On the very last day, The Husband phones. As soon as I hear his voice, everything becomes choppy waves again. Every word he says to me is like I’m being hit by those waves, pulled under where I can’t breathe. I hear him saying he’s been busy and hasn’t actually missed me that much, and I say, “What?” and it sounds hysterical. I’m pulled under again, gone with the undertow.
I cry. Not just regular crying, but the kind that comes from another time and space altogether. The kind that is so deep and hard that you feel like you will never stop, ever. I can hear the uncomfortable clinking of cutlery in the next room where my family sits, trying to eat lunch while I explode from my insides out. I know the girls can hear me, but I can’t stop. They’re just kids and they shouldn’t have to hear this. But I can’t stop. Nine full days without him, and with this one sentence he’s cut me again. He was busy. He didn’t miss me.
I pull it together enough to sneak out the back door, grabbing my purse as I do. I walk around to the other side of the house, and sit on a stoop facing the mountains. I light a cigarette, even though it’s daytime and anyone could catch me. My breathing slows. The hysterical wailing stops. I take in the cigarette smoke and the fresh mountain air. I look at the blue sky and for the first time in my life, I don’t want to go home. I want to stay right here, with my dad’s cousin, with the old sad dog that’s looking at me, with the mountains and the sea. I want to sit right here forever and turn to dust.
And then my dad rounds the corner. He mercifully says nothing about the cigarette in my hand. He just sits beside me and stares out at the mountains, too, the sun beaming directly into our eyes. Here’s my father, talking to me about heartbreak. Talking to me in what might be the most tender tone I’ve ever heard him speak in, since he’s usually well-meaning but often brusque and unemotional. Here’s my dad comforting me, tears in his eyes. I lean my head on his shoulder.
Suddenly, I realize he knows what this feels like. This grief, he’s felt it. He had his heart shattered by my mother, and he fell down the well of self-pity until he was out of reach, even from those of us who loved him most. Now here he is with me on this stoop, telling me as much, telling me how he let his pain devour him. Reminding me that I’m strong and don’t have to be devoured by what The Husband did.
With my head on his shoulder and the sun in our eyes, we stare out at the mountains in silence, that same vista people in my family have looked at for generations. How many of them sat here like this, their hearts in a million pieces, with no choice but to keep moving forward? Did my grandmother ever feel this way? Is it inevitable that one day Birdie will feel like this? God, I hope not.
We sit and stare, and, with his arm still around me, my dad says, “You’re not smoking now are you? Because it’s no good.”
A few weeks later, back in Toronto, I go to my favourite tattoo artist in Kensington Market. She designs a beautiful font for the Italian phrase I want tattooed on my right wrist. I need it there, where I can always see it, inked into my skin to remind me where I’m from and also what I’m made of.
I have mettle. Fortitude. I come from the soil and the sun and the sand and the ruins. I come from war and poetry and invention. In my blood run the seas that flow out into the Mediterranean.
On my wrist facing up at me, she tattoos forza e coraggio. Strength and courage.
I’m going to need it.
PART TWO
I think about how I was once part of love, and now I am apart from it, standing on the sidelines in wasted sexy underwear.
CHAPTER NINE
VOYAGE
WE BECOME OUR OWN WOLVES
It’s January 2013. I am alone in my apartment at 6:00 p.m., eating a fried egg and having a drink. A Dark ’n’ Stormy; it’s become my signature. Imagine — just one year ago, I didn’t even drink at all, and now I drink so much, I have a signature! That’s progress, baby. Let’s do some more inventory, shall we?
I’m thirty-eight years old. I feel like I’ve lost everything, and therefore I believe I have nothing. Oh sure, I own this apartment, so that’s something. And I have things in it, and a cleaning lady I’ve never met who comes every two weeks and cleans it for me because somehow I can’t. I used to clean an entire house top to bottom, a house I owned with The Husband — excuse me, Ex-husband — but now I can barely keep nine hundred square feet clean.
This boy I was seeing for a while could not get over the cleaning lady thing. I don’t even know how it came up, but after it did, he always found a way to use it against me, this completely bourgeois thing about me he found disgusting. I tried to explain to him that when people used to tell me they had cleaning ladies, I would judge them, too, but after my worst year ever, can’t I give myself this one thing? I felt as ashamed of it as he felt suspicious, both coming from lower-class immigrant families and all. But it was a waste of time to explain myself to him. And I didn’t care to. That wasn’t what he was there for.
Anyway, the fact that I cooked eggs today is kind of amazing. Usually, I have a bowl of cereal, or just rum for dinner. That’s all I can manage when Birdie isn’t here. If I don’t have a “date” lined up and I’m just here, alone, it can be pretty bad. But look at me, cooking! How’s that for personal growth?
At this moment, it’s been eleven months since The Bomb dropped, and Birdie and I just got back from a trip to the Bahamas. When The Ex-husband picked us up at the airport, he looked cuter than ever, his hair going silver now as he approaches forty. He small-talks me, but I feel like punching him or kissing him … both in equal measure, sue me. It’s all I can do not to break into hysterical tears in the car, our old car, but the psychologist says I have to stop crying in front of Birdie.
As he drives, The Ex-husband pokes at me, jokes, then notices enough to stop and wipe a tear from my cheek. He looks crushed, but free. Sad he’s hurt me so much, but so happy to not have to miss NFL games anymore because of my family’s events. Or something. Of course I’m oversimplifying, but this car ride is exhausting.
We pull up to my apartment building and Birdie, in her old-soul way, says, “Mom, I just wanted to say that I hope you have a really good night tonight,” as if she’s an empathetic woman in her thirties, not a five-year-old at the end of a long trip. Tears shoot out of my eyes like unexpectedly burst pipes. The Ex-husband squeezes my hand and makes a face that says hold it together.
I do. I always do.
So I’ve started the new year pretty much the same way I ended the last — alone, sad, angry, drinking too much, sad, angry about being alone, repeat. It’s cheesy to make a resolution at a time like this, in January along with everyone else, but goddamn it, I need to do something. I can’t sit here being proud that I made myself a fried egg for dinner for fuck’s sake! Or that I didn’t cry in front of my daughter this time, where’s my gold medal. I mean, honestly.
You have to believe me: I want to stop feeling sorry for myself. I really do. But I don’t know how. I don’t know how to be okay with these empty spaces, the physical one here in this apartment with no husband in it, no daughter. Just the sounds of the fridge buzzing and ice cubes clinking in a glass. Just me and the vast emptiness inside of me where love once was. I don’t know how people combat the loneliness, how they push through the space without having to fill it up with anything they can find like I’ve been doing. But I do know that something’s gotta change. I can’t keep blaming The Husband for throwing me to the wolves when I’ve become my own wolf, devouring myself because I can’t take the pain when the night comes.
Oh, God, sorry. It’s always the rum and sometimes the tequila that makes me this way. Ah, fuck it, really, I can’t keep blaming it on the booze when we all know it’s just my heart — the world’s worst and most broken record. Look, I know that since the beginning of time people have been betrayed and deserted by the person they love and trust the most. This isn’t the first time in history someone’s had a hard time being alone.
But this is my story.
THE BABIES
>
Let me tell you about The Babies. That’s what us single women call the seemingly only available men in this city: babies. All the single women I’ve talked to in Toronto from age thirty-five to forty-five have slept with men much younger than them for most of their dating lives. Oh come on, you say, none of you can find a guy your own age? Where are they all? We talk about it sometimes — Are they all married or in relationships? Are the ones that aren’t married sleeping with twenty-six-year-olds themselves? Does a woman their own age look like a walking piece of baggage?
It’s all very mysterious and it means in this city, there’s a giant group of single, super-educated, well-dressed, great-careered, home-owning, vacation-taking women in their thirties having fun, casual sex with guys ten or more years younger than them. Getting no closer to finding the one — or anyone, really — to have an actual relationship with.
Okay, so they aren’t all babies. Every once in a while a guy our own age will come along, but they’re even worse. They’re trying to find themselves. They aren’t in a rush. They say they’re into polyamory. I mean, why not? They’ve got all the time in the world without a built-in biological expiry date.
Look, I’m not saying every single woman in her thirties wants kids, but for the ones that do, time’s ticking. They are in a rush. They don’t have the same luxury that single men have to stop and find themselves. To casually date and not commit to any one person because there might be something better out there. Someone more right. In a big city like Toronto, there’s endless choice. Everyone can just stay at the sampler table for as long as they want until one day they’re ready to make a decision. Which is cool if you can, but for the single women I know who want to meet someone and have a baby, the endless sampling sucks. All these choices means no one ever has to choose.
So they come and go, in and out of our lives, and because they’re hard to keep track of, we give them nicknames: Shy Banker. Hot Actor. Crazy Guy (formerly Cute Guy). Snaps. The Giraffe. It’s a dating shorthand, a way to quickly catch each other up.
“Whatever happened to Billable Hours, anyway?”
“We just had no chemistry at all. I gave him three dates and was like, movin’ on!”
“You won’t believe who asked me out, now that I finally met someone else.”
“Tall, Stupid Lawyer??”
“EXACTLY.”
“Okay, don’t be mad but Crazy Guy is back …”
“Oh my GOD … WHY are you doing this to yourself?”
“I just think awesome in bed trumps crazy, don’t you?”
I’m really not sure how my life became an episode of Sex and the City. It’s the weirdest thing.
HOW IT HAPPENS IS THIS
It’s hot. July 2012. I’ve just returned from the trip to Italy. The first thing I do when I get back is have sex with The Ex-husband. Even though he didn’t miss me. Even though I never want to get back together with him. It’s funny being human sometimes, isn’t it? We’ve been having sex consistently, several times a week, ever since we moved out of our house and into separate apartments. It’s masochistic maybe, but it’s easy. He lives across the street, and we get each other.
Look, I know, okay? But for the past twelve years I’ve only slept with him. And I’ve never been on a date, ever. I’ve never had a one-night stand. I’ve never picked up a guy in a bar. I’ve never given my number to someone I just met. I have no idea what to do or how to do it, now that I find myself thirty-seven and single for the first time. But I know this — I’m not interested in finding a boyfriend or a new relationship. I just need to have sex with someone other than The Ex-husband. I need to have sex. Simple as that. I just don’t have a clue how.
So I ask my friend’s husband for advice. He’s the quietest person I’ve ever met. Mostly in contrast to her I suppose; she’s Big Laugh, after all. Big Laugh’s Quiet Husband has never said more than a few words to me before this night. But here eating dinner on their balcony in the hot July air, I ask him because he’s a man. And because I don’t really know what else to do and I’m embarrassed to say what I’m about to say. I say, “I need to have sex. But how do I find someone to do that with?”
I say, “I tried to seduce a couple of guys I know, but they totally turned me down. Is there something wrong with me?”
Big Laugh’s Quiet Husband sighs and then quietly says, “There’s nothing wrong with you. They turned you down because they’re good guys who know you and what you’ve been through. What you need to do is find a stranger. You need to go to a bar and pick up a stranger and have sex with him.”
I stare at him. “I can’t do that. I can’t do that! I can’t even imagine how to do that.”
And he says, “Make an online dating profile and be totally honest. Trust me, if you want to, you’ll get laid by tomorrow.”
I hate the idea of having to go online, it freaks me out, but at the same time, it seems like a good way to solve my current problem. So I make an online profile on one of the most popular dating sites in Toronto in 2012. I put up some tasteful but hot photos of myself. I write a bunch of stuff about me that of course no one will read, it’s all about the photos anyway. Within an hour I have more than fifty messages. And I see that Big Laugh’s Quiet Husband was right — I will get laid by tomorrow if I want. And that’s exactly what happens.
FIRST GUY
The First Guy is memorable for being the first. The whole day leading up to us meeting I’m a bundle of nerves. It feels like it’s prom night and I know I’m going to lose my virginity. I kind of am, in a way. I mean, I haven’t even kissed a man other than The Husband since New Year’s Eve 1999. And here I am in July 2012, about to go for drinks with a twenty-six-year-old magazine editor.
He was one of the first to start talking to me on the dating site. He was charming and smart, and we chatted a lot and agreed to meet. Twenty-six is a baby. What am I doing? He said he had lots of experience with online dating and that he loved older women. I told him I had no experience. “So if I chicken out that better be cool!” “Absolutely,” he said.
I do not chicken out. It feels like it’s a thousand degrees out, so I throw on a light dress and a pair of heels. I fan myself on the streetcar the whole way over. I’m early and see him first. He is dressed really nicely and has an incredibly fit body, but his face isn’t quite as cute as in his photos. Undeterred, I walk up to him and we go inside the bar.
We have beer and easy conversation. We talk about where our families are from, about our parents and our siblings and how we were raised. We talk about school and careers and how we each got to where we are professionally. We click, there in that loud downtown bar, and my nervousness slips away. He seems harmless, and into me, and a good candidate to be the first guy I’ll be with after my husband broke my heart.
He also has the same name as my teenage boyfriend, my first love, the one I dated for several years and was the first person I ever had sex with. Two firsts, same name. He was a wonderful boyfriend, my teenage love. Caring, sweet, and loving. In contrast to most of the stories I’ve heard from women about their first sexual experience, mine was awesome because of him. Now here, this young man in front of me is about to usher me into a new sexual phase of my life, and he has the same name as the boy who ushered me into the very first sexual phase of my life. I take it as a sign.
As we talk and drink, I become more sure. This is the right thing to do. For the first time in my life, I am going to have sex with someone I don’t know or care about at all. Despite his age, The First Guy seems pretty mature, with a career and his own condo. We go to that condo.
I text his address to a friend, as well as his cellphone number and his first and last name. If you don’t hear from me by 9 am tomorrow, I’m dead, I text. Oh, just have fun! she texts back. The whole thing feels crazy. Only five months ago I was bored and resigned to my domestic family life, unhappy with the stranger that my husband had become. Now here I am, in a fancy loft conversion with a man with abs like I’ve never seen. It
is insane. It is amazing.
Let’s stop for a moment and reflect on this sweet boy and his hard, hard body. I’ve never seen anything like it, except in movies maybe. But here it is in front of me, lean and smooth and undeniably beautiful. He’s incredibly lovely and generous throughout the whole thing. I just can’t stop giggling because I can’t believe this is happening. If he finds this unsettling, he doesn’t let it show. When it’s over, I’m in awe. I just slept with a complete stranger! And I didn’t think of The Ex-husband even once. It’s the greatest feeling. But poor First Guy! He tries to cuddle with me and I have no interest. I say, “Thank you so much!” with way too much enthusiasm. He seems confused, and why not? He has no idea what he’s just done for me.
When he asks me when he can see me again, I say, “Why??” Honestly, I never want to see him again, even though it was so great. Without having articulated it to myself or anyone, I know my one-and-done policy is now in place. I have no interest in having a boyfriend, or any kind of casually permanent thing. I know I don’t want to get to know anyone enough to like them, enough for them to lie to me, enough to have them break my barely mended heart. I know I just want to do this whole thing over and over again: meet a stranger, have sex, then go home.
Sailing
For me, talking to a guy in a bar and then going home and having sex with him is equivalent to just walking down to a marina, picking out a yacht, and then sailing it around the world. Without a map. Or knowledge of the sea. Or even a fucking clue about boats at all. That’s how foreign a thing it is to do. That’s about how prepared I am. But Life said to me: There’s a yacht, go sail it or something!
Alone Page 11
