The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  Now, this made for an awkward moment. I couldn’t tell if we were holding hands because Andre’s mother was dying of pancreatic cancer, or because our lovers had left us, or because we were both drunk. I gently pulled my hand away.

  “I’m sorry,” said Andre.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  I swirled the scotch around in my glass with my liberated hand.

  “I guess you could be right,” Andre said. “It could just be a phase.”

  “I think it’s a stage,” I said, “not a phase.”

  “What’s the difference?” Andre said.

  “A stage implies growth,” I said. “You go through a stage, you come out the other end up a level.”

  “And a phase is what, then, just nailing some stranger?”

  “Yes, and like I said, I don’t think that’s what this is about.”

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Now that we both know about it, it won’t last much longer,” Andre said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She’ll get bored with him,” he said. “And then she’ll kick the shit out of him. And then you’ll get him back.”

  This wasn’t exactly how I pictured Tom coming back to me—brokenhearted, tail between his legs, shit kicked out of him by his demon lover—but it would do. It would have to. I love him, I thought.

  “I love her,” Andre said. It sounded much worse when he said it than when I thought it. “I can’t help myself.”

  “Ninety-five percent of happiness,” I said, “is picking the right person to love.”

  “What’s the other five percent?” said Andre.

  “That I don’t know.”

  Andre eventually left, but not before giving me his card and taking down my phone number and making me swear to alert him if I found out any new information and promising to alert me if he found out any new information. I didn’t see how new information was going to do me any good, especially since the information I had just received was more than enough to send me right over the edge. I mean, if there’s one thing I know about a woman who is like a drug, it’s that she’s better in bed than I am. Not that Tom and I had any major problems in that department, it’s just that I’ve come up with my own definition of great sex as being sex without any need for discussion, and sex without discussion is pretty much impossible for me. Anything without discussion is pretty much impossible for me. Sometimes I wish I could be one of those people I see walking down the street who appear to have no inner world whatsoever—although it’s certainly possible that these people have inner worlds, I suppose that one of the definitions of an inner world is that it is not apparent to others when they see you walking down the street—but you know the sort of people I mean. People who manage to go through life without thinking about everything all the time.

  I know that when something like this happens to you, when your boyfriend or husband leaves you because he’s been having an affair with another woman, you’re supposed to say something like, “It’s not the sex that bothers me, it’s the lying”; but the truth is that in my case it was the sex. I was always very clear on that. Getting all worked up about the lying seemed altogether beside the point. Even after Andre left and I started piecing things together, reconstructing various lies Tom told me about late nights at work and six-hour Saturday afternoon squash tournaments and weekend business trips—all of that was never anything more than an intellectual exercise, a masochistic one to be sure, but still. The part that really got to me, the part that woke me out of a dead sleep, was always Tom and Kate together, Tom and Kate having sex. I thought about it constantly. I’d picture me coming home early from work, unlocking the front door, walking up the stairs, unlocking the door to our apartment, putting my purse on the hall table, kicking off my shoes, walking into the bedroom, and catching them having sex. I’d make a little yelp of surprise and then I’d run away, down the stairs and out the front door, because it seemed like what one would do in such a circumstance, but also because I wanted to see if Tom would chase me. I wanted to see if Tom, in my fantasy, would at least have the common decency to get of bed and wrap a towel around his waist and chase me out the front door yelling, “Jesus, Alison! This is not as bad as it looks!” I played this scenario over in my head so many times that I eventually stopped running away; I’d just walk in and stand in the doorway and shoot them a look of cool disgust, just like Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors, so much like Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors, now that I think about it, that I’m pretty sure I stole the whole thing outright. Even so, I considered that progress.

  I realize I’m in danger of attributing too much importance to sex, if that is possible (which I secretly doubt—but perhaps that’s only because I attribute too much importance to it). I’ve always thought that if I’d had a little more experience in that particular area, if I’d slept with more people, I’d be better off. I’d have more points of reference. I didn’t, though. I worry about telling you how many people I’d slept with, so I’ll just put it at less than five. More than one, less than five.

  And not four or three.

  Part of the problem was that I lost my virginity late, absurdly late really—I was twenty-five, which I think you’ll agree puts me at the freakish end of things—and I probably wouldn’t even have done it then if it weren’t for my therapist, who talked me into it.

  “When did you make this decision?” said Celeste, my therapist at the time, when I finally broke down and told her.

  “When I was thirteen. I was at church camp. I made a pledge,” I said.

  “To whom?” said Celeste.

  “What do you mean, to whom?”

  “To whom did you make this pledge?”

  “To God.”

  “To God,” Celeste repeated, and made a little scribble on her yellow legal pad.

  My belief in God was one of the things Celeste was attempting to rid me of. Well, that’s not entirely fair: she didn’t have a problem with my believing in God, she just didn’t want it to interfere with anything important, like my freedom or my choices or my sex life. Of course, that’s pretty much the whole point of God. You give up some of life’s more interesting perks and in exchange you lose your fear of death.

  “A decision that served you well at age thirteen, might, at age twenty-five, be subject to reevaluation,” said Celeste.

  So, we reevaluated. We went around and around. Celeste compared it to the embargo on Cuban cigars. It made a certain amount of sense in the sixties, but now? With the crumbling of the Berlin Wall? A McDonald’s in Red Square? To be totally honest, I didn’t need much in the way of convincing. I’d been toying with the idea myself ever since Lance Bateman put his hand in my pants in the eleventh grade, but I’d managed to hold off. For a long time I was waiting for my wedding night, and then when that started to seem silly and futile and quasidelusional, for some reason I kept on waiting. I guess I was waiting for a good enough reason to stop waiting.

  That night I went over to see my boyfriend Gil-the-homosexual and I told him that I was finally ready to have sex with him. The penis embargo was over. I said I had discussed it with my therapist, and a decision that worked for me when I was thirteen might not make the most sense for me now that I was twenty-five, and since he was my boyfriend he was the logical candidate for the deflowering. I’d even bought a twelve-pack of condoms on the way over, figuring that upon hearing the news he’d throw me down on the kitchen floor and have his manly way with me, maybe not twelve times, but definitely more than three, which was the only other denomination that condoms came in. Gil, however, did not throw me down on the kitchen floor. He just sat there, polishing his shoes with a new soft-bristle toothbrush, and told me he needed some time to think about it. He wasn’t sure he was completely on board.

  I would like to report that I broke up with him right then and there, that I said something withering and cruel and never looked back, but I didn’t. I had a job for the man to do. I’m very practical that way. I’m not the ty
pe to throw away a perfectly good blender just because you’ve got to jiggle the cord a little to get it started. The idea of starting over completely from scratch, of meeting someone new and going out with him once and then twice and then three times and then telling him about my sexual status and watching him slowly back out of the room, explaining that he wasn’t interested in getting involved in anything serious and, let’s face it, having sex with a twenty-five-year-old virgin is nothing if not serious—that was more than I could bear. So after some jiggling of the cord, Gil-the-homosexual and I had sex, and then not only did I not break up with him, I stayed with him for eight more months, my brain addled not by the sex—the word perfunctory applies—but by the thought that now that I’d slept with him I had to marry him.

  I did not know at the time we were dating that Gil-the-homosexual was in fact gay. I mean, I had my suspicions—you should have seen the man make a bed—but I did my best to ignore them, largely because I was so relieved to have met somebody who was willing to be my boyfriend without having sex with me. You can’t imagine what a find this was. We’d go out about three times a week, and then I’d go sleep over at his place, and we’d make out and cuddle and fall asleep, and the second my feet touched the floor in the morning he’d start in on the bed. He’d pile the pillows and the shams and the bolsters with such precision and flair that it looked like one of those department store beds that you’re not supposed to sit on. That’s another thing—he didn’t like for me to sit on it once it was made. Not even if I needed to put on my shoes. He also made me drink out of paper cups at night because he claimed he couldn’t fall asleep if there were dirty dishes in his sink. I myself have been known to fall asleep when there were dirty dishes in my bed. Let’s just say, it became a point of contention.

  That’s one of the things that happens when you wait so long to have sex: you end up dating men who aren’t all that interested in having it. With you, anyway. And then, if you’re a certain kind of girl, you end up marrying one of them, and he still isn’t all that interested, only now you’re stuck with him because he’s your husband. You do things the right way, by the letter of the law, and then in the end you get totally fucked. That’s one of the things they don’t tell you at church camp. That, and the fact that all this pledging never to have sex gives you hang-ups. I’ll tell you how big my hang-ups are: I’m not even in my own sex fantasies. And by this I don’t mean to suggest that I’m, say, sitting in the corner in an overstuffed armchair smoking a cigarette and watching—I’m not even in the room! I’m someplace else entirely! Quite possibly shopping! And the truth is, the incredibly sad, pathetic truth is, I’m lucky I can even manage to have any sort of sex fantasies at all. It seems to me that most people’s really juicy sex fantasies have their roots in adolescent obsessions, and my adolescent obsession was Jesus, and even I am not screwed up enough to have a sex fantasy about Jesus.

  I started out telling you all of this because I wanted you to understand why sexual confidence wasn’t exactly my strong point, and why Kate being like a drug was precisely the thing that would drive me the most out of my mind with jealousy, but you should also probably know that as upset as I was about Tom leaving me for Kate, the thought did cross my mind that I might finally get to have sex with somebody who a) wasn’t Tom, and b) isn’t gay. And the prospect didn’t entirely lack appeal.

  Four

  WHEN I WOKE UP ON MONDAY MORNING, I FOUND MYSELF staring up at the pattern on the pressed-tin ceiling over the bed, wondering what would become of me. And I mean this in the full Jane Austen sense of the term. What on earth would become of me? When Gil-the-homosexual and I finally broke up—over a ring my Diet Coke made on one of his cherrywood nightstands—I went straight out the next morning and bought a cheap ticket to Prague. I rented a tiny apartment in the Old Town and stayed there for three months. I felt dizzy with my own independence. I was finally free. I drank Turkish coffee and read thick Penguin Classics and took long, soulful walks over bridges. Well, here I was, free again, and all I could think about was Tom. I started to cry. What if he didn’t come to his senses? What if he never came back? What would I do? Who would I date? What would become of me?

  Four years we’d been together. Four years! Well, it’s better than a divorce is what you’re probably thinking. That’s what everybody kept saying to me. At least it’s not a divorce. It’s better than a divorce. And I would say this back to them. I would say, I’m not so sure about that. A divorced woman at least makes sense to people. A divorced woman has only been rejected by one other human being. Dating a divorced woman is like getting a sweater that’s been hanging in someone else’s closet; it didn’t work for them, but maybe . . .

  I realize that’s nonsense, of course. Cordelia’s divorce was truly the most horrific thing I’ve ever witnessed, and even as I lay there that morning, the picture of misery, mentally tracing the tin bumps on the ceiling in an effort to calm myself down, I knew there was really no comparing the two. Still, all this felt bad, and it was happening to me. Which is one of the reasons it came as such a shock to my system, come to think of it. Very little had happened to me for quite some time. One of the things about living in Philadelphia is that the same events tick along so predictably, year after year, the Mummers Parade and the Flower Show and the Book and the Cook and the Jazz Festival and the Beaux Arts Ball, that you get lulled into a kind of a coma. You see the same faces at the same parties, you’re struck by the shock of the same perfect crisp autumn day after the same months of muggy, dank summer, you end up with the same stinky gingko things on the bottom of your shoes when you make the mistake of walking down 22nd Street during gingko fruit season, and after a while you stop noticing that nothing is happening to you, because nothing seems to be happening to anybody else. If anything really big ever happens to anyone who lives in Philadelphia, they end up moving to New York.

  One big thing that happened to somebody I knew, about eight months before all this, was that the publisher of our paper, Sid Hirsch, ended up in the news because his wife was found dead in the bottom of his swimming pool. Now, I’ve always believed that if anybody over the age of about, say, eight, is found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool, it means they were put there by somebody else, so to have this happen to somebody I actually knew, to have my boss’s wife turn up dead at the bottom of the swimming pool behind their Bucks County home—well, it was almost more than I could take. I’d even swum in the pool! We all had. Every August, Sid and his wife had a big pool party for the staff of the paper, and one of the earliest lines of conjecture around the office was whether or not this year’s party would still be on, and if so, if anybody would actually get in the pool. As it turned out, Sid was officially cleared of any wrongdoing, and he permanently canceled the pool party, two facts which should in no way diminish the cloud of creepiness hovering over him in your mind. I’m sorry Sid’s wife is dead, truly I am, but a part of me is almost grateful, because it spares me the bother of having to perform a character assassination on him here.

  I sat up in bed. I realized I had stopped crying. The last thing I wanted to do was to sit in bed and think about Sid Hirsch, so I got up and went to the paper.

  The Philadelphia Times was founded in 1971. It was originally called the People’s Avenger, and then for a while it was just the Avenger, but at some point in the eighties Sid decided to give it a more mainstream name in order to attract advertisers. There were still a few writers kicking around from the Avenger days, and we’d occasionally publish their diatribes on Third World sweatshops and ozone depletion and racial injustice, but mostly we reviewed things. We reviewed books and we reviewed movies and we reviewed albums. We reviewed plays and we reviewed concerts and we reviewed restaurants. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why the voice of my Inner Critic is so loud—too many years spent reviewing things—but the truth is that my Inner Critic sounds just like my mother, so it’s probably not fair to blame my job. Anyhow, along with all the reviews, we printed a bunch of columns and local
event listings, and a truly excessive amount of reader mail. We ran so many reviews and columns and listings and letters, in fact, that there was very little room left in the paper for actual news. We probably wouldn’t have bothered with the news at all if it weren’t for Warren Plotkin. Warren had received a National Newspaper Award early on in his career for an eight-part series on teenage welfare mothers that he’d written for the Philadelphia Daily News. A week later it surfaced that he’d stolen most of it from a graduate dissertation he’d found online, at which point the Daily News fired him, at which point Sid Hirsch took him out to dinner at The Palm and offered him a job as news editor, at two-thirds his Daily News pay. We were lucky to have him. We were lucky to have anybody, really, which is not to say that there was nothing to like about working there. The truth is, there were many things I liked about working for the Times. Not the pay, and not the prestige, both of which were negligible. But I liked that it was the kind of place where you could bring your dog to the office. Not that I had a dog—I just liked knowing that if I ever decided to get one, I’d be able to bring him to the office. And I liked that I could write pretty much anything I wanted to write and then see it in print a week later, virtually unchanged. This is a very seductive state of affairs for a writer, and the fact that the paper was given away for free in cafés and hair salons and juice bars did little to diminish the pleasure. Most of all, though, I liked that the people who worked there were all a little off-center. They were pot addicts and plagiarists and communists and depressives and alcoholics and neurotics and plain old oddballs, which meant that the one thing that has always plagued me, the quality that, no matter what I do with my hair, I never seem able to shake—my uptight bourgeois suburban normalness—there, at least, made me stand out.

  I walked to work. I always walked to work; I got my best ideas that way. I stopped at the Korean market across the street from the office before I went inside. I picked up the Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer and bought a cup of coffee. I crossed the street, and when I got to the front door, I had to set the papers down on the sidewalk at my feet so I could fish around in my bag for my keys. Just as I was about to open the door I heard a church bell ring, which made me look at my watch, which happened to be on the wrist of the hand that was holding the coffee, and I ended up spilling coffee all over the newspapers I’d put on the ground. I made a quick hop to the left and managed to avoid most of the mess; still, the whole thing almost started me crying all over again. I threw the wet newspapers away, and then I walked up the two flights of stairs and made my way down the long, poorly lit hallway towards the bathroom so I could clean myself off.