steam but still kind of new and startling to a person born in 1971, and she was thunderstruck at the torrent of cruel comments about her (ugly, slutty, shrewish, whiny, unfuckable), Fawad (ugly, smarmy, stalkery, towelheady), and Dexter (narcissistic, privileged, French-influenced, shit-for-brainsy). Having unwisely just now googled the movie, she sees that on Metacritic it boasts a score of 38, indicating “generally unfavorable reviews,” while over on the Tomatometer there’s that green asterisk-blob of a thrown-at-the-actor rotting love apple and a rating of 31 percent. The only chance left for the film would be a festival of mockery on Mystery Science Theater 3000 so vicious it goes viral. (A slut can hope.) Netflix picked it up for pennies a while ago and Saskia streamed it out of wary curiosity, the first time she’d seen it since it bombed. And is she crazy? It still seems like a decent movie to her. Okay, maybe a tad self-serious, but with, come on, folks, a lot of heart and hard work on display.

Anyway, a turbocharged rocket boost to her career it proved not to be, and some more years went by during which she had a few stage roles and a few minor film roles, and once she was nominated for an award, but as she spelunked deeper into her forties and her face began to look fortyish and she failed to get any taller and her large boobs stopped being certified fresh on the Tomatometer, the gigs thinned out. Hey, it’s what happens to 95 percent of working actors, she’s not complaining.

(Beat.)

Of course she’s complaining!

She makes herself tea. Thank god for voice work. Thank god for honey and lemon.

Life choices. What does Mette mean by that? Did she intend it to sound ominous? If Saskia had a partner at the moment, she’d distract herself with him or her, send a text, hop in the sack, have an argument. But the thing with Maggie became such a nightmare, she’s been wary lately. Or maybe weary. Or both.

One guy she dated during her Ithaca acting years was younger, twenty-four to her twenty-eight, a graduate student in English literature, cumulo masses of dark hair, sunken cheeks and sexily alive eyebrows—eyebrows seem to be a theme today—and he told her in a post-coitum tristesse that he dreamed about quitting the program, ghosting his family and friends, and going to live in a stone hut with a peat fire at the top of a wave-shattered cliff in the Orkney Islands, there to do naught but read classics and play ancient airs on his wooden flute. Yes, he was full of shit in all three directions, and she dumped him after a short and lusty while, but his adolescent fantasy stuck with her, probably because it was so much like the reveries of travel she’d lost herself in before getting to know her father, and maybe she missed the . . . she doesn’t want to call it innocence . . . the wide-horizoned immaturity, which meeting her father despoiled early. Anyway, now, years later, when her life seems in some ways inadequate or emptyish or whatever, there are times when that lonely hut at the top of the cliff beckons, and she stands out at the lip where the mist from the waves rejuvenates her, then goes in to the fire where the peaty smoke toughens and preserves her. Witchlike, she listens to the wind talk in the chimney. Over on the next promontory Mette dwells in her own hut—Saskia can see her light burning at night—with high-speed internet yet no earthly way to receive communications, happy as a clam.

Okay, speaking of her love life, here’s the problem in a nutshell. When she dates a man, she longs for a relationship with a woman, and vice versa. She hates to generalize (honest, she really does) but it is simply true that women (in general! not every individual!) communicate better, are more attuned to social and emotional cues, play the game at a higher level. As the rhyme says, when a relationship with a woman is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid. Men may be boring, but they won’t try to eat your brains. (We’re talking about the subset of men who won’t kill you, which Saskia likes to believe she can recognize by the third date.) Maybe she’s just feeling discouraged right now because her last male partner turned out to be a classic withholding monosyllabic stone-faced narcissistic manchild, and her last female partner was Maggie, who was wonderful and exciting and intuitive and passionate and giving and delightfully unpredictable and then watchful and manipulative and groundlessly jealous and crazily accusatory and creepily stalkerish, not only in the cyber sense but actually physically creeping behind Saskia on sidewalks and up stairwells, and Saskia at this point would reference Glenn Close except she fucking detests that movie.

Life choices, as the mystery girl said.

Yes, and regardless of whether Saskia’s lover was an innie or an outie, their relationship with Mette was never good, which became for Saskia a source of mounting frustration. The men tended to offer unsolicited and clue-free advice about getting her out of her room more, or not giving in to her whims, whereas the women often got jealous and competitive, which could be worse. It didn’t help that Mette hated having anyone sleep over in the apartment other than herself and her mother. Routine is important for people like Mette, everyone knows this, but maybe they choose not to remember when it’s midnight on a rainy night. Once Mette was old enough that Saskia could spend evenings and the occasional night at her partner’s place, there seemed to her (Saskia) to be no conceivable grounds of complaint, but it’s simply astonishing how many people want to feel thwarted by other people’s children. What, I get a new girlfriend, but I don’t get a second TV, a second bed, a second coffee machine, a second local bagel joint?

Another factor, which Saskia will acknowledge for

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