Starting From Square Two. Caren Lissner

Erika. Both of them had complained about dating since college graduation. They always made it sound like war, packed with battle plans and tricks and conspiracies. Gert had been skeptical in the past. Wasn’t dating supposed to be fun?

      In college, it had been. It went like this: A guy in your class or dorm would strike up a conversation, he’d invite you for coffee or a movie, you’d flirt relentlessly in the study lounges, and eventually the conversations would turn into heated dormroom aerobics. Or in the case of Marc, the two of you were at the bookstore, and he saw you buying a used copy of Calculus for $44.99 instead of $60 new, and he said, “Where’d you get that?” and you talked about how you almost placed out of the class entirely and how you both thought that math was the worst and best subject in the world. It was the worst because it was boring, but it was the best because it always provided finite answers—no room for guesswork or interpretation. You came to realize you both liked things you could count on. You were in the same lecture, so you could study together. You got an A-minus and the first intense relationship of your life.

      Gert’s other dates, before Marc, hadn’t been bad, either. There was cynical Andy, who was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee and PEZ dispensers. Paul, the head of the political union, called the profs and deans by their first names when he saw them on campus. He went to their office hours even if he wasn’t in their classes, because other students didn’t take advantage of them and he figured it was a good time to schmooze. But neither of them was as driven or interesting as Marc, a guitar-playing business student who had three red-haired Irish brothers, none of whom looked a thing like him.

      Gert’s closeness with Marc was what made her realize that someday, she might need to be with someone again. The idea of going through the rest of her life without a person beside her to help her through it was torture. But she couldn’t imagine dating right now. No one could possibly have Marc’s ideas and expressions, those idiosyncrasies and small kindnesses that made her smile. There couldn’t possibly be anyone like him.

      Gert looked at Hallie, dressed so scantily in the middle of February. Hallie’s dating troubles always had seemed self-imposed. When Hallie had told Gert about the guy who’d said, “I actually drive better after a few beers,” Gert couldn’t believe Hallie hadn’t walked out on him right then. But Hallie had told Gert she wanted to stick with him because he was “sensitive.” Next, Hallie met a guy who didn’t drive drunk, but had big ears. So Hallie stopped dating him. Gert worried that Hallie was focusing on all the wrong things.

      One day Gert actually told Hallie that her priorities seemed skewed.

      “You meet a nice guy and his forehead’s too high,” Gert said. “You meet a jerky guy and you date him anyway and end up bitter when he doesn’t morph into a poet. You hate bars but you go to the same ones five days a week. Why don’t you just relax a little and have fun?”

      Hallie got angry. She said Gert had no idea at all what it was like out there.

      That’s the phrase Hallie had used: Out There.

      Like it was a jungle.

      The subway bumped a bit, and everyone grabbed their belongings to prevent liftoff.

      “Well?” Hallie said.

      “Well, what?” Gert asked.

      “Name one decent guy you’ve met since college who’s single.”

      Gert sighed. “Marc’s brother Michael,” she said. “He’s normal. He’s nice. So there is one who exists.”

      “And you’d date him?” asked tall, ponytailed Erika, from somewhere near the ceiling.

      “I didn’t say I would date him,” Gert said. “He’s Marc’s brother. I’m just saying he exists.”

      “Isn’t he the short one with the mutton chops?” Erika asked.

      “No. Eddie’s married.”

      “Is he the one who wears stained overalls and lives in Maine and breeds Sea Monkeys?”

      “Patrick doesn’t breed Sea Monkeys; he’s a crabber. And he’s married too.”

      “Oh. So you mean the third brother, the eighteen-year-old.”

      “Michael’s twenty-two now,” Gert said.

      Hallie and Erika looked at each other.

      “So you would date a twenty-two-year-old?” Hallie asked.

      “I didn’t say I would….”

      “See!” Hallie said, her voice surging with victory. “That is exactly my point, and something you will learn soon enough. There are no single guys who don’t have at least one major flaw, and a flaw, I might add, that would stop you from dating them—even if everything else was great. Why? Simple math. Women are interesting and honest and sensitive. Most men are not. There is only one normal, decent single guy for every five women in this city. This is what’s known as the Great Male Statistic. Girls don’t want to face the GMS. They want to believe there’s someone for everyone. The truth hurts. You only start coming to terms with the GMS when you’re twenty-six or twenty-seven. It actually killed Sylvia Plath. She finally found this guy in grad school who she thought was so great, and she married him, and he cheated on her.”

      “Didn’t Sylvia Plath have a history of mental illness since she was an undergrad?” Gert asked.

      “Incidental. She didn’t kill herself until Ted Hughes cheated. The truth is, the really good men are snapped up quickly. You get into your mid-twenties and it’s five to one. Don’t give me that look. You don’t believe it because you don’t want to.”

      Gert was ready to go home. “Then why are we doing this?”

      “Because looking for the one in five,” Hallie said, “is still better than being alone.”

      The bar was two blocks from the mouth of the subway. When the women emerged on Bleecker Street, a frigid wind swept through, grazing their bare arms. Hallie wrapped her hands around herself as she walked, but insisted to Gert that she wasn’t cold.

      “The only way to get into a lasting relationship is to find one before you finish college,” said Erika, her dirty-blond ponytail bouncing behind her.

      “Absolutely,” Hallie said. “Look when both of you met your boyfriends. Sophomore year. And—poof—you had taken them off the market forever. Denied to older women like us.”

      Erika said, “I gave up Ben at twenty-four, and someone else got him.”

      “And how long did that take? Five months?”

      “Not even,” Erika said, looking down at her boots. “Three.”

      Gert had heard many times about how Erika had met and lost her college boyfriend. Erika and Ben had started dating around the same time as Gert had started dating Marc—sophomore year. But Erika broke up with Ben five years later. She was pretty, a lot of guys liked her, and her friends and family kept telling her not to settle down so quickly. She wasn’t sure she was ready to make a lifelong commitment, and she didn’t feel hopelessly, madly in love with Ben, the way she’d always dreamed she would be.

      So she told Ben she needed a few months off. Better to figure out what she wanted now, she said, than when it was too late. She dated a few guys, realized Ben was much better than everyone she’d met, and called him up one night.

      It was too late.

      They passed a guy with a huge backpack who was slumped against a building, drunk. A policeman was kneeling down to talk to him. The thick smell of beer-soaked sidewalks and vomit invaded Gert’s nostrils. She remembered it from frat parties in college. It was a sad smell—the smell of being among two hundred happy people but just wanting to be with the one who made you happy. It was a memory she could do without.

      “At least you got to be Ben’s first love,” Hallie said to Erika. “I’ll never get to be anyone’s.”

      “I