Really Good, Actually(25)

i think ur my TA lol can never think of an opening line for these things but, hi, you seem kewl B-) big legs





Chapter 8




I showed up to work, in person, for the first time in late August. Merris must have told everyone why I’d been gone because it was Soft Eyes all around. Most people were nice about it, but the arm patting and head tilting wore on me, and people kept asking if I thought I’d ever get married again, which seemed like a quick turnaround.

Olivia, a quiet medievalist with a gentle, academic-seeming lisp, had gotten engaged during my time away and was incredibly bashful, as though matrimony had a one-in, one-out policy and the start of her marriage had directly brought about the end of my own. Jiro stopped me in the hall to tell me about an event his sister’s church organized for young singles.

“Relatively young,” he corrected himself. “What are you, thirty-four?”

I started closing the door to my office.

Now it was September, and Jon had not answered a single text, call, or email since the Night Burgers incident, when he had been half asleep and seemed confused about who I was and why I was calling, eventually saying, “don’t worry about it, honestly,” and hanging up. At some point, he’d blocked the cat’s Instagram too. I texted Calvin to ask if he had confessed about our evening together, and he wrote back, SO sorry, who’s this? then no, when I clarified. I asked my lawyer if we needed Jon to get in touch for some legal something or other, but apparently with “so few assets on the table” (thanks, Lori), there was unlikely to be much back and forth.

I kept busy with my collages and self-help books and a few more tentative forays into socializing. I was preparing for a new round of students, and Merris’s latest book had some big, unanswered questions at the heart of it that had me spending a lot of time alone in the library, and it was unbelievable how normal it all felt until I went home and no one was there, or something funny would happen and I’d go to text Jon and remember we didn’t do that anymore. Sometimes I texted anyway.

It felt humiliating to admit it, but without a partner to dissect things with, the big and small events of life seemed flimsy. I had accepted that it was over, that it would never be how it was again, even, possibly, that it was for the best, but I would have paid a million dollars for one more cab ride home from a party, drunkenly touching each other’s legs and poring over the night’s events—who had said what about what or accidentally offended whom, who was too drunk and going home with a new person, whether there had been enough snacks and if it seemed like the hosts were having an argument later—thrilled to have been out with so many people and more thrilled to be alone, now, just the two of us, on our way home to fuck and laugh and drink cold, cold water.

But! Better not to think about it. Work was a helpful distraction, usually, though my situation—the confused longing and self-flagellating nostalgia, the constant downloading and deleting of Tinder—found ways to seep in there too. One day, sifting through Alciato’s Emblemata for references to rivers, I was ambushed. “Sometimes sweet things become bitter,” he wrote after someone was attacked by bees. Wow, I thought. So true. “I unhappily bear the fruit of my own destruction,” a chestnut tree said after being shaken by some children. It was disorienting to find that this, too, was about me, a voice reaching across centuries and an ocean to say, sorry about your divorce. When I reached Emblem 192, “That respect is to be sought in marriage,” I had to close the book and take a break, texting the group chat once again about my hair.

The desire to cut and bleach my hair was extremely strong and getting stronger by the day. The group chat had already sheepishly admitted the formation of a second, separate group chat mostly dedicated to tagging in who was going to talk me down that week from a home dye job. I understood the argument against it: how trite, to get a dramatic haircut during a breakup. I wanted to resist. Amy had recently gotten a tattoo of the word breathe, and Amirah had joked that it might as well read divorced. Did I want everyone around me to know, on sight, that I was Going Through Something?

Maybe I didn’t, but there was something alluring about it anyway, the temptation of a fresh start. The image of the runaway in a gas station bathroom with scissors and peroxide, becoming new. Only my pride at the idea of Jon finding out caused me to hesitate—and even then, if I could pull it off, turn into a sexy-stranger version of the woman he’d known . . . well.

I was collating photos of Drew Barrymore in the nineties to support my case when I received an email:

Thanks for your inquiry regarding Janet’s annual checkup. Per our records, Jon arranged it and brought her in last week. You’ll be happy to know she’s perfectly healthy and all her shots are now up to date. While he was here, Jon updated Janet’s account with us and removed your contact info and status as primary caregiver. Was this done in error? If so, we are unable to make further changes without Jon’s input, so you’ll have to get in touch with him. Sorry I can’t be of more assistance. Please have Jon send us a message, and we can amend Janet’s file.





The vet signed off with her name and a little picture of a paw print. It looked like a small cartoon cat was giving me the finger. As I blinked at the monitor, Olivia came in, a bag of lean protein in her hand.

“Everything okay?” she asked, fishing around in her Ziploc for the first of two wet-looking eggs. I told her everything was alright, I was only tired, and she nodded like she knew what I meant, though I suspected she was rarely tired, and as soon as she was, she’d take a reasonable twenty-minute nap and awake refreshed and hydrated.