“Don’t forsake those duties which keep you out of the nuthouse,” Katharine Hepburn once wrote. I’d thought about that line a lot over the past few years: the importance of knowing your limits, what keeps you from stepping dangerously over them, and how to pull yourself back when you had gone too far. I’d learned to get good at diagnosing myself, and just as good at prescribing the necessary medicine. There were times I worried my overdeveloped talent for self-sufficiency might be cutting me off from other equally valuable gifts, like the ability to tell others what I needed. If I was self-made, how would I know what I was forgetting to add to myself? But mostly I’d learned to follow my gut and not feel guilty when I gave myself what I knew I required. Eating alone was one of the inalienable rights New York bestowed on its residents. I’d been taking myself out for solo meals for nearly twenty years when I needed comforting. And I needed it now.
My wretched appearance must have struck a chord with the hostess, because even though the restaurant was packed with young, sleek, good-looking Brooklynites, she immediately gave me a seat at the bar. Likewise the bartender handed me my martini only seconds after I’d ordered it. It tasted like cold liquid velvet. For a while I simply sat and sipped my drink, watching the bartender go about his business. There was a language to bartending same as there was to almost anything else, if you paid enough attention. The Cedar bartenders had been the best in the city; the back-bar had been set up so that every bottle was precisely positioned based on how often it was poured and with what mix or glass. They had rarely looked at what they were reaching for. And always poured without measuring. I could always tell if a bartender knew his game simply by whether he had to turn to find a bottle. The guy behind the bar tonight was no more than twenty-five, had a carefully manicured handlebar mustache that reached all the way down to his jawline and tattoo sleeves up his arm, but he knew how to pour. It was satisfying to watch him line up the glasses, scoop his ice, stir his martinis, and pound the mint.
In my bag was a worn copy of Middlemarch I’d long ago plucked from my mother’s bookshelves and returned to intermittently when I was between other books. On the inside flap her maiden name was written in her graceful cursive. Slipped into its pages, however, was evidence of me: receipts, business cards, and drink coasters from years of dinners and excursions just like this one. So many, in fact, that it was impossible to know what page I’d actually left off on, though it did alert me to the fact that I’d seen Moulin Rouge at the Ziegfeld on June 2, 2001. The idea of being a woman alone at a bar reading Middlemarch was nearly as satisfying to me as the martini I was drinking. And I knew the simple act of reading would give my mind a certain sort of peace nothing else could.
Instead I reached for my phone.
I would just have a quick scroll, I thought, and then return to practical, misguided Dorothea, whose beauty was thrown into relief by poor dress (unlike my own at the moment). I opened Instagram. I’d somehow forgotten it was New Year’s Day. My feed was filled with shots from parties the night before and resolutions for the year to come. I’d spent New Year’s Eve in a back room at the house of a friend of my sister’s, cuddling Connor and watching television so that Alexis could have a break and let loose a bit. I hadn’t yet thought of the year ahead.
I scrolled through the pictures, and I could feel a quickening of my pulse as I got to live vicariously in slivers of other people’s lives. Half the posts on my feed were from New Year’s Eve parties; everyone, it seemed, had had a fantastic night at a fantastic party. The other half were of babies and children. Some were a mix of the two.
I stared down at a particularly enviable picture of a woman I knew and her husband in a lush garden, their baby frolicking on the bright green grass in front of them. They were on some sunny island for the holiday. They were beautiful. I could feel my insides twist up as I mentally marked the things she never had to think about: health insurance for one, how to make the rent, whether she’d get to the end of her life and worry that not having children had been an enormous mistake.
Below that was a shot of a group of young up-and-coming writers on someone’s terrace in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, holding up champagne glasses and leaning into one another. They had navigated their careers early and well, had arrived when the digital world opened more doors much faster. They screamed brains, beauty, and potential.
Another was from a dinner party at the apartment of a svelte young illustrator who lived in Tribeca. The long table had been carefully set up with a row of candles and tall vases of white lilies. In the center was a roasted pig’s head. When I clicked through on her tag I could see the progression of the party through the night.
Mixed into this was what seemed like an endless array of babies and children. There was one chubby creature staring intently at a champagne glass just out of reach, another wide awake on the chest of an already sleeping father. A toddler wearing matching New Year’s paper glasses with the dog. There was a shot of a moist, red newborn, arriving in the world right at midnight. Just below that was a friend of a friend who’d been married as the clock struck twelve.
I knew I should join the chain of extravagant congratulations, but instead I scrolled on. I felt the familiar exhaustion of being required to bolster someone else’s life—like! like! like!—even as I sat there feeling so depleted. I wondered, would anything in my life ever warrant the same excitement? I continued to scroll, refusing to like anything, feeling like an obstinate child. I began to feel as though all the color was being drained of my own life; nothing could be brighter than the pictures on my phone.
Taking in the tsunami of celebratory photos left me feeling as though I were standing just outside a very exclusive club that I was unable to enter. It reminded me of the society pages that used to run in the front section of Vogue magazine in the days before the internet. Flattering photos of long, graceful creatures who inhabited a world where everything worked out and every dress fit perfectly. Like the fashions inside, but with a dose of reality—as if it were possible to achieve this if you were the right sort of person. I thought of my mother’s lifelong love of gossip magazines. Before things had taken a turn for the worse, I’d often pulled up old photos of 1950s movie stars to show her; she remembered every one, and that fact comforted both her and me.
These were not movie stars I was looking at, though, even if we had all learned to pose just as expertly, mastering our best angles. These were friends. And yet their photos left me coveting their lives in ways I never did when I was actually with them. Nothing here comforted me; it seemed instead to capture, in carefully captioned and cropped shots, exactly what I could never have and never be. In my real life I felt as if I walked around with an empty space people felt obligated to fill up. But in the world captured on this screen, it seemed like there was no space—or place—for me at all.
The bartender put my tower of oysters in front of me.
I flipped the phone over. I shouldn’t have looked. Now I was going to have to dig myself out of this emotional hole I’d allowed myself to fall into.
I stared at the decadent first course in front of me. I could take a picture of this. Angle the oysters against my martini glass, put on some red lips and catch those in the top of the frame, crop out the dirty clothes and unwashed hair. I’d be the envy. I’d envy myself in that picture even as I sat taking it. But what story would the picture tell? That I was a woman who knew how to sit comfortably alone at a bar and order oysters and gin martinis. I smiled to myself; actually, that wasn’t a bad story. But like so many of the other photos I was looking at, it would have stripped away so much and been all veneer, no substance—an illusion, life through a filtered looking glass.
We’re always drawn to the clearest articulation of what we think we lack. Whenever I encountered that husband-shaped hole in my apartment, I needed only to open my phone and I could find its cutout there, in exact proportions, in someone else’s life. No doubt, my life, as broadcast, was the stuff of dreams to many. Even I, on m
y worst days, knew that to some degree it was very ideal. I could sometimes feel the eyes of sleep-deprived friends with small children gaze upon me with the crazed look of a hungry beast coveting my time like it was red meat. But I didn’t want to make myself feel better by making others feel as if they were lacking. It was an easy fix. But it was ungenerous. It made me question my own obligation to the truth. If social media left me feeling bad, wasn’t it up to me to do my best not to inflict that on others?
Oh, but there was such a thrill to voyeurism. Somewhere in an old journal I’d scrawled down Susan Sontag’s quote that the modern age had turned us all into “image-junkies,” and photographs were the “most irresistible form of mental pollution.” And that was long before social media had become part of the air we breathed. I knew better than to allow myself to be thrown into a mental temper tantrum over Instagram. It just took effort. I had to lean on my knowledge of the real lives of the people in the photos, which were just as complicated and flawed as my own. I didn’t have to imagine it; I had a front row seat to many of them. I knew all too well that behind the photo of the happy couple clinking champagne glasses was a life that required endless compromise in order to work. It had once compelled one friend to remark to me, “The only thing worse than having no one to complain to is having to not complain because the person at home is tired of hearing it.”
I knew that behind another photo was a couple who slept in separate beds. And there was a friend who, every time I saw her, was on the verge of hysteria from lack of sleep, a traveling husband, and three small children, but who only ever appeared in carefully choreographed shots taken at their country house. And those were the good marriages.
At least half the pictures I’d just scrolled through were of couples who I knew were “figuring it out.” There was the husband who had a profile on the dating app Tinder and women who refused to share a cab with their husbands. There was the wife who had immediately become pregnant on discovering her husband’s affair and who now posted a steady, enviable-looking stream of their child.
It was easy to turn to cynicism in moments like this, a quick and cheap balm. Being alone sometimes felt like being a solitary tree atop a very windy hill; there was nothing between the world and me to break its impact. I had to root myself very deeply in my belief about what was good about my life so as not to be tossed to and fro. Cynicism was a nice heavy armor that protected you. I’d known plenty of older cynical customers back when I’d been a waitress. They saw the worst in everything and scoffed at our naïve youthfulness. At the time I was mystified by the bitterness, but as I got older I understood the appeal. And the danger. It was a devil’s bargain: keep everything out, even the possibility of joy, lest something gets in that hurts too much and too often.
I came back again to what I knew was true for everyone, even if my phone often forced me to take it on faith: life was hard and complicated. Once on a very punishing Saturday night waitressing shift, a twenty-two-year-old starlet had come into the Cedar. I could still recall how blond and glowing she’d been, especially against my black waitress uniform, which at that point was caked with splotches of dried mayonnaise from having delivered so many burger orders. “What a nice life,” I’d said bitterly to my coworker Mary while standing at the kitchen window waiting for a plate of greasy chicken wings to come out. Mary was Irish, in her fifties; she lived with a roommate in a tenement on Second Avenue and was missing a number of her front teeth. She always had a cigarette going at the service station (this was in the days before the smoking ban) and was the kindest person on staff. Getting a shift with Mary was considered a lucky thing. “Oh no,” she said, turning to me sternly, “don’t you think that. She has plenty of her own problems which are just as terrible to her as yours are to you.” “Do you think so?” I said skeptically. “Of course!” said Mary. I’d never forgotten that exchange, as much for the truth it contained as for the fact that Mary, who seemed to twenty-three-year-old me to have so little of value in her life, had continued to know it, too.
So often in the last year there had been no way to take any pictures of the life I was leading—the divide between the messy, painful reality and the screen had been so huge I’d felt unable to bridge it. Just as often, the pictures I looked at seemed to be an advertisement for the right kind of life, though I was never certain whether we were all trying to sell our lives to others or use others to sell our lives back to us. Sometimes I saw radical images, a wonderful reorganizing of what we considered beautiful and valuable, and I knew others were struggling to find a language for their lives, same as me, and I was grateful for their courage and resolve. But many of the pictures that sent me into a state of envy or despair were taken by women who I knew had been sold the same idea of life that I had, and it sometimes seemed to me they were willing to go to great lengths to pose in those roles, whether or not they had turned out to be real-life possibilities. As if they could fake it until they, and all the likes they accrued to help them, made it. My mother would have looked at some of these photos and, beneath the modernized fashion, recognized the same messages about how life should look that she had found in the saccharine gossip magazines of her youth. There were no more shades of gray in my feeds than there had been in those pages. Technicolor had been replaced by filters.
The bartender delivered my steak and a glass of red wine. “This one’s on me,” he said with a lingering smile. Between the martini, the oysters, and now this smile I was already feeling better; the emptiness of an hour ago was giving way to the enjoyment of being able to exert control over my own life. Was it always going to be like this? I wondered. This roller coaster of doubt and elation? Was this the price and the reward for not committing to some larger, more established idea of life? My mother had once told me she believed in the importance of marriage vows simply because they had been the thing that kept her from walking out the door early on. But how did one commit to the idea of not committing? Or was this it? A rolling interrogation of myself. Living in a constant state of reinvention.
The bartender’s smile shook something loose in a dusty and neglected corner of my mind: I needed to have some fun. To go on some dates. A memory of Viktor popped into my head. The thrills of harmless flirtation and attraction. I was not looking for someone to go through life with. I wasn’t entirely sure I was looking for anything. Buried beneath all the racing around and stress, there remained a part of me that was still relieved at having been let off the clock. But dating wasn’t off the table, and with this different view of it, perhaps it might even be a good time.
I opened Tinder. I’d created an account ages ago and then never given it much attention. I hadn’t looked at it since I’d sat by my friend’s bedside in the hospital after she’d been told her baby had no heartbeat, letting her scroll through it for distraction while she and I waited for the epidural to kick in so they could induce. Her husband had left the room (“Few men can handle it,” the nurse had remarked to me in a low voice). And as the two of us sat there together she clicked through the various profiles, eventually handing it back to me. “I think you should really make dates with some of these people,” she said with a slightly admonishing smile. “It’s so much better to go through life with someone than on your own.” I’d put it away after that.
Now there were at least twenty-five messages waiting for me, most of them of the hey variety. Why not just write, Please make this easy on me, I thought. A few of them had written entire paragraphs; just seeing the text roll out was nearly as invigorating as the martini, but I was never going to get in a text relationship again. That I knew. Only real life. One man named Dan had written me five messages over five months, checking in with admirable persistence, each time asking for a date. I looked at his pictures. He was the same age as me, worked in film, and he hadn’t included a single shot of himself with an exotic animal. His profile said, Longtime New Yorker, I like Shakespeare, and wine, and good food. I’m honest and thoughtful. Not looking for a hookup. 6ft. Good enough.
>
I decided to respond, short and sweet. Hello. Would love to get coffee, let me know what works for you.
Just as I put the phone down to reach for my book, it buzzed again. That was fast, I thought. But it was Maddy.
The apartment upstairs is empty. We only want you to move in. Interested?
Somewhere out there is a lady who I think will never be a nun.
The Baroness, The Sound of Music
16. Men of a Certain Age
In 1988 Cher won an Oscar for her role in Moonstruck. In the film she plays Loretta, a thirty-seven-year-old accountant who has given up on love and is preparing to marry Johnny, a practical man she can tolerate. At thirty-seven, she’s in the clutches of middle age—it’s either marry Johnny or live a life of loneliness as a sexless spinster. She is already halfway there; this much is clear. Her hair is graying. She wears black buttoned-up clothes. Comfortable shoes. No makeup. She lives with her parents (in an enormous, glorious brownstone that becomes a sort of silent family member). It’s only when Johnny’s mother falls sick, and he returns to Sicily to be by her side, tasking Loretta with the responsibility of making amends with his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage), that Loretta finds sex and then love. She and Ronny crash improbably, almost violently, into each other with wild, unlikely passion. Loretta promptly goes to the not-so-subtly named Cinderella Beauty Shop and sees a hairdresser who exclaims, “I’ve been wanting to do this for three years!” She gets rid of the gray, finds a knockout dress, paints on some red lipstick, and meets Ronny at the Met for the opera. Bah boom, go the opening notes of La bohème as her sparkly red stilettos appear from the yellow cab in front of the famous fountain. Just in time!
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