Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,98

tech support whenever her computer crashed or she couldn’t get a WiFi signal.

They weren’t dating, but they spent much of their time together. And while Rita at first found Myron merely “decent-looking” (she had trouble finding men over fifty attractive), one day, as he was showing Rita photos of his grandchildren, something in her stirred. At first she thought it was envy of his close relationship with his family, but she couldn’t deny that she was also feeling something else. It surfaced more and more, though she tried not to think about it. After all, she knew from their first mortifying encounter by the mailboxes that her relationship with Myron was a platonic one.

But still. After six months of this, they certainly acted like they were dating. So much so that she considered bringing this up with Myron. She was going to have to, she told herself, because she couldn’t sit a foot away from him on the sofa, wineglass in hand, movie flickering in the darkness, and act cool as a cucumber when he accidentally brushed her knee while placing his glass on the coffee table. (Was it accidental? she asked herself.) Besides, she thought, it was she who’d said she wasn’t dating when Myron first approached her. Maybe he’d said he wasn’t asking her out only to save face?

She hated the fact that she was almost seventy and still analyzing interactions with men with the same obsessiveness she had in college. She hated feeling like a girl with a crush, foolish and helpless and confused. She hated trying on outfits one after the other, discarding this one, replacing it with that one, her bed littered with evidence of her insecurity and overinvestment. She wanted to will away her feelings, to just enjoy the friendship, but she was worried that she might not be able to handle the tension building up inside her—that she might just plant a wet one on Myron’s face if this went on much longer. She’d have to get up the nerve to say something.

Soon. Very soon.

But then Myron met somebody. On Tinder, of all places! (“Revolting!”) The woman was, to Rita’s disgust, quite a bit younger—in her fifties! Mandy or Brandy or Sandy or Candy or some vapid name like that, some name ending in a y sound that, Rita guessed, the bimbo would spell with an ie. Mandie. Brandie. Sandie. Rita could never remember. All she knew was that Myron had disappeared and left a crater in Rita’s life.

That’s when Rita made the decision to see a therapist and end it all if nothing improved by her seventieth birthday.

Rita looks up at me as if her story is over. I find it interesting that though Myron was the real impetus for her coming to therapy, she has never mentioned him before. I wonder why she’s telling me now and what today’s emergency is about.

Rita lets out a long sigh. “Wait,” she says glumly. “There’s more.”

She goes on to explain that while Myron was off dating what’s-her-name, Rita still saw him at the Y, where he swam while she took aerobics—but they didn’t drive over together anymore, because now he slept at Mandie’s/Brandie’s/Sandie’s. They still saw each other at the mailboxes in the afternoon, where Myron would try to make small talk and Rita would give him the cold shoulder. It was Myron who had asked Rita to join the board at their apartment complex, and it was Myron whose invitation she’d brusquely declined. Once, as she was leaving the building for therapy and found herself in the elevator with Myron, he complimented her on her appearance (she always “put herself together” for our therapy sessions, her one outing each week).

“You look lovely today,” he’d said. To which Rita replied, curtly, “Thank you,” then stared straight ahead the rest of the ride down. In the evening, she never left her unit, not even to take out the foul-smelling trash on fish night, for fear that she might run into Mandie/Brandie/Sandie with Myron, as she had done a few times, the two of them arm in arm, laughing or, worse, kissing (“Revolting!”).

Love is pain, Rita had said after she told me about her failed marriages and again after her encounter with the eighty-year-old. Why bother?

But that was also before Myron had ended things with Mandie/Brandie/Sandie; before he had cornered Rita in the parking lot at the Y after she’d spent weeks letting his calls go to voicemail and not answering his texts. (Can we talk?