“But you’re a guy. There are about fourteen eligible men in this city, and it’s totally normal for any of them with their girlfriend light on to get snatched up like that.” She actually snapped her fingers, and I admired the theatrics. “For a woman, it’s a mind-set. Do or die. That’s why some women always have a boyfriend when others haven’t had one in, like, six years. You just think to yourself, ‘Okay, you’ll do’ and keep lining ’em up.”
She saw my eyes drop and knew she’d gone too far.
“Greg, you’re a catch. The point I’m trying to make here is that you could go on Nerve and have five hot girls clamoring to date you in all of thirty seconds.”
“It’s just—it’s weird that I was so wrong about her. Apparently I’m really fucking terrible at reading people.”
She put down her glass and asked the bartender for more water. I could see her assembling her thoughts. “There’s just no such thing as absolute reality. There’s no such thing as ever reading anything quote-unquote right.” She pressed a napkin on the small puddle around her glass. “You and I could be standing together and both see, I don’t know, a guy bump into an old lady on the subway, but our experience of it would be totally different. And that’s just a douchebag and an old lady, action, reaction. Dating’s probably the most subjective experience there is. You’re experiencing another person. A fucked-up, complicated, enigmatic human being.”
We sipped our drinks.
“So you’re saying…what? That I’m wrong and she’s not kind of a bitch?” I let out a half-laugh.
“I just mean that it’s not weird to look back on someone or something and realize that your read on it at the time was completely different from how you’d interpret it now.” Lexy nodded to herself. “I met a guy at this party, that one Mandy had while you were out of town? He’d just published a memoir, and I asked him how his friends felt about him exposing all their shit. He told me, ‘You’d be amazed at how bad people are at recognizing themselves in print.’ ”
“So basically I’m not delusional, we just had different versions of each other in our heads.”
“I’m saying we’re all delusional. And we’re all just trying to find someone whose delusions line up with our own.”
I couldn’t decide if that was encouraging or depressing.
“And people do?”
“People do what?”
“Find someone whose delusions line up with their own?”
“Apparently people do, Greg. Apparently they do.”
* * *
For a few months, I bumped into Edie here and there, the way denizens of this city always do. At first we made polite conversation, smiles forced, auras tense. Then one day that summer, we saw each other in a grocery store. I was heading up the escalator and one of us would have had to make an effort and I was tired and in a bad mood and so we didn’t. I didn’t have histrionically bad feelings toward her, just tiredness, just a sense that we were no longer worth each other’s time. A few weeks later, while I was at a conference in DC, someone texted me something confusing, so I Googled her and up popped an obituary. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t mention a cause of death and there wasn’t really anyone I could ask; I was out of town during the funeral, too, so I sent her parents a bereavement card and that was that. It’s horrible, of course, sad that she died so young, but it also felt strange and thick and faraway. Someone I loved doesn’t exist anymore. You pretend after a breakup that that person disappears, but in this case she did.
I know that’s what should haunt me the most, but what actually snags my mind from time to time, even all these years later, is how we met, the improbable connection, the perfect How We Met. I don’t understand why the universe wasted the whole scheme on that ephemeral redheaded fairy and a relationship that wasn’t going to work. Maybe we weren’t supposed to speak to each other at all and Craigslist messed with the natural order of things, I think to myself, staring at a wall of gleaming white Greek yogurts. I pull out five because my wife likes to take them to work. Maybe we were a miss from the start.
Chapter 5
LINDSAY
The Flip cam video ended with a freeze-frame of blurriness.