Really Good, Actually(51)

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.

Truthfully, I was feeling depressed and broke, two things I was not really entitled to feel, but which nonetheless had become dominant emotional presences in my life. I dealt with these feelings by buying dumb garbage I didn’t need and not looking at my bank balance, ever. Other than the online shopping, I was not doing anything that was not 100 percent necessary to keep myself alive and my rent paid. The days of meditation and self-improvement efforts were over. I walked everywhere with sunglasses and a pair of big wireless headphones on, though they played no music; I had lost the charging cable months ago. I could no longer bear to stop and talk to people, give them the cheery CliffsNotes of my life, smile and promise I was doing great—really good, actually—then carry on, to eat soup and cut my toenails and watch TV in a basement, alone.

This was probably better for everyone, as I was awful to hang out with. All I wanted to do was dissect my breakup, on some days the worst thing that had ever happened to me and on others the very best, a blessing straight from god that would surely lead to all kinds of positive developments I could not quite yet imagine. I knew if I saw my friends I would have to care about their lives in return, and I simply . . . did not. What I wanted was to spend my time monologuing about love and tragedy and whether the size of my calves had anything to do with my being now divorced.

The only person I saw with any regularity was Simon, because he loved to talk about his breakup too, and we could go on and on together about where it had all gone wrong, absolving each other of our various relational mistakes, then eat some food or share a bottle of wine and have sex. My doubts from the diner ebbed and flowed. I could usually overwrite them with a few beers or a solid orgasm. Also, I had clogged my shower drain and now could not use it for more than five minutes without nasty gray water pooling at my ankles. Simon had a lovely shower.

Occasionally I would meet up with someone from one of the apps, so I could do first date makeup and tell my best anecdotes and ask my most interesting questions to someone I would never see again. Seeking connection was lovely in theory, but mostly it felt better to sing the hits for a dazzled new audience, to kiss outside a bar and part ways, to leave them wanting more.

Although I was shunning them, I still wanted my friends to invite me to things. Eventually they stopped, carrying on as though I had moved away or had a baby. So one overcast February afternoon, after a few too many Instagram Stories of everyone hanging out without me, I took out exactly forty dollars, selected “no receipt,” and texted my friends that I missed them, and would they please join me at a trivia night we sometimes went to, hosted by a man we were absolutely certain was the worst person alive but who had a genuinely impressive store of general knowledge.