Really Good, Actually(18)

The class was as quiet and uneventful as it always was, led by a gorgeous pregnant woman whose balayage was the color of the oat milk lattes she drank in the foyer before class, and attended mostly by senior citizens and women who had visibly taken at least one aerial hooping class. And this time there was Calvin, twisting into lightly stretched positions, making forts out of bolsters and blocks and large cloth straps on the mat next to mine. Around the supportive bridge portion, I got the sense he was sneaking looks at me. Something had shifted the way I felt in my compression leggings and the too-tight sports bra I’d had since high school. I kept tucking unruly bits of back fat into the band, trying to keep everything sleek. I made a big show of rolling up vertebra by vertebra, and the teacher complimented the depth of my sleeping pigeon, something that had never happened in my lengthy but intermittent yoga career.

It was exciting to be noticed, I thought, to notice someone noticing me . . . it was exciting, until I remembered this was not an original thought of mine, but a lyric from a song about “dangerous girls” that played on every dance floor I was part of, every year of university. Realizing this I felt old and tired—a divorcée in yoga pants lusting after some guy with a mustache because it seemed like maybe he was checking me out. Pathetic.

After class, Calvin stood in line with me while I got a green tea and kept walking alongside as I turned up the street in the direction of home. I asked if he still lived in his old place, and he said that he did, but on his own now, and added that he had “really done the place up,” with a projector for movies and a rug and everything.

“You guys should come see it,” Calvin said. “Fuck, sorry.”

I told him it was alright; I made the same mistake all the time. “I hadn’t even realized I’d become a ‘we’ person,” I said. “Not sure which is more embarrassing, using it during the relationship or using it after the relationship is over.”

“Probably after,” he said, completely earnest.

I sat on my front steps and asked Calvin the question I’d been strenuously avoiding since the instant I saw him.

“Oh . . . yeah, I mean, he’s been down,” he said, weirdly bashful. “We haven’t exactly gotten into it, but, uh, he’s smoking, I would say, more weed than usual, although I think he’s been seeing s— I probably shouldn’t get into it.”

I agreed that he probably shouldn’t, though didn’t mention that he probably shouldn’t have been outside my house in the first place. It was nice to talk to him; it felt familiar, like good times past, but the change in my circumstances also hung between us. Being alone—even single—felt, for the first time, intriguing.

He came inside, and we drank the beers that had been coming since we first encountered each other, sitting too close together on the couch and laughing about cottage weekends and house parties gone by, his sex life (robust) and mine (nonexistent, doomed). I confessed I’d been staying up too late and crying myself to sleep like a jilted woman in a film. Calvin said it would all work out eventually. He really seemed to believe it, and I wondered, aloud, if maybe it would. Breaks could be healing. People did that, separated and returned to each other. You sometimes heard about couples, apart for years, remarrying decades later. Calvin let out a loud, amicable laugh.

“Oh my god, that’s not what I meant at all,” he said. He laughed harder. “Are you kidding?! That guy is never coming back. You guys are OVER. I meant, like, you’ll both move on with your lives. Oh my god. Imagine!”

I realized as he said it that of course this was true, and of course at that moment he leaned in to kiss me. I let him, for a few seconds, enjoying the novelty of this new mouth, its sugary, beer-inflected breath and bizarrely solid tongue. Having someone casually name what was happening, without pity or reverence, was a foreign feeling too. My marriage was over! That didn’t have to be bad! It could even be funny! At least, it could be okay.

I stopped the kissing almost immediately. Sleeping with the man who had read Neruda at our wedding seemed like it would be very satisfying in a way that felt vulgar and dangerous, but it was certainly not the mature way of doing things. I imagined Lauren making a pass at Jon and felt my throat constrict. If I was going to move on, it couldn’t be with Calvin, and not only because an ex of his had told me he gave her “every strain” of HPV. I hadn’t spent enough time thinking about how to be with someone new. (And, although it was not a key factor in my decision, it occurred to me that I hadn’t trimmed my pubes since April.)

“I think, probably not . . .” I said, sinking back into my corner of the couch. Calvin was so undaunted by the rejection I felt like maybe I’d imagined his attempt. The mood in the room didn’t even shift.

“Weed?” he asked, traipsing over to the stove and lighting a joint before I’d even said yes.

We smoked and drank until late in the evening. I played him a recording of my sessions with the psychic, and he swore the man she’d drawn looked like his uncle. We ordered a pizza and showed each other important YouTube videos: a clip from a documentary where a woman has sex with the Eiffel Tower (me) and an eleven-minute supercut of Jason Derulo singing his own name (him). Sometime after midnight, I asked him to sleep over.

“I can’t stress how non-sexually I mean this,” I said. “But it’s been nice having you in the house and I’d like it if you stayed.”