Another Quarterly Business Review

The spotted lantern flies are back. I’ve just killed two “nymphal instars,” a name the New Jersey State Department of Agriculture appears to use to refer to the bugs in their first, early stages of life. Central Park is buzzing with impromptu concerts, Instagram picnics, and children chasing after bubbles. Oh, my dear Hotties, ’tis the season. Fleet week has finally ended, giving way to streets filled with bright, raucous colour, and long, proud legs. Soon, the city will be sticky and damp. Trickles of condensation will be caught on peach-fuzz lips and cheeks. Illuminated sneakers on the feet of stringy eight-year-olds will pounce on red-winged victims on otherwise quiet Upper West Side residential streets so that a double-income, no-kids millennial couple can count carcasses on the sidewalk. The most lusted-for season begins.

I am pleased but mildly overwhelmed that it is Summer again. It’s too soon to be June. I’m worried I’ll blink, and I will have missed the leaves once again turning gold. I know it’s still all ahead of me—the sweating, the sun, the blades of grass tickling my neck, the hum of the AC, the elaborate (mostly) European holidays. Summer stretches out before us and yet also feels fleeting. We all really do go to Europe, don’t we? “One makes money in America to spend it in in the Old World,” a Colombian software developing divorcé said to me at a party with a thousand oysters. Why don’t we all go spend our money somewhere cheaper? Latin America, Southeast Asia, or Japan, where, apparently, a bowl of ramen will now only run you $4 compared to last year’s $6, thanks to inflation that benefits the dollar-laden tourist. My travel plans this year are shaping up to be a decadent combination of Switzerland, Germany, France, England, and Spain. Maybe I should try to go to Paris in August and test my luck with the Olympians. I might. Why not? It is Hot Girl Summer, after all, and I am, at last, toothless and ready.

Another small pair of black-and-white polka-dot wings crawls against the ribbing of my pant leg. For a moment, I hesitate—what if I am wrong? What if this is just a moth (which it is bad luck to kill), an oddly tinted ladybug, or a beetle of sorts? The leggy little insect, with its delicate spotting, is rather beautiful. It’s a shame that, if she is who I think she is, she’ll grow up to leech on the trees that give us shade. Last summer, I saw a woman swatting lantern flies with a neon contraption along the railings of a Bronx beach promenade. I admired her conviction. With a sigh, I give the third bug a gentle whack with the back of my pen. We’re back.

Every year on June 8th, splinters of a group of once-soon-to-be-single women come together to reflect on their relationships. This all started five years ago, when I sat around a large, functionally ornate wooden table with a group of women who were all sick of their respective boyfriends. After indulging in a few rounds of a flirty seasonal cocktail to inaugurate or re-open a rooftop bar, we all ventured to a nearby restaurant advertising a “pizza & bottle of wine” special, through which, for the low, low price of 19.99, a couple could share, well, a pizza and a bottle of wine. We ordered four. Under yellow lights, we regaled each other with further stories of tepid boyfriends: one was unable to make any decisions for himself (“I’ll have whatever you have”), another lived too far away, a third was always painfully close to offense. We had all been committed to these men since we were in college (an eternity since we were only 24), and though we were regularly irked, we had been comfortable. We were constantly on the edge of collapse, but we couldn’t jump and actually break up. We all had our reasons. Suddenly, someone, I can’t remember who, called the meeting to order: we all need to get out of this. We’re not happy. We’ve been complaining for hours. This isn’t the point. She suggested we set a date. Anyone who hadn’t broken things off by the deadline would have to present a strong case to the group to justify their hesitation. The date agreed upon was June 8th. Almost all of us met it.

The first observance occurred a year later, in the depths of COVID, over Zoom, of course. We had a playlist, and we toasted at a distance with cans of whatever we found in the fridge. We cooed over a single story of a successful app-dating experience. The second and third years were forgotten, I think, or we didn’t do much beyond a flurry of text exchanges in an otherwise inactive thread. During the last couple of years, we have begun to see the date as an opportunity to reflect on our relationships, not to force us to end anything that doesn’t need to be ended, but rather consider whether, if we found ourselves back before pizzas and wine, we’d feel proud of the links we’d sown since the last time we all met. Last year, some of us got together to craft.

I find it very hard to answer the question, “How is it going?” in a larger social setting and use it to create an opening for conversation. A few months ago, I realized that when someone asked how things were going, my instinct was to recount lousy dating stories and lament my inability to find love. On Groundhog Day this year, I was at my worst. It was as if a Disney-obsessed furry little monster took over my body: I spent the entire night trying to convince others (mostly myself) that I would never be hot (or loved) once I lost my tooth. It was entirely unnecessary. I felt (feel?) a need to hide behind the litany of terrors of dating in the city (the great equalizer). The apps! It’s terrible! Woe is me! Do you have any single friends?

The following morning, I pledged to never again default to dating anecdotes to help the time pass. I haven’t figured out what to fill that space with. People don’t seem to respond well to, “Oh, it’s all pretty good. The only news is that I had a tooth removed, and my grandfather died.” And, if I’m honest, that doesn’t really summarize the last six months. If I take a more positive approach and talk about how I feel proud of the work I am doing and express excitement about all the ways I have changed and grown, I worry I sound like I am showing off, or I risk speaking for hours about the intricacies of adult development and the correlation between our cognitive ability to handle complexity and maturation. I need to learn to ask better questions. Yesterday, at a housewarming party, I tried telling people about the great Rhine River cruise I’ll take in August with my grandmother and that I’ve now invested in tennis lessons. Yes, I have watched Challengers. Do these things count as updates? What is an update? What kinds of news do they want to hear?

I suppose this is a good moment to insert a warning for those of you expecting one of my well-articulated arguments about Hotness today: all I’ve got are shards. I’ve been trying to write this entry for a few weeks now, and I haven’t figured out what I want to say about anything. Anything new I could or should say hasn’t occurred to me yet. Onward.

I haven’t had a “serious relationship” since that original June 8th. Well, I suppose my “clock” starts earlier than that—soon after the bad boyfriend soirée, protracted negotiations to end my relationship finally came to a close after months of circling the inevitable. My ex moved out over Memorial Day weekend while I travelled to Mexico City to celebrate my mother’s fiftieth birthday. Sitting in my childhood bedroom full of trinkets and knick-knacks, I worried that it would be painful to return to a bare, emptied apartment, so I ordered a new bed frame, timed to arrive as he left. The night I landed back in New York, I went to see the Potter Puff Musical off-off(-off) Broadway and learned about “Fleet Week” thanks to an improv skit on the show.

Until this year, I haven’t really thought about how I felt about being single on June 8th. I thought I was getting a “pass” on the holiday since I didn’t have a “relationship” to evaluate, so I’d listen and maybe ask questions of those around me.

Last weekend, I realized that all my exes are now married. My high school boyfriend got married in a knee brace (per Instagram) two weeks ago—he was the last one left of the lot. What does that say about me? Does that say anything about me? That same weekend that the high school boyfriend was getting married on a Mexican beach somewhere, I was telling a friend about the college boyfriend, the one from the relationship ended by June 8th. He got married a little over a year ago, also according to Instagram. As she had never met him, she asked to see a picture, and someone across the table pulled out their phone to show the post announcing his marriage in a small, intimate ceremony. He smiled from the screen next to the woman who is now his wife. His smile is warm and familiar. It stretches across his face, pushing past cheeks and eyelids as if all that happiness couldn’t help but escape the edges of his mouth. I see his family’s living room behind him. They still have stacks and piles of books strewn across the floor. I don’t recognize the clothing he is wearing. In the next photo, his wife is curled up on a grey couch with a book. I’m pretty sure there’s a picture of me somewhere in his feed perched just like that.

It was surprisingly easy to fill in the gaps left behind after the first June 8th. I spent the rest of that summer parading around the Hot Summer streets with coffee and bagels and sunglasses and suncream and a diary and books, though always feeling slightly disoriented as I newly imagined my life alone. One night, arriving home after work and perhaps the gym, I showered, made and ate dinner, washed clothes, and finally sat atop of my bed to poke around on the internet. I had an hour or so before I needed to go to sleep. My bedroom windows were open; it was still cool enough that I didn’t need to mount the tyrannical AC unit. A light pitter-patter began until rain covered everything beyond the walls of my apartment. A sharp, soft breeze snuck in through the window and caressed my legs. I could learn to cherish all this space.

Two weeks ago, I met up with someone I hadn’t seen since 2019. Or maybe it was early 2020 when we last saw each other. I had loosely kept track of him through Instagram. I knew he was still writing and travelling, but I didn’t realize he was living in New York City and had been for a few years. He lives on the Upper West Side, and, trying to be funny, he asked me how I felt comfortable among the quacks of the Upper East. I proposed a visit to Ethyl’s, the club on 2nd Avenue with go-go dancers and eighties music, to prove to him that the neighbourhood has some edge. The idea amused him, but it was early, so we agreed to grab a beer at a different bar nearby. When I arrived, the bar was stuffed to the brim with people engrossed in a sports game. Play-offs or finals or something. My friend had tucked himself under a television screen and tried to scan a page of a book by someone I had met another few weeks ago while he waited for me. He looked like he belonged in another time, which I know is precisely what he was trying to accomplish.

Over beers, we clumsily caught up—are you still in touch with…? Oh, I thought of you because I met so and so, wasn’t he at school with you? Remember that roommate of yours? That Independence Day? I had bangs when I met him. I lusted after a PhD in Comparative Literature. I wasn’t happy then, but I didn’t know why. After we’d worked our way through the obvious questions, he asked me what, other than the Upper East Side, remained in my life from the time we last met. It was surprisingly hard to answer the question. Carmen Balcells, I said. She’s still around, though in a new shape and tone. What else? I scanned my life for a moment. Different job, different apartment, same psychoanalyst. Some friends are still around, but he never met them. I feel very much the same, but before him, everything looked very different. Planks of wood on a ship and all.

On Thursday, I went to a Happy Hour with a lot of Chiefs of Staff hosted by a friend who has just returned to New York after pottering around the world for a few years. With a chunky glass of rosé in hand, I told the story of how I became a Chief of Staff at a consulting firm to clusters of ambitious executive assistants and recent MBA grads. The Happy Hour was hosted at a bar just a block away from the offices of my first job in the city, on Varick and Vandam. Content with an hour of low-stakes networking, I walked out of the bar and instinctively navigated to the Shake Shack Innovation Kitchen, which opened months into my time in that first job. I picked up a burger and trod a path that was once very familiar to me to the Hudson River walk way. There were new restaurants and coffee shops. I found it hard to recognize the street where my old offices were, but I quickly found the turn to the river in front of a large building that housed immigration offices and, allegedly, a detention center. In 2018, a summer of migrant crises, activist groups would raise their hands to the building and pray for those trapped inside. I often wondered whether they were praying for ghosts.

I made it home about an hour later after eating my burger overlooking the Hudson and a threatening sky. I navigated around TriBeCa to the Canal Street Q station rather than attempt a train change in Times Square. When I got home, my feet were sore and legs heavy. I took a shower, slipped on my pajamas, stretched thighs and calves, and finally sat atop my bed to poke around on the internet. It was an hour or so before I wanted to go to sleep. I opened my bedroom window; after a week of high temperatures, it was cool enough that I didn’t need to plug in the medieval AC unit firmly bolted onto the wall.

The threatening skies gave way to a light pitter-patter that swelled until torrents of rain fell over the tree growing behind the walls of my apartment. Like no time had passed, a soft, sharp breeze snuck in through the window and stroked my legs. I knew I could learn to cherish the space. I did. But I hadn’t expected just how much this space, my space, would grow and change and turn and shake, and yet remain exactly the same. It’s all so much more peaceful. And rather magical. All along the path, I have been good and bad; reasonable and unreasonable; kind and spiteful; big and small; measured and impulsive. All in the name, I guess, of growing up. But, really, I wouldn’t change any of it for anything in the world.

xx