The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  In the end, I suppose, what does it matter. Either the man hates his mother, or he loves his mother a little too much. Either he’s shut down, so you don’t really know what you’re dealing with, or he’s one of those highly verbal guys who tells you exactly what you’re dealing with, and what you’re dealing with scares the shit out of you. In the end, what you have is a mess, and your relationship consists of picking around in it. I don’t mean to sound so cynical about all this, but I can’t help myself. You fall in love with a person because your subconscious likes something about their subconscious, and it isn’t until much later that you discover that the thing your subconscious liked was the fact that this person was built to hurt you in precisely the way you most fear.

  And the worst part—yes, there is a worst part—is that even when you think you’ve figured all this out, you haven’t. Even when you think you’ve got it all down, you don’t. Even when you think you’ve gone and made it all conscious, it isn’t. You just think it is. Even now, you’re probably convinced you’ve figured this stuff out. You’re probably thinking, yes, I used to be just like you, but then I did the work, I ironed out the kinks in my psyche, I found the right person, we do mirroring exercises with each other, we’ve pulled back our projections, and now I’m happy. And I’m not saying you’re not happy. I’m just saying this: beware of happiness. Because happiness tends to be temporary.

  I’m telling you all of this for a reason, of course. Nina Peeble predicted the night of the dinner party that Tom would come back, but I didn’t believe her, not really, even though I desperately wanted to. I’d lived long enough to know that they always come back to Nina, but they don’t always come back to me.

  But Tom—surprise surprise—did.

  Fifteen

  AFTERWARDS, OF COURSE, I TOLD NINA PEEBLE ABOUT TOM showing up on my doorstep, and when I got to the part about him holding the jar of mustard, Nina said, “What an asshole.” That threw me a little, to tell you the truth. I mean, I knew Nina would have a problem with Tom cheating on me and leaving me for Kate Pearce and then wanting me to take him back, but that the mustard would bother her so much—that I wasn’t prepared for. In fact, it wasn’t until Nina made such a big deal about it that it entered my mind that there was more than one way to look at it. At the time, I considered it not exactly charming and not exactly witty, but close enough to both charm and wit to be at least an interesting detail, worthy of sharing. And I didn’t even notice the mustard until I had registered the look on Tom’s face. You should have seen the man’s face. I tried to describe the look on Tom’s face to Nina, to mitigate the effect the mustard was having on her, but she wouldn’t hear it. “Do you know how easy it is to look sad and guilty when you’ve done something horrible to a person you love?” Nina said. “It’s pretty goddamn easy.”

  Of course, Nina and I often look at these things differently. One of the reasons it’s been so hard to be friends with her over the years is that she says the same thing about every man I ever date. “You can do better” is what she says. Again and again, I can do better. The other thing Nina says that really infuriates me is this: “You don’t want to be an old mother.” “You can do better” and “You don’t want to be an old mother”—what am I doing with a friend who says things like this to me? What do I need to listen to that crap for?

  (And since we’re on the subject, I would like to go on the record for a moment here and say this: I do want to be an old mother. I very much want to be an old mother. Women who had their kids early, I do not envy, not in the slightest. And I do not want to hear how my difficulties will be bigger than yours ever were, how I will end up fatter, and saggier, and tireder than you’ll ever be. I do not want to hear how young you’ll be when your kids go off to college or how old I’ll be when mine go. It is the worst kind of crazy female competitiveness, and the truth is I’m sick of it.)

  Anyway. Tom on my doorstep. Right. When I woke up that Saturday morning, I was in Matt’s bed. It was nice to wake up with another body in the bed, even if it was only Matt. I lay there for a minute or two, staring at the back of his head, and then I got up, got dressed, and quietly let myself out. On my way home, I stopped at the Metropolitan Bakery and picked up an onion bagel and a cup of coffee, and when I rounded the corner onto Delancey, I saw Tom. He was sitting on the top step of the brownstone, and something about the way he was sitting made it immediately clear to me exactly what this was about. Well, well, well, I thought, as I walked across the street and down the sidewalk, towards him. My heart was pounding, and I could feel the blood in my fingertips, but that’s all my brain was saying: Well, well, well. What do we have here?

  “I miss you, Alison,” said Tom.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I love you,” he said.

  I just looked at him.

  “I can’t live without you,” he said.

  “Apparently you can,” I said. I was kind of proud of this, so I said it again. “Apparently,” I said, “you can.”

  This is one of the trickiest parts of this whole story. What makes it tricky is trying to explain to you why I didn’t immediately crack one of my landlady’s terra-cotta flowerpots over his head. I mean, the man had walked out on me in the middle of a dinner party and told me over the phone that he was in love with somebody else—and suddenly he was back, sitting on my stoop, holding a jar of mustard. It was as if the past two weeks had existed in a sort of time warp, like he had gotten tripped up in the time-space continuum, only now here he was, home again, heidi ho, and he had mustard! Come on, little Miss Alison, I can hear you saying. Do not listen to what this man has to say. Do not give him the time of day.

  Still, you must understand that I’d been waiting for this moment, and I wanted to see just how it would play out.

  “I’m so sorry, Alison.”

  “I warned you about her,” I said.

  “I know you did.”

  “You wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “It was a mistake. A huge, huge mistake.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  “Alison.”

  “Do you?”

  “I love you,” said Tom. “I need you. I’m so sorry.”

  I folded my arms in front of my chest.

  “No,” said Tom. “No, I don’t love her. I didn’t ever really love her.”

  I sat down a few steps below Tom. I took my bagel out of the paper bag and unwrapped it and began quite methodically to scrape off the cream cheese with a plastic knife, until there was only the thinnest possible layer of it left. Even at the time, I remember thinking that this was kind of a cool thing to do, to start in on my bagel like nothing particularly monumental was going on. I think now that something in me felt like Tom had denied me the courtesy of a real breakup by breaking up with me over the phone, and I was going to deny him whatever drama he wanted to get going here. Still, I must admit that I felt a certain satisfaction. I had, at that moment, no earthly idea what I was going to do about all of this, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little bit pleased.

  “I had sex with somebody, too,” I finally said. “While you were gone, I mean.”

  I took a big bite out of my bagel.

  “I’m up to three,” I said.

  I looked up at Tom. “I’m not sure I’m stopping at three.”

  Tom nodded his head thoughtfully.

  “Alison?”

  “Um-hm?”

  “I’d like to move back in.”

  I swallowed. “I seriously doubt that’s going to happen.”

  “Please, Alison,” said Tom. “Please.”

  For a significant portion of our relationship, I did not want to move in with Tom and Tom did not want to move in with me, and everything was fine. I didn’t want to move in with Tom because I wanted him to propose to me first, and Tom didn’t want to move in with me because he didn’t want to move in with me. Three and a half years passed in this fashion. Then I decided to lower my sights. “Once he’s lived with me h
e won’t be able to live without me” was my thinking. I can’t claim to know what Tom was thinking, although Bonnie and Cordelia and I have enjoyed hours and hours of empty speculation about it, which I will kindly spare you. At best, he viewed it as a major concession. He said it was like the Jews offering to give the Palestinians the entire state of Israel. It was, now that I think about it, the very strength of his resistance to the idea that made it feel like such a victory when he finally agreed.

  In the end, the reason Tom moved in with me was not because he wanted to, or in order to save money on rent, or even to make me happy. It was because his best friend Darren decided to have a baby. Darren and Tom had gone to Dartmouth together, and they both ended up in Philadelphia after law school, and they were really quite close. They were like girlfriends, really, always having long lunches together and talking on the phone, although it strikes me just now that some of those lunches with Darren might have in fact been lunches with Kate—even now I hate this, the not knowing, the piecing together—but even so, Darren and Tom were close. Darren met his wife Wendy two weeks after Tom met me. Six months later, Darren and Wendy moved in together and Tom and I kept dating. Then they got married, and Tom and I kept dating. Then Darren and Wendy decided to have a baby. They started having sex on day ten, day twelve, day fourteen, and day sixteen. If the four of us happened to have a dinner scheduled for one of their sex days we had to eat late, because Wendy didn’t like to have sex on a full stomach. I suppose if I had been looking for signs of trouble that would have been a pretty good place to start, but I wasn’t looking for signs of trouble. In fact, I remember thinking that all this was good for Tom, that watching Darren step so easily from life stage to life stage might make him realize that he could just relax and trust the river of life. It seemed to be working, too, because a few months into Darren and Wendy’s baby-making effort, Tom told me he wanted to try living together—that’s the way he put it, I remember quite clearly, that “try” dangling out there like a threat—and I said yes.

  Tom and I found a cute little apartment on the part of Delancey Street you can find apartments on and we moved in. Darren and Wendy brought over red wine and Chinese food our first night, and the four of us ate out of cartons on the living room floor and argued about where to put the couch. The river of life was flowing. Three months later, Darren came home early from work and walked into the bathroom and found Wendy sitting on the toilet seat holding a pregnancy test stick in her hand. It was blue. When Wendy saw Darren, she burst into tears. Then Darren burst into tears. He was under the impression they were having a beautiful moment, but they weren’t.

  Darren rang our doorbell later that night and told us the news. Wendy was finally pregnant, but she wanted to have an abortion. Tom and I were shocked. We were stunned. They’d been trying to get pregnant for eight months! Eight months of perfunctory, pre-dinner, baby-making sex, and suddenly Wendy decides she wants an abortion. Darren came inside and sat down at our kitchen table and the three of us started drinking. He kept going on about how Wendy wanted to kill his baby. On and on, how it was his baby too, and what right did she have, and I sat there, nodding, fetching bottles of Rolling Rock from the refrigerator, and I didn’t say the one thing that was slowly becoming so completely clear to me that it was impossible for me to say anything else.

  “Well, obviously it’s not Darren’s baby,” I said to Tom later on, while we were getting ready for bed.

  “What are you talking about?” said Tom.

  “Wendy went to Acapulco on that business trip,” I said.

  “So?” said Tom.

  “Six weeks ago,” I said. “I remember because it was the weekend of your birthday.”

  “So?”

  “She missed her flight and had to stay longer.” I looked at Tom to see if he was getting it; he wasn’t. “Remember how much longer?” Tom shook his head no. “Two extra days,” I said, and I made a gesture, the sort of open-palmed, two-handed gesture one would use to indicate the obviousness of a particular conclusion.

  “Wendy missed an airplane six weeks ago and that means this,” Tom said. He did the gesture.

  “That baby was going to come out habla-ing Español,” I said.

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  “It’s not even a baby,” I said, “it’s a bambino.” I stood there, desperately trying to remember more of my high school Spanish, but before I could really get going I saw the look on Tom’s face in the bathroom mirror and I shut up. There are times when I need to be reined in, and this was one of them.

  I would like to be able to report that I was right about the baby, but I never did find out for sure; Wendy never told me. I did find out some truly horrifying details about their marriage, though, which surprised me, because I’d always thought they were happy. Of course, the only way to know what’s been going on in somebody else’s marriage is to talk to both parties while it is in the process of breaking up. There’s a window there—a week, maybe two—when people will tell you everything. In fact, I think the reason people think married sex is so bad is because the only married sex they ever really hear about in any detail is from their friends whose marriages are breaking up, and the sex they describe is invariably awful.

  “It just shouldn’t take that much work for a person to have an orgasm,” Darren said to Tom and me two days after Wendy finally left him. He was over at our apartment, getting drunk. “It was like trying to build a nuclear bomb,” said Darren. “I’d be down there, trying to cross the yellow wire with the red wire, fiddling with the trigger mechanism, trying to remember exactly how I did it the last time it went off, and then, approximately forty percent of the time, success.”

  “It got to the point where I’d rather read a book,” Wendy said to me over lunch later that week. “And it didn’t have to be a good book.”

  “I don’t even like big boobs,” said Darren.

  “I kept trying to convince myself, sex isn’t everything,” said Wendy.

  “I miss her,” Darren said, drunkenly. “I love her.”

  “I don’t think I ever loved him,” Wendy said, stabbing her salad with her fork.

  “What do you mean, you never loved him,” I said to Wendy. “You married him. You must have loved him.”

  “Now that I think about it,” said Wendy, “I don’t think I did.”

  “Maybe you just don’t love him anymore,” I said. “Maybe you loved him then, but at some point you stopped.”

  “No,” Wendy said. “The night before we got married, I remember thinking to myself, I don’t love this man.”

  “That’s what you thought?” I said.

  Wendy nodded. “Only it was too late. And then we were married, and it was really too late. And then one day my secretary walked into my office and told me she was getting a divorce, boom, one minute she was married and the next minute she was free, and while she stood there, sobbing uncontrollably, asking for extra personal days, it was like the clouds parted and everything became clear.”

  I went home that night and told Tom about my lunch with Wendy. He sat at the kitchen counter leafing through Scientific American while I made lemon chicken and floated theories at him. Maybe Wendy’s pregnancy brought up memories of her mother abandoning her as a child, I said to him, and rather than face those feelings she decided to have an abortion, and rather than face that she decided to leave Darren.

  “I don’t get it,” said Tom. “Do you still think it wasn’t Darren’s baby?”

  “I’m not sure anymore,” I said. “But it doesn’t really matter whose baby it was. Even if it was Darren’s baby, I’m still pretty sure there’s somebody else.”

  “You always think there’s somebody else,” Tom said.

  “I know I do,” I said, “but that’s not why I’m saying this.”

  “Why are you saying it?”

  “Because Wendy is much too happy for there not to be somebody else.”

  “Maybe it’s like pulling out a tooth,” said Tom. “Maybe
that’s why she’s happy.”

  I considered that for a moment. “It might not be an actual affair. It could just be the idea of somebody else.”

  “There’s always the idea of somebody else,” said Tom.

  “No there isn’t,” I said.

  “Yes there is,” said Tom.

  “There isn’t for me,” I said. “Why? Do you have the idea of somebody else?”

  Tom just looked at me.

  “It’s fine if you do,” I said. “I’d just like to know.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little unrealistic to think that you, Alison Hopkins, so completely incorporate all the qualities of every woman in the entire world that I would never so much as entertain the idea of somebody else?” said Tom.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s not having the idea that’s the problem,” Tom said. “Acting on the idea is the problem.”

  “Tell me one thing,” I said, pounding the chicken with a meat tenderizer. “Are we talking about Kate Pearce?”

  Tom sighed a big sigh.

  “Just say yes or no.”

  “Alison.”

  “Because if she’s the idea, we have a problem.”

  “We don’t have a problem,” said Tom.

  “Good.”

  I almost feel proud of myself, remembering moments like that. At least I wasn’t a total fool. At least I wasn’t completely in the dark. Of course, later, after Tom left, Bonnie’s husband Larry asked me if there had been any clues. I told him that there weren’t any, but that was a lie; the apartment was full of them. I found them all eventually, and each one made me more angry than the last, angry that I hadn’t snooped earlier, before Tom left, so I could have greeted him at the front door one day with a handful of credit card bills with incriminating charges and demanded an explanation. That would have been horrible, don’t get me wrong, but at least I would have felt smart. Not that feeling smart would have made up for being betrayed and deceived and abandoned, but it would have been better than nothing.