But now, hours away from midnight, I felt especially determined. I was not going to be a forty-year-old woman addicted to a phantom relationship that was held together by emojis and strings of Xs and Os.
I stood on the subway platform, buzzing phone now in my hand, but I refused to look at it. 646 had an uncanny habit of popping up just when I’d stopped looking for him. It was as if he had an internal sonar that let him know when I was almost out of reach, if not literally, then emotionally. I took a deep breath. I could see the lights of the shuttle train moving down the tracks. I didn’t want him here with me. I resolved whatever was on my phone I would delete it, get on the train, and keep going. I turned it over and typed in my pass code.
4. Woman of a Certain Age
It was Rachel again. I stepped onto the train, flooded with a mixture of relief and disappointment.
You’re going to a hotel by yourself?? Where is the hotel? What is the number? What if I have to call the police?? WHAT IF THERE IS A MAN THERE WHO WANTS TO WATCH YOU SHOWER AND LIKES TAXIDERMY.
I’m turning my phone off, I wrote back, equal parts annoyed that I had to explain myself and amused that we were always able to speak in cultural references that we never had to spell out to each other. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
The phone vibrated again and I looked down in frustration. It was a picture of Tippi Hedren being attacked by birds. I rolled my eyes, and wrote back.
Wrong movie. BIRDS is the one where the unmarried woman is made insane by . . . birds. PSYCHO is the one where the unmarried woman is on the run alone and gets murdered in a motel.
People were always amused at how opposite Rachel and I were in nearly every way. We sometimes joked that the only thing that was missing to fully complete the contrast was that one of us wasn’t blond. While I was always seeking out alone time, she was a gifted networker, the world’s greatest summer camp counselor, forever organizing a group.
You’re going to a motel! Alone! There are birds at this beach, aren’t there? PSYCHO BIRDS.
I sighed. The public editor of the New York Times had once told Rachel that she “should give a course in persistence, one of life’s underrated great qualities” after being on the receiving end of a series of emails requesting a clarification in a story. After a decade of friendship and now a business, I didn’t need a course in it—I knew that if I didn’t give Rachel some information before disappearing she would get anxious at some point and not hesitate to call the NYPD until they came to look for me, regardless of whether I wanted or needed to be found.
I’m going to the Playland Motel. It’s just in Queens. That is part of New York.
I switched to airplane mode before she could respond and put my phone back where it had been at the bottom of my bag. I was determined to be away. If there was an emergency it would have to wait till tomorrow. It was doubtful anyone else would reach out anyway. Maddy knew me too well to worry, and Mauri had been on too many whirlwind trips with me to think this was strange. It was unlikely my mother was even aware that it was my birthday tomorrow.
The smell of the sea rushed at me when I exited the subway car two stops later. No one got off the train with me. The bang of the exit door echoed loudly behind me as I descended the flights of stairs to the street below. As I’d expected, it was empty out here. The motel was on the far corner, and as I made my way down the vacant block the only noise came from the international flights out of JFK that were taking off in their regular intervals overhead.
I’d been emailed a code when I’d paid online back in the office; the instructions said to use it to access the front door and also my room, and now I understood why: there was no reception desk or check-in person. There was no front door either. Just the entrance to a bar downstairs that was open but empty. Instead I followed signs down an alley to the back of the building; the only people there were the kitchen staff from the Chinese restaurant next door, smoking cigarettes and eyeing me as I walked past. The smell of fried fish mingled with the cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air; I glanced at the stack of garbage bags at the back door of the restaurant, alert for any movement of rats.
Incongruously cheerful signs on the wall above the garbage pointed me to a keypad. The code worked on the first try. Once inside, I climbed a flight of stairs. It was silent. Could I really be the only one here? I stopped and listened for the sound of any human movement but could hear only the faint noise of a city bus pulling away out on the street. Rachel was right. Woman alone in an empty motel did sound like the beginning of a story that did not bode well for the heroine. This would make an excellent opening to an old Law & Order episode, I thought. Except if this really were a Law & Order episode, the detectives would spend the entire hour trying to figure out why I’d come out here by myself. I looked at the door numbers; my room was at the far end of the hall. I knew from the website that each room had been designed by a well-known artist and had been given a name. The site had made it look fresh and adventurous. But in the silence the hall looked long and foreboding. I walked quickly, forcing myself to punch the keypad beside my door calmly. I was in. I promptly locked the door behind me, considering briefly the lack of a dead bolt. I took in the room. Half of it was covered by a green geometric shape painted on the wall that reached from the ceiling down the walls at an angle and onto the floor, giving it an odd, lopsided feel. My stomach grumbled. I crossed my fingers there was a kitchen at the bar, thinking it was going to be a long night if there wasn’t, and headed back down.
The bar looked like the kind of bright white and airy surfer place one might find somewhere on the coast of California, not at the edges of New York City. Except for a handful of people, all of whom were hunched over their drinks in a way that suggested they were regulars, and some kids in the corner, the room was mostly empty. I ordered a gin and tonic, grabbed an empanada from a tray, and took a table to myself. It was open mic night, and a few locals had begun to line the walls, holding their instruments, waiting their turn. As I wolfed down the empanada and sipped at my drink, two young black kids took the stage. They were both in surfer shorts and sandals; their hair grew high and wild above their heads. They couldn’t have been more than sixteen. “Hey there,” one said into the mic, waving at the room, before moving back and nodding to his partner. After a few false starts they began to play a very faithful version of “Twist and Shout.”
When I’d first set foot in New York, age twenty-three, it had been like one of those videos of captured animals being released back into the wild. There’d been no transition. The world immediately, finally made sense. When I thought of those years now, what I remembered most was the sensation that I was in the exact center of the world, inside the best secret, one that I shared only with those around me. I felt lucky, which in those days I’d found more reassuring than professional accolades or words of encouragement. Who knew what was around the corner or through a door? Who knew what the night might bring? Anything was possible. It had been a long time since I’d felt that way—at any time a quick Google search immediately dispelled the notion I was either the first to discover something or at the center of anything. I didn’t want to be a person who spent the rest of her life moaning about change; still I missed that sensation, the exhilaration of being entirely in one place. Now, as the two kids on stage shifted from the Beatles to Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” and their earnestness and unlikely music choice wove its way around me—this is what you’ll get when you mess with us—mixing with the sea air that breezed in through the open doorway, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the perfectness of it all. The wholeness. The incongruity and unexpectedness of two surfer kids out here with electrified hair, singing their hearts out to Radiohead. This was how I’d wanted to feel. This was why I’d come. I needed to be reminded that life was not a done deal. I was not a done deal.
Presently the duo, my unlikely birthday saviors, got off and were replaced by two white surfer dudes who immediately began wailing out Tenacious D as though they were at a suburb
an college frat party. Ah well, the city giveth and the city taketh away. It didn’t matter. It was enough. I put my empty glass on the bar, pushed the change the bartender handed me back to my twenty for a tip, and left.
The beach was a block away. I could hear the waves now. Apartment buildings rose up behind me, and I thought about the people who’d been trapped in them after Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, and the power had been knocked out for days. Some had been too old to get down thirty flights of pitch-black staircases and had no electricity or phones or family to help. I’d delivered food and supplies all around here that month. You’d never know looking at it now that everything along here had been ravaged. It seemed impossibly recovered. It’s a luxury to worry about your age, those high-rises seemed to be reminding me, to worry about being alone when there are so many other not inevitable things to be concerned over. I nodded, as though I were in an actual debate with them, which wasn’t that strange; my life had felt like a debate with invisible voices telling me what to do, how to dress, hurry, hurry, hurry, lest happiness pass me by. But now, in the quiet night, alone, I also knew better. I was lucky, sure, but more important, I was also a relatively modern phenomenon: a woman in charge of her own life, who could do what she wanted. With that came a responsibility. There was no blueprint yet for this: I was going to have to create it for myself.
I reached the sand and walked up to the dark boardwalk. The beach was deserted in both directions; above me there was the faint glow of the moon behind the clouds. I could hear the waves breaking in a regular rhythm, but all I could see was a large, dark expanse that reached out and out, broken here and there by a ghostly whitecap. Lights from ships far out at sea flickered in the distance like tiny candles.
It was nearing midnight. I gazed at the dark water for a long time, thinking how it made the perfect metaphor for the uncharted waters of the decade ahead. I let myself be overwhelmed by the idea that I had no sense of what the coming years would contain and no clue how to navigate through them. So few of the cautionary tales that had been told to me had panned out: I hadn’t become a tabloid headline, the career hadn’t ended, the empty motel marked a new beginning, not my demise.
I was determined to do better from this point, leaving certain baggage behind me. So many bad decisions, bad habits, bad relationships. I also knew, now that I was finally here and there was no more time for last-minute swerve-offs, that there were other things I was going to be required to leave behind. I made myself list them in my head. There might never be a child. I might always be alone. More than that, I was going to have to figure out how to live well in a world that had given me little indication that was possible. I didn’t know how I was going to do that, just that I had to try. If I had a birthday resolution for the year ahead, that was it.
I made myself say it out loud: I might always be alone. It sounded less overwhelming against the noise of the breaking waves. I laughed. Fuck off, I thought, I am done feeling bad. And then aloud: I can do whatever I want. Just then I remembered seeing Patti Smith, two summers before, reading an old poem at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, the city aflame behind her in the setting summer sun. I’m gonna get out of here, she said, as if she were once again that young girl who’d written those lines decades ago. She was going to get on that train and go to New York City. She was never going to return, no never. She was going to travel light. How I loved that. Oh, watch me now, she’d said. As if she was about to perform the world’s greatest magic trick.
Oh, watch me now, I thought.
Then I turned around and went back to my hotel room.
•
I woke up feeling victorious.
This was unexpected.
Was this what it was like on the other side? I thought, staring up at the ceiling. I felt like I was in the final scene of Thelma & Louise if immediately after their car had plunged off the cliff it had sprouted wings, Harry Potter–style, and flown away. I felt like Dorothy opening the door into Oz. Everything was suddenly Technicolor. I’d killed the witch; let the adventure begin. Or was I the witch now? I wondered with a smile: smart, powerful, a force to be reckoned with, and untethered from all the expectations of who I was supposed to be at this point.
It helped that through the open window I could hear the whooshing pulse of the ocean, punctuated by the intermittent roar of an arriving subway and the ding of the train doors as they opened and closed. Through the slats in the blinds, I could see the pale blue of the early morning sky; the breeze that rattled in smelled like salt. The world outside felt wide and open.
“I feel great.” I said this out loud, lest the dueling voices that had been in my head the day before were thinking of making a reappearance. And then for emphasis: “I feel fucking great.”
I got out of bed and put my bathing suit on under my pajamas, grabbed my book and a towel, and walked down to the beach for a swim. It was a Friday morning, and apart from the morning joggers I was the only person around. The water was so calm and flat the ocean looked like a lake. A lake with oil slicks and a few floating plastic bottles, which were probably always there, but easier to miss when the surf was up. I took off my pajamas, wrapped them in my towel, put the straw panama hat I’d brought with me, even though the sun was still casting only weak morning light, on top of the pile, and walked to the water. I waded in, trying to skirt the slicks and debris, and walked out until I was deep enough that I could comfortably dunk myself under. The gently rippling water did not give me the crashing baptism into this new decade that I’d hoped for, but the salt water felt good as I floated there, letting the current carry me back to shore. Afterward I sat on the cold sand, my now wet pajamas pasted against my legs, and read my book. Every once in a while, I turned my phone on to field birthday messages and scroll through Facebook posts. Mostly though, I wondered about my sudden change in outlook, which felt like a gift from the universe. Would every day be like this now? Would this sense of lightness and expectation weave its way into my life the same way the heavy dread and shame had these last few years? I felt a little bit like I’d just fallen in love. That same sense of elation and possibility. Except I was alone. It was confusing.
A man slowly walked by along the water’s edge, his pants rolled up to keep from getting wet. I kept my head down out of habit, knowing that to do otherwise would be to invite company. Women alone always seemed to be seen as an advertisement: open space, please fill.
Under downcast eyelids, I watched him change course and wander slowly up to me. Sure enough, he stopped a few feet away. Head down in my book, I pretended to be fully occupied, even as I shifted my legs underneath me in case I had to stand up quickly. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me.” I looked up as slowly as I could. He was older, and heavyset, and had what sounded like a Russian accent. His white shirt was held together by its two middle buttons and fell open over his lower stomach, revealing a hairy belly. I couldn’t tell if he was distraught or drunk. His clothes were rumpled, but he didn’t appear to be homeless. I glanced behind me as discreetly as I could to see if anyone was around, but the joggers had left, and it seemed I was alone. I turned my eyes to him but didn’t say anything, hoping to make clear with my silence that I had no interest in this conversation. He was undaunted. He cleared his throat. “Can I ask you, what does a woman mean when she says she needs space?” He put his hand to his chest. “I have lost my wife, she has left, and it hurts so deeply.”
I stifled a laugh, not because I thought his pain (or inebriation, if that’s what it was) was funny, but because it was too ridiculous. After all this, to be happily siting alone on a beach on my fortieth birthday and be called upon by a male stranger to answer for his aloneness. I shook my head and shrugged, thinking if I kept silent maybe he’d go away. The silence stretched. But he didn’t move.
“I see you here, you wanted space from . . . something.” He shook his head. “And so I thought I’d ask you. Why would my wife want to be alone? Maybe you have wisdom.”
I sighed lou
dly and gazed at him directly with what I hoped was a look that conveyed my deep annoyance. It had no effect.
“I have no wisdom,” I said finally, reaching for my phone as though answering a call. “Maybe she just needs time.”
“Maybe time,” he said, nodding slowly, his head dropping, “maybe time.” He stood there for a minute more silently. Then he said, “Excuse me,” and walked away.
I watched him shuffle along and felt a little bad that I’d been so cold, but how could I be expected to explain to him why a woman would want to be alone when I wasn’t yet entirely sure how to explain it to myself? I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. I couldn’t even think of a movie to go see, or a book to read, where I could be sure to find some sense of my life reflected back at me. I had arrived in a land without stories.
Finally, as the last rays of the sun were disappearing, turning the water from gold to its more usual slimy black, I boarded the train back to my life and into this new decade. It had just been a day after all. A mostly regular day. Short and sweet, and other than the discovery that it was possible to feel good after turning forty—I hadn’t, as it turned out, lost my head—there wasn’t all that much to say about it. Not yet.
As I sat down my phone vibrated again. Probably another birthday message; they were trickling in more slowly now, but still coming.
I looked down: 646.
Hey—are you in New York City?
Of course. Of fucking course.
5. Women Never Really Faint
No One Tells You This Page 5