“WHY’D YOU bother going?” asks Maggie. I’m telling her the story of the third date, seated on the living room couch of her spacious suburban home, my legs folded under me, my head resting on my hand. Maggie speaks quietly—she has gotten quiet and careful the past few years—but with force. “I just don’t understand why you go on any dates at all. You don’t like anyone. Why don’t you just admit that you’re not interested in having a relationship? It’s OK to be single. Just do it. Just be single.” We’ve just eaten steak for dinner, filet mignon, naturally. Maggie had spent the whole afternoon shopping for the dinner, she told me. What a hard worker. Her commitment to spending her husband’s money was an inspiration to women everywhere.
I look at her hands, at her enormous wedding ring. Three icy karats on a solid gold band. We weren’t raised to care about jewelry, but here she is, caring about jewelry. I’ve watched her clean it, her precious ring, swab it, shine it. Underneath the ring is a thin line of pale skin, with one brown freckle—like the ones on her lovely shoulders—in the center acting as a divider. It’s her real skin underneath.
Robert is in the kitchen doing the dishes. My glass of wine is poised on a ceramic coaster they purchased on their honeymoon in Costa Rica. There was a blue chicken painted on it. They had twelve of these coasters, but they only ever used four at a time. The rest sat in a drawer. Eight blue Costa Rican chickens roosting in a drawer in Westchester.
She continues, “I have never seen you happy with a man.”
“That’s not true,” I say. “I loved Alan. I was devastated when it ended.”
“You loved Alan because he lived in Chicago. The farther away the better, that’s what works for you. You know—just do these men who ask you out a favor: stop saying yes.”
Maggie has tried to fix me up before, has sat me down in front of them, one after another, dinner after dinner in Westchester. A husband buffet. These single men of the suburbs were all in their forties and wealthy and really into their jobs, with one big hobby each, biking or sailing or their car. Men really do love their cars, I learned at those dinners, and if I could just love their cars, maybe I could love them, too, and they, in turn, could love me. If only.
They trotted out their divorce stories, too, which had become so practiced it was as if they were pitching a movie in Hollywood, the most important details refined into quick sentences designed to sound off the cuff and funny and memorable. (“She didn’t think she had a drinking problem—she drank, no problem,” said one, but I could see in his eyes that it hadn’t been funny at all.) But they were back in the saddle, these men, they wanted you to know that, and being single was just a minor detail that they planned on changing as quickly as possible. If I liked what I saw. If I were interested. If I wanted to try.
Finally I told Maggie: I couldn’t possibly take another bite.
Of course they were all Robert’s friends, which might be part of the reason why I never liked any of them. My sister doesn’t have any of her own friends anymore. She gave them up when she moved to Westchester with Robert. She sucked in his life, inflated herself like a balloon with his job and his friends and his family. She filled herself up with him until there was no room for anything else. Except for me. I’ve got a permanent residence somewhere in her, in the ankle or the elbow. Maybe I’m a joint.
GARETH AND I met again at the same Irish bar, this time on a Tuesday. I was a half hour late. I didn’t really care. He wore another suit, crisp and pressed as I remembered, but the rest of him had collapsed: his posture sagged; his arms, his shoulders, his head, and his neck were all slung forward and drooped down as if beneath the floor there were a giant vacuum slowly sucking in his enormous frame, bone by bone, pound by pound. He was sitting in a booth near the back by the kitchen, underneath a framed sepia-toned picture of a baseball player at bat. The frame was crooked. He did not rise when I joined him. I tried to straighten the frame as I sat, but it dipped down on the other side so the player and his bat were askew, aiming a shot at the sky.
“Thanks for meeting me,” said Gareth.
There were three empty pint glasses in front of him, and he gripped a full fourth one.
“I will make this brief. I was sad when our relationship didn’t work out. I felt very close to you immediately, as I told you at the time. I thought you and I had a real future together, even though we didn’t agree on the whole children issue, but I think you would have come around. So I have to wonder why it didn’t work out.”
I looked around me to see if anyone was listening. “We only went out on one date,” I said.
“Twice,” he corrected.
“I would hardly count meeting for a quick beer a date,” I said.
“To me, it was a date,” he said. Something in his voice, a tenderness unfamiliar in my daily existence, convinced me to play along.
“It was a date, sure,” I said soothingly. I inched toward the edge of the booth.
“So after two dates and several phone calls and countless e-mails I have to wonder, why didn’t it work out?”
I sat there and waited to hear a theory, and then I realized he was actually asking me a question. “Oh, you want me…? OK. I just wasn’t interested. It’s not a big deal, you’re simply not my type.”
He looked down, and made an impatient noise. Then he drew himself up, pulled his shoulders back, looked at the ceiling, and then proclaimed, “It’s because I’m fat.”