I left my husband behind in Boise, Idaho, six months before the virus would end the world. I had always prayed for a global pause, which I felt guilty about when it came to pass. It was a fantasy of mine in childhood, when my brothers were being praised for their muscular and showy intellects, that they would freeze suddenly while I was left to move around freely. I had seen a Twilight Zone episode about a woman with a pendant that allowed her to stop time at will—I chose to ignore its ending, in which a nuclear missile is hurtling toward her and, when she suspends it, she is left to live in solitude forever or else accept instant annihilation. In my version of the fantasy, I would spend years studying and accruing knowledge and wisdom, which I would then shock and overpower my brothers with when I unfroze them.
As an adult, my desire was much less ambitious. I wanted the world to pause so that I could nap as much as I wanted without worrying about what I was missing out on. A distant relative sent me a quote after my father died at the age of fifty-three. It said that death was only like being put to bed as a child while the party continued in the other room; you could still hear the laughter as you slipped peacefully into your long rest. They meant this as a comfort, naturally, and to suggest that my father would remain proximate to our family in some sedate, nonfunctional way. The sentiment horrified me because that very experience had badly upset and enraged me when I was a child. All I wanted was to be with other people, lots of them, and all the time. That was true when I was a child and it kept on being true, and the only way I could tolerate a party ending was if it was guaranteed nobody could have fun without me.
I was twenty-nine when I left Derek. One of the things that had never sat right with me about my husband was his name. It was impossible to render the name Derek erotic or iconic. Granted, my own, Jane, was hardly more exciting, but it had a classic, timeless passivity which was feminine and pliable. I never wanted to say Derek’s name while we had sex, not even when we first met and were in love seven years before. Eventually there came a time when I realized I never said his name aloud to him at all. We called each other baby, honey, and kitten, and as the years went on our voices rose into infantile squeaking, which we did initially as a kind of in-joke parody of coupling itself but which had ingratiated its way into the relationship so fully that it had been drained of all irony. I couldn’t tell if the baby voices stopped us having sex or the lack of sex amped up the baby voices, but either way the two progressed in steady tandem.
I left Derek because a man in a band told me I should move to New York. When he said this to me I realized I had been waiting a long time for a person to explicitly direct me to do anything at all. I nodded back dumbly and said, “Oh, OK,” like he had suggested getting pizza for dinner.
I met that musician during the festival that happened every March. I volunteered as an artist liaison officer and for four years I had allowed myself to have one sexual encounter with a person who was passing through town for the event. It seemed like a fair compromise to make with myself, and low risk because they never stayed past Monday and had no connection to my husband or my job at an arts organization that staged high production value puppet shows for disadvantaged children.
Moving to New York was much easier than the culture would have me believe, although it was true I had $163,000 from my father’s life insurance payout to ease the transition. I had let it sit untouched since his death, knowing there would be a time I would need it to save or transform my life. I gave $10,000 to Derek to cover my half of the rent for the year, and $42,000 to a friend of a friend to sublet her apartment in Fort Greene for one year. I didn’t know what rent in New York cost except that it was a lot, so the amount of money shocked but didn’t surprise me. Years later I would learn that the woman who let the place to me was a liar and the apartment only cost her $1,800 a month. I learned this when I had a drink with our mutual friend, and said in passing:
“Isn’t it crazy that Margot pays $3,500 for that place? The walls are so thin, and the shower barely worked.”
My friend looked at me with stern pity.
“Jane,” she said, “you moron. Margot was taking you for a ride.”
Weeks after I moved to Fort Greene the musician stopped returning my messages. This did not confuse or sadden me—he had never suggested he loved me, only that he thought I would have a better time in New York than Boise. It did, though, leave a large vacuum in my evening calendar, which I had expected to fill by having sex with him for at least a few months. Instead I walked around the small apartment and looked at Margot’s things—her gay things, I thought to myself with a smile. People in New York were saying gay as a pejorative again, whereas in Boise the friends I had in the arts sector were at pains to never use regressive slurs because they feared the judgment of the imaginary New Yorker in their heads who side-eyed their parochialism. I should write the folks back home and tell them they can say gay again, I thought. Gay was the only way to describe Margot’s twee and affected apartment, with its single stiletto balanced on top of a stack of Vogues as a supposed art object instead of a shoe, and its cream faux-fur sofa throw. Worst of all was the extremely expensive typewriter on proud display next to the door, which she had warned me in a passive-aggressive note not to make use of, and from which protruded a sheet of thick beautiful paper on which she had typed the first sentence of The Bell Jar followed by an ellipsis as though Sylvia Plath got distracted and wandered off.
I went out to dinner alone every night, sometimes at the unremarkable Mexican café across the street, and sometimes an expensive place called Roman’s further up on DeKalb Avenue. Margot had left an irritating list of local businesses and restaurants she recommended on the counter for my arrival, and for Roman’s she had written: “Best bread! Get there early to buy a loaf to take home, or sit at the bar for the fava bean puree and a martini and a chat with Heather the bartender—heaven! X.”
I hated to admit it but Margot’s advice was good—Roman's was the only place in New York I didn’t feel clumsy or pointless. Its discreet marble counter, discreet but amiable service, and discreet bowls of excellent $32 pasta which always panicked me on arrival due to the tastefully moderate size. I sat at the bar and read and applied for the jobs on LinkedIn where you could do so with a single click. Sometimes Derek would send me emails late at night, I assumed after he had been drinking, where he would tell me about what women he was seeing and how he missed me. In one of them he told me he had recently watched a documentary about a guy who murdered women he met through online dating services, and Derek warned me that if I was doing stuff like that I should stop immediately. This worked like the musician telling me to move to New York but in reverse—it was almost as good to have somebody tell you explicitly what not to do as it was to have them tell you what to do.
The men on the apps would tell you what to do too, but it was difficult to find the ones whose bossy commands didn’t make you want to laugh. One I went home with told me to get down on all fours in front of him and then said “Crawl?” but like that, a question. I asked him where I should crawl to.
“Crawl over to the fridge and get me a beer?” he asked. I stood up and left, his timid but unerring entitlement reminding me of my brothers.
I couldn’t go out with anyone who wanted a serious relationship or to get married because I had so emphatically turned away from such things. It seemed safer to do whatever the opposite of marriage was, and I found that this was to date somebody in an open marriage. There was nothing as unlike being married as being brought as close as possible to someone else’s marriage without entering it.
Most of the men depressed me for the same reason; they loved their wives and they didn’t want to be on the date and were doing it only to fulfil their side of an arrangement that had been forced upon them. Some of them depressed me because they were instead the horny instigator of the open marriage and were contemptuous of their wives. Only a few seemed happily married and not in the precursive period of inevitable divorce. Joey was one such man, a handsome guy in his mid-fifties who ran a record label as a hobby after making a lot of money some other less interesting way.
On our first date we went to a dive bar near his house in Ditmas Park where he apologized charmingly for eating a basket of chicken tenders with his hands. We made out at the bar and he whispered in my ear asking if he could take me to the bathroom. I thought of the chicken and said no, maybe we could go somewhere. He took out an app on his phone which found cheap proximate hotels and we went there. As he laid me out on the bed after removing my clothes he sighed happily and said, “I love New York,” seemingly in earnest.
When he suggested a second date I asked if he wanted to go to Roman’s on DeKalb. He seemed surprised I knew it—I had played up my wide-eyed potato-eating country mouse schtick for him.
“Sure,” he said, “Roman’s.”
When we sat at our table I let him touch my legs in an almost inappropriate manner before I stopped him and asked that he tell me everything about his family. He smiled with a strain—it was important to Joey and to his wife that they be up-front about everything to anyone they dated, they were conscientious about that, so he had to give me what I wanted even though I could see he did not wish to. Through the bean puree and the orecchiette and even into the bavette, I asked him questions about his wife, Christine, who I saw from the picture I forced him to show me was pretty and blonde in the way Stevie Nicks was, and then his two teenage daughters, Luca and Prince.
“What do they like?” I asked him. “What’s their favorite thing to do?”
“What do they like? Um, I guess they like places like this, honestly,” he said, gesturing around him at the inviting lighting and the people chattering happily at the bar. “Christine and I grew up sneaking into shows and drinking other people’s beer, but we didn’t grow up with money. The girls always had money so they like the things people with money like. I don’t mean they’re stupid, or bad kids or anything, they just like getting dressed up and sitting with their friends in nice restaurants.”
I was fascinated by this. I couldn’t imagine what sort of exotic child would grow up desiring such things. A month later, Joey and I went out for the last time. We sat in the window bar seats of Roman’s because we hadn’t made a booking and it was all they had. Joey, more excited than ever to try to finger me in public now that we were sitting in full display to the street, was whispering things about how bad I was and what I wanted him to do when I suddenly felt his hand constrict, gripping my thigh with a force which was not passion.
“What?” I said, drawing back.
“Shut up,” he said, rotating very slowly so that only the back of his head was visible from the street. His daughters walked into the restaurant then, and when I looked at them I felt a kind of sentimental affection, the kind I occasionally felt toward myself when I recalled a formative age or vulnerable moment. They were beautiful, obviously, with naturally smokey hooded eyes which made them look sexier and wiser than they had any right to be. I felt affection toward Joey, too, his visible panic disrupting for the first time the glib effect he had so far shown me, the one which came easily to rich, good-looking, happily married people who needed nothing more from you than brief access to your sundress. I kept beaming over at the girls, rapt, when they noticed their father pirouetting on his bar stool to avoid being detected. What would happen now? Maybe they would cry. Maybe they would hit me! Maybe I would be their new mommy.
“Oh,” said Luca, “ew. Hi, Dad.”
Of course a sixteen-year-old who liked nothing more in the world than to order some crudo and a fennel salad to share would not be scandalized by her parents’ open marriage, I realized regretfully. The girls walked, arms linked, to their spot near the back, and Joey and I met eyes for one moment while we both registered that they could get an actual table where we could not.
Six months later, I would be back in Boise, eighty grand lighter, with a list of every man I had slept with in the interim and their distinguishing features. “Joey,” the entry said, “I love New York. Roman’s. Daughters.”
