15
“Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”
Kiki and I were standing in my walk-in closet. Miles was leaving for a sleepover birthday party at Corbett Grassweather’s house, and I would be . . . alone. Free to go out on the town with Kiki. Sort of. I gripped my cell phone in case Miles needed me and wanted to be airlifted from the slumber party, which I was weirdly secretly hoping he would.
Corbett’s party wasn’t just a Spider-Man theme. No, no, no, no—that would be too easy! Too pedestrian! You see, Mary and her husband called the owner of Marvel and arranged for Stan Lee himself to come and do drawings for the boys! And: You guessed it, Tobey Maguire would be “stopping by” for the cake, since now many hedge funds were investing in movies and the Grassweathers had befriended the webbed one by funding a pet project of his. Nice. Here, without exaggeration, are party themes of some hedgie children Tim’s friends had thrown for their beloved offspring:
It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. I wanted to shield him from the excess as much as I could, but I wasn’t going to have him be the only one to miss the parties. All I could do was try and stay grounded in our new family of two. Keep him centered, read to him about other places outside this bubble. So far, so good: He was a truly loving, good kid with a huge heart and strong values. But as he kissed me at the Grassweathers’ and skipped off with his Spider-Man sleeping bag and navy duffel, it occurred to me that he couldn’t wait to have me bail. So there I was. Walking home alone to face getting ready to go out like the old times.
HEDGE FUND KIDS’ BIRTHDAY PARTIES
I stood staring at my closet wondering what to put on to face the world as a singleton again. I gulped wearily at the prospect of gussying up, until Kiki burst into my apartment, fiercely dressed in a chocolate brown leather mini, a chic cowl-neck sweater, high boots, and bloodred nails.
“Okay! Let’s get this party started! We need wine and music.”
It had been so long since I’d done this: the revving up pre-night out. Choice after fashion choice that Kiki handed me was about as over the top as a spa day for six-year-olds.
“Keeks. I’m in my mid-thirties. This is too wild,” I protested as she handed me a red satin D&G clinger she’d brought. “You don’t wear this hem length at my age.”
“Bullshit. All those Sex and the City girls were older than you and they wore Hermès scarves on their boobs, for Christ’s sake!”
“That was a show. And I ain’t Sarah Jessica.”
We blared songs from my newly downloaded file on iTunes, which Kiki had introduced me to, blowing the cobwebs off my stereo and buying bands I’d never heard of but liked. I’d never felt so old: The rockers who crooned the tunes we shimmied to were a decade younger. And would probably laugh if they saw this mommy ramping up for a Saturday night.
I was oscillating from fear to excitement to cold strength. I knew it was “character building” to be dumped—I never had been ditched before—and I strangely almost found solace in the fact that this was a rite of passage for me; suddenly I was in on the Top 40 chart lyrics about heartbreak. Now I knew what all those dumb happy people didn’t—there’s a whole subworld of the miserable out there. And guess what? It’s so much hipper! Kiki blared the Smiths as I brooded in front of the mirror applying eye shadow. The darkness was making me grow, and hey, everyone probably has one big earth-shattering heartbreak, right? Now mine’s out of the way.
And now, along with my thinner frame (the Grief Diet is so amazing), I had something I hadn’t had during the sad times in my marriage: hope. Loneliness when there’s a human next to you is way worse than alone-loneliness for some reason. When you’re single, there’s always the accompanying reverie that you’ll find Him, that special Dream Guy who will be forever your companion, laugh factory, lover, and, most of all, friend. But Tim and I hadn’t even been close friends for a while. Before we had met, I used to see married couples and truly felt like they were little skipping in slo-mo through green pastures holding hands, like they had crossed over into happy-land and knew something all of us single ignoram uses didn’t. But years into marriage, I realized that there is no gold-laced border into the land of rainbows and hazy sunsets. It was . . . the same. Or maybe worse. Because then the dream of finding that perfect love was over. And here I was on the outside again, back across that border in the realm of the unattached, where anything was possible. It was terrifying but electrifying.
To get to the way West Village, Kiki and I piled into a taxi, which stank so horrendously that you could toss your tacos. I was praying for the little yellow oxygen masks to spring out of an overhead compartment, but instead I just zoned out on the descending numbered street signs.
When we got to the party in one of the Raymond Meier buildings where one of the Olsen twins formerly resided, there was that crush of bodies that instantly transported me back in time. It wasn’t that Tim and I hadn’t been to parties; we just went to sedate, catered affairs with mostly married people. Or married people’s hanger-on single friends who wanted to be married. This was not that at all; it was a full-on raucous rager, music blaring, lights low, hot-blooded hook-ups hours away. But it wasn’t the fleece-and-headbands preppy twenties set, either; it was entirely new to me. There were some younger people, but there were plenty of thirtysomethings as well, just not older drones like uptown. These were edgier, cooler-seeming people who didn’t seem to give a shit about aging. In fact, they dressed so young, they seemed younger, whereas the women at Miles’s school may have been the same age but instead of vintage band T-shirts and fishnets and mod minidresses, they wore pleated kilts and cashmere twins sets and (gasp!) capes and looked way, way older than their years. I always had been somewhere in the middle—never matronly, but not edgy, either. But seeing people look so cool and stylish inspired me to take more risks and take clothing dares the way I did in college when Jeannie and I would flaunt our assets more than I had as a Mrs.
There was an energy bounding through the loft that I couldn’t relate to, but wanted to. Reading my nervousness, Kiki squeezed my hand. She spied her friend Eliza across the crowded space and waved, dragging me behind her through the mass of dancing bodies.
There was a round of introductions yelled over remixes of Nine Inch Nails, and of the faces who mouthed their names over the din, one guy did catch my eye. He said his name was Matt Sevin, which seemed to ring a bell. Lucky seven: I liked the sound of it. There seemed to be a cool twinkle to him. We all sat near each other and tried to chat, but the music was so loud that it was a strain to gab freely. I gleaned he was a music journalist for Spin (hot!) and that he lived in DUMBO in Brooklyn, but not much else. I chatted with a few people plopped nearby, but I kept making eye contact with Matt. Finally, when everyone was heading out to some late-night party across town, my mommy clock kicked in, even though Miles hadn’t called my cell. I wasn’t exactly used to the words “after-party” and slowly felt myself turning into a pumpkin. My eyelids got heavy, and I even let a yawn escape as partygoers piled into the industrial elevator. As everyone hopped into cabs, I could sense Matt staying near our smaller posse, but what was the point of sticking around when I didn’t have the energy to turn on the charm? I decided to bid everyone adieu and bolt. As it turned out, my non-strategy proved a good strategy.
“It was fun shouting over the music with you,” said Matt flirtatiously.
“Yeah, you, too. Very worth the laryngitis I’ll have tomorrow,” I said, and smiled.
“Holly, do you want to grab dinner sometime?”
“Sure, I’d love that.”
“Somewhere quiet, I promise.”
And with that, I had set up my first post-divorce date.
