by Sarah Dunn
Well, there I was, on my way to the bathroom, when I saw the cute guy in the blue shirt. He was walking down the hallway directly towards me, and he had one of those really great walks. I wondered what a cute stranger was doing wandering around in our hallway. Maybe he’s lost, I thought. He smiled at me. Maybe he’s available, I thought. I smiled back. We passed by each other, and I took about three steps, and then I turned my head and looked over my shoulder at his ass. (To this day, I don’t know exactly why I did that. I am not the sort of person who checks out men’s asses. I’m not even all that interested in asses, as a physical characteristic on a man I mean—I’d put good shoulders and a nice chest higher on my list of priorities; possibly even a really attractive pair of hands.) Anyhow, just as I was turning my head to check out his ass, at that exact moment, the guy in the blue shirt turned his head to check out my ass, and we ended up locking eyes, and I laughed twinklingly and he smiled and nodded his head and we both kept right on walking, not missing a beat. I walked past the kitchen and went into the bathroom and locked the door. I did my best with the coffee stains, and then I climbed up on the toilet seat and turned around so I could see my butt in the mirror over the sink. I realized that the cut of my pants made it appear deceptively small (a triumph!), and then I climbed down off the toilet and unlocked the door and headed off to see if I could find out who he was.
I shared an office with Matt, the music editor, and Olivia, the sex columnist. When I walked in, Olivia was at her desk, sorting through a big pile of mail from her readers. She picked up a letter written on pale blue stationery and fluttered it open and began to read it out loud.
“Dear Olivia. After months of ashtanga yoga, I have managed to develop enough flexibility in my spine and neck to be able to gratify myself orally. While understandably pleased with this development, I am worried about sexually transmitted diseases and want to know if it is possible for a person to get AIDS from themselves.”
Olivia looked up at me and tilted her head expectantly.
“Something is seriously wrong with the state of public health education in this country,” I said.
“You think?” she said.
Olivia’s column generally works like this. Philadelphians with various perversions and fetishes and sexual peculiarities send in letters describing in painstaking detail what it is exactly that turns them on. Then they ask her whether they are normal or not. Then she assures them that they are. Once, a woman wrote in saying that she liked to have sex with her German shepherd, and she wanted to know if that was okay. Well, Olivia (who by the way is bisexual) finally came out on the side of decency and morality and restraint and said that having sex with one’s dog was definitely not okay, because—and you could really hear Olivia’s wild, anything-goes, I’ll-fuck-anything-on-two-legs mind churning away, because even Olivia had to know that her arbitrary “two legs” standard wasn’t going to be compelling enough to make this lady give up her new hobby—becausethe dog could not consent. That is the sort of newspaper the Times is. The sort that counsels against bestiality on the grounds that the animal involved can’t articulate the word no.
(Anyhow, just try to be an evangelical Christian, however nominal, however far in the distant past, and work at an alternative newspaper if you want to get an idea of what it would have been like to be a Jew working for the Nazi High Command. I mean, you have to hide it. You have to hide it well. Fortunately, it’s not the sort of thing that tends to come up in normal conversation. But what would happen is that, say, Sid Hirsch would ask me what my father did for a living. Well, one of my fathers is an extremely right-wing Republican entrepreneur who is always doing extremely right-wing things like going to prayer breakfasts with John Ashcroft and attempting to privatize the state prisons in Texas. My other father runs the ministry of a famous evangelical Christian quadriplegic who paints with her mouth and types inspirational books with a stick and sings Jesus songs at Billy Graham crusades. So: “He’s a dentist” is what I would say.)
Matt swung open the door. He stopped in the doorway with a big grin on his face and a magazine rolled up under his arm. “I just lost twelve pounds. Ask me how.”
“Jesus, Matt. Is that my magazine?” said Olivia.
Matt looked down at the copy of Entertainment Weekly under his arm like he was noticing it for the first time. “Maybe.”
“Keep it,” said Olivia.
“Psycho Bathroom Guy was stuck inside,” Matt said. He flopped down on the couch. “I saved him from another day trapped in the bathroom.”
Psycho Bathroom Guy worked in the advertising department down the hall. He had a phobia about touching the bathroom door, although it took the three of us quite a long time to finally come to that conclusion. For a long time, he was just Loitering Bathroom Guy.
“No matter how big my problems are,” Matt said, “at least I am capable of touching a men’s room door.”
“Yes,” Olivia said flatly. “That’s something to cling to.”
“Ask me about my date,” Matt said to me.
“How was your date?” I said.
“I’ll skip the boring parts,” said Matt. He paused for a moment. “So we’re back at her apartment. And she’s got two cats. And we’re making out on the couch, and I hear a big crash coming from the kitchen. She doesn’t want me to investigate. I, of course, insist. Guess what I find in the kitchen.”
“What?” I said.
“Two more cats,” he said.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“She has four cats. But she doesn’t want to be The Girl with Four Cats, so she locks two of them in the kitchen whenever a guy comes over. Which makes her just The Girl with Two Cats, which is in itself so unremarkable it doesn’t even necessitate classification.”
“Why doesn’t she just lock all four of them in there and be The Girl with No Cats?” Olivia said.
“That’s the brilliant part,” said Matt. “She can’t, because of the smell.”
Olivia nodded her head, appreciating this.
“Are you going out with her again?” I said.
“Of course I’m going out with her again. The woman has demonstrated a level of deviousness I have to respect,” said Matt. “If nothing else, I might learn something from her.”
Just as I was about to ask if either of them knew anything about the guy in the blue shirt, Sid Hirsch appeared in the doorway.
“Conference room in five minutes,” said Sid.
“What is it?” I said.
“Big stuff, people,” Sid said. He pounded the doorjamb with his fist three times. “Big stuff.”
I feel kind of bad dragging Jeffrey Greene into this story, and I’d leave out what happened to him if I could, but I can’t. I always loved Jeffrey. Everyone did. He was the managing editor of the paper, and he’d remained firmly rooted in that post for eighteen years. He was kind and intelligent, sweetly and contentedly gay, and orderly to the point where if you told me he had to lick the light switch three times before he turned it off, I’d believe you. Jeffrey Greene was the person who hired me, in fact—not Sid. When I came back from Prague, I sent Jeffrey some old columns I’d written for my college newspaper, and he called me in for an interview. In the middle of our meeting, Sid walked by Jeffrey’s office and stood in the hallway outside the open door. He looked in at me and said, “Man, can you write.” And then he disappeared. I liked Sid for a long time after that, that single compliment garnered him an enormous amount of goodwill, and even though he went on to act like a buffoon and a blowhard and an idiot, for years I believed that deep down he was perceptive and amusing and smart. And then I didn’t. And then I started hating him like everybody else. It was a relief to finally hate Sid wholeheartedly. It was a nice pure emotion, sharp black and white in a world of gray. Anyhow, everyone at the paper had been waiting for Sid to do something really off-the-charts horrible for a long time, something worse than simply underpaying us and belittling us and refusing to turn on the air conditioning until June t
wenty-first and making us put fifty cents in a shoebox every time we wanted a cup of his coffee, and here he’d finally gone and done it: he’d fired Jeffrey Greene.
I found out about it at the staff meeting. We all did. It was quite a shock, actually. I mean, nobody got fired from the Philadelphia Times. This was the place you ended up when you got fired from someplace else. We were all gathered around the conference table, which was really just two old particleboard trestle tables set end to end, when Sid walked in and said quite matter-of-factly, “Jeffrey Greene is no longer with the paper.”
Well, one thing you should probably know about Jeffrey is that I’d always wanted his job. I’d wanted his job for four and a half years. Wanting Jeffrey’s job, come to think of it, was the closest I’d come to having an actual ambition. Well, that’s not entirely true—I had a handful of lofty, unattainable ambitions, but wanting Jeffrey’s job was the only one that could be achieved without any extraordinary effort on my part. I was in line for it, for one thing, and the Times was the sort of place where being in line for something really counted. It was one of the remnants of the place’s hippie past; outsiders and overt power-seekers were considered suspect. And no one else around the office—in line or otherwise—was even remotely qualified for the job. Anyone who’d ever been remotely qualified to take over from Jeffrey had left a long time ago, when it became apparent to them that Jeffrey had no intention of ever leaving. I hadn’t left. I’d stayed for four and a half years, waiting for just this opportunity. And here it was. And I was ready.
“We will all miss Jeffrey. We all love Jeffrey,” Sid said. “I would like to suggest, however, that one of the reasons we love Jeffrey is because we are fearful of change.”
Sid looked straight at me, and for a minute I was afraid he had gotten wind of Tom’s departure and was trying to send me some kind of message. I tried to send him a message back. I’m ready for change, I thought, staring straight at him. Bring it on. I felt a little burst of hopefulness. Maybe this is how it’s supposed to happen, I thought. Maybe Tom was supposed to leave so that I could focus on my career, and then that thing would happen that sometimes happens when a woman redirects her energy away from her relationship and puts it into her work, namely, that the man (Tom) would suddenly find me interesting again. It all made perfect sense.
“There’s someone I’d like you all to meet,” said Sid.
Sid opened the door to his office and motioned to someone outside, who turned out to be the cute guy in the blue shirt from the hallway, who turned out to be taking Jeffrey’s job. All of this information spilled out so quickly that I had no chance to react, which was a good thing, because while it was only just hitting me that I was apparently not a good editor, I’ve always known without a doubt that I am not a good actress.
Five
HIS NAME WAS HENRY WICK, AND HE HAD BEEN A WRITER FORRolling Stone magazine. In fact, that’s just how Sid introduced him, as Henry Wick Who Used to Write for Rolling Stone. It was disgusting how pleased Sid was with this fact—I mean, Sid had been pleased with himself when he managed to hire a notorious plagiarist who’d been fired by the local Daily News, snagging a real writer from Rolling Stone made him practically apoplectic. Anyhow, Sid made a big speech about how he had decided it was time for us as an organization to move to the next level, and how Henry was going to help us get there, and had he forgotten to mention that Henry had written for GQ and Details and had had a feature published in the New York Times Magazine? I will say, to his credit, that Henry looked mildly embarrassed throughout the whole thing. I will also say, again to his credit, that when Sid went around the room and introduced Henry to each of us individually, Henry shook my hand and gave me a big smile and said quite charmingly, “Nice to finally meet you face to face.” And then he and Sid locked themselves in the conference room for the rest of the day, presumably plotting how exactly to go about turning the Philadelphia Times into Rolling Stone.
Bonnie took me to the Opera Café for lunch on Wednesday to cheer me up. I needed cheering up. Tom had left me. My career was in the toilet. I’d gotten caught checking out my new boss’s ass. And I know there are women who like drama, who create little soap operas just so they can feel like they are the star of their own life, but I am not one of them. In fact, it occurs to me that that was part of the reason I was with Tom in the first place: he didn’t go in for drama. If I ever tried to get dramatic, he’d go into the other room.
“Larry and I have someone we want to fix you up with,” Bonnie said after we sat down.
“Tom left five days ago,” I said.
“So?”
“So I’m still in love with him,” I said.
“That’s what makes it so perfect,” said Bonnie. “If you’re still in love with Tom, it’ll be easy for you to act like a normal person. Nothing’s at stake for you. You’re just having dinner.”
You should probably know that six years before all of this happened, Bonnie gave me the telephone number of her cousin Jake, who was working as a management consultant and happened to be passing through Philadelphia. He claims I called him eight times. This piece of false information made its way back to Bonnie via a complex communication network consisting of her aunt and her cousins and her mother and her sister Lisa, and as a result Bonnie and her entire extended family are convinced I behave like a mental patient whenever a single man is involved.
“You know how they say you’re supposed to act like you’re not interested?” Bonnie said. “Well, you won’t be acting. You aren’t interested.”
“If I’m not interested, then why am I out on this date?” I said.
“Think of it as practice,” she said.
“Wait,” I said. “Is this guy a real date or a practice date?”
“If you like him he’s real, and if you don’t he’s practice.”
“We’ve already established I can’t like him, because I’m still in love with Tom, so that means he’s practice, and the last thing I’m interested in at this point in my life is a practice date,” I said.
“You haven’t been out there in a while. Dating at thirty-three is different than dating at twenty-eight.”
“First of all, I’m thirty-two. Second of all, you got married when you were twelve, so how do you know what dating at thirty-three is like?” I said. “Information I have only a theoretical interest in, seeing as I am thirty-two.”
“When you’re thirty-two, or thirty-three, basically when the word thirty with or without a hyphen can be used to describe you, men think you want to have a baby. They watch the news. They read the papers. They’re familiar with escalating rates of mongoloidism. They think, she’s nice, but if I start dating her now, in six months she’ll be putting the screws to me. If you’re twenty-eight, they think there’s still breathing room. They’re more relaxed, you’re more relaxed, everything has a better chance of working out.”
“I’ve got breathing room,” I said.
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do.”
“Alison, you wasted your breathing room on Tom.”
Placido Domingo started singing a song from West Side Story. Maybe Bonnie’s right, I thought. Maybe this isn’t just another romantic failure. Maybe this is the one that’s going to ruin my life, the one to which all of my future disappointments will be traced—my inability to conceive children, my parents being too old to see my adopted daughter, Ping, graduate from college, the fact that I end up dying unloved and alone. I picked at the goat cheese on my salad. I wondered if I’d have to fly to China to pick up Ping, or if they’d just stick her on a plane and we’d meet up in an airport lounge. I’ve never really wanted to go to China.
“I’m not saying they’re right,” Bonnie said. “You have plenty of time. Wendy Wasserstein had a baby when she was forty-eight.”
“The last thing I want to do when I’m forty-eight years old is have a baby with some defrosted sperm and my mother holding my hand in the delivery room,” I said.
“Your
mother will be almost eighty by then,” Bonnie said. “Maybe she’ll be dead.”
“The women in my family live a very long time.”
The women in my family do, in fact, live a very long time. My great-aunt Ellie was still mowing her neighbor’s lawn when she was a hundred and seven years old. My grandmother—who everybody calls Grandma Texas even though she lives in Idaho—is ninety-four, and she still drives her 1984 Chrysler LeBaron every day (although as an accommodation to her age she more or less exclusively limits herself to right turns), and she still volunteers at St. Luke’s Hospital, even though St. Luke’s Hospital is no longer affiliated with the Catholic Church and is owned instead by a large HMO that nonetheless happily lets her run the information desk for three hours every Tuesday morning, for free. I called Grandma Texas a few days after Tom left. I told her what had happened, and at some point I made what I thought was a little joke. What I said was, “Now I’m the family old maid.” “Oh, don’t be silly,” Grandma Texas said, in a kind, grandmotherly tone; “Claire is.” Now, it is true that my cousin Claire is thirty-eight years old and not married. It is also true that Claire is a lesbian, although nobody has gotten around to telling Grandma Texas that fact, who thinks that Claire and her roommate, Karen, are just two career girls who are down on their luck in the man department. Claire and Karen have lived together for eleven years, and every December they send out Christmas cards featuring a photo of the two of them hugging some stray dog they found limping around behind an Exxon station, and they both have let themselves go to such an extent that the consensus is that they’re incredibly lucky to have one another. It was precisely this line of thinking that made me realize, after I got off the phone with Grandma Texas, that you couldn’t really consider Claire an old maid, seeing as she’d found what appeared to be lasting happiness with another human being, which in turn made me face the following fact: I was the family old maid. It was such a depressing thought, really, that I didn’t even stop to think how truly idiotic it was. But something happens to a person in a situation like this. At least, something happened to me.
