would drive me the most out of my mind with jealousy, but you should also probably know that as upset as I was about Tom leaving me for Kate, the thought did cross my mind that I might finally get to have sex with somebody who a) wasn’t Tom, and b) isn’t gay. And the prospect didn’t entirely lack appeal.
Four
W HEN I WOKE UP ON MONDAY MORNING, I FOUND MYSELF staring up at the pattern on the pressed-tin ceiling over the bed, wondering what would become of me. And I mean this in the full Jane Austen sense of the term. What on earth would
become of
me? When Gil-the-homosexual and I finally broke up—over a ring my Diet Coke made on one of his cherrywood nightstands—I went straight out the next morning and bought a cheap ticket to Prague. I rented a tiny apartment in the Old Town and stayed there for three months. I felt dizzy with my own independence. I was finally free. I drank Turkish coffee and read thick Penguin Classics and took long, soulful walks over bridges. Well, here I was, free again, and all I could think about was Tom. I started to cry. What if he didn’t come to his senses? What if he never came back? What would I do? Who would I date?
What would become of me?
Four years we’d been together. Four years! Well, it’s better than a divorce is what you’re probably thinking. That’s what everybody kept saying to me. At least it’s not a divorce. It’s better than a divorce. And I would say this back to them. I would say, I’m not so sure about that. A divorced woman at least makes sense to people. A divorced woman has only been rejected by one other human being. Dating a divorced woman is like getting a sweater that’s been hanging in someone else’s closet; it didn’t work for
them,
but maybe . . .
I realize that’s nonsense, of course. Cordelia’s divorce was truly the most horrific thing I’ve ever witnessed, and even as I lay there that morning, the picture of misery, mentally tracing the tin bumps on the ceiling in an effort to calm myself down, I knew there was really no comparing the two. Still, all this felt bad, and it was happening to me. Which is one of the reasons it came as such a shock to my system, come to think of it. Very little had happened to me for quite some time. One of the things about living in Philadelphia is that the same events tick along so predictably, year after year, the Mummers Parade and the Flower Show and the Book and the Cook and the Jazz Festival and the Beaux Arts Ball, that you get lulled into a kind of a coma. You see the same faces at the same parties, you’re struck by the shock of the same perfect crisp autumn day after the same months of muggy, dank summer, you end up with the same stinky gingko things on the bottom of your shoes when you make the mistake of walking down 22nd Street during gingko fruit season, and after a while you stop noticing that nothing is happening to you, because nothing seems to be happening to anybody else. If anything really big ever happens to anyone who lives in Philadelphia, they end up moving to New York.
One big thing that happened to somebody I knew, about eight months before all this, was that the publisher of our paper, Sid Hirsch, ended up in the news because his wife was found dead in the bottom of his swimming pool. Now, I’ve always believed that if anybody over the age of about, say, eight, is found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool, it means they were put there by somebody else, so to have this happen to somebody I actually
knew,
to have my boss’s wife turn up dead at the bottom of the swimming pool behind their Bucks County home—well, it was almost more than I could take. I’d even swum in the pool! We all had. Every August, Sid and his wife had a big pool party for the staff of the paper, and one of the earliest lines of conjecture around the office was whether or not this year’s party would still be on, and if so, if anybody would actually get in the pool. As it turned out, Sid was officially
Four
W HEN I WOKE UP ON MONDAY MORNING, I FOUND MYSELF staring up at the pattern on the pressed-tin ceiling over the bed, wondering what would become of me. And I mean this in the full Jane Austen sense of the term. What on earth would
become of
me? When Gil-the-homosexual and I finally broke up—over a ring my Diet Coke made on one of his cherrywood nightstands—I went straight out the next morning and bought a cheap ticket to Prague. I rented a tiny apartment in the Old Town and stayed there for three months. I felt dizzy with my own independence. I was finally free. I drank Turkish coffee and read thick Penguin Classics and took long, soulful walks over bridges. Well, here I was, free again, and all I could think about was Tom. I started to cry. What if he didn’t come to his senses? What if he never came back? What would I do? Who would I date?
What would become of me?
Four years we’d been together. Four years! Well, it’s better than a divorce is what you’re probably thinking. That’s what everybody kept saying to me. At least it’s not a divorce. It’s better than a divorce. And I would say this back to them. I would say, I’m not so sure about that. A divorced woman at least makes sense to people. A divorced woman has only been rejected by one other human being. Dating a divorced woman is like getting a sweater that’s been hanging in someone else’s closet; it didn’t work for
them,
but maybe . . .
I realize that’s nonsense, of course. Cordelia’s divorce was truly the most horrific thing I’ve ever witnessed, and even as I lay there that morning, the picture of misery, mentally tracing the tin bumps on the ceiling in an effort to calm myself down, I knew there was really no comparing the two. Still, all this felt bad, and it was happening to me. Which is one of the reasons it came as such a shock to my system, come to think of it. Very little had happened to me for quite some time. One of the things about living in Philadelphia is that the same events tick along so predictably, year after year, the Mummers Parade and the Flower Show and the Book and the Cook and the Jazz Festival and the Beaux Arts Ball, that you get lulled into a kind of a coma. You see the same faces at the same parties, you’re struck by the shock of the same perfect crisp autumn day after the same months of muggy, dank summer, you end up with the same stinky gingko things on the bottom of your shoes when you make the mistake of walking down 22nd Street during gingko fruit season, and after a while you stop noticing that nothing is happening to you, because nothing seems to be happening to anybody else. If anything really big ever happens to anyone who lives in Philadelphia, they end up moving to New York.
One big thing that happened to somebody I knew, about eight months before all this, was that the publisher of our paper, Sid Hirsch, ended up in the news because his wife was found dead in the bottom of his swimming pool. Now, I’ve always believed that if anybody over the age of about, say, eight, is found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool, it means they were put there by somebody else, so to have this happen to somebody I actually
knew,
to have my boss’s wife turn up dead at the bottom of the swimming pool behind their Bucks County home—well, it was almost more than I could take. I’d even swum in the pool! We all had. Every August, Sid and his wife had a big pool party for the staff of the paper, and one of the earliest lines of conjecture around the office was whether or not this year’s party would still be on, and if so, if anybody would actually get in the pool. As it turned out, Sid was officially
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