Turning Thirty Read Online Free

nodded.
    â€˜And despite your mom’s encouragement we have no urge whatsoever to perpetuate with each other, right?’
    I nodded again.
    â€˜That’s why we’re not upset. Biology is telling us there’s no point in crying over spilt milk.’

four
    It was eleven o’clock on the following Saturday morning, and we’d just finished breakfast. Five days had elapsed since our decision to split up and I was now sleeping on the sofa (a.k.a the Sofa from Hell), which explained why my neck was killing me. On Tuesday I’d told Paul Barron, my boss at work, that I wanted a transfer out of New York and preferably out of the USA altogether. While I’d enjoyed my time there and made a few friends, I knew I didn’t want to stay now that Elaine and I were over. A move was definitely what I needed. ‘Matt,’ began my boss, by way of an answer to my request, ‘at the kind of level you’ve attained here, as a software design team leader, the world is your oyster.’ Roughly translated, he meant that because I was good at my job, which I was, I had the choice of all of the company’s European offices: London, Paris, Milan and Barcelona. ‘Thanks, Paul,’ I’d replied. ‘That’s . . . that’s nice.’ He then asked me where I wanted to go and that was when I looked really stupid. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just know I want to go.’ He’d smiled and told me to think about it and get back to him.
    I looked at Elaine across the empty breakfast plates. I hadn’t told her that I was planning to transfer yet. I think I was waiting for the right moment, but right now I didn’t feel this was it. Elaine was wearing her slob-around-the-apartment garb: a marl grey T-shirt that she used to wear to her yoga class and a pair of brown shorts from the Gap she’d bought the year that brown was the new black. She had nothing on her feet and she was picking at the dark red polish on her toenails. No one seeing her now would’ve guessed that she worked for one of New York’s coolest public-relations companies albeit in the lower echelons. Monday to Friday she did her work uniform of fashionable-yet-stylish very well. Saturday was her day off.
    â€˜What are you thinking?’ she asked.
    I’d obviously been thinking a little too hard about my transfer. ‘What brought things to a head for you?’ I asked, as a way out of confronting the transfer. ‘I mean, was it any one thing or was it lots of things combined?’
    â€˜I think it was that film we watched at Sara and Jimmy’s last weekend,’ she said, still playing with her toes.
    â€˜ The English Patient ?’
    She nodded. ‘It just got me thinking, you know? That poor English guy’s wife runs off with that German pilot and that was supposed to be romantic. I mean, affairs they’re so . . . sleazy, they’re so yuck. By which I suppose I mean that . . . Well, you know Emily?’ Emily was one of Elaine’s workmates. ‘You know she split up with her boyfriend, Jez, because he went all funny ’cause he didn’t think he’d done enough with his life?’
    â€˜I think you’ll find that what Jez wanted to “do” – and, in fact, actually was “doing” – was more women.’
    â€˜And she was having a gadzillion affairs with anything that had a hairy chest and a gym membership card.’
    â€˜Gadzillions?’ I asked, pulling a face.
    â€˜Millions of gadzillions,’ said Elaine. ‘Millions.’ She paused. ‘It’s just so horrible, isn’t it? They obviously just got bored of each other but were afraid to call it quits when their time was up and because of that they put themselves through months of misery dragging the whole thing out . . .’ She let her sentence hang in mid-air momentarily, then picked it up.