Chapter 17
It didn’t feel right to be so tired. Regardless, Annie was exhausted and needed to be horizontal for a little while if she wanted to make it to the lido deck later tonight.
The dragon book she was reading weighed about ten pounds, and so it also counted as exercise when she held it in her lap or over her face.
The heroine in the book was taking over a kingdom after her sister’s illness, which felt familiar enough.
The dragons had just hatched and were spitting fire onto various cloaks and piles of hay. Annie put the book on the nightstand.
The beds were comfortable, if spartan. Everything in the cabins seemed to be made out of the sort of highly durable material that was immune to mold or dust but might give you cancer if you pressed your face against it.
Annie pulled her laptop onto her belly and wrote a quick email to Claudia.
Hi honey—Cruise is NUTTY but fun so far!
It’s what I imagine Comic Con would be like if there were no men.
It’s fun, I’m having fun. Miss you lots and lots.
Give Figaro a big kiss for me, and have him give you one, too.
Love you, hon. Xo Mom. To Katherine, she wrote, Kitty, this place is crazy.
So so so wish you were here. Cruises are very wheelchair-friendly.
If it had been a few weeks later, it wouldn’t have been a problem. Xoxox Sis.
Ding! An incoming message. Annie clicked it open—it was from Geoff.
Whoopsie, read the subject line. Hey, Annie—Sorry to bug you again, but it turns out while Kayla is great (doing GREAT!
!), there are some basics she still needs to get briefed on.
We promoted her so quickly (again, she’s doing GREAT), but there were a few things that have come up that we’ll need your help training her on.
Thought I’d reach out just in case you’ve got access to any training docs on your home computer, anything you could send over that might help.
Otherwise we’ll just wait until you’re back. Thanks again, G.
Annie had been a senior in high school when it came out, Katherine had been in eighth grade.
She’d had a crush on a guy in her math class, Lawrence Rink.
He’d had red hair and freckles—Annie knew from Facebook that he still did.
Lawrence had been kind—exactly the sort of person who would have been the world’s best first real boyfriend, but instead, Annie had never done anything about it.
She’d sat next to him every day for years.
They’d had punch together at the school dances.
He was shy, and she was shy, and it had been an insurmountable situation.
Lawrence! He was probably still married—who would divorce Lawrence Rink?
On the television, the video crackled and paused, and then it was Boy Talk sitting on two couches with a young man in between them, holding a microphone.
“So,” the man said, “what do you remember about making this video?”
Shawn spoke first. “It was cold. You remember?” He tapped his brother on the knee, and Keith nodded.
“Freezing,” Keith said. “But it was April, and we needed the new video by June, and so we were out there in our T-shirts, flying through the air, pretending it was summer.”
An unseen crowd laughed.
“I remember the director was German, right?” Scotty said. “And he kept saying ‘Vasters, boys!’ when we were running on the boardwalk. He was hot, though.”
The crowd laughed again, at Scotty’s bad German accent and at his admission of sexual attraction before anyone else knew he was gay, and Annie thought to herself, Well, there it is.
He knows that we know. He knows we didn’t know.
He knows we’re all still here, supporting him.
There had to have been times when Scotty wondered if the Talkers would still love him, and they did, and it was beautiful.
In some ways, they really were old friends, the men and the Talkers.
That was the goal of this whole thing, to make people feel that.
Chris had never wanted to tell anyone anything.
It had been one of their biggest problems, the way he answered “Fine” whenever Annie asked him how he was, even if she could see smoke coming out of his ears.
When they finally started couples therapy, it was too late.
There was no way for him to talk about anything that didn’t involve peeling back about twenty layers of skin, and so all he did was grumble and growl and then shout.
Annie had said to him—this had made him madder than almost anything else—that if she ever got married again, she was going to marry someone who didn’t have anger issues.
Someone more like Lawrence Rink, who had always let her share his calculator.
Chris had asked for the divorce, even though Annie had wanted it first, she was sure.
What was her problem? Wanting to keep things nice, wanting to keep things steady?
Whatever that was, Annie wanted to make sure she never did it again.
Of course Chris found someone else before she did.
That was how the world worked. That was how algorithms worked.
A good-looking fifty-two-year-old man with a decent income could find a woman to date in minutes.
Chris had dated a score of women (she knew this from Claudia) within the first month, and by three months, he had a girlfriend.
Annie didn’t want to know more, but she did.
The woman—Emily—was thirty-five and pretty.
She said she didn’t care about having children, but Annie knew what that meant—she wanted a husband, and she wanted a baby.
Anyone could have told him, but Chris was not a good listener.
If Annie were a betting woman, she would have put a hundred bucks on Chris being back on diaper duty within the next year.
He was going to get back on the track, he was going to start over, which would make him feel young again, at least for a little while.
Was that the difference between men and women, that Annie had no choice but to face her own mortality, whereas Chris could choose to ignore it until his body began to fall apart?
The other parents would think he was a grandpa—that was as weird as it would be.
One did hear stories about men doing better the second time around, with all that testosterone and ambition out of their system. How nice for Emily.
Annie had downloaded one app, let Claudia help her set it up, and then she only opened it when she was drunk, a state that was now achievable at exactly one and a half glasses of wine.
Chris hadn’t wanted her in so long that Annie didn’t even remember what it felt like to want someone, to be wanted.
She’d been left wanting in the wanting department.
Annie didn’t like swiping because it all felt pointless.
Whose idea of a dream date was a divorced fifty-year-old woman, one who hadn’t been injecting toxins into her forehead or lifting weights or starving herself for decades?
She wasn’t trying to be dramatic. It was the truth—there were middle-aged women out there who looked sleek as greyhounds, and she wasn’t one of them.
It was fine! She was fine with it! Chris had found a newer model.
That’s what men did. And then the old models—interesting, smart women—hung out with each other until they died.
She wasn’t trying to be morbid. That was just how it felt.
Annie wondered what Keith Fiore’s marriage was like.
She would ask Maira. Maira would know. She imagined him in his glasses, singing to his wife in their kitchen, a room that smelled like simmering tomato sauce.
It was so funny to think of regular women having married these men.
Did they think they’d done something impossible?
Or had they just met a man and fallen in love, and that love had come with the baggage of talent and fame?
Like Kelsey, Terrence’s new wife. She was too young to have beheld him in the prime of his fame, so who knew what she thought.
At least Shawn’s wife understood what he’d been through, because she’d been through it too.
Corey’s wife—maybe ex-wife now—was an actress too.
They’d been on the same prime-time television show.
That made sense, like two teachers falling in love, or two cryptozoologists.
Annie couldn’t fathom getting married again.
It was too hard, too painful. For now, she was content with freedom.
Freedom from whatever Chris had boxed her into, freedom even from what Claudia had made her into, freedom from everything that society told her a woman should have or be or do.
Maybe she’d stop coloring her hair and be one of those older women with two long gray braids, like ancient teenagers.
She wasn’t there yet, but maybe someday.
The interview clip ended, and another music video started.
It was for a song Annie didn’t know, presumably from after they got back together, and seemed to be just Shawn and Keith singing, with the rest of the guys hulking in the background.
Shawn was wearing an unbuttoned shirt with a vest over it and a newsboy cap and dark sunglasses, the kind of outfit you’d put on if there was a fire and you were given thirty seconds to leave the house with as many items as you could wear.
Women in the next cabin were laughing, maybe at the video, though probably not.
Annie sat up in bed and clicked the volume button.
Keith started to sing straight into the camera.
He wasn’t really looking at her. He was staring into a camera and asking it for help because it had helped him before.
Annie hadn’t masturbated as a teenager. That was another thing Annie felt ashamed of—ashamed that she hadn’t, like some kind of religious zealot, when in reality, she just hadn’t known how.
With boys, it seemed easier, like everything else.
If you pull on this, something comes out.
It was a math problem. But no boy had ever given her an orgasm, and nothing she’d ever seen or read or heard as a teenager had given her any instructions, so it took until she was in college with a sweet, patient boyfriend to find out what all the fuss was about.
It was something the divorce was giving her space to get used to.
That was the point, wasn’t it? She didn’t need anyone else.
She was an island. Islands didn’t need other islands to exist. Annie reached into her small bedside bag, which contained her eye mask, her earplugs, some nose stickers that were supposed to keep her from snoring, her melatonin, and a very small vibrator.
Usually, Annie pictured herself walking into a hotel lobby: somewhere dark enough that, in reality, she’d need to turn on her phone flashlight to look at the drink menu.
She would walk in and see a man. A handsome man.
She didn’t usually imagine anyone in particular, but sometimes she did.
Lawrence Rink. Louis, who worked in sales at the magazine, whom she had almost kissed once at an office holiday party.
A cute math teacher from Claudia’s school.
It didn’t really matter—it wasn’t real. Now Annie imagined walking through the hotel lobby and watching a man turn around.
She thought about Shawn Fiore’s face, but it was too manicured, too sharp.
That’s what he had lost from his youth—his impetuousness, his roughness.
He had looked real then, but he didn’t look real now.
Annie shook her head and started over, back from the hotel lobby door.
This time, it was Keith Fiore’s face that turned toward her, his adult face.
She thought about being so close to someone’s body that you weren’t even looking at them anymore.
She thought about Keith until she wasn’t thinking about anything, and then the video changed, and the guys were fifteen again, singing “Sunshine.”