How to Be Single (22 page)

“That would be great,” Georgia said. Sam gave the bartender their order and turned back to Georgia, smiling. The smile that last week was sheepish and tentative was now radiant. He was wearing the same kind of clothes, but they looked different on him now. Trendy. They chatted pleasantly, he standing, while Georgia sat. Georgia had not been dating enough to know why this felt incredibly awkward. Why shouldn't he stand if he wanted to? It's a free country.

“So, how have you been since we last saw each other?” Georgia asked, casually, sipping at her Guinness.

“Great. Really great.”

“That's wonderful. So what's been going on that's so ‘really great'?”

“You know. I'm just getting out there, you know. Meeting people, finding out who I am without Claire. Spreading my wings. It's exhilarating.”

“Exhilarating. Wow. That's great. Exhilarating. Well, you can't beat exhilarating, can you?”

“No. You can't beat exhilarating!” Georgia thought about her life since getting a divorce from Dale. Well, she did sleep with a Brazilian prostitute. She guessed that could be considered exhilarating.

Sam took a big gulp of beer and wiped his lips with his sleeve. Georgia looked at him, not knowing if she wanted to know more, but unable to stop herself.

“So. What makes things so exhilarating?”

“Well, it's really fascinating, actually. I've been meeting all these women, you know?”

Georgia raised her eyebrows. Sam explained himself.

“Well, both of us, we're going out, we're meeting people, you know? We're getting back in the game, seeing where we fit in the whole scheme of things, right?”

Georgia nodded politely. “Yes. Exactly.”

“So I'll admit. I've been doing some online dating this week. Like every night of the week. I just decided to just jump in headfirst. Whoosh!” Sam made a big diving motion and then a big splash with his hands.

“Whoosh!” Georgia mimicked, agreeably.

“And it's amazing what I learned. I mean, my wife didn't sleep with me for years. So I guess I assumed it was because I was actually physically repellent. But now I've been dating, and women want to see me again. They don't mind that I have two kids or only make sixty thousand bucks a year. They want to see me again!”

Georgia gave him the response he wanted. “That's great, Sam! Good for you!”

Sam leaned in and grabbed Georgia's arm. “The truth is, all my life, I never got the girls. I was the nice guy who all the girls said they just ‘liked as a friend.' And then they would go out with the assholes. Well, guess what? Those girls are now unmarried women in their thirties and forties and me, the nice guy with a decent job? I might as well be Jesus Christ himself.”

Georgia felt her stomach turn. A complete flip-flop as the words “Jesus Christ himself” came out of Sam's mouth. She leaned against the bar, trying to remain calm. She knew that this was probably the truth, but so far no one had spelled it out so unrepentantly. In New York, in terms of dating, nice guys over forty do in fact finish first. They are as miraculous as loaves and fishes falling out of the sky. Georgia felt herself flushing, with tears forming at the rims of her eyes. “You know, I'm not feeling very well.”

Sam immediately became concerned. “What? Really? I'm so sorry. Can I get you anything? Water?”

The thing was, Sam really was a nice guy—which is exactly why he was such a deadly dating agent in New York.

“No, that's okay. I think I'm just going to get a cab and go home, if you don't mind. I'm so sorry.” But in fact, Georgia wasn't that sorry. Sam had so many dates lined up he probably would be relieved to have a night off. She now understood the whole standing-up-at-the-bar thing. He had been dating so much his ass hurt. Or maybe he knew he was going to have to dash to his next date that evening and didn't want a stool to slow him down. Georgia got up. Sam helped her put on her jacket, walked her outside, and waved down a cab.

“Will you be okay?”

Georgia looked at him, a dull pain filling up her entire body. “Don't you worry. I'm fine. I think I ate something bad at lunch. It's been bothering me all day.”

Sam opened the cab door and Georgia climbed in. “Okay, I'll call you in twenty minutes to make sure you got home safe. Is that all right?”

“Yes, of course. Thanks,” Georgia mumbled. She turned her head so he wouldn't see that she was now crying, her sadness washing over her. Georgia had just learned another important lesson about being single. You might be out there dating to meet the love of your life, but the other person might be just wanting to eat a nice steak on a Saturday night—or just trying to “dive in.” She felt humiliated. How could she have thought it was going to be so simple? A nice guy meeting her, liking her, and wanting to be with her. This was New York, and she felt the statistics were now spitting in her face.

Being true to his word, Sam did call exactly twenty minutes later to see how she was. He really was nice. What an asshole.

Two hours into her first shift as an animal shelter volunteer, Ruby watched as they took three dogs to their deaths. They didn't necessarily say that was what was happening, but she could tell. A man in a white coat would take the dog out of the cage and leave the room with it. The dog would never come back. Ruby was horrified. She knew that was what they did here, that was their policy, but she had no idea that it happened so often. It felt so random, so cruel. As the third dog was being taken out of its cage, Ruby stopped the young man.

“Excuse me, sir?”

The young man looked up at Ruby, with the door opened.

“Could you please tell me—how do you choose?”

The young man closed the cage door, almost as if he didn't want the dog to hear.

“You mean, who we…take?”

Ruby nodded.

This was obviously an uncomfortable subject. He cleared his voice. “We decide by their adoptability, so we take into account their age, their health—and their temperament.”

Ruby shook her head. “Temperament?”

The young man nodded.

“So, the crankier the dog, the more chance that he'll get put down?”

The man nodded. He clearly wasn't happy about it, either. He smiled at Ruby politely, and then opened the cage door again. He took out Tucker, a German shepherd mix. He didn't make a peep, but he did look skinny; sickly. Ruby was now fighting back tears.

“May I hold Tucker, please? Just for a moment?”

The young man looked at Ruby. He studied her face and ascertained that he didn't have a nutcase on his hands. He led Tucker out of the cage and walked him over to Ruby. Ruby kneeled down and gave Tucker a big hug. She petted him and whispered in his ear how much she loved him. She didn't cry, she didn't make a scene. She just eventually stood up and let him go.

As she did, the strangest thought came across her mind, a thought she wasn't necessarily proud to have: She was glad that she decided to volunteer at this shelter. And not because she felt she could do good here; not because she felt the animals needed her. No.
If I can do this and not lose my shit,
she thought to herself,
I'll be able to do anything—and that includes dating again.

Eventually, this became the routine. Ruby became the Sister Mary Prejean of the animal shelter. She would make sure that the last face they saw before they met their maker was a face of love. So whenever Ruby worked, which was once a week, on Thursday evenings, if there was a dog that was about to be put down, that young man, Bennett, would walk the dog over to Ruby. She would then administer his or her last rites, which was a big, big hug and lots of long, whispered affection. Then they were walked into the room, where they were given their injections and put to sleep.

Meanwhile, Serena was meeting her man everywhere: in broom closets, pantry rooms, and even in the ladies' room of Integral Foods on Thirteenth Street.

The one thing they never risked doing was meeting in one of their rooms. That's the first place one looks for you if they need you, and there was no good way she could explain sneaking out of Swami Swaroop's closed bedroom. But every other enclosed space was fair game. If the purpose of becoming a swami was to help her feel a powerful, all-encompassing love that made her tap into God's transcendent spirit, then those crazy sannyasin vows completely did the trick.

While she sat meditating on this particular morning, after already having a brief tête-à-tête with Swami Swaroop in the basement bathroom, her thoughts replayed the whole scenario: her ass on the sink, he in front of her, then both of them on the closed toilet seat, then them against the wall. These were definitely “extraneous thoughts” that the meditation leader would be wanting her to clear from her mind. But as hard as she tried, Serena couldn't. Because she was in love. And because this was her first time, she was struck by how perfectly apt those words were:
in love.
Serena loved this man so much that she felt as if she were floating in a bubble. A bubble of love. That she was existing, every moment of every hour,
in
love. And it was, ironically, the most spiritual experience she'd ever had. No yoga class, no meditation course, no ten-day juice fast had ever gotten her as close to the exultation she felt as this brand-spanking-new sensation of being in love.

During this meditation, she let herself say all the things she wanted to say to herself. “
This is what everyone has been talking about. All the love songs and the poems and the films. This is what life is all about. Being in love. Loving someone. Having someone love you
.” And as she let her breath go in and out, slowly, she went even a step further. “
I had no understanding of what it meant to be alive. Without love in your life, it is meaningless.
” There. She said it. And she meant it. How could she ever,
ever,
go back to living in the world without this feeling? This is everything, this is life, this is truth, this is God. Luckily, she didn't have to live without it. Because Swami Swaroop wasn't going anywhere. Oddly, she still called him Swami Swaroop. At their most intimate moments, she might say, “Oh, Swamiji,” but that's as civilian as it ever got. And Mr. Oh Swamiji seemed to be existing in the same bubble of love, always wanting to be with her, touch her, talk to her. Sneaking a glance, a smile, a touch. He even gave her a gift, a secret sign that she was his: a tiny black string. He tied it around her ankle and told her that every time he saw it, he would know that they were bound together. To Serena, this proved that he was in love as well, and she was content to let things float on as they were.

The only thing that slightly diminished the joy of this cosmic commingling of souls was the fact that she had not yet expressed the enormity of her emotions to anyone. With my traveling, we kept trading phone calls, and she hadn't spoken to Ruby, Georgia, or Alice in a while. She certainly hadn't said any of this to Swami Swaroop. And it was starting to get to her. This joy was lodged inside her, warming her, uplifting her, but it also needed to be let out. It needed to be put into the world, as a truth, as a reality, so she could soar even higher than she already was. So that the love had a place to go, out of her heart, and into the world.

It was her turn to teach the first yoga class of the day. It was early, at seven thirty, and made up of just six very dedicated women and one man. She was guiding them through their Pranayama, their breathing exercises, telling them to inhale through the right nostril, pinch the other one closed with their left thumb, and reverse the process. As they moved through this chakra-stimulating process, Serena made a decision. She was going to tell Swami Swaroopananda how she felt. Serena felt it was disrespectful to the universe, to God, not to acknowledge the blessing that had been bestowed upon her.

This particular yoga center was very old-school. This was not cardio yoga or yoga done in a room the temperature of Hell. This was good old-fashioned yoga, and now they were doing their leg lifts. “Left leg up, and down. Right leg up, and down.” As she spoke, her mind wandered. She planned how she was going to talk to him. She decided she would break the cardinal rule and go into Swami Swaroop's bedroom after class. She would gently and sweetly just tell him what they both already knew and felt. She would describe the depth of her emotions, not to ask for any decisions or commitments, but just wanting a release from the secret. It should be a celebration, this feeling, and she needed to be able to celebrate it, even if only between the two of them. Just then, as she looked out onto her class and all the legs that were being raised in the air, she saw something that made her gasp. It sounded something like this: “Now both legs, up, and down…up, and…kahhh!”

Of the twelve raised female legs in the yoga class, four of them were sporting little black strings around the ankle.

Serena immediately tried to control her breathing—she was a swami and yoga teacher after all. She recovered enough to say, “Excuse me. Now both legs up, and down, up and down.”

She searched her mind for an explanation. Maybe it was some kind of new trend that Britney Spears or some other celebrity created to honor some disease. Wait! Don't the people who are into Kabbalah wear little strings? These women were all Kabbalists. That's the answer. She got through the class, peacefully and with equanimity. She comforted herself with the knowledge that these women all changed in the same dressing room before and after class—surely they would have noticed the strings. Swami Swaroop knew she taught these women yoga, he knew she was bound to see their ankles during a leg raise or shoulder stand. What kind of man would give all the women he slept with a black string? No. There was some other explanation and she was in love and she was still going to tell him how she felt.