Really Good, Actually(31)
Coming home from a date with an old colleague, distantly flirtatious acquaintance, or friend of a friend with whom there’d always been tension, I felt a satisfaction and pride bordering on mania. Realizing that other people—lots of people!—liked me or thought I was pretty or wanted to fuck me was spectacular. I had hoped that Jon would love me forever, sure, but a part of me had also assumed he was the only person who really wanted to try.
Back at my apartment at four a.m., I’d pass the hall mirror and catch my own eye: a person beguiling enough to be asked out, hot enough to be frenched in the back of an Uber, “good on text” enough to acquire a second and possibly third date. Spewing my little anecdotes and doing some eyeliner and discreetly finding opportunities to touch whomever’s back had worked. I was, according to the objective opinion of an outside body, worthy of time, and what was the saying? “Time is how you spend your love”? Take it up with Zadie Smith!
That loving and supporting someone for many years was not the same as eating pizza with them for two hours in a bar full of pinball machines did not really register. I was fucking lovable, actually. I was fine.
A Fantasy
I am walking home from doing something productive and morally good, like spinning. I have recently showered, and my hair has dried exactly right. I am not wearing makeup, but I don’t need to be, my skin is dewy like I’ve done three simultaneous sheet masks. I look French. I feel French. I am not even listening to a podcast while I walk, because I am the type of person who wants to Experience Life.
The sun is setting, and I breathe deeply, the way people do when they are internally settled and have nothing to prove. No part of my boob is popping over the top of my sports bra, which I am wearing as a shirt, a decision no one has noticed, because I am pulling it off with such ease.
As I walk up the street, lit beautifully, someone hands me a smoothie: “You should have this, miss.” They don’t even think to say “ma’am,” and why would they, I am young. I drink the smoothie and the wheatgrass in it settles in my body, energizing it or pulling out toxins or whatever wheatgrass is about.
I hum to myself and skip a little way down the pavement, I feel so light. When I get home, I will burn incense and read a book, and my phone will be in another room and I won’t even remember which one, because I am so unbothered to be away from it. I will moisturize my body and feel neutral about my cellulite, which is okay to have, everyone has it, even someone who is doing as well as me.
As I walk up the street I will know, deep within my body, that I am loved. By friends, family, and even—
Suddenly, there he is. Jon, red-eyed and tired-looking, wandering aimlessly like a person who has made many bad decisions in life, one of which haunts him in particular. I see him long before he sees me, and I think, how tragic.
It is hard to see him struggle when I am doing, in the words of our friends, acquaintances, and one surprisingly personal but nonetheless correct front-page newspaper article, “incredibly well.”
I think maybe it would be kinder to avoid him, and so I measure my pace to let him pass on ahead. I’m walking so slowly, but it is not enough. The way he’s trudging—resignedly, with devastation—means I’ve almost caught up. I’m trying to imagine the kindest way to say I’ve met someone when:
“Maggie! Maggie!”
I turn at the same time Jon does. We both see the man immediately—can’t miss him, because of the crowd that’s formed. He runs toward us in his massive, experimental trousers, smiling and waving.
“There she is,” says Harry Styles, slipping a stylish, tattooed arm around my waist.
Jon clocks it immediately: our easy intimacy, the flush in my cheeks. I feel a flicker of compassion for the man who was once my husband. I want to ask Harry Styles to be a little less familiar, to show some respect for the awkward situation. I want to say, Harry Styles, please. But I know I can’t stop him—he’s too excited, it’s all so new. Jon’s face falls, but he reaches out to shake the hand of the international superstar I met by chance on an airplane and charmed by pretending to be unfamiliar with his discography.
“Better not, mate,” says Harry Styles. “I’ve spent all morning fingering your wife.”
Chapter 10
The activities frenzy took over sometime in mid-autumn, and even I could tell it was a bad sign.
“Absolutely not,” Lauren said, after I suggested we sign up for a krav maga intensive Olivia promised would wreck us. “No adult starts a hobby from a good place.”
She was right. It didn’t matter if it was a buzzy new fitness trend or an aspirationally useful class or something fun and specific, like life drawing or an Italian conversation group—everyone involved in adult learning was running from something.
I’d learned this firsthand, having got the idea to take up a hobby from reading wikiHow’s advice for managing a divorce during a particularly pathetic dark night of the soul. The list featured eighteen tips, though the final seven pertained to the raising of children in a joint-custody arrangement and were therefore not relevant. “Get a Hobby” was tip number four, right above “Revisit Old Passions,” a heading accompanied by an illustration of a woman stirring something beige in a frying pan while imagining an alarm clock. A hobby seemed less confusing, and the sixth tip, “Get a Therapist If Needed,” did not apply to me.