I ate a cookie and experienced some light FOMO. My friends were probably in a hot tub right now, dipping breadsticks into sour cream and laughing their heads off, creating amazing memories and inside jokes I’d never quite be part of. I wondered if maybe this entire thing had been a bad idea. I went to my bookshelf and opened some Pema Ch?dr?n, heavily dog-eared.
I had acquired the book last summer, while purchasing a bunch of novels about change, travel, the moon, and how badly famous figures in American literature treated their wives, at a local bookstore where I liked to flirt with the cranky old man behind the counter. When I brought my selections to the register, he said, “Bad breakup?” and threw in When Things Fall Apart for free. A few weeks later we went on a date where we both got incredibly drunk but only one of us talked about our experimental poetry collection for too long.
I flipped through my Ch?dr?n, taking in highlighted passages that had, I guess, been important to me a few months earlier: “Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.” Sure. “When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something.” Maybe! “So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn’t even sit for one, that’s the journey of the warrior.” I did not feel like a warrior, but I did move the bowl with my phone in it to the bathroom.
Looking for direction, and with time to kill while the oven warmed up, I kept reading until I found this: “Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end . . . that is the basic message.”
I was attempting to relax with death when Merris came downstairs. Despite her move-in day promise about keeping to herself, Merris visited my apartment fairly regularly, to drop off leftovers, or ask who Chet Haze was, or complain about a recent interaction with a student （“Honestly, and I hope you won’t find this offensive, I’m just not certain we need to queer everything”）。 This time, she was bringing twelve grapes.
“To eat at midnight,” she said. “You have one at each stroke of the clock. They do it in Spain, for luck.” I asked her if she had Spanish heritage. She did not, but had spent several New Year’s Eves there and kept up the tradition on her own.
I told her I welcomed anything that might make this year better than the last.
“Oh, you’re not having such a bad time,” Merris said. “I’ve heard you down here giggling with that curly-haired fellow, Sinjin or whoever.”
“Simon.”
“Simon, sure, that’s what I said. How’s it going?”
“Oh, too fast,” I said. “Heading for disaster, almost certainly.”
Merris looked surprised. “And what makes you think that?”
“Isn’t it supposed to take half the time you were with someone to get over them? I’ve got another three and a half years of basement wallowing, if that’s the case.”
“That’s ridiculous. Where did you read that?” Merris said. “Inessa’s husband died last July, and she’s been the scarlet lady of her birding group. Though I suppose she doesn’t necessarily have the . . . what would it be . . . fourteen required mourning years left.”
All the upstairs ladies talked about death like this—like it was an appointment they knew was coming up but had forgotten exactly when they’d booked it in for.
“It’s no bad thing to fall in love,” said Merris, and I snorted.
“I am not in love,” I said. “But I do like him. A lot. He’s infuriatingly difficult not to like.”
I had been surprised, lately, by the intensity of my fondness for Simon, and had indeed wondered in private if I was falling in love with him, which was unnerving. The last time I’d felt like this I married the man, so had assumed the experience was unique to finding one’s soul mate. But here it was, more or less the same, with some guy I’d found in a bar: the tension and warmth and sense of shared momentum. The feeling of being looked at, of wanting to look at someone more than I wanted to do anything else. The sudden realization that this human being is in possession, somehow, of the best and nicest brain, the warmest torso, the sexiest legs. The follow-up realization that you’re into men’s legs now, that this person has made that so. I knew, of course, that eventually I would reveal the part of myself that made him recoil, and he would go, and I’d be despondent, so for now I was just trying to enjoy the view.
“I’ve never been with someone so straightforwardly handsome,” I said. “I keep taking these languid photos of him lying around down here.”
Merris said it sounded like I was in love, or possibly reading too much Alan Hollinghurst. I said it was too early to call it and reminded her I was still seeing other people. Sort of. I was talking to them, anyway, in my DMs and on the apps, making flirty little comments, then retreating when they suggested meeting in person. It was important, I said, to know there were options, to have a frisson at the bus stop. Merris said that sounded exhausting and invited me to spend the countdown with her and the ladies upstairs.
“If we make it that far,” she said. “Betty’s fading already. Inessa’s mixing some Irish coffees to pep us up.”
I thanked her but declined; the plan was to go it alone.
“How alone can you be, with all those sordid direct mails?” she said, her haughtiness undercut by the nearly-there wrongness of the words she was using. When she opened the door, I could hear Betty telling Inessa that her new year’s resolution was to “smoke more, why not.”
I put my godforsaken bread in the oven and blew out my candle to let the baking smell fill the studio. Half an hour later my windows were fogged from the heat, and the tray I removed from the oven had a gorgeous, loafy-looking loaf of bread on it. I felt proud, then very silly, then proud again. I looked at the clock: it wasn’t even 10:30.
I decided to watch Titanic the way I had when I was younger, stopping when the boat hits the iceberg. As a child this habit had arisen from necessity: the first VHS finished with Jack and Rose in love, startled by the sound of ice grinding against metal. To see the rest of the film you had to eject the tape, put it away, and insert a second one, which seemed like a lot of work just to watch all the characters you’d grown attached to drown in the freezing Atlantic, so mostly I didn’t. To me, James Cameron’s masterpiece was a rom-com about two young misfits from different social classes who meet, decide not to commit suicide, and against their family’s wishes, have sex in a car.
Kate Winslet’s hand smacked the window at 11:27. This seemed impossible. It felt like an entire year had passed, like I was staring down 2020. I looked at my unassembled SKURNSK, the pieces piled in a corner, and my mattress on the floor. Panic or determination rose in my throat. It was this or try again to journal.
The single cartoon figure frowned up at me from the instructions sheet. Further into the instructional booklet was a diagram labeled exploded parts. It was a drawing of the bed frame’s component pieces laid out individually, all the little bits of metal and wood that would combine to make something useful and, if not stylish, more appealing to the eye than a loose pile of junk.