All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [18]
I walk across the campus lawn to dinner with Barbara, a psychologist, who has been in love and married twice since we were in school, one union ending in tragedy. She has always been soulful and perceptive. I make some crack about the singles table at dinner, and though we haven’t seen each other in a decade, she sees right through me. “I know you’re sad about being single,” she says. Happily, she doesn’t try to diagnose the problem, or give me any pat advice about how I ought to learn to be more open to a relationship, make a list of all the qualities I want in a man and visualize him arriving at my doorstep, or put pink candles on my bedroom windowsill to attract him with feng shui. “Enjoy being single while it lasts,” she says, letting me in on the secret that being married and having children isn’t all I romanticize it to be. There are plenty of days when she’d like to be single just for a few hours, not to mention have a sexy fling with a man on an Italian island. Not that she would trade it all, not for the world.
“We can’t have it all,” I say, trying out some of that mature perspective.
“Maybe we can’t have it all at once,” she says. “But there are phases in life; maybe we can have it all, just one thing after another, serially.”
“You think?”
“It’s like the Manhattan trifecta,” she says. I raise my eyebrows; she’s from New York, and I have no idea what she’s talking about. “In Manhattan, it’s impossible to get the great relationship, the great job, and the great apartment all at once,” she says.
I smile. “I do have a great job and a great apartment.”
“Then if the right man comes along, you’d better be careful about your lease.”
I laugh and give her a hug. Maybe the right guy will come along, although I realize that two decades after college, you have to expect that everyone you meet will have difficult traits, awkward histories, and annoying habits (I know I do). In any case, looking around at my classmates seated so smartly at the white linen tables set up on the lawn, I still have twinges of regret that I didn’t eventually marry one of these amazing college men, these funny, high-SAT-scoring guys who were always asking thoughtful questions and called themselves feminists not just so they could get laid but because they honestly respected women.
But you can’t second-guess history. During dinner, an accomplished and engaging guy comes up to me while I’m in line for a drink and confesses, tipsy, that he once had a huge crush on me. I’m flattered and floored. “That,” I finally muster, “is a painful thing to hear from such an attractive, married man.” I find myself fantasizing about the men at the reunion—How did I overlook this wonderful guy? Why can’t we run off together now and try again?—but most are married; and not only are there rules about married men, there are delusions, on both sides, about still-single women they may have gazed at in government class or smooched and never slept with decades ago.
After dinner, I walk back to my dorm room, which is in the same complex of buildings where I lived as a sophomore, the year I had the most trouble with men, food, sex, pot, paranoia, personal style, and everything but my classes, whose challenges I could at least work through if I tried hard enough.
I brush my hair and freshen up for the party that starts later on, then stop at my reflection in the mirror. Here I am, with my prospects for finding a mate heading steadily downhill on the graph of time, and I suddenly look older and fatter, with wiggly arms and creases on