That first month alone passed in a haze. A typical day involved waking up after one, then lying in bed joylessly masturbating while The Last Five Years soundtrack (original off-Broadway cast recording) played in the background. My afternoons consisted mostly of trying to work, then giving up and posting Instagram Stories containing oblique references to my emotional state. At some point in there, I turned twenty-nine.
It was this that had forced me to confess to my friends. As a group we went hard for occasions, and a birthday should have been no exception. We had agreed months ago to celebrate with a trip to Toronto Island’s nude beach, bringing cake and cocktails and nothing else. The chat was deep in discussion about the importance of sunscreen and the merits of various private water taxis when I cracked. need to postpone, I wrote. jon moved out . . . permanently i think? An unbearable few minutes of silence followed, then Clive wrote, be there in thirty.
I fell back on my bed and stared at a patch of water damage on the ceiling until I heard him bounding up the front steps. I got up, fixed my hair, and went to the door, and for a moment I did not want to let him in. He would see my bare apartment, the missing books on shelves, the piles of takeout for one. If I showed this to Clive, I would eventually have to show everyone else. I would have to walk around and be in the world, alone.
I screwed my courage near the sticking place and unlocked the door.
“Out of ten, how ready are you to joke about this?” he asked.
I mulled. “Six?”
“Right,” he said. “So we’ll get into the eyebrows another time.”
Clive and I had met in the university’s drama society in second year, and became close when we played each other’s love interests in what he termed a “chubs-only” production of The Music Man. He still occasionally yelled “MADAM LIBRARIAN!” and pulled me in for a wet kiss after a few too many drinks. We leaned against the kitchen table (I would need to buy some chairs) while I tinted my eyebrows with beard dye and Clive told me I’d be back to normal in no time.
“These things happen,” he said. “If you had committed to everything you wanted when you were nineteen, you’d still be wearing that little vest. And anyway, the happiest people on earth, statistically, are childless, unmarried women. You did it!” He clasped both my hands like our Little League team had just won the big game.
To be blasé about something like this was classically Clive. The only things he took seriously in life were cooking, his job as a producer of structured reality television, and his 2011 New Year’s resolution to “become famous,” which he was still working on. Around the same time as the resolution (and potentially in service of it), he had asked us to start calling him Clive instead of Brandon, which was his given name, and although it took some getting used to, ultimately we agreed that stylish Brandons were thin on the ground, so the change was fair enough.
Clive and I split a bag of jagged low-calorie chips and toasted the beginning of my “ho phase,” though my lip started to quiver as our glasses clinked, forcing him to walk it back and remind me that every ho must take things at a pace that works for her. When his assistant texted that they were in danger of losing Scott Moir as a guest judge on a new show where hockey players were paired with professional ice dancers, Clive ran off, promising to check in on me tomorrow.
Amirah arrived an hour or so later, distracting me from my own circumstances with one of her classic workplace embroilments. Although she had been happily partnered for over a year, Amirah was constantly stoking emotional affairs with men at the hospital who then became obsessed with her. The latest of these poor fuckers was an orderly called Brian.
“It’s getting bad,” said Amirah, half sorry and half loving it. “Last week he made me a playlist. He keeps asking if I’ve listened to it, but to me, that is where I draw the line.”
“At listening to the playlist.”
“Yes,” she said gravely. “Who knows what could be on there?”
It was easy to understand how Amirah was wreaking romantic havoc on C-Wing. She was casually gorgeous, even in scrubs, and a little bit mean in a way men were obsessed with. When I moved into my dorm, she was already fully installed in her room across the hall, adjusting the angle of a Pussycat Dolls poster near the window. I’d said, “Do the non-Nicole ones even have names?” and she’d said, “Maybe they’re all called Nicole,” and that was it.
“How are your parents taking it?” she asked after we had scoped Brian’s track list (handwritten on heavy paper, highlighting relevant lyrics . . . oh, Brian). I told her they were following my lead, which meant we were not talking much. My mother had offered, instantly, to come down to Toronto and get me, to take me back to Kingston for as long as I needed and feed me all kinds of comfortingly nostalgic baked goods; but I stayed where I was. In a way it was a relief that my family—mom, dad, younger-but-wiser sister Hannah—was safely stowed a few hours out of town, the depth of their worry revealing itself only in my father’s daily text: alive? y/n.
Anyone trying to comfort me had been dealt an impossible task: too much attention and care felt like pity, not enough was proof that I was worthless and no one wanted to be around me. I told Amirah my ideal situation (to the extent that any of this could be considered ideal) would be for everyone to know about the divorce without my having to tell them, and for me to lie in some kind of hyperbaric de-stressing chamber until I was ready to reenter society. I needed a few weeks to be disgusting on my own and adjust to my new life as an unlovable husk. Amirah curled her long legs underneath herself, and I could tell she was going to say something annoying.
“Do you want my mom’s therapist’s number?”
I did not. It was only a divorce, and not a particularly juicy one. I hadn’t even had any significant dreams—what would we talk about?
“I don’t think I’m very ‘therapy’ in general,” I said. “Doesn’t seem like a fit.”
I meant it. The only therapist I’d ever met was Jon’s cousin Penelope, a small woman with lank blond dreadlocks who ran workshops where participants dug their own graves and were buried in them to experience ego death.
“I don’t think this would be . . . like that,” Amirah said. She held a finger to her lips and bit the corner of a hangnail, looking at me pensively while she ripped it off with her teeth. “But it feels like, if there was ever a time for a li’l soupçon of therapy, this would be it, right?”
“I’m good,” I promised. “I downloaded this meditation app thing, and I’m gonna do more running . . . Hey, does Tom know about Brian?”
Tom was Amirah’s lumbering boyfriend, a man with enormous hands and a booming laugh who had some important, hip job at a downtown brewery. They had met on a dating app last spring and been inseparable ever since. Their love language seemed to be tagging each other in flattering photos captioned with long descriptions of their friendship and the way life together felt like an adventure. Their favorite adventure was going to restaurants. First Tom would post Amirah holding a crisp glass of white—fridays with this one—then when mains arrived, Amirah would post Tom—big boy loves a slice—after which Tom would repost her photo of him, with Amirah finally closing the circuit by sharing the original “fridays” post to her Story. In this way, everyone they knew got to see every side of the table at which they had eaten. This behavior was very, very unlike Amirah, but love makes people corny and a bit absurd, and that is just how it is.
I was curious how she felt the embroilments fit into the photoshoots, the oyster nights, the big boy himself.
“I’m not doing anything with these guys,” said Amirah. “And Tom’s only a boyfriend, so far.”
I had forgotten about Amirah’s unorthodox definition of the word, which she felt implied no real commitment outside time spent together. Amirah was always ruthlessly casual until the instant she decided a man was the One. There had been two Ones so far—a high school boyfriend and a med student who still texted sometimes—but Tom seemed due a promotion.
“Anyway,” said Amirah, “one is real life, and one is, like, a frisson. I know what I want long term, but sometimes in the moment you really need to know someone has never seen anything better than your ass.”
That did sound nice. Maybe I could have a frisson or two, even if my long-term trajectory was irreversibly “husk.” Amirah received a text asking her to cover for someone at work. “Do you mind if I go?” she asked. “I’m trying to build up goodwill so I don’t have to work New Year’s. Plus there’s a patient I promised I’d make friendship bracelets with.”
“Should I be jealous?” I asked.
“Well, she’s a seven-year-old with bone cancer, so probably not,” said Amirah.
I sucked the insides of my cheeks between my teeth. “Fuuuuuck!” I said. “Fuck. I meant, like—”
“I know what you meant,” she laughed. “And this patient’s prognosis is pretty good. Chill out.”
I was always amazed at how lightly Amirah wore the day-to-day heaviness of her work, how she could go into the hospital and deliver difficult news to parents or help children manage pain they would be dealing with for their entire lives, then come to dinner and listen to the rest of us complain about bad email etiquette. Whenever she revealed some harrowing detail about the hospital the rest of us would panic, though as she’d pointed out many times it was not a competition, and Clive’s professional stress was not less valid just because it was mostly caused by the tumultuous personal lives of minor Canadian sports personalities. (“Are we . . . sure about that?” Clive had asked at the time. I still was not.)
“God, that’s so intense,” I said. “I don’t know how you aren’t constantly having a breakdown.”
“There is actually a crying room on the third floor,” said Amirah. “But it’s mostly nice to be able to be there for people going through a hard time. Like it’s difficult, but it’s good. I’m sure that’s how you feel when you . . . explain Macbeth, or . . . Honestly, I have no idea what your job entails.”
“Like half of it is coming up with puns for the pre-colon part of paper titles,” I said. “But in many ways that is similar to helping children with cancer, you’re right.” I stood and started rummaging through my cupboards. “Let me feed you before you go.”
I took out ingredients for her favorite sandwich, a disturbing combination of pickles and hummus with honey and ballpark mustard. Amirah stood behind me as I assembled it, swiping her index finger into open jars before closing them and putting them back in the fridge.
“Why don’t you text the Laurens,” she said, taking a first, soggy bite. “Don’t sit around your apartment alone. It sucks in here without Janet.”
To avoid crying at the mention of my cat, I shouted, “GREAT IDEA” with unconvincing vigor and pulled out my phone. It turned out the Laurens were convening shortly at a bar near Emotional Lauren’s office that offered wine by the ounce. I told Amirah I did not feel particularly sociable but did want to drink several thousand ounces of wine.
“Perfect!” she said. “You can walk me to work.”
She grabbed her bag and we headed to the hallway, where I tried to make myself presentable with a stray mascara I’d left on the shelf near my keys. I poked at the bags under my eyes and sighed loudly.
“Shame this had to happen right as I lost my last shred of youthful beauty,” I said.
“Don’t talk that way,” said Amirah, pulling on a pair of decorated plastic clogs. “Ugh, I could kill Jon. I’m so mad at him.”
“It’s not his fault,” I said, shoving my keys into a purse and opening the door. “Really. It’s my fault, if anything.”
Amirah made a face. “How is it your fault?”
I didn’t really know, that was just how it felt.
The next day I was supposed to go to work but could not bring myself to do it. For one thing, Toronto’s humidity levels had switched from June’s traditional “Coca-Cola misting zone” to a “world’s armpit” scenario we usually didn’t struggle through until August, and for another, I looked like shit and was sad all the time.
Although I didn’t teach in the summer, I normally worked a few days a month at my cramped desk in the English department as a research assistant for Merris, the elderly and understanding early modernist who had supervised my master’s thesis and occupied a place in my imagination somewhere between feared-yet-beloved aunt and powerful elder witch. I had not come in for the last two Wednesdays, texting her vague and unconvincing excuses each time. This Wednesday, she called.
“Merris, hi—sorry, I—”
“What is it today, grandmother’s emergency dentist appointment?”
I liked working for Merris. She was the most knowledgeable person I had ever met, and she never made other people feel stupid, though sometimes, as now, she could not resist toying with them a little bit. I could see her sitting at her desk, smiling wryly, long fingers wrapping the cord of her office phone around her knobbly left thumb. She was probably wearing a pair of reading glasses with another perched on top of her head. Sometimes there was a third pair on a stylish chain around her neck.
“I think I’m getting a divorce,” I told her. “I mean, I am getting one, but I don’t know when or how, exactly.”
“Ah.”
I hadn’t loved telling anyone about this development, but breaking the news to Merris felt spectacularly silly. I was a twentysomething going through a breakup, so what? Merris had been married twice, divorced once, and was now widowed and living what she called her “best life,” sharing a large duplex in the east end with two other professors in a kind of highbrow Golden Girls situation.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Work from home for now and come in again when you’re ready.”
I told her that might be never. Merris laughed and tried to pass it off as a hiccup. “Take as long as you need,” she said, “as long as you only need until September.”
Merris had not cared for Jon, based largely on her feeling that he’d lectured her about French Canadian cinema for “several hours” at a department function a few years ago. When I asked Jon about this, he told me they’d spoken for under fifteen minutes, during which he’d said almost nothing about film, except to mention he’d recently been to a showing of Xavier Dolan’s Mommy. I suspect they were both being low-level insufferable and disliked seeing their own pretension mirrored in the other. At our wedding, he had tried to ingratiate himself to her by quoting Sonnet 18, and she’d said, “Shakespeare, for weddings? You might be onto something.” Like everyone I’ve ever loved, both of them were capable of being a Bit Much.
After Merris and I hung up, I returned to my usual activities: working, eating, and thinking up reasons to avoid taking a shower. Most days, after a few hours of carefully scrutinizing plays from the 1500s that were unpopular even then, I’d reward and/or punish myself by looking at Jon’s various social media profiles. He had recently scaled back our already minimal communication, something I was trying to take with a casual grace while freaking out about it internally. In an effort to seem breezy, I’d also suggested we block each other on social media, to “facilitate our transition out of each other’s lives.” He had done so unnervingly quickly, though neither of us had blocked the joint Instagram account we’d created for our cat.
If I logged out of my own account and in to @perfectjanetgoodgirl, there was Jon: not posting much on main, but certainly playing the piano and singing (!) in his Stories, broadcast from some darkened basement. I’d poke around in his tagged photos and watch his friends’ Stories, looking for something painful—audio of him laughing at a party, a video of a concert where he was standing close to a woman I didn’t know—evidence of joy or satisfaction in his new life as Not My Husband. It was objectively unhinged behavior, this cyberstalking via pet account, but I was comforted that Janet occasionally watched my Stories too, meaning Jon was doing the same thing to me.
We had not yet decided who would get the cat, easily our most precious shared possession. She was technically his, but we (Janet and I) had lived together for as long as we (Jon and I) had, and I loved her fiercely, even if her main hobbies were screaming and vomiting on my clothing and furniture. She was tough and enormous, a big streetwise tabby with scraggly gray-brown fur and intelligent green eyes. When I read student papers in bed she would sneak into the room, attracted by the sound of rustling paper. By the time I realized she was headed for me, it was too late: she’d already be midflight, soaring up from the floor to land directly on top of the essay in my hands. I had apologetically returned more than one crumpled, punctured term paper to a confused student, but I would have let that cat destroy everything I owned—which she did occasionally seem on a mission to do. The house was so quiet without her. It was weird not to have to check on top of the fridge when I entered the kitchen (she had a small pouncing-on-people’s-heads problem); every unopened packet of foul-smelling treats in the cupboard broke my heart. Jon and I had agreed to take some time to think about what would be best for her, with an eye to a potential shared custody situation. Like many things about my old life, I missed her often.
I spent the evenings watching my murder shows (having plowed through England’s offerings, I was now exploring the sex-based killings of Scandinavia), and thinking about being alone, and sometimes just putting my feet on the floor and sighing. If I was feeling ambitious, I would brush my hair, open and close the windows, and fill online shopping carts with expensive outfits for invented functions. The group chat checked in regularly, but I never had any updates for them, and I knew they were busy enjoying their own lives—they didn’t need some loser divorcée dragging them down. I slept poorly but napped often. I’d eat lightly during the day, then start a bolognese or fajitas or some other ambitious dinner concept, and give up and eat cereal while watching someone called Anders or Lars skulk around Helsinki or Stockholm, furious at their ex-wives for having the audacity to be murdered. I found cooking for one exhausting and depressing.
I tried the mindfulness app but couldn’t make it stick. I did not want to be grounded in this moment. This moment was miserable! I tried to reminisce about past triumphs—graduating from university, say, or giving a blow job once in the South of France—but my entire life had been witnessed by Jon. I had to go back to high school to avoid him, and those memories were boring. Almost nothing had happened to me before we’d known each other. Meeting him had felt like the most significant event in my life, and until a few weeks ago, every year that passed had only reinforced that this was true. Now what? I thought. There are only so many times a person can read “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. It took three to four minutes, plus a few extra, for crying. I’d do that and be back, instantly, to now what? Now what, indeed.
Along with Janet, Jon had taken most of the better items in our bar cart (to say nothing of the bar cart itself), so I’d make cocktails from Cointreau and lemon juice and soda water, eventually using regular water, eventually drinking straight Cointreau. Once the Cointreau kicked in, I’d be ravenous for whatever dinner I’d abandoned, and took to ordering something I called “Night Burgers” from the only place that my delivery app offered at four a.m., a generic chain pub with a gigantic menu that included history’s most middling hamburger. A Night Burger was exactly this item, plain, with a pickle and french fries. It was bland and stodgy and always arrived cold, but I did not want the food to be an experience. I wanted it to look and taste how I felt, which was like nothing. I wanted a tepid meat puck, and I got one, often.
It was my first time, ever, living alone. Growing up with my parents, sister, two dogs, and a rotating series of doomed hamsters, our house was bustling. It was barely a transition to move to the din of university residence halls, where the boys wrenched the doors off stalls in the inexplicably co-ed bathrooms and rolled melted tubs of ice cream down the eleven-story back staircase, staining it pink and shutting down half the hallway for a week. As soon as we could, Amirah and Lauren and I moved in together, watching reality television and getting briefly into day-weed and never ever cleaning the bathroom.
After graduation we ventured farther into Toronto, and Emotional Lauren and I became the fifth and sixth residents of an enormous house in the west end, crammed with artists and baristas and grad students and—we found out after we moved in—one bat in the basement that someone’s boyfriend’s landlord had caught him keeping at his own place.
When Jon and I moved in together, it was the smallest number of people I’d ever lived with, and I loved it. I was twenty-three when we got our first apartment. Most of my peers were still in grubby shared houses (Emotional Lauren still had a bat in her basement). I felt impossibly adult. I liked coming home to one person—my person; liked making cupcakes at ten p.m.; liked putting on some weird album of Jon’s and vacuuming the rug so we could have sex on it. When I was in the house alone, if Jon was stuck at work or away with friends for the weekend, I savored it as a treat, knowing he’d be home soon to disrupt the quiet or drag me out of the bath. After we got married, I sometimes felt it was a shame that I’d never get to experience living alone but concluded I wouldn’t be very good at it. It seemed, so far, I had been right.
Still, there were a few benefits to my Personal Situation: I’d been given essentially unlimited bail privileges on account of it, and I exercised these with relish. I bailed on my own birthday, family events, coffee dates with colleagues and friends from high school I’d been meaning to catch up with for years. I attended only things I really wanted to, which meant I attended almost nothing, not even Lauren’s Jimmy Buffett Bang Bus Birthstravaganza. Lauren had been understanding. Emotional Lauren texted to say she’d added my name to the card: i copied your handwriting from that time we did MASH drunk . . . it says you’re going to have four husbands . . . tho apparently your future car is a toilet ☹ Part of me felt it was rude, avoidant maybe, to be ditching out on so much, but wasn’t this the kind of thing women were supposed to be doing, saying no?
The Old Me might have worried this would make people hate me. In the past I was worried about basically everything, basically all the time. Now my constant, low-level anxiety was replaced by a feeling of dull invincibility I referred to as “haha, so what.” Concerned you might be coming down with a cold? No illness could be worse than this new, gaping emptiness at the core of your very being, haha. Feel like you said the wrong thing at a party? The person who promised, in front of everyone you know, to love you for the rest of your life didn’t make it two years, so what! Missed a deadline for work? The thing is that life is actually a joke, and nothing is guaranteed to us, and anything you think is guaranteed will probably be taken from you unexpectedly, and also it seems like deep down you may be an unlovable shrew, which is probably a bigger problem than some late assignment—let’s give that a big haha, so what!
When we were married, Jon rarely stayed out late. On the few occasions he did, I would enjoy my evening until about two, then lie awake staring at the ceiling, thinking about all the things that could go wrong. What if the power went out, and I needed to know how to interact with that big box in the basement? Our back door was rickety and unreliable. No matter how carefully I closed the bolts, checked and double-checked that I’d done it, fear would keep me awake. I’d get up to redo it ten times in the night in case someone was about to break in and kill me. I didn’t worry about that anymore. Maybe someone will break in and kill me, I’d think. Perfect.