Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  An idea occurred to me. “Do you…want a roommate?”

  Her eyes lit up. “That would be so fun! Let’s look at some apartments!”

  It felt good to have a plan. I didn’t feel bad that Jon had no idea what I was planning, but I also told myself that he had to at least have an inkling about what was going on. We were essentially living separate lives at this point; I went out with friends almost every night, and he rarely came with me. Jenna and I looked at a couple of apartments together, but nothing felt right, and eventually we decided to look at places on our own. I found a sublet on Craigslist back in Fort Greene, just a couple of blocks away from my old apartment. It seemed perfect: a garden apartment in a brownstone, and I could bring my dog.

  Finally, I told Jon I was moving out. “Where are you going?” he asked. He seemed blindsided—not necessarily by the fact that I wanted to break up, but that I had already set things in motion without him. I felt a little bad—had it been deceptive of me to do all this behind his back?—but ultimately rationalized that I needed the plan in place to have the breakup conversation in the first place.

  “I found a sublet in Fort Greene,” I said. “Lee is going to come with me.” Lee had originally been my dog, but for the past three and a half years had felt like our dog. Jon looked sad when I said that, and it occurred to me that he was probably more upset about losing the dog than losing me. “I think we can evaluate our options when the summer is over,” I said, as though I were an HR manager having a conversation with an underperforming employee. It dawned on me that it was possible he wasn’t blindsided by the fact that we were separating, but because I was moving out and wasn’t asking him to be the one to move out. But I knew I had to be the one to leave him, and the apartment. There would just be too many memories of him, and of us, if I stayed.

  He nodded. I don’t think even I believed that we would be “evaluating our options” when the summer was over, just as I doubt any employee in the history of corporate America has been put on a Performance Improvement Plan and not eventually been fired. It was just a way to ease us both out of the situation, but I almost immediately regretted not just ripping the Band-Aid off. It was clear that we both knew that this was the end. And even though I’d technically broken up with Jon, I felt like he had led me there but was ultimately too scared or lazy to break up with me himself, which made me hate him in that way where you don’t even want to expend the energy to actually hate someone but suddenly things have come into focus so clearly that you’re simultaneously disgusted with him and yourself.

  Nothing had ever been bad, exactly, in our relationship; it had just been a long time since things had been good, and those kinds of relationships are the hardest to extricate yourself from. And yet, nothing was ever really great between us—it was fine, and for a long time fine was enough. Until, of course, it wasn’t.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I brought very little to the sublet. Jon had kept the bed in our old place, so I ordered a new bed frame and mattress on Overstock, and, on the beautiful marble fireplace mantel in the bedroom of the new apartment, lined up the books that I’d brought with me, my “these are the ones I’m saving in the fire” books like Harriet the Spy and The Believers and The Intuitionist and Heartburn, the novelization of Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein’s divorce, which was admittedly a little on the nose. I folded the suitcase’s worth of summer clothes and put them on the shelf in the closet. The apartment felt refreshingly spare—none of Jon’s dirty socks on the bedroom floor, no unread mail cluttering the entryway table, no shaving products taking up valuable bathroom sink real estate. My newfound minimalism was calming, even as I sometimes missed the four huge bookcases and overstuffed dresser in the old place.

  But sprinkled in with the calmness was the unnerving feeling that I was moving backward. I was thirty-three, getting to the point where—even in New York where it can seem like people stay single forever—my friends who were married or engaged were starting to outnumber those who weren’t. I didn’t regret my decision to break things off with Jon, but I did have the creeping feeling that perhaps what I had thought would be forward momentum was actually putting me back in time, to a period in my twenties when I lived alone and was single, with just Lee to keep me company.

  In the weeks after I moved out, I started losing weight—not deliberately, exactly, but now that I was living alone, I wasn’t eating at restaurants as much, and sometimes I would forget to eat lunch, or just grab something quickly at the coffee shop around the corner. But once I started noticing that my clothes were looser, I found it hard to stop. I started weighing myself every day and charting my “progress” on an app, and I got great satisfaction at watching the chart of my weight go down, down, and down some more, and the positive reinforcement I got from everyone around me—“You look amazing!”—just fueled my desire to get smaller. My whole life, I’d been told “beauty comes from within,” but even though I’d always known deep down that that was a lie, to see the world reinforcing and rewarding a very specific version of external beauty was eye-opening. It was like I had finally gotten the pink memo, and it turned out that, yes, of course I was treated better because of how I looked. It was intoxicating, but also scary, like a kid who’d been given the keys to a brand-new car the second she got her learner’s permit. I worried that I, too, would crash.

  I had never been the pretty girl, and historically I had taken a sort of refuge in this identity. It was comfortable, familiar. Even once I started dating, I told myself that I wasn’t beautiful—cute, maybe, but I reasoned that guys who were into me probably liked my personality, not my totally average looks. It was armor to shield me from what I was convinced would be the inevitable rejection from anyone I was remotely interested in, a self-loathing comfort zone that got reinforced over and over again, usually because I was too chicken to ever tell people how I felt about them. And yet, I paradoxically came across as incredibly self-assured and confident, even if that was never how I saw myself. I always felt crushingly insecure and worried not just about what people thought of me, but whether they would include me; I had a near-pathological fear of being left out, of feeling like I wasn’t in on the joke, that I didn’t get the memo. At camp the summer I was twelve my quote for the summer on the bunk plaque was, “What about me?” When I protested, the girl who had been in charge of the plaque—a bottle blonde whose boyfriend had snuck into our bunk at least three times a week so they could make out on the creaky metal bunk beds—shrugged and said, “I mean, you do say that a lot.”

  * * *

  —

  ONE NIGHT IN college, my friend Will and I were sitting on the floor of the school newspaper building’s lobby, waiting for the shuttle to pick us up. We both worked for the weekly arts and entertainment magazine, and it had been a long night getting the magazine ready for publication. I was exhausted.

  “So you know that I’m in love with you, right?” he said suddenly.

  “Um…” I said. I had thought that it was possible that Will had a crush on me, but I was so used to being the crusher, not the crushee, that I had put it out of my mind. It was barely comprehensible to me that someone could find me attractive, let alone be in love with me.

  “Well, I am,” he said. “I’m not expecting anything from you. I just thought you should know.”

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t feel the same way—I liked Will as a friend, and I thought he was a brilliant writer and a kind person, but I was not in love with him. I was also a little bit repulsed—not because he was repulsive, but because if Will loved me, then he had to be a loser, right? Only a disgusting loser would be in love with me. I realized that he must have hoped that I would respond differently, that declaring his love for me must have taken courage that he wasn’t sure he possessed. I knew this because I was usually the person who was pining after their friend, and most of the time, I pined in silence. Will was showing me, I thought, what the guys I pined after
thought about me: sweet, well-meaning, but ultimately deserving of pity, and certainly not someone to be in a relationship with.

  Now, more than ten years later, I felt like I finally had the sexual power that had always eluded me. But it was dangerous, addictive. The validation that I got when someone found me attractive was a dopamine rush, and when men responded to it, it just fueled my need for more validation from them. I was going out almost every night, drinking until I got drunk, flirting, and feeling omnipotent.

  One of the guys I fixated on was Max, someone I’d met through friends who was almost impossibly hot and alluringly aloof. We slept together, and then when he started ignoring me I flirted with Tim, a bartender at the bar down the street from my apartment, who Max was friendly with. I had a fantasy that this would make Max jealous (it didn’t). One summer night, after hours of hanging out at the bar where Tim worked, we went back to my place.

  Tim wandered over to the fireplace and stared at the mantel. “You have so many books,” he said, sounding both impressed and confused. “You must like to read!”

  “Um…yeah, I do,” I said. I saw him a couple more times, but his comment stuck in my head. Even if he was just a fling, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep with someone who thought that fifteen books in your apartment was a lot.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE END of the summer, Jon and I got together for a drink. We hadn’t seen each other since I’d told him I was leaving. “So…I don’t think we should get back together,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yeah, I figured.” We sat in silence for a moment. Our relationship was going out not with a bang, but a whimper. There was a part of me that wished it had been more dramatic. Why hadn’t Jon fought for me, or even registered any objections to ending the relationship?

  “I can come by and get the rest of my stuff in a couple of days, if that works?” I quickly added, “I can come while you’re at work.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s fine.” We didn’t do a postmortem of our relationship, or discuss anything else about the breakup. We finished our drinks and left. It was an appropriately anticlimactic end to a relationship that had sputtered to its conclusion. I told myself that this was a mature way to break up, not a depressing, emotionless ending to spending nearly four years of my life with someone.

  But now, my sublet was ending, so I had to officially start my new life. I found a cute apartment on Craigslist that was just a few blocks away; it was occupied by a couple who were leaving New York and looking for someone to take over their lease. It was perfect: on the second floor of a small apartment building, with a decent-sized living room with a big window overlooking a picturesque block of Fort Greene, a new kitchen, a small, quiet bedroom. Hardwood floors! I will be happy here, I thought.

  When I went back to the old apartment to get the rest of my things, it felt like walking into a time capsule, even though it had been only three months. The traces of past-me were everywhere—my favorite posters on the walls, clothes hanging in the closet, books on the shelves, even toiletries still in the bathroom. The thought crossed my mind that it wasn’t too late to slip back into my old life, tell Jon that I wanted to give things another shot. I could stop fixating on getting engaged and try to repair what had gone wrong. But as I started going through my stuff, deciding what to keep and what to take with me, I was overcome by deep sadness. What had been the point? I wondered. Why did anyone allow themselves to even try to build a life with someone, if it was just going to end with a Man With A Van, boxes of discarded books left in the lobby, and the feeling that you’d just wasted almost four years of your life?

  On the dresser in the bedroom, I saw a lease that Jon had signed for an apartment nearby. I felt simultaneously indignant—how dare he move on so quickly!—but also, relieved. Thank God he was moving on so quickly. It absolved me of any guilt about the breakup, I told myself, or how I’d handled it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A few weeks after I moved into my new apartment, it was the week of the annual CMJ event in New York, a music festival that showcased up-and-coming bands at various venues around the city, and my friend Claire, who worked for a music marketing agency, had invited me out to see some shows. We started the night at a small party at a bar on the Lower East Side, then she got a text from a co-worker that he was at Bowery Ballroom, a venue on Delancey Street that wasn’t too far, so we headed over there.

  I was feeling confident—hot, even—and a little tipsy, but not too drunk, just the right amount of drunk where things seem possible. I was wearing a skintight Mackage leather jacket that I’d bought at the Bloomingdale’s in SoHo a few days earlier. It had cost a fortune, four hundred dollars. I couldn’t afford it, but I’d bought it anyway: I’d been ghosted by a guy I’d gone out with a few times whom I had developed some budding, “this could turn into something” feelings for. He, apparently, did not feel the same way. Even if I never saw him again, I wanted to make sure I looked good if I did happen to run into him—so good that he would rue the day he hadn’t returned my texts. I called it my revenge jacket. I felt sexy and powerful and badass in it—definitely not like someone who would get ghosted. Revenge Jacket Doree behaved differently than I did. She was fun! And spontaneous! And a little bit wild! She for sure didn’t overthink things. She was always up for whatever; she was the life of the party. She was someone I had never been, never thought I could be, and now somehow, sort of, was. I simultaneously loved and hated her.

  When we got to Bowery Ballroom, we found Claire’s co-worker. He was with a friend, a blond hipsterish guy visiting from North Carolina. The friend seemed a little bland, but cute—and wide-eyed, like this was his first time in the Big City. We started talking, and then, as the electropop performer DOM took the stage, we were making out, and the next thing I knew we were on the subway going back to my apartment.

  “What do you do, anyway?” I asked as we snuggled on the F train. I was trying to pay attention so we wouldn’t miss my transfer, but this spontaneous, unexpected encounter was exciting. I realized I knew basically nothing about this guy, except that he was a friend of a co-worker of a friend—vetted, but barely.

  “I’m a Breathalyzer salesman,” he said.

  I laughed. “Oooooookay,” I said. I was pretty sure he was just using it as a line—like he knew that saying he was a Breathalyzer salesman would appeal to a New Yorker who trafficked in irony, something I could tell my friends the next day over all-you-can-drink brunch while we snort-laughed our mimosas out of our noses, if I had been the type of New Yorker who went to all-you-can-drink brunches. I hadn’t ever pictured what a Breathalyzer salesman looked like, but I would have put money on one being older, perhaps slightly heavyset. Definitely wearing khakis. In fact, I hadn’t ever considered where police departments procured Breathalyzers in the first place. Amazon? Breathalyzer dot-com? Definitely not from a twentysomething in Red Wing boots and a beanie visiting his friend in New York and going to an indie rock show.

  We had sex—my first true one-night stand—and in the morning, as we were lying in bed, I said, “That was funny how last night you said you were a Breathalyzer salesman.”

  He laughed. “I am a Breathalyzer salesman.”

  “So wait,” I said. “Really?”

  “Really,” he said. “I drive around and sell Breathalyzers to police departments.” He paused and looked around my bedroom. “Can I ask how old you are?”

  “I’m thirty,” I said quickly. I was actually thirty-three, but I instinctively felt like I needed to take three years off my age. Why was he even asking, anyway? Wasn’t asking someone’s age one of those things you weren’t supposed to do, especially after a one-night stand?

  He seemed surprised. “Really? You’re thirty?” He paused. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  I laughed, a little nervously. Did he mean I didn’t look thirty, or did he mean that he couldn’t believe that
a thirty-year-old was acting the way I was, getting drunk and taking a virtual stranger home and sleeping with him? But…didn’t thirty-year-olds do that all the time? Even…thirty-three-year-olds? “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty-eight,” he said. “I guess I was surprised that you’re thirty because I’m the only one of my friends back home who still isn’t married. So I was wondering if you were my age yet, but also, I guess I should have figured you were older because you live alone in New York.”

  “Oh, well, thanks,” I said. “What’s it like being the only single friend? I guess that’s one good thing about living in New York—there are still plenty of single thirty-year-olds.”

  “Well, I live alone, but I own my house,” he said.

  “Wow,” I said again, looking around the apartment that I shared only with my dog, Lee. I couldn’t imagine being the only one of my friends who wasn’t married at twenty-eight. Twenty-eight! I hadn’t even met Jon, the first person I thought I might marry, at twenty-eight. Twenty-eight was when I had gone back to school, when I had left Philly for good, when I shared a shitty apartment with Alison on a shitty block in Williamsburg. My life had barely begun at twenty-eight.

  After he left, I noticed the Revenge Jacket on the floor; I must have just tossed it when we had come in the night before. I sat down on my couch and held it for a moment. Where did Revenge Jacket Doree end and where did the “real” me begin? It was getting exhausting, feeling like I was toggling between identities. How much more validation from men would be enough?

  * * *

  —

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS later, I was once again at the bar down the street, the one where I’d met Tim—who thankfully wasn’t working that night—for a friend’s birthday party. There was a guy there, Louis, who had been a couple of years ahead of me in college. We weren’t close friends, but we’d run in the same social circles. I hadn’t seen him much since college, but he looked the same, like a perpetual grad student, but an incredibly hot perpetual grad student. He was soft-spoken, with delicate tortoiseshell glasses, and a wry affect. In college, Daniel and I had both crushed on him from afar, in the way that you might admire a famous person, always referring to him by his full name: Louis Foster.