I nursed a cup of tea in my hands while looking out the window, down at the street. It was late in the morning and Central Park, was full. There were joggers, people walking with babies in strollers, families, and picnickers. The weather, for now, allowed it. My attention was on a couple on the pavement about to enter the park. I called them a couple, but I really didn’t want them to be.
From my distance, looking out the window of Brenna's townhouse, I was close enough to notice that the man was significantly older than the woman. She was dressed up like one of those trendy young women who worked at a magazine. A Conde Nast or Hearst princess whose father was financing her life while she worked for peanuts at the magazine, being berated by her fashionable yet cruel superiors.
He was dressed well too, but… well… the best accessory was always a handsome face. He wasn't bad looking, maybe if I got closer I would find that he was perfectly decent-looking, but he was noticeably older than her and those kinds of relationships just made me a bit ill. The cynic in me wanted them to be father and daughter, but then, he put an arm around her and kissed her, before they walked into the park.
Well, mystery solved. They were together. I took a sip of my tea. Congratulations to them. I had no real reason to oppose their union. I tried to imagine their love story, but to me it seemed too gross. Either that or I was too jaded.
That was the reason I was in New York instead of London. My hometown had chewed me up and spat me out, so I had walked away with what was left of my dignity. I booked a ticket with no return and here I was. Of all the times that I had been to New York, I never really imagined this place as home. I always imagined New York and London being too different for me to get used to but here I was, a few months deep and London was not calling.
When I said that London had chewed me up and spat me out, what I meant was whatever toad of a man that I had dated last had chewed me up and spat me out and I was still reeling from the fallout. The official story however was that I was here for the abundant work opportunities in my field. Yes, my field. Parties, yachts, galas, you know, my field. Andrew was the man that I had dated and he had one day, completely out of the blue, sprung it on me that he was no longer invested in the relationship and had found someone new. Moving all the way across the Atlantic was a perfectly natural reaction to that, hardly an overreaction.
My grace had lasted exactly thirty hours after his confession. I scoured the internet to find out who that someone new was and immediately regretted my decision. It wasn’t just one voluptuous blonde with impossibly long legs; it was two. The man had left me for a pair of incestuous twins. What could I have done besides move to America surely? Where did I even start to compete? How was I supposed to make sense of that? The only way I could have one-upped him was if I started a harem of men that I kept naked and oiled in the courtyard out my house and had frequent public orgies with them. Checkmate. He won that round.
My relationship history read something like the biblical book of Revelation. My lineup of exes was a motley crew of lying, cheating misfits. There was Rodney, I couldn’t remember which number he was in the lineup, but he had ended up being gay. To this day, that bothered me a little. He was obviously gay from the beginning since homosexuality didn’t suddenly appear in individuals like bouts of the flu. Why had he pursued me if he liked men all along?
I felt sorry for whatever reason made him feel like he had to lie about his orientation, but then, it was my time that he wasted. If he told me at the beginning, I might have been amenable to being his beard for public events if he really wanted me to. After he told me, I did my research to make sure that wasn't just a convenient excuse to get away from me, and turns out, it wasn't. Last I checked, he was screwing a man who worked in gay porn. The two of us had been together for a year. An entire year. I never brought him up when people asked me about my exes.
That relationship hadn’t even been the worst. Another one in the lineup, Michael, joined a monastery right after we started having relationship problems. A fucking monastery. His relationship with me was bad enough for him to swear off of women completely for the rest of his
life. He didn't cheat and he wasn't secretly attracted to men the whole time, but it was a little traumatic to think that I could have been the cause of him relinquishing civilian life to become a man of the cloth. At least that was a somewhat noble pursuit. If a man was going to leave me for some reason, any reason, at least it was to dedicate his life to Christ.
There was a Spanish guy after that. The Spanish part was actually a lie, he called himself Carlos but he was actually named Charles and was as English as I was. He ended up lying to me about being chronically ill with lupus and probably much more given that he couldn’t even give me his real name. When we were together, he would keep making these excuses to fly back to Barcelona.
I thought he was cheating on me so of course, I confronted him only for him to tell me that he was receiving treatment for his lupus. Of course, I felt like a horrible monster and one day, while he was in Spain, I decided to fly out and comfort him. A little surprise to show how sorry I was and how much I loved him. Long story short, treatment wasn’t the only thing he was going to Barcelona to receive. When I showed up at his apartment, I found him in bed with another woman’s lips wrapped around his cock. So, he was cheating but the jury was still out on whether he actually had lupus.
Was he worse or better than the magician though? What was I thinking? Magicians were endlessly cringey, on top of that the relationship had crashed and burned anyway, so the comparison was moot. That one had pulled a magic trick on me, disappearing. He wiped himself off the face of the Earth completely; changed his email, his social media, everything. I had no idea where he was to this day. It was really a blow to the self-esteem when people who were objectively worse looking than you ghosted you.
And that was why I was here, unofficially. Officially, I was trying to get my business off the ground as a personal stylist. Oh yes, no men for me in New York. There were tons of men here, everywhere, very cute American men with accents who drank cold beer right out of the bottle, but I wasn't interested. I wasn't looking. For once in my life, I was putting myself first. You would have thought that since I never really had anything shaped like a career in my life that that's what I was doing all along, but not really. Floating from party to party, from fashion show to yacht was really for the benefit of other people. I only attended those events to be seen. Here in New York, besides my friends, nobody really knew me. I was gaining a public persona, however, but it was for professional rather than personal reasons.
I had followed my longtime friend Eddy here when she and her husband Niall decided to take some time off of living in their home in the English countryside, swapping it for New York City where Niall used to live. I figured, why not? Nothing was really keeping me there. As far as friends went, Eddy was my closest one. A real friend; not just someone I associated with because we attended all the same parties or because our parents were friends. Eddy and Niall lived right next door and their home connected to this one like two islands with a little causeway between them so they could split childcare. Brenna’s husband, Charlie, and Niall were cousins, so the living arrangement worked.
When they got to the city a few months ago, they had all attended a function for charity and asked me for help getting them into some good clothes. I dressed them, and by the end of the night, people were clamoring for my contact information, asking whether I offered personal styling services. I didn't then, but I accepted one offer and boom, my business was born. It hadn't been long, but I had had some really great features in magazines and blogs and had been building up a client list of the city's rich and famous.
Look at that, little old me with a real job. I had played around on the editorial staff of a fashion magazine back home, but I hadn't had any passion for the job, and let's be honest never really had expectations from the managerial staff as far as actually putting in any work. I had gotten it through family contacts which made it feel like it didn’t really count. Since I lived and breathed couture, it felt like this job was right up my alley. The money didn't mean much to me at all, I had never really had much need for it, but the satisfaction that came with the work was intoxicating.
At twenty-seven, I didn't have kids, I didn't have a boyfriend, I had left my old life behind, but I finally had a career. Perhaps it wasn't much by other people's standards, but it was the world to me. It was me finally applying myself in a way that mattered and receiving appreciation for it. It was great to have an outlet for myself, energetically as well as creatively. Twenty-seven years of bad relationships had done a number on my self-esteem, but now that was building back up. I was done looking for men, only clients from now on. It was my job to make them fabulous and it was one I did well.
I heard a baby crying. Brenna, harried and stressed, shuffled into the room holding her baby, Hannah. Riley, Eddy’s five-year-old son bounced in after her.
“Why is Hannah crying, Aunty Eddy?” he asked her.
“I don’t know, Riley, why don’t you ask her?” she said, sighing. Putting the baby down on the sofa, she checked her diaper to make sure it wasn’t wet. I looked on with mild amusement. Riley was five and Hannah was still an infant; Eddy and Brenna, their mothers were right around the same age as I was. It was sobering to have both my closest friends experiencing something as lifechanging as motherhood together while I wasn’t. Whenever I felt left out, I just remembered moments like this, I just remembered Brenna telling me when she popped her episiotomy stitches and got an infection after delivering Hannah and I snapped right out of it.
Brenna called for Prue, the kids’ nanny. Riley ran around the room and came back to the sofa with something in his hand, a key. He jingled it above Hannah’s face, which distracted her enough from whatever was bothering her to stop her crying.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” Brenna sighed, stroking Riley’s red mass of hair, inherited from his mother Eddy. Prue walked into the room as the commotion calmed.
“Was that Hannah making all that racket?” she asked. “Somebody needs a nap I think.” Brenna handed the child over like she had just returned home from war. Maybe one day I would dip my toe in that pond but not for a long time. One adventure at a time, please. I was still coming to grips with being a career woman. Prue left with the children and I walked over to the sofa where Brenna had collapsed.
“You alright there, mama?”
“If I ever decide to have another one, please shoot me,” she said.
I laughed and sat, putting my cup on the coffee table. “Likewise.”
“Wait, you don’t want kids?” she asked.
“With a front-row seat to this circus, how could I?” I asked.