How to Be Single (21 page)

So that was the attitude I took when Will finally slowed the boat down and I was able to sit down for a chat with these blokes. Will poured us all champagne, and Rachel had brought some tiny “nibbles”—itsy-bitsy pieces of black bread with salmon and crème fraîche on top. They were delicious. I asked the men if any of them had girlfriends. They said they didn't. I asked them if it was because there were too many options, and they all just laughed and shrugged. Well, Freddie didn't laugh because he was too cool to laugh.

“So that means yes,” I said.

They all just shrugged again, sheepishly. But John tried to explain.

“It's not like that. I want to settle down, I do. To fall in love. But I just haven't met the right girl yet.”

“But don't you think that you might be having a hard time meeting the right girl because you're never quite sure if there's another right girl coming right after her?”

Will spoke up this time. “No, when you fall in love, it just hits you, doesn't it? You just know. There could be five hundred supermodels and you wouldn't give a toss.”

The others agreed. I really had only one question that I had wanted answered. It was about the damn statistics.

“What does it feel like? To not have to worry about finding someone to love?”

John looked at me, surprised. “What do you mean? I worry. I'm not sure.”

Will agreed. “I work all the time. When do I have time to meet anyone?”

John added, “Just because there's lots of women around doesn't mean I'm guaranteed to meet someone I can fall in love with.”

Will poured himself a little more champagne. “In fact, it can be more depressing really, meeting all these women, and none of them being ‘the one.'”

There was no way Will was going to get me to feel bad for him because there were too many women. I pressed on. “So you're saying it's just as hard for you to find love here in Sydney as it is for the women?”

The two men nodded. Freddie was just staring out into the ocean, stone-faced. I didn't let it drop.

“But wouldn't you have to agree that the odds of you falling in love are better, simply because you're meeting more people who might be ‘the one' than the women are? Don't you think that has to help your odds?”

John said, “I don't think it works that way.”

Will said, “All it takes is one.”

These men had an entirely different way of viewing the statistics than I did. Apparently, to these men it doesn't matter if there are a lot of fish in the sea. Finding the one fish to love for the rest of your life is difficult no matter where you swim.

Alice continued the interrogation.

“So have any of you ever been in love?”

They all nodded their heads. Will began. “When I was a teenager I was in love. I got my heart crushed. I had a girlfriend when I was nineteen who just trampled me.”

John agreed. “I treated my girlfriends well when I was young. I brought them flowers, wrote them love poems.”

Will laughed and John went on, embarrassed. “I couldn't help it, I was a romantic! I had a girlfriend when I was twenty-one whom I would have married. I was head over heels for her. But she broke up with me because she said I was getting too serious.”

I wondered where this woman was now. I hoped she wasn't single and living in Sydney.

Alice looked at Lance Armstrong. “So, Freddie. You've been awfully quiet.”

Freddie just looked at Alice and shrugged. “It was the same for me. I got crushed when I was younger. But I figured it out. Until a woman is around thirty, thirty-two, she has all the power. We hit on them, we fight over them, we chase after them. Then, around thirty-two, thirty-three, it all shifts. We get the power and they're the ones fighting and chasing after us. I think it's just payback. For all the shit they put us through when we were younger.”

The other men looked at Freddie, not really disagreeing, but not wanting to start trouble. Alice narrowed her eyes, shifted in her seat, and calmly took a sip of her champagne. I dove in.

“Would any of you consider going out with an older woman? Someone in her late thirties or even forty?”

“I prefer the strategy of ‘divide your age and add four,' if you know what I mean,” Freddie said, not really joking. The other guys laughed.

I did the math. That meant that they all wanted to date nineteen-or twenty-year-olds. I was considering jumping off the boat right then and there.

Freddie added knowledgeably, “We don't meet single older women when we're out, because there aren't any.”

Alice quickly said, “Excuse me?”

In a cool, slow tone, as if talking to two imbeciles, Freddie explained, “There aren't women that age out at my clubs and restaurants because they're all married.”

I had to step in now. “Are you telling me that you think all the women over, like, thirty-eight are married? That's why they're not at your clubs?”

“Yeah. Of course.” The other guys agreed.

Alice, confused, said, “You're saying there are literally no single women in Sydney who are over, say, thirty-eight?”

Freddie nodded his head confidently. “Yes.”

I stared at him for a minute and then cleared my throat. “Do you realize that the statistics, with which I'm quite familiar, don't support that at all?”

Freddie shrugged. “I own half the bars and restaurants in this town. Who are you going to believe, the statistics or me?”

I was unable to stop talking. “Do you think, Freddie, that the reason you think there aren't any women over the age of thirty-eight who are single is perhaps that you're just not noticing them? That they might be invisible to you?”

Freddie just shrugged. “Maybe.” Alice and I looked at each other. This was the biggest confession we had gotten out of any of these blokes all day.

“Well, you two don't have anything to worry about for years, so what's the fuss?” Will asked. “How old are you ladies? Thirty-one, thirty-two?”

Even here, on this boat with these men, it made me feel good to hear that. Damn me to hell. This time, Alice didn't feel the need to correct him.

That night, Alice may have blow-dried her hair and put on her heels and mascara, but she might as well have been wearing khakis, hiking boots, a safari hat, and carrying a rifle. She was out to track down where all the women over thirty-five were.

We went to one of Freddie's places, wittily called “Freddie's World.” It was a cavernous space with a huge circular bar in the middle and throngs of people mingling about. And there seemed to be no man drought here.

“You fan out to our right, I'll go left. We'll meet up by the archway up ahead.”

I went right, my eyes peeled for any woman with light lines on her forehead and creases stretching from the bottom of her nose to the corners of her mouth. All I saw were baby-faced cuties, with under-thirty radiant skin. I got to the archway as Alice came up.

“I went up to two women who I thought might be over thirty-five. They told me they were twenty-seven. One of them almost punched me and the other one left to go cry in the bathroom.” Alice looked around again. “Otherwise, I came up with nothing.”

“Let's go to one of his restaurants,” I said. “I mean, women over thirty-five still have to eat, don't they?”

We walked a few blocks and found Freddie's Fish, a very trendy sushi restaurant that wrapped around the whole corner, with high windows to show all the beautiful people eating rice and raw fish inside. Luckily, we were seated at a table in the middle of things. The table next to us was empty, but by the time our sake had arrived, four women, all of whom had forehead creases and expensive handbags, sat down next to us. Jackpot.

After they ordered, we tried to look at them and smile every once in a while, to appear friendly. Alice hid our low-sodium soy sauce in her bag so she could ask, in her thickest Staten Island accent, to borrow theirs. They took the bait.

“Are you from New York?”

“Yes. Yes, we are,” Alice said. “My friend Julie is writing a book about being single all over the world. Sort of a self-help book with a world view.”

The women were interested. One of them asked, “So, you've come to Sydney to do research?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What have you found?” asked another.

“Well, I haven't learned anything yet, but I have some questions,” I said, shyly.

The four women leaned toward Alice and me. They were all very pretty. One of them smiled and said, “Okay. Shoot.”

Alice jumped in. “Where do you women go out to meet men? Bars?”

“No, no,” said one. “I never go to bars.”

“Never,” said another one.

The third one said, “I go out sometimes with a few of my other friends and it's usually pretty depressing.”

“The men our age, they act like we're invisible.”

Alice banged her fist on the table. “I knew it! Do you go to any of Freddie Wells's clubs?”

“It's hard to avoid them,” the fourth one said. “But I've pretty much stopped. I'm thirty-seven and I started feeling completely over-the-hill.”

Everyone else agreed. “Now we just go out to dinner.”

“Or if it's a function for work.”

“Otherwise, I just stay home.”

Maybe Freddie was right after all. Maybe this was the Town of Lost Women, where ladies over a certain age are forced to stay home and watch television. I looked at these beautiful, vital, stylish women talking as if they were ready to play shuffleboard and get cataract surgery.

I had to ask: “Do you ever think about moving? Somewhere where there are more men?”

“Or where they have bars for people over twenty-five?” Alice added.

One of them said, “I was thinking of moving to Rome.”

“Yes, Europe. There I think the men will fuck you when you're fifty,” another one said, hopefully.

The other women seemed heartened by this concept. I thought this might be correct. Maybe that could be another bestselling self-help book:
Places Where Men Will Fuck You When You're Fifty.

“But really. How could we? Just pack up and leave our home because our love lives are so bad? That seems ridiculous,” one of the women said.

As we sat eating our edamame and drinking our sake, I thought about me and my friends. Our love lives could be considered disasters. But I would never dream of suggesting any of us leave New York to find a man. Or would I? Shouldn't we all be taking these statistics a little more seriously? We finished our sushi, and being appropriate women in our late thirties in Sydney, we went home and went to bed.

Back in the States

Georgia's week was filled with two quick, witty emails from Sam, a brief phone conversation, and even a text saying “gr8t talking to u!” The text struck Georgia as a bit out of character for the sweetly unhip Sam she met a week ago, but she didn't give it more than a passing thought. She was just relieved that she had a romantic prospect—no matter how far-flung. This thin strand of hope can get you through a lot of days of making your children's lunches alone, and going to bed alone and imagining your husband having sex with a young, nubile dancer with sinewy thighs. Georgia had a prospect, and even when Sam emailed her, asking if they could push back their date a couple of days because something “came up,” she didn't even notice. All she cared about was that he didn't cancel on her, that he was still a prospect.

They met at a bar in Brooklyn. Sam suggested it since it was close to his apartment. Georgia didn't mind. Why shouldn't she be the one to travel? Living in Brooklyn, he must be on the subway all the time. He had to wake up in the morning for work, and had had to travel farther the last time they met. It only seemed fair. But when Georgia walked in, she was surprised at how young the crowd seemed; it felt like your standard college pub.

And the minute she saw Sam, Georgia could tell something was different. He looked literally flush with…something. Confidence. That's what it was. He seemed much more confident than just a week and a half ago. She let that observation pass and kept focused on the task at hand: being delightful.

“You don't mind if we just sit at the bar, do you?” Sam asked, casually,
confidently.

“No, no, of course not, that's fine.”

Sam pointed toward one lone stool at the corner of the bar. “Here, why don't you sit there?”

Georgia was a little confused. “Oh. Okay, well…don't you want to…?”

“No. I've been sitting all day; it'll be good for me to stand for a bit.” Georgia sat down dutifully on the stool and looked at Sam as he leaned against the bar.

“What can I get you? They have great Guinness here.”

Georgia couldn't help but notice the demotion: from restaurant to bar, banquette to stool, wine to beer.