The activities frenzy took over sometime in mid-autumn, and even I could tell it was a bad sign.
“Absolutely not,” Lauren said, after I suggested we sign up for a krav maga intensive Olivia promised would wreck us. “No adult starts a hobby from a good place.”
She was right. It didn’t matter if it was a buzzy new fitness trend or an aspirationally useful class or something fun and specific, like life drawing or an Italian conversation group—everyone involved in adult learning was running from something.
I’d learned this firsthand, having got the idea to take up a hobby from reading wikiHow’s advice for managing a divorce during a particularly pathetic dark night of the soul. The list featured eighteen tips, though the final seven pertained to the raising of children in a joint-custody arrangement and were therefore not relevant. “Get a Hobby” was tip number four, right above “Revisit Old Passions,” a heading accompanied by an illustration of a woman stirring something beige in a frying pan while imagining an alarm clock. A hobby seemed less confusing, and the sixth tip, “Get a Therapist If Needed,” did not apply to me.
I could not sell Lauren on Israeli martial arts, but I did convince her to join a singles bowling league on the grounds that there might be a few hot guys in attendance. This was a deception. I knew there would be maybe one eligible man among the bunch, even in a best-case scenario. Every class I signed up for—every group workout, creative writing seminar, or weekend workshop on making your own essential oil blends—was wall to wall with the recently dumped, most of them women, all of them much older than me.
Once, at an extremely ambitious “introduction to bouldering” evening I’d found on Groupon, I saw two women near my age and got excited, thinking, this is it, this is how you make friends in your thirties. But it transpired that they were not amateur rock-climbing enthusiasts hoping to make connections; they were sisters, there to support their mom, who was—you guessed it—deep in the middle of her second divorce.
“It’s hard,” one of them said, putting chalk all over her hands in a way I found inscrutable and weirdly alluring. “She keeps saying, ‘We must admit that the heterosexual experiment has failed.’ And like, I agree with her, but she’s not a lesbian, so . . . I don’t know what she thinks the plan is.”
Later, when I was sitting on the floor of the rock-climbing gym, watching the supportive-if-cynical daughter clamber up the simulated cliff face, her mother sat down nearby, offered me a Capri Sun, and sighed so long and loudly that I dusted myself off and left.
Outside of bouldering, I tried a macrame class, a “stitch and bitch” evening, and a pottery night where everyone around me frantically shaped clay into little breasts for plant pots; there was a tie-dyeing workshop, a pan-Asian cooking weekend, and a group fitness class where we were encouraged to scream throughout, releasing our rage and whatever was holding us back from our undefined, individual goals. This I left after the instructor hollered, “There are more important things than MONEY!” and the entire class cheered, even though it had cost them all forty-seven dollars to be there.
It had cost me nothing, and a big reason I was so into my new hobby of “having hobbies” was that most activities allowed you to attend a first class for free. The city was teeming with opportunities to try crafts and athletic hybrid activities at no charge. If you had enough time on your hands and weren’t fussy about things like studio cleanliness or instructor expertise, you could take multiple free yoga classes any day of the week.
I continued attending my local studio’s restorative class (Calvin never reappeared), but otherwise shopped around, taking hot yoga, yoga for runners, and something called “Rihanna yoga” in different but nearly identical storefronts across the city. I would zip to Mixed Level Movement before my 10:30 seminar (Enter Wet: Weather on the Elizabethan Stage), then walk into the gloomy, windowless room where I taught, my head held conspicuously high. After class I’d disengage my core and slump over my desk for seven hours before stopping in for another round of subsidized chaturangas on the way home.
Most of my non-yoga efforts were centered around unlocking some untapped but prolifically talented creative side that various leaflets and online class descriptions assured me lay dormant within us all. My apartment slowly filled with tangled yarn “plant hangers,” lopsided clay sculptures, and a miniature Zen garden resembling a litter box with a small takeout fork attached.
I did the majority of this alone. My friends were anti-activities on principle, and I could no longer invoke their sympathy in the same way I had earlier in the summer. They were used to it by now—I was going through a breakup and would be for the foreseeable. They couldn’t be expected to drop everything and come to my side whenever I felt bad. I felt bad all the time! Occasionally, as I struggled with glue and yarn or cut up little bits of fabric to sew onto a bigger bit of fabric, I would imagine my contented friends: Emotional Lauren snuggled up with her laid-back boyfriend, Nour, watching nature documentaries and crying about baby animals; Lauren coming home from an F45 class to her perfectly appointed apartment for one, ready to order fancy delivery; Amirah and Tom finding their light over tapas; Clive watching a movie with the handsome older dudes with whom he was in a kind of throuple situation. And there I was, tie-dyeing a towel.
Eventually even my single friends were not single enough for the path I was on. Clive ducked out after the fitness class I had brought him to turned out to include a jazz dance component. Lauren broke at paint night as we stood side by side, drinking wine with twelve other women all outlining the same image of a city skyline at sunset. She added a few swipes of pink to the corner of a fading sky and said, “This is self-harm. This is worse than when my boss made us go axe throwing.”
I could not sell anyone from the group chat on axe throwing, and Amy had spent the last two weeks holed up in a loft with some finance guy, alternating between texting this is IT!!!! and ignoring me for days. Instead, I took Nathan, a bearded, muscular man I’d met several years ago at a house party, who had recently responded to one of my Instagram Stories at three a.m. with lol.
Nathan was the kind of man who would have been considered vaguely alternative ten or even five years ago, but whose signifiers now combined to make clear that he was a former suburbanite who had moved to the city, gone vegan, and taken a job in music PR.
“People think it’s all grain bowls and acai,” he said, taking a wide stance and eyeing the axe in his tattooed hand. His flannel shirt and ripped jeans seemed fused to his body, like someone had vacuum-packed Kurt Cobain to store over winter. “But I’m living proof that you can eat like crap and still live a plant-based life. Ask me which Doritos are vegan,” he said, winding up. “It’s not all of them, but it’s more than you’d think.”
The fact that he got a bull’s-eye instantly, and several more thereafter, I found oddly depressing. Dating has a way of making incompatibility feel like personal failure; there was nothing technically wrong with Nathan, except that I did not like him or want to spend any more time with him, which, in the context of us having paid forty-five dollars for an hour of axe throwing and one draft beer each, was a problem. When he told me I seemed like I had a “great shape under there,” I offered to go to the bar.
The venue did not only host axe throwing. Adults above the drinking age could come here to enjoy any number of loosely camp-themed activities: tug-of-war, shuffleboard, and that classic camp pastime, enormous video arcade games. I skirted around a large, rowdy group as they jostled each other over indoor lawn bowling, their opponents insisting, yes, Scott had put his foot over the line, he had—he had!—they’d all seen it.
What were they all doing here? What were they hoping to feel, these adults engaged in games from their real or imagined pasts? Distracting themselves, I guessed. This was the conclusion my ongoing hobby experiment seemed to be working toward. Skiing weekends, bowling, after-work volleyball leagues, knowing about professional sports . . . all activities seemed to be transparent efforts in void-avoidance, when actually nothing drove home the meaninglessness of life more than watching thousands of people desperately cheer as one millionaire tried to get a ball across another millionaire’s line. The only activity that has ever really interested me is sitting around with my friends in flattering lighting, eating food and talking about who wanted to kiss us, and what we were wearing when they did.
I thought about this as I watched a group of twentysomething girls cheering while one of their friends whacked a pinball machine. They were having a level of fun I’d never seen outside of a commercial for a chain restaurant. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe avoidance was the way forward. I considered joining them to cheer on their friend, who wasn’t even doing that well at pinball, not that you would know from the onslaught of support she was receiving from her rowdy companions. She had just landed in a fifty-point pocket when the dart pierced my leg.
What happened was this: a woman shrieked, and when I looked for the source of the sound, three people were staring at me with their hands clapped over their mouths.
I looked down at my thigh. The skirt I was wearing (leather, a big swing) and the tights (double layered for extra smoothing and support) had helped, but there was nonetheless a small lawn dart impaled in my upper leg.
“Ohhhhh my god,” one of the women yelled. “Oh my god, are you okay?!”
I didn’t know how to answer. The dart did not appear deeply embedded, but what if it was plugging a vein? What if, when I pulled it out, I spurted blood all over everything, like in movies where someone gets nicked in the, what was it, jugular? Wasn’t there a major artery in the leg somewhere? The key was probably not to panic, to keep my heart rate low, but that didn’t feel like something that was up to me. What was the breathing thing—four, eight, five?
“Do you mind if I have a look at that?”
The voice belonged to a curly-haired man wearing a concerned expression and a shawl collar cardigan. “Are you a doctor?” I asked.
“Better,” the drunk woman said, grabbing me by the arms and giving me what she must have felt was a reassuring shake. “He’s my boss.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“Maybe!” she said.
“You absolutely are not,” the man said, gently pushing her away. “Go get some water, okay?”
Over her shoulder the woman yelled, “6Bites ER! CODE RED!”
Formerly called Taste of T.O., 6Bites was one of a number of new media ventures that dove in headfirst when a child actor turned rapper suggested we start calling our city “the 6ix.” It ran restaurant reviews and interviews with local chefs and the occasional exposé about “toxic kitchen culture,” but mostly it seemed to make its living via videos of disembodied hands cooking completely inedible recipes and listicles about where to get a Bloody Mary with a burger in it.
“I’m sorry about her and everything else about this,” said the man, kneeling to examine my leg. “A disaster, start to finish.”
An ambient awareness that he was quite handsome solidified into stress about whether all the tights and leather had given me swamp crotch.
“We gave the new hires a bar tab,” he said. “This is the worst it’s been, but believe me when I say you are not the first casualty of this dart game. Maybe I could . . .” He reached tentatively for the dart.
“Shouldn’t we get an employee or something?” I asked.
“They’re all, like, nineteen and stoned,” he said. “I think I’m your best shot. Plus, it looks like it’s not—I mean, that’s barely in there. Just let me . . .”
His fingertips made contact with the body of the dart. I flinched and looked away, unable to bear it. My face was still scrunched, body tensed, eyes averted, when I heard it clink to the floor. I examined my skirt: it hadn’t even pierced the lining.
“I’m Simon,” he said, smiling as he got up off the floor. He had the calmly confident demeanor typical of the attractive, but there was an openness to him that suggested something else: an insistently supportive home environment maybe, or a religious upbringing. He looked like someone who thought heaven was real.
Simon offered to buy me a drink to make up for the injury. I pointed out that there had not, in the end, been any injury at all. He said, “Still,” and started walking toward the bar.
I didn’t know how to process the straightforwardness of his flirtation. It was my understanding that romantic (or at least casually sexual) intent was communicated with a series of tongue-in-cheek digs about the other person’s clothing, habits, or character, maybe some social media interaction conducted at a conspicuous hour. This earnest “can I buy you a drink?” approach was new and disconcerting. Still, he was very good-looking, and I had ignored weirder feelings than novelty in the name of a few minutes’ conversation with someone hot.
Simon got to the bar, made easy small talk with the person behind it, and ordered a drink I’d never heard of, with bourbon and Campari and some third ingredient I didn’t catch. It was bright red and tasted sweet and bitter, with a cherry in it. He thanked and tipped the bartender. I watched them absorb his easy smile. Then he turned to me.
We conversed easily and without any uncomfortable pauses for twenty minutes or so. I discovered that he was thirty-one, single, and lived nearby. He was almost impossibly straight—the button-down shirt, the assumed camaraderie with the bartender, the fervent support of a soccer team I didn’t even know Toronto had—but no immediate red flags presented themselves. He seemed to be a kind, soft-spoken man who felt at home in this bar and presumably every other place he’d ever been. The yelling of drunk people and clattering of various lawn games made it hard to hear each other, and although I liked having to press my face near his ear to speak, I wanted to talk more intimately and in private.
“Are you allowed to ditch your interns?” I asked. It was unusual of me to “put myself out there” like this, but I had already noticed myself trotting out reliable flirt techniques: an exaggeratedly girlish version of my regular laugh, insults that were really compliments, some slutty straw work I was not proud of. It didn’t feel like a risk to show this man interest; for reasons unclear (to me at least), he was visibly interested already.
“Technically no,” he said. “Although I do hate it here. Do you need to get back to your group at some point?”
I looked back at my booth, where Nathan was chatting happily with another table, presumably about seitan. “Not really.”
“Great,” he said. “Would you like to come home with me?”
Simon had biked there. He fiddled with a U-lock while I sent Nathan a text saying I’d had to leave due to an unspecified emergency I heavily implied was diarrhea. His bike freed, Simon offered to walk beside me, then said, “Wait, no,” taking off his sweater and bunching it over his pannier rack to form a crappy cushion: “Get on.”
I rolled my eyes—the whole thing seeming kind of Aladdin. But I did get on, and we coasted down Dovercourt and the autumn wind whipped my hair back, and I thought that if this was how Princess Jasmine felt, she was probably having a pretty good time. Then I opened my mouth wide and a bug flew into it.
When we stepped inside his apartment, I yelped.
“You have to tell me what’s going on with curtains,” I said. “I’ve been going on all these dates and no men have them? What is that? Do you hate sleep? Privacy? I recently gave a blow job in full view of some teens jumping on a trampoline.”
“Jesus.”
“The man had no curtains!” I said. “There was literally no other option.”
“Guess you could have not given the blow job,” he said, taking off his coat and hanging it on a neat row of hooks by the door. “I moved in here somewhat short notice, and there were these terrible plastic blinds, so I took those down and haven’t replaced them yet. I’m going to.”
“When did you move in?”
“Four months ago.”
I walked past him into the living room; it was midcentury modern, like everyone else’s. Something smelled good, either his apartment or him. I peeked into the bedroom to make sure there were sheets on the bed (not always a guarantee, Tinder had taught me). Not only were there sheets, the bed was made.
His closet didn’t have a door, and I could see a row of crisp blue collared shirts, exactly like the one he was wearing now. I wondered what this meant about his personality, if he was risk averse or wealthy or had merely found out Uniqlo was going to stop making a particularly well-loved style of oxford. This Snoop’s Math was one of the best parts of being single, and the reason I rarely invited anyone back to my place. I wanted to nose around the other person’s home, drawing conclusions from their drinking vessels, tchotchke placement, toilet paper ply; the idea of someone doing this to me made my blood run cold.
I wandered back into the living room, where Simon was rummaging in his cupboards.
“Snack situation dire, I’m sorry to say,” he said. “Want a beer?”
I nodded. His fridge was clean and sparse and sad: a few Modelos, some Polaroid film, three kinds of hot sauce, and dog food.
“Do you not eat at home?” I asked.
“Not often.”
“Do you have a dog?”
“I did, yeah.”
Simon and his girlfriend of four years had broken up last spring. To deal with the loneliness he had adopted an ancient Chihuahua called Bartholomew who died more or less instantly thereafter. Simon had spent the summer grieving the ex and the animal, and now he was in therapy, excavating what he wanted from life, his shortcomings as a person, the ways he’d failed and been failed in his relationship.
This was more information than I’d wanted, about the dog or his emotional history. He looked away wistfully, and it seemed like he might cry. I really, really didn’t want him to.
“All I’m hearing is that dog food’s been in there for three months at least,” I said.
Simon pursed his lips in mock-annoyance. “Do you want this beer or not?”
I took it and thanked him, leaning over to awkwardly clink the base of my beer with his. He was farther away than anticipated, and the amount of effort expended to reach him was made immediately pathetic by the dull thud of glass barely tapped against glass.
“What about you?” he asked. “When was your last relationship?”
I paused for a moment, then said it had been a while since I’d seen anyone. Even so, my love life wasn’t that interesting. Nothing major to report.
“Really?” he asked. “No big loves? No ‘one that got away’?”
“Nope.” I shrugged. “Not a relationship person, I guess.” I told him I’d recently deleted Tinder for the fourth time and hoped it would stick.
Simon had not ventured onto the apps. He had been casually seeing a friend of a friend, and their time together seemed to be running its course. She had been asking, with increased frequency, for him to slap her in the face while they had sex.
“I want to give her what she wants, obviously,” he said. “But it feels a bit . . . soon maybe? I’m trying to figure out how to do it in a respectful way.”
I told him that might be missing the point. There was an unpleasant moment in which Simon was obviously thinking over how to say something, and then he came out with it: “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to sleep together.”
“You don’t have to slap me,” I said. “I mean, you could. I’ve never tried that, but I’m sure it’s, like, a step up from hair pulling, which at this point in the discourse is basically kissing, right?”
“It’s not that,” he said.
I was starting to feel embarrassed. He was the one who invited me here! What had he thought was going to happen? I recalled a phrase I had been shocked to learn was common parlance in Australia: “I’m not here to fuck spiders.” I had first heard of this saying from a bisexual polyamorist from Melbourne, with whom I’d shared a drink and a conversation about whether I’d be an appropriate participant in the threesome she and her husband were hoping to arrange. We did not have the threesome, in the end, but it’s always fun to learn something new about language.
It occurred to me that I had read the entire situation wrong. Maybe this man did not find me incredibly compelling, as his behavior, speech, and body language had suggested. Maybe he was only trying to avoid a lawsuit for 6Bites. Maybe he was “too nice,” and this kind of misunderstanding happened to him all the time, his friends always warning him to stop inviting strange women back to his place for a long talk and no sex over one beer. Maybe he had a bad penis. Maybe he was gay. I was about to make my excuses to the overly polite homosexual company man with the busted dick when he put his hand on my leg and my brain stopped working.
He removed it almost as quickly, but the idea, let’s say, had been planted. I moved toward him, and he shifted slightly backward, saying, “I need to tell you something first.”
I leaned back on the couch, tucking my legs underneath me in an effort to look understanding and ready to listen and also, probably, small. Simon took a deep breath and launched into a long, emotional story, the short version of which was that he had cheated on his girlfriend.
Of course! Of course he had. Naturally he was not just some super-bachelor who appeared out of nowhere, rescuing divorced women from low-stakes lawn game accidents. He was a classic bad man, a dirty dog. He had met someone at a vodka-sponsored food festival (for god’s sake) and slept with her and lied about it for several months, until confessing and getting kicked out of his apartment by a woman who had done nothing but love and support him (probably) for the last four years of her now-wasted life.
It was a classic tale, and one I knew well, having talked many friends through near-identical scenarios in recent years. For straight women in their late twenties, getting cheated on by a partner is basically jury duty.
I told him this made me think 40 percent less of him but did not particularly impact my feelings about whether to spend the night in his bed. The relief that spread across his face seemed unrelated to sex.
“Really?”
“You caught me at a good time,” I said. “I’ve been reading a lot of Esther Perel.”
He seemed, again, like he might cry. I patted his back and considered telling him about my breakup, but decided it was not enormously relevant and might even, in this instance, be bragging. After all, neither Jon nor I had broken the one mandatory condition of contemporary romantic coupling; we had done the noble thing and slowly fallen out of love over time.
I considered saying something like do you want to talk about it? though this proved totally unnecessary. He did want to talk about it. A lot. It was interesting to hear him wrestle with so many things at once: whether the relationship would have ended on its own some other way (probably), whether he was a good person (unclear), whether he should be dating again yet (unclear but . . . probably not), and what to do about the “toxic male paradigm” (his words) in which he had been raised and socialized. His sentences were full of conditions, deferments to his various privileges. He used a lot of therapy terms. This was clearly a man who journaled.
I told him it seemed like a positive sign that he felt bad, that he was doing all this therapy and asking all these slightly lame questions about morality and love and manhood.
“I hope so,” he said.
He looked sweet and nervous and shy, the casually confident man from the bar punctured and deflated by the great lawn dart of life. I tried to temper some of the empathy I felt by thinking about how mad his girlfriend probably was and would remain for some time. If I was her friend I would have suggested we burn him in effigy. But I did not know her, so instead I was in his living room, waiting for him to stop moping and go down on me.
He finished his beer and said, “I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m fundamentally a worse person than I thought I was. How can you tell if something you did was a stupid mistake or a real sign of your character?”
I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I suggested we go to his room.
The sex was more intimate than I was hoping for—I could see how this man’s style might require some lead-up to a slap—but also significantly better than average. Like everything else about him, it was sincere and engaged and purposeful. I wondered if this was because he didn’t know I was divorced; as far as he was concerned I was just some woman, single for normal reasons. Maybe what I was feeling was the absence of pity, the way someone touched you when they didn’t know your life was in shambles. Whatever it was, I felt connected to him in a way that I hadn’t with anyone else I’d been out with since Jon. This was annoying, to be sure, but you can’t argue with technique. After a combined four orgasms we fell asleep, the streetlamps outside shining directly into the bedroom.
The next morning, I woke up spooning Simon tightly—a position borrowed from my married life, and something I had been humiliated to find myself doing instinctually with several recent dates. It never felt right: the familiarity of the feeling and the strangeness of the people brought on an unsettling emotional vertigo. I tried to remove my hand without jostling him. He muttered something, half asleep, then turned me over, the crook of his elbow on my waist, his forearm coming to rest between my boobs. I lay there awkwardly, wondering how long it would take for him to get up so I could leave.
When my eyes opened an hour or so later, I was alone. I dressed quickly and came out into the kitchen, my mouth tasting stale and feeling textured. Simon was making coffee in a robe.
“Morning,” he said amiably. The robe was monogrammed.
“I think I’m late for work.”
I walked into his weirdly clean bathroom and rinsed my mouth with toothpaste, jamming my finger clumsily around my gums and teeth and the sides of my tongue.
“You can use my toothbrush if you want,” Simon yelled from the kitchen.
“What? That’s . . . no thank you.”
Simon popped his head around the door: “Doesn’t seem less hygienic than anything else we got up to, but suit yourself. Coffee?”
“I have to get going.”
“Sorry for oversharing last night,” he said. “I’ve been struggling with how to be transparent about my past with new people while also being conscious not to, you know, emotional dump.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“It’s really, um, don’t worry about it,” I said distractedly, my eyes scanning the living room for things I’d dropped the night before. I grabbed my phone from where he’d plugged it in (!) on his nightstand and put my hair up in a bun. When I came back out to the kitchen, there was coffee on the counter in a to-go cup.
“You just have these in your apartment?”
“A friend of mine manages a coffee shop,” he said. “Slips me a sleeve every now and then. I mostly use them to take beer to the park.”
I picked it up and took a sip. It was delicious.
“Are you a serial killer?”
He laughed and leaned toward me, pressing his lips to mine with a surprising amount of force for eight a.m. and pushing me up against his open front door. For a second, I thought he might try to take me back to the bedroom, but he pulled away, looked at me, and said, “That was nice. I’d like to see you again.”
This was very off-putting.
“Were you raised in a cult?” I asked. “Are you American, or something?”
A neighbor opened the door across the hall, and I was suddenly conscious of my smudged mascara, my conspicuously backcombed hair. Simon made a conspiratorial face at me, then waved at the neighbor, a hip dad who looked put together, if sleepy. It struck me that this man was probably five years older than me at most, and yet I felt like a teen caught necking at the movies by a grown-up. I wondered if he considered me a peer or a young person, if he waved at a lot of women in this hallway. The neighbor disappeared down the stairs and I turned to Simon, my ridiculous paper cup hot in my hand.
“Thanks for the coffee.”
“Any time.”
Three days later, Simon texted me a screenshot of an online purchase: ONE (1)—PAIR LINED GROMMET TOP CURTAINS in DARK GRAY. I spent a few days trying to think of something clever to say back but couldn’t come up with anything, so I left it.