Alice Brown's Lessons in the Curious Art of Dating Page 0,2

and Lou were in Luigi’s wine bar for a “Secret to Finding Mr. Right” postmortem. Kate liked Luigi’s, with its battered wooden tables and soft candlelight. It had everything she wanted in a bar nowadays—booze, a seat and near-pitch-black lighting.

“We’re not thinking about it. You are,” replied Lou, giving the barman her best, unmistakably lascivious look. Lou didn’t believe in being ambiguous.

“Of course you are,” Kate contradicted her. “Every woman who’s in her thirties and single is thinking about it. It’s all we think about. If you’ve not bagged a man and got yourself pregnant by thirty-five, you might as well skip straight to the end and reserve a single room in the retirement home.” In the half-light of the bar, Kate glowed with righteous indignation.

“But you’re not thirty-five! And you’re talking rubbish.”

Kate shook her head. “Once we hit our thirties it’s over. Men don’t want us anymore.”

“That’s the spirit,” Lou deadpanned, her eyes scanning the bar for talent before settling back on the barman. He gave her a wink and twiddled—quite suggestively, Kate thought—with the beer taps.

“I’m just being realistic,” Kate reasoned. “And the Daily Post’s enough to kill off anyone’s positivity. It does a ‘time’s running out’ article every bloody week. You know what it said yesterday? There are twenty-eight million single women over the age of thirty-five in America, and only eighteen million single men. That means ten million women are going to spend the rest of their lives on the shelf just because of impossible math.”

“Better cancel the emigration plans then.”

“Everyone knows that where America leads, we follow,” Kate stressed. “The Daily Post says that in the next few years Britain’s going to have an epidemic of single women. Apparently we’ve got a bleak future of longer working hours and later retirement to look forward to with none of the good stuff like babies, families and a husband to top up our pensions with. I’m telling you, Lou, Sex and the City wasn’t a comedy: it was a warning!”

“Nonsense,” Lou scoffed. “And since when did you believe everything you read in the papers? And what’s with the hang-up about thirty-five? It’s not like all the men suddenly fall off the face of the planet. Besides, we’re forever hearing about those granny moms popping out kids in their sixties. When they smile you can see their dentures. You’re only thirty-three and you’ve still got your own teeth—you’ve got bags of time.”

Kate twirled the stem of her wine glass. Lou was right about one thing: she shouldn’t believe everything she read in the papers, not least because so many of the stories she’d planted there herself. Kate worked in PR—or “in lies” as Lou liked to call it. She should know how much of what was written was exaggerated for the sake of a titillating daily read, because she was part of the machine that served it up. It was what she got paid to do.

But this seemed different. Surely it was an indisputable medical fact that your fertility dropped at thirty-five? And it certainly seemed that the number of men who looked your way decreased with every year you got further away from your twenties. What if it was just nature’s way . . . the dating equivalent of survival of the fittest? Just as the old, wobbly zebra at the back of the pack always gets eaten by the leopard, maybe men couldn’t help getting less interested in you the less able you were to breed? Could it be that—for the survival of the species—all men age fifteen to a hundred were naturally programmed to fancy fertile twenty-one-year-olds? Judging by the number of men who’d been interested in her recently, Kate was sure this was true. Men were divining that any moment now her gums would recede and her ovaries collapse. She was, she realized with a sickening lurch, the wobbly zebra at the back of the pack. Good for a quick snack, but nothing more nutritious.

Kate looked up, ready to share this realization with Lou, but her friend had pulled out her makeup bag and was flipping open her compact with the speed of a fast-draw cowboy.

Kate watched with a grudging admiration. She loved Lou, even though they were opposites. Lou was lots of the things she wished she could be: confident, brave, dramatic. She was the kind of woman who could emphasize both her eyes and her lips and not give a damn about whether she looked slutty. Slutty! That was another thing that