The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  Anyhow, as far as not writing about Tom, I really couldn’t see how I was going to manage to avoid it. Tom Hathaway was a recurring character in my column, and it simply wouldn’t be possible to have him just drop out of it altogether. I was going to have to tell the truth, and there were several general problems with that, and one specific one. First of all, this was not the sort of breakup that reflected well on the victim. I realized that the second I hung up the phone. In fact, it strikes me that if I hadn’t had a living room full of witnesses, it’s entirely possible I would have changed the story around a little—made Tom’s behavior seem slightly less appalling—not because I wanted to protect him, but because I wanted to protect me. Also, there was the question that always comes up in a situation like this, the what was she (me) doing with him (Tom) in the first place question. Too many pieces of the puzzle were missing, and if that much was clear to me—the person who had been living in the midst of all the puzzle pieces and yet apparently missing them entirely—I could just imagine how it would look to somebody from the outside. So those were the general problems. The specific problem was this: Tom is an attorney, and it crossed my mind that if I wrote about what happened that night when he asked me not to, I might end up getting sued. In my experience, there is a certain type of writer who wastes a lot of energy worrying about getting sued, and usually it’s just self-aggrandizing nonsense, but the truth is in this case I’m not so sure. I suppose it doesn’t help that I always give people the same names they have in real life. I can’t help it. Otherwise I can’t keep everybody straight. I really don’t believe in changing details much, either. That’s what the writing books always tell you to do—“change the identifying details” is how they put it—but I can never bring myself to do it.

  I feel I should point out that I became the kind of columnist I became before it was a cliché, before the Suddenly-Susanness of it all hit the culture full force, before the whole thing became boring, and silly, and obvious. By the time all that happened, it was too late. I was hooked. I suppose if I had been exposed to Dorothy Parker at an impressionable age she would have been who I wanted to grow up to be, but we didn’t get Dorothy Parker in Arizona when I was growing up; we got Nora Ephron. Who I proceeded to want to grow up to be. I didn’t find out until years later—after I’d been exposed to Dorothy Parker myself and had begun to idly contemplate attempting to become her—that Nora Ephron had wanted to grow up to be Dorothy Parker, which made me quite pleased.

  Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for somebody like me to become somebody like Dorothy Parker, or somebody like Nora Ephron for that matter, because I’m not Jewish. Not only am I not Jewish, I am the opposite of Jewish. I was raised as an evangelical Christian, a real born-again, a tribe which completely lacks a comedic tradition and is almost entirely missing an intellectual one. We also don’t have much in the way of a self-hating tradition, come to think of it, although God knows everybody else in the world wishes we would hurry up and develop one. Because—and I realize I don’t have to tell you this—people hate evangelical Christians. They hate, hate, hate them. They hate the Christian right, they hate the Moral Majority, they hate Jerry Falwell, they hate the pro-lifers, they hate people with the little silver fish on the back of their minivans, they hate the guy at the office with the weird haircut who won’t put money into the football pool. Of course, the guy at the office with the weird haircut could be a Mormon, but for some reason people don’t hate Mormons. Most people think of Mormons as just sort of inoffensive super-Christians. The only people who don’t think of Mormons as Christians, in fact, are Mormons and Christians. A few years ago, my mother called me and told me that the people who’d moved in next door were Mormons.

  “Do they have a trampoline?” I said.

  “How did you know?” said my mother.

  “Mormons love trampolines,” I said. “I don’t know why, but they do.”

  Anyhow, my mother befriended her counterpart next door, and the two of them spent the next three years swapping one-dish recipes and trying in vain to convert one another. Which brings us to people’s fundamental problem with born-again Christians, which is that they don’t want to be converted. They don’t even want to entertain the notion that they might need to be converted. The problem is that at some point in the conversation, the person being converted is going to say something like, “What happens if I decide to take a pass?” and the person doing the converting will get a drippy, painfully sincere look on his face and say, “Then you’ll spend eternity in hell.” This is upsetting, even if you think they’re completely full of shit. And, well, the rest of it sure doesn’t look like any fun. Even when I was a kid I knew it wasn’t any fun. In high school youth group, no matter what we were doing some kid would say, “See, we don’t need to drink to have fun”—even then I suspected what I now know is true—namely, that it is more fun to drink and do drugs and have sex than to not do so. It is much more fun.

  You’re probably wondering, if I was an evangelical Christian, what I was doing living with my boyfriend Tom in the first place. Well, the truth is I haven’t been much of a Christian for quite some time—since college, really, although some of the more glaring aftereffects lingered well into my twenties, the pink sweaters, the bad hair. If I’d stopped to give the matter any thought I would have jumped ship before I got to college, because being an evangelical Christian in college is unbelievably tedious. Everybody around you is busy drinking and smoking and trying psychedelic mushrooms and experimenting with lesbianism and sucking Jell-O shots out of the navels of strangers in Cancún during spring break, while you sit around, trying to be good. The worst possible thing to be is an evangelical Christian at an Ivy League university—which is what I was—because you’re not only trying to be good, you’re trying to be smart. You end up fighting the Scopes Monkey Trial over and over again on your dorm room floor—only guess whose side you’re on? Guess who you have to be? Plus, there’s all that time spent sitting around in small circles with other Christians, pondering imponderable questions. Would it be possible, the classic one goes, for God to make a rock so big that He couldn’t lift it? Could He make a black cat that’s white? Could He make a square circle? Then you move on to important matters. Like how far you can go and still be considered a virgin. This is a matter of contentious debate, but let me assure you: it is all true about Christian girls and blowjobs. (It is not, however, true about Christian girls and anal sex, with a few truly pioneering exceptions, only one of whom I happen to have met.)

  It strikes me that a bit of clarification is in order, and that is that there is no real halfway with evangelical Christianity. Blowjobs notwithstanding. It is possible, for example, to be raised as a Catholic and then to grow up and stop obeying the rules and stop going to church and generally have nothing in your life that would remotely indicate to any reasonable human being that you are a Catholic, and yet still be considered, by yourself and everybody else, a Catholic. Not so with evangelicalism. You’re either in or you’re out. You’re either with them or against them. And so, before we go any further here, I would like to make the point that I am currently out. Another point I’d like to make is that this is just the sort of thing I found really irritating about evangelicalism in the first place.

  I hate going on record with that sort of thing, because of my parents. My poor parents. My kind, good, devoutly Christian parents. They really did nothing to deserve this. I mean, I’ve been in therapy for eleven years, so presumably they did something to deserve something, just nothing to deserve this. I hesitate to mention my eleven years of psychotherapy, because you’ll undoubtedly think I’m really screwed up. The question of how a person with normal-sized problems can end up in therapy for eleven years is one that only a person with nothing much wrong with them who’s been in therapy for a long time can understand, so there’s really no use in me trying to explain myself here. The more interesting question is how I managed to afford it. Well, when I graduated from college I was broke and d
epressed and I started going to a public clinic where they only charged me thirteen dollars a session, and before I knew it eleven years had gone by. I didn’t make much progress, mainly because it was a teaching clinic where graduate students worked for a year before heading off into private practice, which meant that every September, my current therapist would hand over my file to the new guy, and the two of us would have to start all over again, at the beginning, with my childhood.

  There is really no need for you to try to keep all of my therapists straight. There have simply been too many of them. My most recent therapist was named William, and he had vertigo. I for one had always suspected that vertigo was a made-up condition, the sort of thing moviemakers come up with to explain why the hero can’t cross the bridge to save the girl, but William had actual vertigo. It got so bad that during our sessions he’d sort of worm down out of his chair and lie down on the floor at my feet. “Go on,” he would say. “I’m just having one of my attacks.”

  “Maybe I should go,” I said the first time this happened.

  “Why should you go?” said William. He was staring up at me from the carpet. “Does this make you uncomfortable?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why are you uncomfortable?” said William.

  “Because my shrink is lying on the floor,” I said.

  “My lying on the floor is a reasonable response to my attack of vertigo,” said William. “Why should that make you uncomfortable?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It just does.”

  “Does it trigger any sexual feelings in you?” said William.

  “None whatsoever.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” he said.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you are attracted to unavailable men, men like Tom, who even though he is your boyfriend is emotionally unavailable to you, and I as your therapist am by definition unavailable.” All of this from the floor.

  “You don’t seem that unavailable, William.”

  “Do you mean you think I have sexual feelings for you?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said.

  “Well, I do,” he said. “Shall we explore them?”

  I should of course have stopped seeing William, but I didn’t. You have to keep in mind that I was paying only thirteen dollars a session, and for thirteen dollars a session I was willing to put up with a certain amount of unconventional behavior on the part of my therapist. And I didn’t want to make any waves at the clinic, because if anybody ever really examined my file, they’d figure out pretty quickly that they should raise my fee. Which is, unfortunately, exactly what happened approximately three weeks before the night of the dinner party. When I showed up for my regular Monday morning appointment, the director of the clinic poked her head into the waiting room and ushered me back to her office. She sat me down in front of her desk and calmly informed me that William wouldn’t be working at the clinic anymore. He’d had to be carted off to the loony bin in a straitjacket and everything, although the director didn’t tell me that part, Yolanda the receptionist did. Apparently it was quite a scene. Anyhow, it turned out that I was the only one of William’s patients who hadn’t complained about him, which is how come I’d ended up in this woman’s office. She figured I must have some sort of problem. Of course, everybody at the clinic had problems, she just figured I must have really BIG problems.

  All of which is to make the simple point that, although I had been in therapy for just over eleven years, I did not, at the time of the events in question—the events that make up this story—have a therapist. Nor, I might add, was I fixed. I did, however, have a certain affinity for, and interest in, and familiarity with the inner self. Which is why, now that I stop to think about it, the fact that all of this came as such a surprise came as such a surprise. I mean, eleven years of psychotherapy! A father who left when I was five! You don’t even have to dig that deep to get at my subconscious—it’s all right out there in my life, masquerading as fate. The truth is, I could draw diagrams of why what happened with me and Tom happened; I just haven’t been able to figure out how you get from understanding why the bad things that are happening to you are happening to the point where you manage to avoid them altogether. That’s the part that eludes me at every turn. That’s the part I’ve never been able to get a straight answer on, not from any of my therapists. I actually put the question to Janis Finkle—my last real therapist, the one who immediately preceded William—at our final session, and she said to me, “You don’t.”

  “You don’t?” I said.

  “You don’t,” said Janis.

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “What do you think the point is?” said Janis.

  Well, I haven’t figured out what the point is. Another thing I haven’t been able to figure out is whether the religion of my childhood is the source of my neurotic problems or the cure for them. I have figured out a few things, of course, but for the most part, none of them seem to apply.

  Three

  LATE THAT SUNDAY NIGHT, MY DOORBELL RANG. I HAD SPENT the previous twenty-four hours at home, alone, waiting for just this moment. And I was fully prepared. I had a long speech worked out in my head, a speech that opened with a blanket condemnation of Tom’s despicable behavior and segued into a psychological study of all three parties involved and eventually worked itself around to the idea that I loved Tom and he loved me, and we could get through this thing together, with the two-pronged proviso that he agree to see a couples’ counselor and promise never to speak to Kate Pearce ever again. It was a pretty good speech, and the truth is I was anxious to try it out. I went over to the front door and peered through the peephole.

  “I have something awful to tell you,” a man who was not Tom said through the door. “Your boyfriend is having an affair with my girlfriend.”

  I unhooked the chain and opened the door.

  “You must be Andre,” I said.

  “How did you know?” he said.

  “I know all about Tom and Kate,” I said, “so I figured you must be Andre.”

  There were several things about Andre’s appearance on my doorstep that made me feel better, but the most obvious was that he was so clearly in worse shape than I was. I’m not talking about what he was wearing (a green tracksuit), or the fact that he obviously hadn’t shaved in some time—rather, that Andre’s going to the trouble of tracking me down and knocking on my front door was so plainly an act of complete and utter desperation that I felt relatively sane in comparison. I let him in, and we sat down at the kitchen table and immediately started in on a bottle ofTom’s good scotch.

  “Tell me everything you know,” Andre said. “And then I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  I didn’t know much. Actually, the only thing I really knew was that Tom and Kate had been having lunch together, and Andre just nodded his head impassively at that, because he already knew about the lunches. Andre, it turned out, knew everything. He’d been spying on the two of them for months—for five months, to be precise, which is exactly as long as the affair had been going on—and whatever he hadn’t been able to figure out by spying, Kate had told him outright when she’d finally broken up with him four days before. She’d wanted him to move out of their apartment, and Andre had stubbornly refused to budge—believing, or so he told me, that they could work things out as long as they didn’t do anything drastic—so she recounted humiliating detail after humiliating detail about her affair with Tom, hoping, I suppose, to appeal to his sense of pride. I’d only known Andre for about fifteen minutes, but I had a sense that appealing to his pride was the wrong approach.

  “And then when she realized I wasn’t going anywhere, she finally left,” Andre said.

  “Where did she go?” I said.

  “That’s one of the things I thought you might know,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t,” I said. “And I don’t see how knowing that would do either of us any good.”

  Andre just loo
ked at me like I was utterly and hopelessly naive. Clearly it would be necessary to ascertain Kate and Tom’s whereabouts if he were to continue spying on them.

  “Why do you want her back so badly?” I said.

  He took a deep breath. “She’s like a drug.”

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  “I can’t get enough of her,” he said.

  We just sat there a moment, Andre with a lovesick look on his face, and just when I was about to suggest that it might be time for him to leave, he turned to me and asked what Tom was like in bed.

  “I’m not going to tell you that,” I said.

  “Come on,” Andre said. “I need to know what I’m up against.”

  “I don’t think how anyone is or isn’t in bed is what this is about.”

  Andre stared at me blankly. “Then what do you think it’s about?” he said.

  “I think Tom’s going through a stage, and he needs to figure some things out.”

  “Really?” said Andre.

  “Yes. And I’m not going to overreact,” I said.

  “You’re very together, you know,” Andre said. “You seem like a very together person.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And you’re nice, too,” he said, nodding his head thoughtfully.

  “Thank you.”

  We sat in silence for a moment.

  “My mother is dying. She has cancer of the pancreas,” he said matter-of-factly, and then he reached across the kitchen table and took hold of my hand.