The Saddest Woman in the World: This Could Be You

“Have you ever dated a guy who had a girlfriend?”

The woman stood alone at the sink with a forgotten, melting cocktail in one hand. She’d been standing there when I came into the bathroom; for all I knew, she’d been standing there for hours. Her eyes were fixed on her own reflection in the mirror, but her question (uttered in a spectacular Long Island accent: Have you evuh…?) seemed to be addressed to the ladies’ room at large.

“No,” I said, drying my hands at the paper towel dispenser beside her.

“Yes!” a voice piped up from inside the bathroom stall.

The woman turned to look at me, blearily. “Don’t do it,” she said. Her voice was raspy and her face was weathered; she was older than me. “It’s hell.”

The toilet flushed and the girl who’d said “Yes!” emerged: my friend Lizzie. I hadn’t realized she was in the bathroom too.

“You’ve dated a guy with a girlfriend?” I asked Lizzie, surprised.

She clarified: “I slept with a guy who had a girlfriend. Just once. It was a huge mistake.”

“Right?!” exclaimed the older woman. She leaned back awkwardly against the sink; she was tall and leggy and towered over us. “I broke it off after a month. I didn’t want to be the other girl, you know?” We knew, we said. “But now what I want to know is, should I write his girlfriend a letter telling her what happened? I feel like she deserves to know that her boyfriend is a huge fucking jackass.”

“No,” I said, at the same time that Lizzie said “Yes!” We looked at each other.

“If it were my boyfriend,” said Lizzie, “I’d want to know.”

“Right?!” said the woman.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not really your business, you know? You would just be starting drama.”

“It would be an anonymous note,” said the woman. “I don’t want to start shit. I just wanna do her a favor, so, like, she can be informed and shit.” She sighed. “All my friends say I shouldn’t do it. But I don’t know…”

I said, “I think it all comes down to why you want to tell her. Are your motives pure? Or is there some part of you that wants to get back at this guy by breaking up his relationship?”

At this, the woman’s face turned bright red. She sniffled, and then tears were streaming down her face.

“I loved him so much,” she cried. “And he told me he loved me too, and he kept saying he was gonna leave her—but if he really loved me he woulda left her right away, right?”

“Right. I know his type,” said Lizzie grimly. “He was just preying on your insecurities.”

“I’m thirty-two years old,” said the woman. “All my friends have significant others. I’m the only single girl left.”

She shook with sobs, and her elbow knocked her purse into the sink. The faucet was motion-activated, and water began spraying all over her purse. She was crying too hard to notice, so I ran forward and grabbed her purse, now dripping wet, and pulled it out of the sink. She was oblivious to all of this.

“And the sex was the best I ever had, like, ever,” she was saying. “With him I could do stuff like, if I told you, you’d run out of here like, ‘That lady is a freak!’…”

And then it was like looking at one of those optical-illusion drawings that can either be an old hag or a young maiden. Up till now I’d only been seeing the old hag with the Long Island accent and the leathery fake tan; now I had blinked, and suddenly I saw…me. Me now, single, young, happy—blink—me in ten years, still single, not so young, not so happy…

“…I could call him up and go, ‘I want you to cut me all over,’ and he’d be like, ‘Sure, baby, that’s so hot,’ and he made me so happy…”

Lizzie was saying all the right things—“But you will find the right guy someday! You’re beautiful and one day an amazing guy is going to see that! Also, your boots are really cool!”—and I knew I should join in, but I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her she would be okay. I didn’t know if she would be okay. I didn’t even know if I would be okay. Maybe I wouldn’t; maybe, in ten years, I would be crying in a bar bathroom in Queens, too.

The woman wiped her eyes and shakily began reapplying her slimy pink lip gloss. “You girls are so beautiful,” she said. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-four,” said Lizzie. “It’s my birthday!”

Guiltily, I said, “Twenty-three.” I wondered if Lizzie was thinking what I was thinking: And all the men your age want to date us instead of you. Don’t you see we’re the enemy?

“I better go back,” said the woman. “I’m here with my friend Ed. He’s the only other single one left, so we go out together a lot. He’s in love with me, and I’m not attracted to him, but—”

“—but it makes you feel really great about yourself to be desired like that, so you hang out with him all the time,” I finished for her. I understood. We were the same. “Right?”

She beamed. “Right! Hey, you guys are so smart! What do you do?”

“I’m studying archaeology,” said Lizzie.

“Cool! Like Indiana Jones!”

“And Frankie’s a journalist,” said Lizzie, which was charitable of her.

“Oh!” The woman turned to me, wide-eyed. “So, like, you must know a lot about grammar and shit, right? Can I ask you a question? I always forget this one: is it more correct to say me and Jennifer, or Jennifer and I?”

“Well, it depends—” And I tried to explain as we walked out of the bathroom together. It was hopeless, I knew; the bar was loud, and the subject was complicated, and I was shouting and incoherent and going way too fast. She was nodding blankly, and I could tell she wasn’t absorbing any of it, but I pressed on desperately. My other friends must have been wondering where I’d gone, but I couldn’t go back to them just yet. It was incredibly important that I make her understand. I could do this one thing for her, at least.

“Just take out the Jennifer and,” I kept saying, over and over again. “If you’re ever confused, just take out the other person. Okay? It’s just you…it’s just you…”