Chapter 10
Claire was wearing lipstick for the first time in years. She wasn’t really sure how she felt about it.
She’d bought the lipstick at a drugstore in Beaufort on Tuesday, standing in the cosmetic aisle for eleven whole minutes trying to choose a color. It was called Rosewood, which she thought sounded elegant and literary, but it made her lips look like she’d had injections.
This lipstick was for speed dating.
This was Nina’s pick for month seven.
Nina, who six months ago couldn’t even walk into a grocery store without sitting in the parking lot for twenty minutes, had signed the three of them up for speed dating at a wine bar in downtown Charleston.
When she texted the group chat with the plan, Harper responded with a single word:
Why?
It wasn’t even a question. It was a statement of disgust.
Claire had responded with,
I’m a married woman.
It wasn’t a great marriage right now, but she had the certificate.
And Nina had responded with,
I know, but that’s not the point. The point is sitting across from a stranger and being interesting. When was the last time any of us had to be interesting?
Claire didn’t have an answer for that because the honest answer was really embarrassing.
The last time she’d been interesting to a stranger was so long ago she couldn’t even remember it. The last time she’d been interesting to her own husband was even longer ago.
She was a third-grade teacher who organized pantries, baked pound cake, and slept in the guest room of a marriage that had gone so quiet you could hear the refrigerator hum.
She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, her in her Rosewood lipstick.
She’d chosen a green blouse that she bought last week, and she never would have chosen it six months ago because it was way too bright and noticeable.
Her hair was down. She was even wearing earrings.
Greg was in the den, of course. It was hard to tell the den and Greg apart these days. Greg was more married to the den than to her. She could hear the television through the wall, the murmur of a game or a show or whatever it was he had retreated into tonight.
She had told him she was going out with Nina and Harper, and he’d said, “Have fun.”
Two words.
The same two words he said every time she left the house now, delivered with the same flatness, as if she were a neighbor he was being polite to rather than a wife he was losing.
She hadn’t told him about speed dating. She told herself it was because he wouldn’t understand, which was completely and totally true.
But the deeper truth was that she didn’t want to see his face when she said it.
She didn’t want to watch him process the information that his wife of two decades was sitting across from another man, not because she wanted another man, but because she wanted to remember what it felt like to be seen.
Greg would hear the term “speed dating” and just assume she was looking for a replacement.
She absolutely wasn’t. She was looking for a mirror.
She wanted to sit across from someone and see them recognize her worth in four minutes of attention. She wanted someone to ask her questions and really listen to her answers.
She put the lipstick in her purse, turned off the bathroom light, and left.
The wine bar was on East Bay Street. That was Harper’s territory. So Harper was already there, sitting at the bar, drinking a glass of something that was expensive, obviously.
“There are name tags,” she said instead of greeting them. “They want us to wear them.”
“Well, that’s kind of how speed dating works,” Claire replied. “These are strangers who don’t know our names.”
“I’m the vice president of a major financial firm. I don’t wear name tags. If I wanted to wear a name tag, I’d be a mechanic or a refrigerator repairman.”
“Well, you wore a name tag at the tattoo parlor.”
“That was a sticker Wren put on me as a joke. I didn’t even notice until we were in the car.”
Nina arrived looking like a totally different person. It was like watching an old photograph slowly develop.
She was wearing a dark red dress that Claire had never even seen. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she wore a necklace that caught the light as she moved.
She looked kind of like Nina from before, but not exactly.
She looked like a new, upgraded version, one that had the same history but operated differently.
Kind of like when you upgrade your computer’s operating system.
You still have the same computer, but it works in a completely different way, with entirely new features.
“You look great,” Claire said.
“Oh, thank you. It’s Lucia’s dress. Trust me, she supervised my entire outfit. She said I was basically a presentation. In fact, she did a presentation. She actually had slides.”
“Slides?” Harper said, laughing.
“Yes, on her phone. She showed me three different options and then ranked them by sophistication and approachability. She’s sixteen, but I have absolutely no idea where she gets this.”
“David,” Claire and Harper said at the same time.
Nina smiled. There was only a little bit of sadness behind the smile. Most of it was just easy.
The event coordinator was a woman named Bev, with the energy of a summer camp counselor and the organizational skills of a general.
She pulled together thirty or so people in the back room of the wine bar, where the small tables had been set up in rows of two chairs each. There were candles lit and wine glasses waiting.
There were roughly the same number of men and women, and all of them seemed to be somewhere around forty-five to sixty years old. Everybody had that same expression on their face, a sort of hopeful dread.
Claire imagined that she was probably wearing that same expression too, although she wasn’t going to take a chance and look in the mirror.
“Okay, everybody,” Bev announced, clapping her hands with excitement.
“You have four minutes at each table. When you hear the bell, the men will rotate. Women, just stay seated. At the end of the night, you can write who you’re interested in on the cards I’ve given you.
If there’s a match, we’ll put you in touch with each other.
Now, the most important rule is that everybody has fun.
Remember, this is supposed to be fun. This is not a tax audit. ”
“This does not feel fun,” Harper murmured.
“It feels like I’m going in for a big performance review,” Claire said.
“Oh, good Lord, it’s four minutes,” Nina said. “We can survive anything for four minutes. We survived thirty seconds in the Atlantic in the bitter cold.”
“Well, the Atlantic didn’t ask me what I do for a living,” Harper said, crossing her arms. “Or make me wear a name tag.”
The bell rang, and speed dating began.
Claire’s first date, which sounded really weird given that she was married and had no interest in dating anyone, was named Tom.
He sold insurance.
And he smiled too much.
And he had those big, overly white, capped teeth that made him look like he might have been a horse in a previous life.
He asked her what she did for a living. She said she was a third-grade teacher. His response was, “Oh, that must be very rewarding.”
She said it was. She wasn’t sure if she meant it. It depended on the day you asked.
He asked her if she had any kids of her own. She said two, grown.
He asked if she was divorced. And she said no, she was married.
His smile flickered for a moment. She could see him recalculating something in his head.
And then he spent the remaining two minutes just telling her about his boat.
She zoned out.
Her second date was a man named Phil. He was recently widowed and talked about his late wife for three of the four minutes. It was gentle and loving. And Claire listened.
She thought of Nina and wanted to reach across the table and hold his hand. But she didn’t, because that wasn’t what this was supposed to be.
And then she thought about Greg and wondered if, after she died, would he talk about her for three minutes straight at a speed date?
She doubted it.
He would probably talk about the Braves.
Her third date was a woman who had accidentally ended up at the wrong table. She was looking for a trivia night that was happening in the front room. Claire pointed her in the right direction. They both laughed. And it was the most natural conversation she had all evening.
Claire loved trivia. She almost followed the woman into the other room.
Her fourth date was a man named Richard. He was a retired English professor.
He did have kind eyes and a nice sport coat with those cool patches on the elbows, but he also had that particular quality of attention that comes from spending decades listening to students talk about what they think a poem means.
He asked Claire what she liked to do. She opened her mouth to say what she always said: cooking, reading, and spending time with her family. You know, the menu of acceptable answers that you carry around.
She had done that for twenty-six years, the resume of a woman who had defined herself entirely by her relationship with other people.
Instead, she suddenly said, “I’ve started drawing again. I used to paint in college, and I stopped, and I just started drawing again a few months ago.”
He leaned forward, as if he were actually interested.
“What do you draw?”
“Waves mostly, the marsh, my friends sometimes.” She paused. “I’m not very good yet. I guess I’m relearning.”
“Well, relearning is the most interesting part of it,” he said. “It means you already know something, but now you’re choosing to know it differently.”
The bell rang. Richard smiled, tapped the table, and moved on.
Claire sat there for a moment, looking at the empty chair across from her.
She didn’t want Richard. She didn’t want Tom or Phil or any of the men who had rotated around her table for over an hour. She didn’t want someone new.
What she wanted was to sit across from someone, anyone, and say, “I’ve started drawing again.” And have that person lean forward, as Richard did, instead of shrugging, as Greg would likely do.
The problem wasn’t that she needed a different man.