Neither of them knew how to dance—only jump. The other people in the crammed Lower Haight basement gave them space, more as a precautionary measure than any kind of courtesy. But Edie and Peter were a decade older than everyone else on the floor and hardly noticed. They were like two kids bouncing on a bed, so wild was their joy, so tiresome was their energy.
The song changed.
Edie bent her knees, attempting to “get low,” moving closer to the floor with each beat. Peter followed her with ease. They were as far down as their respective thirty-five-year-old knees could take them when their eyes met, thighs on the verge of collapse.
Edie fell first.
“Shit,” she shouted between breaths of laughter, reaching for his hand to pull herself up from the sticky wooden floor. Peter lifted her toward him. She was tall but he was taller, and she let her head rest against his chest, just below his neck. She could tell by the moisture in the air and the sweat on her brow that her thin, fraying curls had expanded into a cloud of frizz above her head, but she was too drunk to attempt a remedy.
To Edie’s delight, Peter’s girlfriend, Nicole, had recently stopped coming to parties where she knew there would be dancing. It wasn’t that Nicole hated dancing; it was just that she hated dancing with Peter. Not because he was a terrible dancer, but because he was enthusiastically bad.
But Edie and Peter had been jumping together since college. Back then they’d stomp on Peter’s torn sofa after a long day of engineering labs, screaming along to Pearl Jam or Red Hot Chili Peppers or whatever angsty male pop CD was in rotation until they crashed, then drifting into debate about capitalism or sexism or whether cups should really be round when squares stacked so efficiently, until their eyes closed.
Fifteen years later, they still reverted to this youthful version of themselves when they were together, like siblings settling into their roles, drawing out in each other something the rest of the world could not. Sure, Nicole knew the details of Peter’s current life better than Edie—which underwear he preferred, the sounds he made when he slept, whether his smooth, straight hair still curled in the morning—but Edie knew the seed of his very being, a seed inevitably buried by the gnawing pull of adulthood. Nicole would never know this part of him because he was no longer capable of showing it. And though Edie couldn’t quite prove it, she knew that Peter liked this earlier, foundational version of himself best, and would always love Edie for being the only one who could see it.
Edie wanted to live and die in the old version of herself. At thirty-five, Peter could have anything he wanted because in the past ten years Peter had become very, very rich. But whereas Peter had grown more confident with time, Edie had grown more insecure. As a teenager, she’d flip through the J.Crew catalog at night, picturing herself as a grown woman in the sleek, angular suits, running a company and bossing men around, returning to a tastefully designed home, which she surely owned, where her husband and child were waiting with love and dinner. But adulthood was no longer a fantasy to shape, it was a reality to deal with. Her uniform was old Reebok sneakers and whatever hoodie was clean, she could barely tolerate the men around her enough to wake up each morning, let alone run her own company, and she had
nothing but streaming services in her one-room home, if you could call a rented studio apartment a home, to return to. There was no single thing to blame, just a continuous string of dreams that hadn’t worked out. Being with Peter made her feel like the ambitious know-it-all she was in college because he expected nothing less. She was allowed to be her old self with him. He reminded her who she was.
She placed her hands on his shoulders, like softballs in her palms. It still surprised her, how round and firm they’d become, how different he was from the skinny nerd she used to know. She had stopped dreaming that something might happen between them when Nicole had moved in. Instead, she took solace in the fact that he would never really be wholly happy with her, that part of him would always need Edie.
“How’s your cult going?” she shouted into his ear, Rihanna blaring in the background.
“Some cults are good, E.” He loved the chance to defend himself, and she loved making him try. “Just because you had one bad CrossFit experience.”
“After ten minutes of exercise, you can’t move for a week. How is that good?”
“If you tried it more than once, maybe you’d know.” His hands were tight on her hips.
“Sorry I don’t want to align myself with a bunch of libertarians who pride themselves on competition and aggression. But I’m glad it works for you!”
“And yet you work in tech?”
She had to laugh (or cry).
He looked down at her with his big olive eyes, shining with pleasure at their usual push and pull.
When the song ended, Peter leaned closer, his mouth to her ear. “I have to tell you something.” She braced herself. They had reached the age when this phrase was a predictable prelude: marriage or children, one then the other. Surely, he hadn’t proposed to Nicole without consulting with Edie, but she’d assumed the topic was on the horizon.
“Nicole and I broke up.”
The music faded and she jumped back to look at him, desperate for more than these small, impossible words, life-changing words, which he was somehow dropping like an afterthought on the dance floor. He had to be fucking with her. He and Nicole had considered “taking a break” in the past, but a full-on breakup, and without discussing it with Edie first? Her heart raced beneath her damp V-neck T-shirt. “What the fuck, Peter?”
“It’s too loud in here,” he shouted, Drake now unbearably pounding. She followed him through the sweaty basement crowd, up the stairs, and down the hall until they found an empty corner.
Although Edie considered Peter a gem, a sparkling pearl in the middle of the foul, murky ocean otherwise known as Dating at Thirty-Five in San Francisco, he was still a man. And what had happened, she realized, as he began to describe the previous evening, was that he had stopped “feeling” his girlfriend of seven years.
“I feel terrible about it.” He shook his head, staring down at his gray
New Balances. “I really thought we could make it work.”
The thing about Peter was that he really did want to make it work. He wanted to be an average guy who could fall in love with an average woman and have a kid and buy a house, and be a good dad with a good dog who was very good at playing fetch. But Peter had become a multimillionaire at twenty-nine when his adtech company, PrimalSearch, went public, a year after he’d gotten together with Nicole. Back then, the tech scene was still emergent and the city was full of nerdy, insecure men. Which is to say, it was a woman’s market. When Nicole expressed interest, Peter thought he’d won the lottery. Edie hated the idea of “love at first sight,” a phenomenon reserved for the beautiful, but Peter refused to admit it was anything but.
Time passed and his million in stocks multiplied by five, then ten, then twenty, until the idea of working was nothing more than a cute distraction. He started sleeping in and spending most afternoons at CrossFit, going into the office just enough to feel like he had a place to be. He bought a multimillion-dollar Victorian on Dolores Park and hired a personal stylist. With each year that passed, his skinny boyish body became more muscular, and his graying hair hotter, merely by the fact that it stayed on his head.
Meanwhile, San Francisco was becoming an actual destination for everyday people, not just a haven for nerds—Edie included herself in this category—which meant that now, in 2017, attractive women were no longer a rare find. So, by the time Peter hit his midthirties he had power, power he had never had a chance to leverage. And he was curious.
Or at least that’s how she interpreted his underwhelming, not-feeling-it line, which he couldn’t stop repeating as if the simple repetition might give it shape, like kneading dough.
They had never been a good fit anyway, she reminded herself. Nicole looked like she’d been plucked from a Madewell campaign, with thick chestnut hair and well-behaved bangs. She was petite and somehow always seemed to be smiling. She was charming enough to float breezily along in conversation without adding much of herself, like a perfectly suitable side dish.
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt her.” It was second nature to affirm him. To Edie, Peter was still the lanky boy in college who was there for her when her life had depended on it.
“Exactly.” He nodded. “That’s the last thing I wanted.” He kept his head down, the way he must have looked as a boy, Edie thought, getting gently scolded by the nanny. “But she said if I didn’t propose, we were over.”
Well, then. That
explained the suddenness of the news. Edie couldn’t help but feel proud of Nicole for forcing him to confront what must have felt inevitable.
“I should have ended it years ago. She’s almost forty. She wants to have kids.”
Edie had forgotten Nicole was four years older than them. She panicked at the thought that a woman could put seven years into a man and have it end in an instant. Meanwhile, here she was, unable to even get started.
“Don’t blame yourself,” she got out, despite her own mounting discomfort. “She could have left at any time.” He had loved Nicole. Edie was shocked when he’d agreed to go to couples therapy years ago, and read books with names like Attached and How Can I Get Through to You? “You were doing your best. She wasn’t, like, held hostage.”
“That’s right.” More nodding. “Thanks, E.” He looked up, concern on his face. “I totally forgot to ask—how was your doctor’s appointment?”
She assumed he’d forgotten about her fertility check-in, especially given his news, and was touched by his interest. “It was fine. We don’t have to talk about it now.”
“Please, I want to take my mind off the breakup. And I know you’ve been worried about the appointment.” He angled his body toward her, blocking her from the newly formed crowd.
The doctor had been kind when he broke the news, or at least not overly sentimental. Like any other diagnosis, it was simply fact. Her follicle count was below average for her age, which was already above average for pregnancy. If she decided to have a child in the future, hers would be a geriatric pregnancy, he’d added (rather cruelly, Edie couldn’t help but think).
“Do you want children?” the doctor had asked. When she opened her mouth to explain that she wasn’t sure, she was shocked to realize that she was on the verge of tears. She managed to get out a curt “Don’t know,” before retreating back to silence. To no longer have the option was to confront her own mortality, like when a small child sees their own blood for the first time. It was terrifying. “I want to have the option,” she added. After all, she had scheduled this checkup.
“I’m going to freeze my eggs,” she declared to Peter, as if this were an empowering choice, not a dire recommendation from a concerned gynecologist.
“That’s great!” He looked so happy for her. “Now you can take your time.”
“Right.” It was all so depressing.
“Hey.” He took her arm in his hand. “I’m really proud of you. If I can help at all—bring you groceries, help with the shots—tell me.”
His eyes lingered on hers and she considered saying it right there. Her love for him had grown, from a platonic gratitude for the kind
boy in her dorms, to a deep admiration and awe at the way he seemed to make life work for him, to now—the first time in their lives that they were both single—an overwhelming need to finally formalize their closeness. There was no one in the world who knew her better than he did, and she knew the same was true for him. They understood one another. They had fun together. He was finally free. They could finally try.
He touched his nose with his index finger, before her words could form. “Want any?”
She shook her head. Peter never went to a party without drugs but she never let herself take them, sure that if she did, she wouldn’t be able to stop. He never pushed. “How about you get us drinks while I run to the bathroom? I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”
Her phone buzzed as she refilled their glasses with whatever was left on the foldout table—Smirnoff and tonic. The alert barely hit her consciousness. She mindlessly swiped it open.
“New match?” Peter said, back from the bathroom, his coke eyes peeking over her shoulder at her Tinder prospect. He grabbed her phone before she had a chance to see the face on her screen, but his laughter told her everything she needed to know.
“You can do better than that,” he said, and began to swipe for her, as always. His standards for her were higher than her own, and he proceeded to reject each new face.
She took a long sip of her drink and considered this new world, a world in which Peter Masterson was now single. A world where Peter was now single and telling her that she, a thirty-five-year-old woman in San Francisco, should still be picky.
“Let’s go back to the dance floor. I can’t think about any of this right now.” He looked up and held out her phone. “None of these guys are good enough for you anyway.”
The next morning, huddled under the fluorescent lights of her office bathroom, Edie tapped open Tinder. Nothing had happened between her and Peter last night, and she knew she’d have to be patient. Even if he had technically left Nicole, it was a sudden, major change in his life. He’d barely wanted to talk about it before running off to get high. He needed time to process. And she needed a distraction.
The man wore a robot mask, but Edie swiped right anyway. According to the one line of text on his profile, he was a professor and didn’t want his students recognizing him. She liked the professor part, and in the split second she gave herself to form a judgment, she failed to register that this forty-five-year-old man was swiping on women young enough to be his students. They didn’t match anyway.
She flushed the toilet. No one was ever in the women’s bathroom at Tixster. She let her hands rest under the automated faucet, staring at her reflection. She didn’t love what she saw but by now she was tired of trying to change it. Her scalp was too easy to spot through her thin, frizzy curls, and the smile lines from her nose to the tips of her mouth seemed cavernous. More and more frequently, she couldn’t seem to catch her own eyes, as if she were in a trance, and maybe she was. In the hours from ten to seven, she floated from one meeting to the next, playing the part of a woman in charge. It was easier to play if she wasn’t all there.
She walked from one end of the bright yellow office to the other, offering how’s-it-goings without pausing for answers. The room was loud, from the voices of the open-office setup, but also visually—oversize photos of concerts and crowds lined Tixster’s walls. The company gave everyone a budget for desk decor, so each day she passed succulents in pots shaped like cats, a life-size Han Solo cutout, a family of stuffed teddy bears, and too many crystals. Her desk was bare except for a photo of her and her mother in a simple black frame. It was taken when Edie graduated from Stanford Business School, the only time her mother ever visited California—her dad had stayed home to work—before her fall. She’d pocketed the decoration money, instead.
Elizabeth approached Edie’s desk as she took her seat. Elizabeth insisted everyone call her Elizabeth. Not Liz, not Beth, even Lizzy wouldn’t do—Edie had tried them all. Elizabeth demanded people give her every syllable of their time.
“Morning, Edie!” Elizabeth chirped. “How was your weekend?”
Mondays and Fridays were the only days people at Tixster had anything to say to one another. Edie knew Elizabeth was only talking to her because Edie was her boss, but, despite herself, Edie appreciated the attention. The rest of her team were men and couldn’t be bothered. “Good,” Edie lied, unable to remember a single thing about it other than Peter’s news.
Elizabeth’s neatly shaped eyebrows popped up, waiting for more.
“How was your weekend?” Edie asked in turn.
“So good! We went to the new exhibit at the MOMA.”
She didn’t specify the composition of her “we.” Elizabeth had moved in with her college boyfriend last year once he’d finished law school, granting her access to a one-bedroom apartment, while Edie, almost a decade her senior, had not yet graduated from her
studio. Elizabeth would probably be married by twenty-seven, the age that, so many years ago, Edie had planned to be, back when she believed she could plan those sorts of things.
“How was that?”
Elizabeth jumped into a description of an exhibit and, like the steady, mumbled buzz of NPR, her voice gently nudged Edie’s brain awake. All her co-workers ever did was brag about consuming art. Their weekends were a visual résumé of cultural experiences: a way to show the world that they were artsy without ever creating actual art.
In the last five years Tixster had become an international platform of self-congratulation. People posted the cultural events they had attended on their Page—concerts, exhibits, DJ sets, the occasional poetry reading for the obscure—while friends and strangers applauded with “Claps.” It’d started as a discovery platform, for users to meet other people attending the same events. But it quickly became clear that people’s need for validation far surpassed their desire for connection, so “Claps” were born. The app was very popular.
Edie had joined Tixster two years ago for the money when she finally admitted that she needed a tech salary to survive in San Francisco. The salary from her previous job at a nonprofit—the best she’d ever had, a family of sorts—was hardly enough to cover her rent and pay off her student loans, let alone support her mother, who could no longer work after she’d fallen and needed in-home care. It wasn’t hard for Edie to get the job at Tixster; she’d studied computer engineering at Cornell when “tech” was mostly microprocessors and defense companies—she’d chosen the highest paying major, knowing her loans would be large—so there were few women in her field at her level. The problem was that Edie hated tech companies.
“I posted some shots on my Tixster page if you’re interested.” Elizabeth seemed to have concluded her story.
Edie squeezed out a smile. She had done nothing interesting with her weekend. Other than dance with Peter, all she’d done was go on dates. But those felt like more of a life sentence than a choice. She felt as if her time to find a partner and start a family was narrowing like a real-life game of “escape-the-room.” Despite the fact that Edie didn’t have an active desire for children, she did feel an aching urge to move forward, to establish the real life that her colleagues were (apparently quite easily) settling into.
“Great to see Pages getting good use,” she said as Elizabeth’s freshly painted fingers held out her phone, displaying attempts at artful compositions of the exhibit.
Really the posts made Edie want to die. It was the slow dilution of actual beauty through the exploitative performance of its consumption. But that was what Pages were for—the key performance indicator was number of posts, followed by number of Claps—and Edie was the director of Pages at Tixster.
“Very cool,” Edie
said, handing Elizabeth’s phone back to her after pretending to admire a self-consciously framed photo of a painting depicting what looked like a perfectly ordinary square. “Okay, time for work,” Edie said, pulling a mock sad face before turning to her screen. She took out her Nutri-Grain bar, the same strawberry treat she allotted herself each morning, and opened her calendar.
Edie’s first meeting of the day was in Burning Man. All conference rooms were named after events and Burning Man was the biggest room in the building. She was one of four women in the twenty-person meeting, one of whom was taking notes. A group of guys from the mobile team presented their “process,” which was mostly photos of them surrounded by sticky notes for reasons that were unclear. When her phone buzzed it felt like a gift from the gods.
What do you think? It was a text from Peter, with an image attached—of a woman.
She opened the text cautiously, like a Tupperware that’s been sitting in the fridge for months. Her hair was long and thick and wavy in that flawlessly messy way that either took hours in front of a mirror or incredible genetic luck. Her features were bold and unforgiving but also proportional. She was tall and thin but not in a sickly way. She had a Julia Roberts smile, wider than Edie’s entire face and full of Chiclet-white teeth. Her skin was smooth and olive, which made her enormous dewy eyes pop. In short, she was stunning. Edie’s heart sank as she realized what she was looking at.
Next screen: Her smile was tempered as if she were hiding a secret, there were deep lines around her mouth and eyes, marking a face that had let itself live, like a good, worn hoodie. Her eyes were bright and telling. Next screen: all text. She had a PhD from Princeton and a reference to Cardi B in her profile.
This was a dating profile. Peter was already on the apps.
“So, in conclusion, we want to maximize the value of our user base,” the VP said, as if it weren’t the most obvious fact in the world. The meeting seemed to be ending.
Going out with her tonight! Meet up after?
Was he absolutely insane?
P, she seems great. But online dating is a lot. I think you should take it slow. She sent the text before she had a chance to read it over. Then added, I don’t want you to get hurt.
He had not only found the perfect woman in under twenty-four hours, he had matched and scheduled a date with her. Edie knew
how impossible it was to find an attractive man capable of love at her age. What she tried to forget, though, was its harrowing flip side—the city was crawling with brilliant, competent women ready to jump at the possibility of potential.
People shuffled out of the room and Edie followed. Her boss, Derek, zoomed by on a scooter toward his standing desk. No one wanted to walk at Tixster, but everyone wanted to stand. Edie always wanted to sit. She ran five miles every night and couldn’t be bothered with the quasi-exercise of the standing desk, which she had a feeling burned about as many calories as chewing a stick of gum, ...
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