by Sarah Dunn
“That’s a good story.”
“I know. I’m thinking of using it when I’m out on dates,” said Matt. “How do I come off?”
“Funny. Perceptive,” I said. “Slightly unbalanced.”
I got up to get a glass of water. I stood at the sink, filling it up. I looked over my shoulder at Matt, who was sitting at the table. He had a look on his face.
“What?” I said.
“Your ass is looking good these days,” said Matt.
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“Why not? It’s a compliment.”
“I just don’t like the idea that somebody I know is monitoring my ass,” I said. “Good or bad. I just don’t like it.”
“Fine. I’ll discontinue my entire Alison’s-ass monitoring program,” he said.
I sat back down at the table.
“Why don’t you monitor Olivia’s ass instead.”
“Oh, I do.”
Later, we went upstairs and sat on the couch. Matt had opened a second bottle of wine, which we were most of the way through. I tucked the edges of an afghan under my legs.
“There’s nothing worse than a Jewish funeral,” Matt said, “because we have no afterlife.”
“You must have something,” I said.
“When I was a kid I asked my dad, Dad, when I die, will I go to heaven? No, he says. Jews don’t believe in heaven. Well, what do we believe in instead? I asked him. Nothing, the man tells me.”
“He really said that? Nothing?”
“Nothing,” said Matt. “I was nine years old at the time. Which means that the existential crisis brought on by that ‘nothing’ has passed the quarter-century mark. And most of the time they manage to gloss over it. But at a funeral, you know, the question’s gonna come up.”
“So what do they say?”
He swirled the wine around in his glass. “Apparently Aunt Mitzie is going to live on in my memory. Which is unfortunate for her, because I spend very little time thinking about dead people,” Matt said. “You’re Catholic, right?”
“Protestant, actually.”
“Same thing,” he said. “At least you get heaven. At least you get angels and tiny harps and ‘follow the white light.’”
In point of fact, I don’t think we get to follow the white light, but that seemed to be quibbling, so I didn’t say anything.
“Even if it’s not true,” said Matt, “sometimes it would be nice to think it was true.”
We were both quiet for a moment. My head was starting to spin from all the wine.
“So,” Matt said. He got a very serious look on his face. “Wanna fuck?”
I gave a short, surprised laugh.
“No,” I said. “But thanks for asking.”
“I’m nothing if not a gentleman,” said Matt. “Have some more wine. You might change your mind.”
“I think I need to sleep,” I said. I remembered something Matt had said about the girl with four cats. “I might get in your bed and sleep with you but not sleep with you.”
“I knew you were that girl,” said Matt.
We went upstairs. Matt loaned me a T-shirt and a pair of boxers. I went into the bathroom to change, and then I got into bed. Matt has a surprisingly comfortable bed. It’s huge, and it takes up so much space that when you want to get in or out you can’t come in from the sides, because the walls are so close; you have to climb up from the foot. Matt turned out the light and crawled up into bed beside me. He put his arms around me, and after a few minutes I started to drift off to sleep.
“When you were in grade school,” Matt said, “were you one of those girls who, when you loaned somebody a pencil, said, ‘make sure I get that back’?”
“No.”
“Just checking.”
Fourteen
I MET TOM HATHAWAY AT A DINNER PARTY GIVEN BY MY FRIEND Nina Peeble. Nina used to be my very best friend, and then for a while she wasn’t my friend at all, but by the time she threw the dinner party where I met Tom, we were friends again. I remember thinking that night when I got home how happy I was that Nina and I were friends again, because if we hadn’t made up I wouldn’t have been invited to her dinner party, and if I hadn’t gone to her dinner party I wouldn’t have met the man I was going to marry, and if I hadn’t met the man I was going to marry at that particular party I quite possibly never would have met him at all, and the rest of my life would have been wasted, searching for him.
“I don’t know,” Nina said the next day, when I called her up and asked about Tom.
“What’s wrong with him?” I said.
“Nothing,” said Nina.
“What is it,” I said.
“That thing with his nose doesn’t bug you?” she said.
“What’s wrong with his nose?” I said.
“If you didn’t notice it, then that’s great,” said Nina.
“Notice what?” I said.
“Nothing,” Nina said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Two weeks later, Tom Hathaway called me and asked me out to dinner. Nina had arranged the whole thing. It’s impossible to convey, really, just how good Nina Peeble is at that sort of thing. She managed to fix up her brother Jack with an OB/ GYN he saw on the Today show doing a segment on perimenopause; six months later they were engaged. Anyway, it was very kind of her, and it was certainly more than I had a right to expect, given our complex history.
It is my belief that all successful female friendships fall into the same basic paradigm: one person gets to be the girl and the other one has to be the boy. I was just about to claim that this has nothing whatsoever to do with lesbianism, but now that I think about it, I don’t think that’s true; what I’m talking about, in fact, is a nonsexual version of the same agreement you see in lesbian couples, where the girl is the girl and the boy is the boy and both parties are more or less fine with it. Now, the interesting thing about me is that in some friendships I’m the girl and in others I’m the boy. With Bonnie, for example, I’m the girl—mainly because she’s married and has three kids and isn’t really interested in being the girl anymore; and with my friend Angie, I’m the girl—because Angie is much too sensible to want to be the girl; but with Nina Peeble, I’m the boy. I always have been. It was clear to me that if Nina and I were going to be friends I’d have to be the boy before I even met her, because I happened to see the inside of her underwear drawer. She was assigned to be my roommate my freshman year in college, and by the time I showed up on move-in day she was already settled in and off to the campus bookstore, and while I was looking for a place to put my stuff I pulled open what turned out to be her underwear drawer. There were rows and rows and rows of perfectly folded pastel underpants, lovingly arranged with little dividers and satin sachets and tiny boxes holding God knows what, and I knew immediately that this was a woman with whom I could not compete.
The problem with this arrangement, of course, is that the person who is forced to be the boy eventually starts to resent it. My resentment towards Nina took eight years to flower, and when it did, it took the following form: I slept over at her old boyfriend’s apartment and almost had sex with him and then I called her up and told her about it. Of course, I wasn’t conscious that that was my motivation at the time; I thought I really liked him. His name was Andy Bass, and he was four hundred and fifty pages deep into a novel he was writing about a twelfth-century pilgrim who was journeying to Santiago de Compostela with a scallop shell tied around his neck, and his apartment was piled with books on monastic orders and medieval architecture and the Black Death, and the night I slept over I had to wear his ski gloves to bed because his heat had been turned off by the utility company. We stayed up most of the night, making out and talking about Rilke and Foucault, and then at six o’clock the next morning he jumped out of bed and ran outside and moved his car to the opposite curb to avoid getting a parking ticket from the street sweepers. For some reason I found him appealing. Anyhow, it was a stupid thing to do, getting involved with him in the f
irst place, and when I told Nina she was understandably upset (although, to be fair, Nina and Andy hadn’t seen each other in four years and were by all accounts completely over—by that point in her life, Nina Peeble was more or less exclusively dating investment bankers and future congressmen), and, as a result, she refused to speak to me for two years. But then, just as suddenly as it began, it ended. Nina called me on my birthday and told me she missed me and she forgave me and she wanted to be friends again, and she was throwing one of her dinner parties, and would I like to come along. I said I would; and I went; and there was Tom.
I managed to create a rather elaborate hypothetical personality for Tom based on the two anecdotes he shared with the table at the party. The first one was about some legal work he was doing for three orphans who’d been abused by their foster mother and fed nothing but Wonder Bread and ketchup soup. The second had to do with six weeks he’d spent in Alaska, alone, kayaking through the interior. Well. Here was a man who cared about orphans. Here was a man who wasn’t afraid of bears. Here was a man who knew how to catch a salmon by tying a fishing line to the back of his kayak. I don’t ever expect to find myself in a situation in which I need a man who can catch a salmon by tying a fishing line to the back of his kayak, but still. You never know.
By the time Nina Peeble persuaded Tom to take me out to dinner, I was out of my mind, really, with fantasies of the two of us kayaking through untamed wilderness with our two biological children and the adorable, freckle-faced orphans we’d adopted, and I was convinced that it would show. My only hope, it seemed to me, was to pretend that I wasn’t interested in him at all—I figured the two poles would cancel each other out and I’d end up seeming relatively normal. So, when Tom showed up at my front door for our date, I searched hard for flaws. He was as tall as I remembered, and his shoulders were just as broad, but Nina had been right about his nose—it veered off a little to the left. Nina would never consider dating a man with a nose that veered, but Nina could afford to be picky. I’d given up on picky. It could be argued that I’d skipped over picky altogether—how else could you explain my nineteen months with Gil-the-homosexual?—but the truth is that Gil had been the classic Good On Paper boyfriend, and in my mid-twenties pickiness I’d selected him over all sorts of more obviously flawed yet heterosexual options. Anyhow, Tom’s nose is what keeps him from being conventionally good-looking, and I’ve always been grateful for that. It’s just noticeable enough to make you think he might have encountered some sort of trauma in the birth canal. (Years later, I happened to mention a theory to my therapist Janis Finkle—that maybe the reason Tom was feeling suffocated in our relationship was because he had gotten stuck in the birth canal—and Janis said to me, “Maybe he feels suffocated in your relationship because you’re suffocating him.”)
“What the hell happened last night?” Nina said when she called me the next morning.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Tom thinks you can’t stand him,” said Nina.
“I was trying to seem disinterested,” I said.
“Well, you succeeded.”
“Shit.”
“He said you kept staring at his nose.”
“Oh, God.”
“I told you it was bad,” Nina said. “You didn’t believe me.”
“I really don’t mind it,” I said.
“A nose belongs in the center of the face,” Nina said.
“I think I’m in love with him.”
“Oh, dear,” Nina said. “Let me see what I can do.”
So Nina went to work again, and Tom called me again, and we went out to dinner again, and afterwards, in a particularly valiant effort to not appear disinterested, I invited him back to my apartment and went to bed with him. This was not exactly my style, but look at what my style had gotten me: I’d had a single gay lover who was walking around with the last name of a Chinese woman who’d dumped him for an Argentinean salsa instructor. Perhaps it was time for a new approach. So when Tom walked me home, I invited him up, and just as I was unlocking the door to my apartment building he put his hands firmly on my shoulders and turned me around. And then he kissed me.
“You know, rats won’t mate with each other if they don’t like the way the other one tastes,” said Tom.
“How come?” I said.
“That’s how they tell if they’re a good genetic match,” he said. “If they like the way the other one tastes, then they’re a good match.”
He kissed me again.
“I like the way you taste,” said Tom.
“I like the way you taste, too,” I said.
I realize that that doesn’t sound at all romantic, but you’re going to have to trust me on this one. You have to trust me here because it’s hard, really hard, to try to explain what it is exactly that made you fall in love with a person. The parts that make you fall out of love, that’s easy. The treachery and the infidelity and the lies and the minor cruelties—those things are considerably easy to get across. But I couldn’t in good conscience leave out the stuff about our first kiss and the rats tasting each other, because it’s representative of an entire side of Tom that I quickly came to love, which I think of as his Mr. Wizard side. For the first few months of our relationship, in fact, it seemed like whenever we weren’t having sex, Tom was explaining something to me. How they make a seedless watermelon seedless. How those clocks that plug into a potato work. Why our kids would have blue eyes but not necessarily blond hair. One time, when we drove out to Lancaster for the weekend, he walked me out into the middle of an alfalfa field and used the beam of his flashlight to point out the constellations to me, and then we went back to the bed-and-breakfast and had sex in what turned out to be a ninety-year-old wingback chair, which the proprietors proceeded to remove from our room the next morning while we were off having brunch, along with the Oriental rug.
“You know what’s weird?” Tom said to me the next morning.
“What?”
“This feels exactly the way it’s supposed to feel,” Tom said. “In my experience, very few things in life feel exactly the way they’re supposed to feel.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Do you?” he said.
“I do.”
“Good,” he said. “That means you love me, too.”
And I did. I loved him and he loved me, and everything was good for a long, long time. It was a relationship. We were a couple. We did Thanksgiving at his grandparents’ house and Christmas at my parents’ house and New Year’s Eve with our friends Darren and Wendy, and once, early on, we even carved a pumpkin together for Halloween. When people we knew got married, we gave them wedding presents as a unit, and when Sid’s wife ended up dead at the bottom of his swimming pool I sent an elegant arrangement of white lilies from the both of us, and my sister’s kids called us Auntie Alison and Uncle Tom. I was happy. I was relaxed. But, every so often, something would happen that would remind me that it was all an illusion—no, illusion is the wrong word; it was real, but it was temporary. It was a temporary situation.
Like Tom would decide to buy a new couch.
“What’s wrong with your couch?” I said.
“Nothing. I’m just tired of it,” said Tom.
“I’m not sure about this one,” I said when I saw it in the showroom. (This was the kind of couch you’d see in a showroom.)
“What’s the matter with it?” said Tom.
“It doesn’t really go with anything,” I said.
“It’s black,” he said. “Black goes with everything.”
“Black shoes go with everything,” I said. “A black leather couch only goes with, I don’t know, Buck Rogers furniture.”
“Well, I like it,” Tom said.
Tom bought the couch. Next, he brought home a jagged-edged glass-topped coffee table. Then it was a truly horrible entertainment console. Through it all, I kept my mouth shut. I tried not to push. I tried desperately to be the kind of woman who has her shit so completely together
that she doesn’t even notice that her boyfriend of three years is making a series of high-end home purchasing decisions without so much as considering whether or not said purchases could ever blend in with the tasteful, non-Buck-Rogers furniture she has been slowly accumulating all of her adult life. Any man who doesn’t have trouble with commitment is already committed to somebody else, I’d remind myself. Go slow. Give the man his space. The couch can always go in his study.
Still, every so often, something inside me would snap.
“You think you don’t have issues, but you do,” I said to Tom one day after I got home from therapy.
“What are my issues?” said Tom.
“I’m not going to tell you,” I said.
“Give me one issue,” said Tom.
“Okay,” I said. “Your mother.”
“What about my mother?”
I took a deep breath. “You have unresolved feelings of anger towards your mother.”
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” I said.
“I love my mother,” he said.
“You just think you do,” I said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” said Tom.
“It means that everybody thinks that they love their mother, and that their mother loves them, until one day they stop to really think about it,” I said. “Maybe they do, or maybe they don’t, but either way, that’s when all their issues start to come up.”
“Maybe I don’t want my issues to come up.”
“That’s what’s keeping our relationship from going to the next level.”
“I like this level,” Tom said. “I’m comfortable at this level.”
“Because you’re angry with your mother.”
(Okay, ladies: beware of men who hate their mothers. Because a man who hates his mother will end up hating you. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get a man to admit that he hates his mother. If you try to draw one out on the subject, he will simply become convinced that you hate his mother, which he will then use as an excuse to start hating you when really, the person he hates is, in fact, his mother. But there is an easy way to determine if a man hates his mother. At some point, he will make an offhand comment about her in a tone of voice that is completely unremarkable and yet makes you think, “I wonder if he hates his mother?” and then, trust me, he does.)
