pertained to the raising of children in a joint-custody arrangement and were therefore not relevant. “Get a Hobby” was tip number four, right above “Revisit Old Passions,” a heading accompanied by an illustration of a woman stirring something beige in a frying pan while imagining an alarm clock. A hobby seemed less confusing, and the sixth tip, “Get a Therapist If Needed,” did not apply to me.
I could not sell Lauren on Israeli martial arts, but I did convince her to join a singles bowling league on the grounds that there might be a few hot guys in attendance. This was a deception. I knew there would be maybe one eligible man among the bunch, even in a best-case scenario. Every class I signed up for—every group workout, creative writing seminar, or weekend workshop on making your own essential oil blends—was wall to wall with the recently dumped, most of them women, all of them much older than me.
Once, at an extremely ambitious “introduction to bouldering” evening I’d found on Groupon, I saw two women near my age and got excited, thinking, this is it, this is how you make friends in your thirties. But it transpired that they were not amateur rock-climbing enthusiasts hoping to make connections; they were sisters, there to support their mom, who was—you guessed it—deep in the middle of her second divorce.
“It’s hard,” one of them said, putting chalk all over her hands in a way I found inscrutable and weirdly alluring. “She keeps saying, ‘We must admit that the heterosexual experiment has failed.’ And like, I agree with her, but she’s not a lesbian, so . . . I don’t know what she thinks the plan is.”
Later, when I was sitting on the floor of the rock-climbing gym, watching the supportive-if-cynical daughter clamber up the simulated cliff face, her mother sat down nearby, offered me a Capri Sun, and sighed so long and loudly that I dusted myself off and left.
Outside of bouldering, I tried a macrame class, a “stitch and bitch” evening, and a pottery night where everyone around me frantically shaped clay into little breasts for plant pots; there was a tie-dyeing workshop, a pan-Asian cooking weekend, and a group fitness class where we were encouraged to scream throughout, releasing our rage and whatever was holding us back from our undefined, individual goals. This I left after the instructor hollered, “There are more important things than MONEY!” and the entire class cheered, even though it had cost them all forty-seven dollars to be there.
It had cost me nothing, and a big reason I was so into my new hobby of “having hobbies” was that most activities allowed you to attend a first class for free. The city was teeming with opportunities to try crafts and athletic hybrid activities at no charge. If you had enough time on your hands and weren’t fussy about things like studio cleanliness or instructor expertise, you could take multiple free yoga classes any day of the week.
I continued attending my local studio’s restorative class （Calvin never reappeared）， but otherwise shopped around, taking hot yoga, yoga for runners, and something called “Rihanna yoga” in different but nearly identical storefronts across the city. I would zip to Mixed Level Movement before my 10:30 seminar （Enter Wet: Weather on the Elizabethan Stage）， then walk into the gloomy, windowless room where I taught, my head held conspicuously high. After class I’d disengage my core and slump over my desk for seven hours before stopping in for another round of subsidized chaturangas on the way home.
Most of my non-yoga efforts were centered around unlocking some untapped but prolifically talented creative side that various leaflets and online class descriptions assured me lay dormant within us all. My apartment slowly filled with tangled yarn “plant hangers,” lopsided clay sculptures, and a miniature Zen garden resembling a litter box with a small takeout fork attached.
I did the majority of this alone. My friends were anti-activities on principle, and I could no longer invoke their sympathy in the same way I had earlier in the summer. They were used to it by now—I was going through a breakup and would be for the foreseeable. They couldn’t be expected to drop everything and come to my side whenever I felt bad. I felt bad all the time! Occasionally, as I struggled with glue and yarn or cut up little bits of fabric to sew onto a bigger bit of fabric, I would imagine my contented friends: Emotional Lauren snuggled up with her laid-back boyfriend, Nour, watching nature documentaries and crying about baby animals; Lauren coming home from an F45 class to her perfectly appointed apartment for one, ready to order fancy delivery; Amirah and Tom finding their light over tapas; Clive watching a movie with the handsome older dudes with whom he was in a kind of throuple situation. And there I was, tie-dyeing a towel.
Eventually even my single friends were not single enough for the path I was on. Clive ducked out after the fitness class I had brought him to turned out to include a jazz dance component. Lauren broke at paint night as we stood side by side, drinking wine with twelve other women all outlining the same image of a city skyline at sunset. She added a few swipes of pink to the corner of a fading sky and said, “This is self-harm. This is worse than when my boss made us go axe throwing.”