The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  “Why are you all dressed up?” said Matt.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Yes you are. Olivia,” Matt said, “don’t you think Alison looks exceptionally good this morning?”

  Olivia looked me up and down slowly and nodded her head.

  “Tom and I broke up,” I said.

  “What?” Olivia said. “When did this happen?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “You just wanted to know why I look good, and now you know.”

  “Because you’re back on the prowl,” said Matt.

  “I’m not on the prowl,” I said. “I just felt bad, so I figured I should try to look as good as possible so I wouldn’t end up seeing myself in a mirror and feeling even worse.”

  “What happened?” said Olivia.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “Of course you want to talk about it,” said Olivia. “Tell us what happened.”

  I looked at the two of them. It was clear I wasn’t going to get away with not talking about it. “He thinks we’re growing apart.”

  “Bullshit,” said Olivia.

  “Why is that necessarily bullshit?” Matt said to Olivia. “Maybe they were growing apart.”

  “That’s just the kind of bullshit excuse men always come up with,” Olivia said. “It means he wants to fuck strangers, that’s what it means.”

  “Actually, I’m pretty sure he knows who he wants to fuck,” I said.

  “Who?” said Olivia.

  “Her name is Kate Pearce,” I said. “And he’s already fucking her.”

  “How do you know that?” said Olivia.

  “It’s been going on since May,” I said.

  “He told you that?” said Olivia.

  “He said he was in love with somebody else. I figured out the rest.”

  Olivia walked over and sat one of her haunches on my desk. “Who is she?” said Olivia.

  I told them a little about Kate. I said she was bony, and her hair stuck to her head like a helmet. I said she had a little-girl frailty that made me want to puke. I told them she had given Tom a lasagna for his birthday, and I should have known then where this all was headed, but I didn’t. (I’m tempted to leave the lasagna out of this, because it’s kind of a confusing detail, as details go—Kate Pearce is not the lasagna-making type—but Kate did in fact make a lasagna for Tom, early on, before the sex part of their affair started, and I’ll tell you something: it was a very crafty move.)

  “What do you mean, bony?” Matt said. “You mean thin?”

  “She means bony,” Olivia said. “There is still such a thing as bony.”

  “No. He’s right. She’s thin,” I said. “She’s beautiful. She’s thin and beautiful.”

  “She’s new,”said Olivia.

  “That’s the thing. She’s not new,” I said. “They went out for three years in college, and then she dumped him.” Then I told Matt and Olivia my theory, which I had spent the greater part of the past week developing. When Tom was two years old, his mother ran off to Hollywood to become a movie star, although the closest she got was a small recurring role as a nurse on a show called Daniel Denby, Medical Doctor. Tom’s grandmother, who ended up raising him, would put him in his pajamas and sit him down in front of the television set every Thursday night to see if he could catch a glimpse of his mother, although even that often ended in disappointment, because her part was so small and she got cut out of episodes at random. All of which, it seemed to me, explained a few things about Tom’s psychology. He had a certain amount of anger towards women. He had a pronounced unconscious longing for the lost mother. And my theory was that Kate’s reentry into Tom’s life after all these years had triggered those feelings and he was powerless to resist them.

  “Yes,” said Olivia. “He’s reenacting his childhood psychodrama.”

  Matt turned to me and said, “And guess who’s Grandma.”

  I slumped my head down on my desk.

  Olivia started to pace around the office. “It’s perfect. He wants the woman who abandoned him. He can’t help it. It’s hardwired into him. His seeming inability to commit to Grandma —”

  “Please,” I said.

  “This time, though, Mommy wants him too. They start having that incredibly hot sex that you can only have when it’s really about something else, something primal, something transgressive, only Tom doesn’t know that is what’s going on. He just thinks he’s found his soul mate. He thinks he’s found his missing piece.”

  “I feel sick,” I said.

  Olivia looked at me. “Then again, I could be wrong,” she said.

  “I’m going to kill myself,” I said.

  “God knows I’ve been wrong before,” said Olivia.

  “Guys want to have sex with their old girlfriends. End of story,” Matt said. Then he turned to Olivia. “And I can’t believe you get paid to write an advice column.”

  Olivia left to get a cup of coffee, and after a bit Matt came over and sat on the edge of my desk.

  “You realize you’re much better off this way,” Matt said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “When somebody leaves you, it’s always better if they leave you to be with somebody else,” said Matt.

  “Why is that?” I said.

  “Because otherwise it means they just really, really can’t stand you.”

  I just looked at him.

  “It’s much less personal this way,” said Matt.

  “It feels pretty personal,” I said.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  Nine

  I MET BOB, MY BLIND DATE, AT AN ITALIAN RESTAURANT ON Tuesday night after work. I walked in and spotted him instantly. He was the bald guy sitting at the bar. He paid for his drink, and then we sat down at a table.

  “How old are you?” said Bob. “Do you mind if I ask?”

  “Thirty-two,” I said. “And no, I don’t mind. How old are you?”

  “Forty-six,” he said.

  “You’re forty-six?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Bob.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just surprised Bonnie didn’t mention our age difference.”

  “I don’t consider this an age difference,” said Bob.

  “You don’t consider fourteen years an age difference?” I said.

  “Not really, no,” he said.

  “When was the last time you dated a sixty-year-old?” I said.

  Bob leaned back in his chair and looked at me through half-closed eyes in a way that I’m sure he believed was incredibly seductive. “Larry told me you might be trouble.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. I just got the impression that you might be trouble,” said Bob. “Does my age bother you?”

  “Kind of, yes,” I said.

  “How come?”

  “Because, someday, when I’m forty, maybe I’ll want to go out with a guy who’s forty-six and single and a doctor and I won’t be able to because you’ll all be out on dates with thirty-two-year-olds with fresher eggs.”

  “Physiologically speaking, a thirty-two-year-old’s eggs aren’t really that fresh,” said Bob. He got all medically, in that way that doctors sometimes get. “The idea of thirty-five being the cutoff is sort of a myth. Fertility itself dramatically decreases from thirty-five on, but you start seeing statistically significant increases in chromosomal irregularities much earlier.”

  “How much earlier?” I said.

  “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine. If I were a woman, I would’ve had all my kids by thirty. It’s not a popular position these days, of course, but it’s scientifically sound.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You cannot have this conversation with women on dates,” I finally said.

  “And why is that?” said Bob.

  “Because,” I said. “Because I forbid it.�
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  He laughed. “You forbid it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “As a human being who is forced to share this planet with you, I forbid you from ever having this conversation with another woman with whom you are on a date.”

  “I wouldn’t have this conversation with you if you were any older. Trust me. I get fixed up with a lot of thirty-five-year-olds and I never even mention it,” said Bob. “I mean, a single thirty-five-year-old woman takes one look at me and thinks, here’s my chance to get a baby in under the wire and dramatically decrease my chance of getting breast cancer.”

  Maybe I should throw something at him, I thought. One of these crusty dinner rolls. Just pelt him with it.

  “I just read an interesting article,” he said. “It claimed that women who are in their forties who are having trouble getting pregnant shouldn’t worry, because the technology is evolving so fast, they can just wait another twenty years and have a baby in their sixties.”

  That’s it, I thought. I picked up my dinner roll and threw it at him. It glanced off his right temple and then hit the floor and rolled a few feet before coming to rest underneath a neighboring table. Bob shut up for a second, and then he started to laugh. He was a much better sport about it than I would have expected, actually. He laughed and laughed, like getting hit in the head with a piece of bread was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him.

  “See, that’s great. That’s great. Most girls wouldn’t do that. Throw food at a blind date.”

  “It was a first for me,” I said.

  “Anyway,” said Bob. “You don’t have anything to worry about. You won’t still be dating when you’re forty.”

  “How do you know that?” I said.

  “Because I know,” said Bob. “I know what’s out there.”

  There were many things that were bothering me about this date, and I found myself, as I sat there, listening to Bob tell me what exactly it was that was wrong with the women who were still “out there,” trying to distill it down to its essence. I finally put my finger on it. Bob thought he was the prize. It didn’t matter that he was fourteen years my senior. It didn’t matter that he was dull, or that he had no hair to speak of, or even that the tip of his nose moved ever so slightly whenever his upper lip touched his lower one. Still, somehow, Bob got to be the prize. And I don’t mean to make it sound like I had nothing to do with it—I found myself thinking he was the prize too! I didn’t even like him, and still I considered him the prize. And lest you think it was because he was a doctor, let me say that I associate the desire to marry a doctor with a particular order of bourgeois thinking I have somehow miraculously been spared, so it wasn’t that. It was worse than that. It was that he was a chair. Life was a game of musical chairs, and it was somehow clear to both Bob and me that when the music stopped, somebody would be sitting on him and I just might be left standing.

  I spent the rest of the evening playing with this idea, rolling it around in my mind, trying to see it from every angle, and as I did, it slowly revealed itself to me to be what it actually was, which was utterly ridiculous. If one of us is a chair on this date, I finally decided, it’s me. I’m the chair. It felt good, getting to be the chair. Now that I stop to think about it, I wonder if this is the way a certain type of man feels whenever he goes out with a woman who falls shy of Christy Turlington in the looks department. I have no idea how things work if one of the people on a date looks like Christy Turlington—surely a different set of rules applies—but if there is anything that interests me less than the problems of unbelievably beautiful women, it is the problems of men who want to date unbelievably beautiful women. Anyhow, I sat through the remainder of my dinner with Bob awash in a sense of my own chairness, which at the time felt dangerously close to healthy self-esteem, although I see now that it wasn’t. I see now that the fact that I’d managed to flip the whole thing over on its head didn’t mean anything more than that: I’d managed to flip the whole thing over on its head. Still, it felt good at the time and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t.

  I was so preoccupied, really, thinking things silently to myself that it wasn’t until midway through dessert that I realized I’d made my way through this date being completely and uncharacteristically low-key. I was so low-key I hardly recognized myself. I didn’t even have that feeling I always have on blind dates—I’d only been on two blind dates in my life, but I recall quite plainly having this particular feeling while on both of them—where you try to make the other person fall for you simply so whoever did the fixing up will be convinced that you’re desirable. Fuck that, I remember thinking as I looked across the table at Bob, who was droning on about his time-share in Maui, the tip of his nose dipping every time he encountered a word containing a B, an M, or a P. I’m desirable. I’m the chair!

  Bob, for his part, didn’t seem to notice that I wasn’t saying much. He paid the check, and we walked up Walnut Street towards my apartment. When we got to Rittenhouse Square, we walked across it, towards the fountain, which was lit up and running. It was really quite beautiful.

  “Do you believe in love?” Bob said to me when we reached the fountain.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you believe in love?” said Bob.

  “Of course I do.”

  “No. Really think about it.”

  “Everybody believes in love,” I said.

  “Everybody thinks that they believe in love,” said Bob. “But if everybody actually did, things would be much different.”

  I started to worry where all this was headed. I once went on a terrifically bad first date with a guy who, when I told him I was ready to go home, reached across the table and took one of my hands in his and said, “If we’re going to have problems, let’s just have them.” Perhaps my new understated charm was more powerful than I thought.

  “I feel like I should tell you that I’m not going to call you,” Bob said when we got to my front door.

  Or perhaps not.

  “I’m at a point in my life where I like to be honest with the women that I go out with. It’s a thing with me.”

  “That’s very considerate of you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Bob said. “That’s why I do it.”

  I opened the front door and stepped inside. Then I turned and looked at him.

  “I feel like I should tell you that if you had called me, I would have waited two weeks to call you back, and then done so only at a time when I was certain you’d be at work, at which point I’d have said something vague and unconvincing into your machine about how busy I was, and how I’d give you a call when I came up for air. And then I never would have,” I said. “Come up for air, I mean.”

  I smiled sweetly and shut the door in his face.

  Ten minutes later my phone rang.

  “How was your date?”

  It was Henry.

  “Words cannot describe it,” I said.

  “Give me the high point and the low point.”

  “Well,” I said. “I had to throw a dinner roll at his head to make him shut up.”

  He laughed. “And the high point?”

  “There was no high point,” I said.

  “Come on. There had to be something.”

  This moment is the high point.

  “My salmon wasn’t bad,” I said.

  “At least you got a nice piece of fish out of it,” said Henry. “Can I stop by?”

  “Now?” I looked at the clock in the kitchen. It was past eleven.

  “I’m in your neighborhood,” Henry said. “I’m at a pay phone. I’m standing next to a gigantic garbage can with a padlock on it. So the garbage cannot escape.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “How about this. I’m going to pretend that I got cut off, and then I’ll show up on your doorstep, at which point you can do with me what you will.”

  The phone clicked off, and I did a little dance.

  I felt so close to Henry after we had sex that night that we ended up having
one of those conversations where you feel like there is no use hiding anything anymore, you’ve just given yourself so entirely to the other person that you feel like running around your apartment and opening up your drawers and closets and cabinets and pulling out all sorts of shameful things and arraying them on the bedspread and shouting, “Look at this! And this! But love me!”

  “Promise you won’t laugh,” I said.

  “I promise,” Henry said.

  “Three.”

  He started to laugh.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just, three,” said Henry. He cocked his head up on his palm and looked at me with almost scientific interest. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two,” I said.

  “That’s one a decade,” said Henry.

  “I wasn’t having sex when I was ten.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “So, does that pose some sort of problem for you?” I said.

  “I don’t think so. It’s kind of sweet,” he said. “I suddenly feel this strange compulsion to kiss you on your forehead.”

  He leaned over and kissed my forehead.

  “Tell me about them,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The Big Three.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Wait,” said Henry. “I’m number three?”

  “Didn’t I just tell you that?”

  “I thought I was number four,” Henry said. “I thought you meant three besides me.”

  “You’re number three.”

  “Oh, God, that’s, that’s . . . tragic. Tragic is what that is. That is a tragedy. You are a one-woman humanitarian crisis.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “No. You were right to tell me. I just feel like I should have done better work here. Given you my A material.”

  “That wasn’t your A material?”

  “I don’t know what that was,” Henry said. “That was my slightly drunk, ringing-from-a-pay-phone material. You deserve better.”

  “Next time,” I said.