Uncoupled

What's the word for when you ignore your own truth? Oh, right. Twenty.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

In 1990, I kissed a girl at the White Party at the Fillmore East. Her emerald green velvet mini dress shimmered like a mermaid’s tail under the disco lights, the fabric slipping beneath my hands on her waist as she pressed against me. We’d only just met, and declared each other the most beautiful creatures we’d ever seen. God bless ecstasy. She tasted like limes—juice, pith, and rind—and smelled faintly of Bain de Soleil, transporting me to Onset Beach on Cape Cod, circa 1979. My boyfriend stood next to us, watching, bemused, then started narrating the scene in a deep, haphazardly British accent as if providing voice-over to a nature program. The heretofore heterosexual Kelly slips the beautiful, blonde stranger the tongue. The wee wisp of a girl appears to enjoy it. What will happen next? Isn’t there always a man with something to say the second a woman lets herself out of the cage?

In my twenties, I knew I wanted to be single, to play the field as we used to say. Do we still say that? I had no idea how to be single. The so-called field stretched out in front of me, a confusing expanse crowded with men demanding I pay attention to them, and oh, how I noticed—precisely as I’d been conditioned to do.

I like to periodically watch this incredible clip of Cher on the Sally Jessy Raphael show. Sally asks Cher, Are men important? And Cher responds, Like… for what? The emphasis on what. Such a goddamn treasure of a soundbite. There’s a cut to the audience, and the expression on some guy’s face as the woman next to him howls with laughter is…chef’s kiss. It’s the how dare you feed me this turd expression we see on the faces of all these billionaire fucks who are trying to break our souls.

Of course, this clip has been relentlessly used out of context, and it’s not the whole picture. If you watch the rest of it, Cher explains that she’d consider partnering again with the right man, but she thinks too many women believe they can only get what they need in life from a man instead of creating it for themselves. For my money, the video clip does double-duty. Not a single woman I knew growing up talked like Cher.

I had to visit an ENT in my early twenties for a chronic sinus and ear infection that, in hindsight, was likely the result of my weekend party drug habit. I don’t remember the youngish doctor’s name, but forty-some years later, my body remembers the space we took up together in the examination room. The way I imagined he appraised my long neck before lifting my hair aside and bending close to look through the scope resting in my ear canal. The way the skin between my toes sparked awake as the black rubber tip slid into place. The feel of his breath on my cheek and how I moved closer to it. Our imagined life together unfurling like a fiddlehead fern into natural, possible perfection once he and I inevitably became a couple. One afternoon, weeks after, I looked up from my book and there he was, sitting across from me on the train. Was I on my way to the Met on a Saturday afternoon? Or to meet my friends at Dojo in the East Village for early dinner before a show at The Knitting Factory? Was I headed back to Brooklyn after work? I know I was alone and he was alone and that his ridiculously chiseled face broke into a grin when I looked up and recognized him and the very existence of the man I’d called boyfriend for that whole last year was sucked out of my consciousness, much in the same way Jeffrey Goldberg’s name and phone number got sucked into Mike Waltz’s phone. Listen, how dare you suggest I did this on purpose? You’re blowing this out of proportion. These things happen all the time.

Who cares that I knew on some level that I should get to know myself better before committing to a man who had likely been raised to expect a woman to put him first? So what if both times I opted for legal marriage over living together, it was for the health insurance, and I felt in my gut that it was a mistake. I had no idea how to act on that knowing. I was raised to take the path of least resistance and shown at every turn that I would need help to survive.

I’ve been single by choice for nearly the entire decade of my fifties—for the first time in my life—and it’s absolutely glorious and very fucking hard. A lot of shit does not get accomplished. But every day, I decide everything for myself, and every day, I gain another layer of understanding of how the world is built by men for men at the expense of women, or more precisely, by wealthy white men for wealthy white men at the expense of everyone else. Every day, I’m angry that nobody taught me when I was young that my existence mattered separate from a man’s. Every day, I see more clearly that I don’t need to move over and make room for one.

I don’t remember what the ENT and I talked about as we exited the train together, our shoulders bumping in that way that can happen with someone you’ve met but don’t really know. Familiar and strange. Accidentally on purpose. Both people leaning into it but also apologizing in whispers. He was headed somewhere. I was headed somewhere. Maybe we both had other people waiting. But we should get coffee or a drink sometime soon. Let’s exchange numbers. He wrote his on the inside cover of my worn copy of The Sheltering Sky, and I tore off a piece of the back page to hand him mine. He said, Are you wearing Drakkar Noir? I think I like it better on you than on me.¹ We never called each other, but when I visited NYC a few years ago with my nineteen-year-old daughter, I imagined looking up and seeing him sitting across from us on the train to the Met.

My boyfriend’s name was Daniel. He was an actor (and waiter) and made me laugh by narrating our dates in silly voices. I loved the double-takes when people saw us walking down 7th Avenue holding hands, a six-foot-tall curly redhead with a guy who barely reached her shoulder. Chris, my boyfriend before Daniel, was taller than me, and the air force and a difficult childhood had created scowl lines between his brows thirty years earlier than should be allowed. I could make him laugh, but usually only by poking fun at myself.

I existentially disappointed Chris by turning my visit to Brooklyn into the end of us. I fell in love with myself reflected in the city’s million windows, dropped out of my junior year of college, and signed a lease for an apartment in Park Slope. I let Daniel down a few years later by falling for the walking red flag that was my boss. We made a baby, my boss and I, and then we got married and divorced. Then Chris and I got back together, and he and I made a baby, then we got married and divorced. If you haven’t already noticed them, I’m sure you can see my red flags.

God, I miss that everything is possible energy. It sparked off the dark-eyed deli dude who handed me my warm buttered bialy with a smile. It washed over me as the Jamaican cyclists raced past me in a blur of dreadlocked neon and patchouli, shouting on your left while I rode my five loops around Prospect Park. But I also felt it every time I stretched out alone on the extra firm mattress in the apartment I paid for with the money I earned as a graphic designer at a bridal magazine in Midtown. The mattress was the first purchase I made with a credit card that nobody (no man) had to cosign for me to open the account. Ninety degrees in my apartment, the curtain dancing against the pastel green wall as a late afternoon storm rolled through Brooklyn, the city’s hot breath hitting my bare legs in sticky bursts, my cells singing, holy shit, this is my life. Stoned on Mott Street dime bag weed,² listening to The Last Temptation of Christ on my Walkman and imagining Daniel in his terrible Astoria apartment where the planes practically scraped their bellies on his roof peak as they came in for a landing at La Guardia. Maybe I felt a little sick wave of guilt roll through me when I realized I was glad he wasn’t lying beside me with his nervous energy and goofy voices demanding my attention. I loved him, though. Not that I trust what I thought I knew in my twenties.

1. It smelled incredible on me in 1990.

2. Remember when you could buy a dime bag from an empty storefront where some guy would pull a cardboard box out from under the counter, and it cost $35, and you could go home, roll a joint, smoke half of it yourself sitting on your fire escape, then hold your own in a conversation? What happened to that weed?