Really Good, Actually(28)

Rather than mindfully noticing the leaves on the trees, the smells and sounds of the street, I meditated on how much I despised my husband, his intensity and pretensions and taste in music, the bump on his nose from a high school hockey injury. I hated his back hair and his mother’s cooking and how he was too tall to be technically short but not really, actually tall, and certainly not “close to six feet” as he claimed. I recited like mantras my pet hates, lingered over every time he’d disappointed me, hurt my feelings, expressed anger. I thought about moments I’d looked at him and felt, Jesus, this person?; times he’d humiliated me at the grocery store, broken a mug in anger, cut someone off in traffic. I ran through my twenties thus far, blaming him for every negative experience, paving over birthdays, trips, Saturday mornings, dinners and movies and Christmases with family. I reshaped our happy memories until they were revealed for what they truly were: false moments of hope concealing the truth. This was a man who would promise to love you and lie about it. This was a man who would steal your cat.

I got drunk and had sex with Calvin.





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Chapter 9




When classes began again, I promised myself I’d stop thinking about Jon. This turned out to be surprisingly easy; all it required was 100 percent of my energy, 100 percent of the time. I stayed busy with work and meetings, going to friends’ houses to gossip and text through movies, and obligatory calls to my family to tell them that, yes, I was okay, no, I still did not want to move home for a while to “sort some things out.”

I avoided thinking about him on my commute to work, crammed onto the bus with my headphones in, occasionally looking at attractive strangers with an expression Lauren called “Missed Connection eyes.” I barely thought about him while trawling sublet listings in my office or fielding students’ half-assed questions—more comments than questions, really—about Spenser or whomever. I did not think about him during long weeknights alone, sitting on the living room floor marking papers, or doing probably unhelpful facial tightening exercises, or lighting my one fancy candle for an allotted thirty minutes before blowing it out again.

I didn’t know exactly what the plan was; all I knew at this stage was that staying occupied meant staying distracted and therefore something close to happy. If I emerged from this period with a better body, cooler life, cuter face, and incredibly hot, possibly famous new partner, so be it. In service of those goals, I started a “squats challenge” and made a resolution to cycle more and possibly save up for preventative Botox. I stopped crying all the time—in fact I hadn’t cried in weeks—and made jokes online about my fabulous, wild life, spending my weekends drinking and dancing and dating. Because it provided the most instant distraction, I focused most heavily on the dating.

My friends feared I was moving too quickly, warning that my first time with a new person might feel messy and emotional. It had actually been alright—minus a few instances of erectile dysfunction from Calvin—though I had resolved not to tell anyone about that particular life choice. Having a sexual secret felt kind of fun and soapy, but I was also fairly ashamed of myself. So I feigned interest in their advice about taking it slow, while secretly hoping to take it as fast as possible, to push Calvin swiftly down the scroll of my sexual history. I was impatient, too, because being excited or nervous or horny was better than being sad.

“This is what I’m supposed to be doing,” I told my friends one evening at Clive’s. “Getting back out there. I’m on Tinder and I think I’m going to try Hinge.”

Lauren laughed ruefully and said, “Godspeed.”

Amirah pointed out, not necessarily helpfully, that I’d barely been “out there” to begin with. Having dated Jon since I was nineteen, I wasn’t making some grand comeback to single life. This was my debut.

My first date was with a twenty-seven-year-old bartender called Sofia, from whom I got the idea to use normal-to-average photos of myself on my dating profiles. She had seemed pretty enough online—short and strong, with bold eyebrows and little Marie Antoinette boobs—but when we met in real life, and I first saw her walking toward the patio where I was guarding two ciders while trying not to be sweaty, she looked so beautiful that I thought briefly about running away. Instead, I wiped my clammy palms on my jeans and, before I could stop myself, shook her hand like this was some kind of sexual and emotional job interview, which I guess in a way it was.