Chapter 13
Something changed after the holidays, the way it always does, but worse. The snow and the salt stains and the sweating-on-the-subway of it all loses its festive tinge every January, and the emancipatory effect I’d been hoping for from a “clean slate” had not arrived. Even Amy’s party had been a bust. After dragging my ass out of bed and putting on some light makeup, I had arrived to discover a room full of couples having arguments and a few single people who mostly appeared to be on MDMA. Amy was in an upstairs bathroom making out with a guy named “Maxton.”
I left shortly after arriving, to go home with an ostensibly straight friend of Amy’s called Tamara, who told me she “never did this”; I got the impression she never did this a lot. I had been attracted to Tamara because she was tall and had a kind of horny glint in her eye, but when we got back to her apartment she became probing and intense, asking me about my emotional baggage and star sign and feelings about my place in the universe. （What was it about me that attracted this type of person? Why was it so hard to just go home with a stranger and get railed?） When I told her about the divorce she made a noise that sounded like an empathy orgasm, then pulled me to her chest and cradled my head like a child’s.
“You must be devastated,” she said, petting my hair in a way that was not unenjoyable but was not the romp I had hoped for, from the glint. “This must be such a dark time for you. I’m a Highly Sensitive Person, so you don’t need to tell me, I get it.”
I did not think it required a person to be highly sensitive to know that divorce was painful, but more than that, I did not want to talk about it with Tamara. I kissed her for a minute or two, and it was going well until she made the noise again, then pulled away and said, “Poor little bird.”
I told her I was okay, mostly, that I knew nothing worthwhile came easy and was taking it one day at a time. In reality, life since my mom’s house had felt very dark indeed, more or less blurring into one long nap punctuated by cereal and episodes of Housewives; but I did not share this, because I did not want to be this woman’s bird. She poured us each a glass of water and told me a lengthy anecdote about her friend’s bike accident, laboring particularly hard over the doctor’s instruction that—should this friend ever find herself hurtling over her handlebars on Roncesvalles Avenue again—she not brace for impact.
“You have to go limp and let it happen,” she said softly. “You can’t fight it, or you’ll break every bone in your body.”
She was rocking me back and forth at this point, but getting a cab at that hour, on New Year’s, would have been impossible, so when she slid her hand under my shirt, I pretended to be asleep.
The next morning we lay around in her bed, where, to avoid further cycling metaphors, I asked her to tell me the twist endings to every episode of an anthology series she had recently watched about the dangers of social media. In one episode, a man was apparently framed for murder by his hamster, due to technology. In another, a media teacher bludgeoned her students to death with an iPad. Fine.
I left Tamara’s house and met Amy at a nearby greasy spoon, where we bought a six-pack of hash browns and coffees the size of our heads. She wanted details about the rest of my night, but there wasn’t much to tell, especially since she was against television spoilers. Amy’s New Year’s resolutions were to finally commit to the 30 Day Shred program, set up monthly donations to some good causes, and smile more. I told her she already smiled a lot.
“Ultimately, I think you can always do more,” she said, blotting a hash brown with a paper napkin until it was translucent and heavy with oil.
I told Amy I wanted to burrow.
“That’s okay,” she said. “It takes as long as it takes.”
I told her that her skin shouldn’t look so glowy on a hangover, and she explained how to rub frozen spoons over your face until it depuffed back to normal, like you hadn’t pumped yourself full of poison the night before. I was thinking about how wise she was, how much she had life figured out, when she gave me a book of poems by a man from the internet who was always telling women to wear their wounds like wings.
“You’ll love this,” she said, completely sure. “I’m obsessed with the one about skinny-dipping in your own power.”
Amy walked me to a different diner where I had promised to meet Simon for breakfast, stopping in to say hi before heading to a New Year, New Booty HIIT cardio class. Simon did not look hungover either. I slid into the booth across from him and pretended to consider the sticky laminated menu before ordering another round of hash browns.
I realized he did not know I went out last night, that he thought I had stayed home to be alone and bake bread. I thought about Tamara’s cold hand on my boob and wondered if Simon had gone home with someone too. I didn’t ask, but decided on my own that he had, and she had been elegant and gorgeous and very good at drawing or something. I was distracted by this imagined rival throughout our meal.
“Everything okay?” Simon asked, his fork hovering over a plate of eggs slathered in salsa. Whenever he encountered them on a brunch menu, Simon made a point of ordering huevos divorciados, winking at me when they arrived. He often made little jokes about my marital status, making a big deal about having a “married woman” in his bed or quipping about my future second and third husbands. I knew he only did this because I responded with loud, enthusiastic laughter and because I often made jokes like these myself, but coming from him they made me feel exposed and uncomfortable, emotionally nude.
“I’m alright,” I said. “Just the old . . . New Year’s blues.”
I had never heard this phrase in my life and realized almost instantly after saying it that this was because it was not one. Simon’s lips stretched into a restrained smile and his eyes twinkled with amusement. “Ah,” he said. “Of course.”
He poured tiny plastic containers of cream into his coffee, stacking the empties on top of each other in a neat pile as I ate my eighth hash brown of the day. Whether because of my hangover, or the mild deception about the night before, or some other reason unknown to me, I couldn’t join Simon on our usual register. It suddenly felt ridiculous to be at breakfast opening packets of jam with some other, different man, as if this time it would work out, as if it could ever go another way. When the bill arrived, he seemed to understand that I wouldn’t be coming back to his place, kissed me primly on the cheek, and promised to text me that evening.
I boarded the streetcar, cried a bit, and arrived home. I pulled on a second pair of socks, got into bed, and opened the book Amy had given me, which instructed me to let myself “dream wild.” I closed the book and went to sleep.
My friends were not happy with me for skipping the dips and hot tub party and were further disappointed by my flakiness in the weeks that followed. I tried to fake a sudden devotion to work, but my waning interest in my job had long been registered. Pretending I was doing Dry January kept them off my back until I outed myself by tweeting something about a five-alarm hangover and a need for spaghetti that felt like an emergency. I ended up sending a text saying I was taking time to commune with the Physics of the Quest, something I had read about in Eat Pray Love, which I had downloaded as an e-book and was about halfway through. Clive texted back, gross, with a heart emoji.