Chapter 10 Training Montage #2
“Maybe if I was capable of dating you casually, it would be different, but I’m not.” So now he likes me too much to be with me. That’s a good one, I think. Nick would be proud of that level of pretzel logic. “I’m better as your friend right now.”
I realize this is timed conveniently with our committee work, too; it means that we weren’t lying at all.
I don’t bother to ask him about Eliana. I don’t ask if Eliana is the friend he confided in, the one who told him he wasn’t ready to date me.
I know I can’t do that and not sound hysterical, jealous, screaming and begging him not to do this to us. I have some pride.
“I understand.”
I don’t understand, but I end the call as quickly as I can and then sit alone on my bed, my knees shaking.
There’s a hollow place in the middle of my chest as my eyes drift to the buildings outside: the burning brick red from the setting sun and the lemon glow from shops.
I had this whole plan that I was going to become an amazing dancer and then win him back, but my plan is unwinnable.
It was always going to be unwinnable, because I’m a single parent.
The rebel inside me wants to scream. To go to his house and yell outside his window.
To get wasted. I am itching to get out of my skin, like I’ll die if I sit in my grown-up apartment being grown-up about this, too.
Nick is gone. Hannah is gone. Ollie doesn’t love me.
I can’t even tell Vivi about this, because Vivi doesn’t even know we were dating.
I can’t tell Abby, because she was angry that I let Nick stay with me in the first place and will blame the whole disaster on me.
I stand up and put on my sexiest club clothes. Black boots. Tight shimmering top. I want to go out and forget my rational brain for a while. Hannah isn’t here. I can pretend I am twenty again.
A voice in my head is saying: don’t drink, don’t drink, don’t drink.
I bat it away. Of course I’m not going to drink, I tell the voice. I’m just going to go to a club and pick up a man and sleep with him and do every single thing that I used to do when I was drinking. Where’s the risk in that?
Where’s the risk in letting Rebel Laura have a night out?
‘Mercenary’ is a new club in downtown Manhattan, tucked away in a space behind a popular steakhouse restaurant and below a yoga studio.
When I make my way to the long entrance hallway, the music is booming and a bridge-and-tunnel crowd are lining up to get carded, dressed in New Jersey and Long Island haute couture.
I’m not even feeling snobby about it; I grew up poor and spent enough time wearing faux leather pants that I can recognize my people.
And they are definitely my people: dark-haired Italians or bottle blondes tottering in heels, exhorting each other with strong local accents about holding purses and where to find the strongest drinks.
As soon as I’m inside, I wade into the fray, dancing by myself, listening to the bass line vibrating up my spine. It’s music I don’t know, but it still feels familiar: the kind of assertive, mindless pulsing that always helps when there is something I need to forget.
I have apparently forgotten that even at my age, as a woman alone, I will become an immediate target.
I wanted to feel attractive tonight, but instead I feel like prey.
Within ninety seconds of thumping bass, there he is across from me: a young man who looks about twenty-five, dancing as close as he can, making his intentions clear with the subtlety of a subway train.
He grins at me and tosses out the universal club head nod. Then he comes closer, not quite grinding against me but suggesting that grinding is in the near future.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he calls into my ear. He’s handsome enough to pull off his assertiveness, and he smells nice, but his hair is a little too slicked back, his diamond earring a little too large.
He’s boring, I think, and feel unkind thinking it.
He’s so unspecific, even though I know that if I talked to him, I’d hear the specifics: how he works as a trainer at his gym; how he’s going on vacation with his brother to Miami soon; how he doesn’t read a lot of books, but he likes girls who read.
We would go to bed, and it would be a coin toss whether he could make me orgasm, but he’d try his best until either he succeeded or I faked it.
Then in the morning, he would say something like, ‘Laura, you’re an amazing woman,’ some line that he heard in a movie once when he was fifteen.
He probably won’t mention that I’m older than he is, or he might talk about how he ‘likes older women.’ Depends how smooth he is.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he shouts again, since I haven’t responded.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom!” I shout back.
A moment later, I stand in front of a large mirror, my face glowing like a Renaissance portrait in chiaroscuro against the charcoal-painted walls.
The bathrooms are still very nice, I notice.
No graffiti, flattering lighting, dark wood decor.
Women have vomited here, but not often enough yet for the smell to persist.
The only way this would be tolerable is if I were drinking.
I look at my face and get a little teary, realizing how much this part of my life is officially over, even if Hannah wasn’t in the picture, even if I weren’t sober.
It feels like going back to your childhood bedroom and realizing you can never stare up at your boy band poster with the same sense of yearning.
I don’t want this anymore. I will never want this again.
I want something real, and every time I reach for it, it slips through my fingers.
Ollie was supposed to be a mature adult, but maybe mature adults can’t ignore that I’m a walking red flag, a series of problems. He did his best, but eventually there were too many issues for him to pretend them away.
There was a neat line of red flags stretching out from me like a runway, directing him to get the hell away.
Maybe if I drank, I could lie to myself and act like I was young tonight.
Maybe that’s why people drink in the first place: to try to get back to the point where they aren’t damaged yet.
I wipe my face in the mirror, mascara smears leaving coal smudges in both directions, just as a young woman emerges from the toilet stall behind me.
She washes her hands as she glances over, taking in my expression as I listlessly wipe at my make-up with my thumbs.
“Man problems?” she asks.
“My boyfriend dumped me,” I say blankly. That part is true.
She turns and puts her arms around me, this complete stranger. She must be very drunk. “He is not worth it,” she intones. “No man is worth it.” I nod into her shoulder. She smells like CK One.
Emerging from the club a few minutes later, I decide to stop by an AA meeting on my way home.
I track one down in the Village that’s being held late enough that I can still drop in.
A famous actor is there, which is the kind of thing I would love to tell my friends and won’t.
The glamor of big city life: twenty people sitting in a church basement, wary and exhausted, one of them fresh from shooting a movie with Sandra Bullock.
On the subway later, I think about West Coast Swing.
It sometimes seems silly, all the formal positions like leader and follower, all the rules about frame and handholding, but I realize how nice it is when no one is likely to give you an unasked-for ass grind.
In partner dancing, you never get surrounded by two men, one on either side, blocking your ability to exit.
I remember Jody asking me pointedly if I was going to quit dancing. I stand up in the subway, having a silent moment of decision as I stare at my face echoed in the dark window, tunnel support beams flickering behind my reflection like ghosts.
I am not quitting West Coast Swing because of Ollie.
I am not quitting at all.
I text Jody and Helen as soon as I get off the train, even though it’s late at night. Any time in the next 3 weeks that you want to go swing dancing, I’m in. I want to get as much practice as possible before Garden State Swing.
Helen texts me back eight exclamation points in a row.
I have eighteen days until the Swing Festival, and what follows is as close as I’ve ever lived to a training montage.
I tell myself that I am Rocky running up endless stairs, the Karate Kid painting fences, Elle Woods studying for the LSAT.
I am going to get good at this, and I am not going to quit because of Ollie.
And while Hannah’s away, I have all the time in the world to make good on that goal.
I sign up with Jody for the intermediate West Coast course that’s starting on Saturday mornings in July.
I sign up for Thursday evening lessons at a smaller dance studio in lower Manhattan, and I bookmark another ‘Hot and West’ night near me in Brooklyn.
I sign up for four one-hour private lessons with Hank so I can learn how to do Jack & Jill improvs. I keep going to the Friday night open practice sessions at Manhattan Swing Workshop, too.
I even sit through an entire lesson taught by Eliana at one of our Manhattan Swing nights. She seems to have literally no idea who I am, but she has a lot of useful tips about pop-outs and footwork. Jody finds Eliana annoyingly perky, which I take as a sign of loyalty.
Jody tells me she has finally made a plan to see Téa.
“Meh,” Jody says. “It probably won’t work out anyway.”
“No sparks?”
“I don’t know if I believe in sparks.”
Ben still hasn’t returned to class, though Jody texts him again to check in.