The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  The taxi turned onto Cordelia’s street and pulled up in front of her building. I thrust a crumpled twenty over the front seat, and while I was waiting for my change, I folded my arms across my chest and discreetly pressed my forearms against my breasts. Which were tender. Tender!

  “Here you go,” said the cabdriver. He handed me my change.

  I headed into Cordelia’s apartment building. I nodded to Enrique the doorman, and he waved me on through. I got into the elevator and pressed the button for the eleventh floor.

  I stood alone inside the elevator. Shame settled over me like a mantle. When had I turned into a whore? I asked myself. What had happened? Where had I gone wrong? How had I come to the conclusion that any of this was acceptable behavior? I was living with a man I wasn’t married to, and I’d slept with a guy I’d known for less than a week, on our first date. Which wasn’t even really a date, come to think of it. The man had asked me to dinner in a stairwell. We’d split the check. I might as well have put an ad in the back of our paper and asked him to leave the cash on top of the dresser on his way out. I watched the numbers of the floors light up, one by one, and my eyes filled with tears. Well, Alison, I said to myself, you are reaping what you sowed. You sowed sluttish behavior, and now you are going to reap an unwanted child whose paternity is in no way certain.

  The elevator doors opened. I walked down the long, poorly lit hallway and rang Cordelia’s doorbell.

  “What’s wrong?” Cordelia said when she saw my face.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said, and I burst into tears.

  Cordelia nodded her head calmly and let me in. I flung my coat over a chair and threw myself face-down onto her couch.

  “I’m going to kill myself,” I said.

  “You took a test?” she said flatly.

  “You know how Bonnie says every time she gets pregnant, she knows?” I said. “Well, I know.”

  Cordelia walked into her kitchenette and pulled a bottle of Absolut out of the freezer. She poured us each a big drink.

  “Drink,” she said.

  I sat up and shook my head no. “The baby,” I said.

  Cordelia rolled her eyes at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Do you know how many times we’ve had this conversation, Alison?”

  “More than once.”

  “Many, many times more than once.”

  “And I’m never pregnant,” I said.

  “And you’re never pregnant.”

  “Never.”

  “You’re never pregnant. You work yourself up and you get hysterical and you never once have gotten pregnant.”

  This was the truth.

  Now, without getting too explicit about my inner workings, this whole thing with me has always been a rather inexact science. I do not run like clockwork. I run in a manner designed to create the maximum number of niggling suspicions and false alarms and full-blown pregnancy scares. And perhaps you think that a normal person with a history like mine would exercise some caution when leaping to the kind of conclusions I leapt to in the back seat of the cab. Perhaps a normal person would. Not me. There is never a doubt in my mind. I’m always one hundred percent convinced. Now that I’m giving the matter some thought, it occurs to me that the whole system functions as my own personal penance for having sex. For while I have, on a conscious level, quite rationally decided that having sex with an individual to whom you are not married is okay so long as neither party is married to or otherwise entangled with anybody else, my subconscious is down there going not so fast. And so it starts lobbing up fears. And diligence of application of various prophylactic measures does not do anything to mitigate them. I trace this back to a girl in my youth group who got pregnant in high school and maintains—to this day—that she never actually, technically, entirely, had sex. So even multiple lines of defense mean nothing to my psyche.

  “I know we’ve been through this before,” I said, “but this time is different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Because I don’t know who the father is,” I said, and I burst into tears again.

  Cordelia put her hands on her hips. “Who are the candidates?”

  “What do you mean who are the candidates?” I shrieked. “You know the candidates! Tom and Henry!”

  There was a long pause.

  “And they don’t even look alike!” I said.

  Cordelia cocked her head at me.

  “They have different-colored eyes!” I said.

  “That’s your plan?”

  “I don’t have a plan!”

  “Well, I do,” said Cordelia. “Put your coat on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the drugstore.”

  I shook my head vigorously. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t take it.”

  “I can’t take it,” said Cordelia. “And I refuse to do this for one minute longer than absolutely necessary.”

  Cordelia and I took the elevator down and walked around the corner to the CVS. I plunked down the nineteen dollars for a test, the good one—nineteen dollars I could ill afford, now that I was unemployed. I trudged back to Cordelia’s clutching the brown paper bag in a sweaty fist.

  There is no need for me to draw this part out. I followed the directions on the box, I sat on the toilet for what seemed like an eternity with my eyes screwed closed, and then I opened them. Relief poured over me. There is no better feeling than this one. In fact, it strikes me that the only plus to this pregnancy hypochondria is that this feeling—the feeling of not being pregnant when you don’t want to be—is so sublime. For a while, all of your regular problems seem so small and manageable in light of this new impossibly huge one, and then, with the simple act of peeing on a stick, the impossibly huge problem disappears.

  “You know,” Cordelia said to me, “we really have passed into the realm of behavior that ought to be evaluated by a mental health professional.”

  I nodded.

  “This is not normal,” she said.

  I nodded again.

  “Next time you think you are pregnant, remind yourself that you’ve never once gotten pregnant. You’ve been having sex for years, and you’ve never gotten pregnant. Not once.”

  She gave me a long hug.

  “Cordelia?” I said into her neck.

  “Yes?”

  I pulled out of the hug and searched her face. “Do you think maybe I can’t get pregnant?”

  She hit me.

  And I headed home.

  I have two theories about why it was that I took Tom back. No, I just thought of another one—so that makes three. Three theories. The first is that Tom leaving me for Kate Pearce was a blow to my narcissism, and his return fed into my ideas of my own incomparable self-worth. Janis Finkle was the first person to use the term narcissist in connection with me. She just casually lobbed it into one of our sessions, like it was something we had both acknowledged long ago, like it was a fact that had been written down in my file right next to the names of my siblings and the town I grew up in and my recurring dream about the boating accident. After our session, I went straight to Barnes & Noble and sat down on the mottled green carpet in the psychology section with the DSM-III open on my lap. I flipped to Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I read through the diagnostic criteria. I definitely had three of the indicators, and quite possibly four, while you needed five to be considered a clinical case. Which was cutting things a little close as far as I was concerned. When I saw Janis the next week, I really grilled her on the subject, to such an extent that I undoubtedly appeared to be obsessed with my own narcissism, like a snake that had developed a taste for its own tail. Anyhow, I don’t believe I’m a primary narcissist—I am capable of acknowledging other people’s feelings and seeing things from points of view other than my own—but I do have narcissistic tendencies, and when Tom told me he couldn’t live without me, the narcissistic part of me perked right up. Of course he couldn’t! Poor fellow! So. That’s one. The second theory is a little
more on the nose. Perhaps you have put together the following: that my father left when I was five, and—as I am on the record as having two fathers—he did not come back. So Tom’s return was a reenactment of the central fantasy of my childhood, and on some level I was unable to resist it.

  The third theory, as it turns out, is the only one I was aware of at the time. The third theory is that I loved Tom. And love makes you do crazy things. Of course, craziness also makes you do crazy things, but oh well. Tom was back. Things weren’t what I’d thought they were, but I would survive. I’d never dreamed that I’d be able to stand something like this, but here it looked like I could. Just because I’d spent so many years coloring inside the lines, it wasn’t fair for me to expect perfection. People make mistakes. Life isn’t fair. People change.

  When I got home, Tom was stretched out on the couch with his headphones on. His eyes were closed, and he was lying perfectly still, and for a moment it crossed my mind that he might be dead. He wasn’t, of course; he was asleep. I shook the thought out of my head. I went into the kitchen and pulled a box of pasta from the cabinet and started to make dinner.

  Nineteen

  THE MOVIE WHEN HARRY MET SALLY DID A GRAVE DISSERVICE TO single people everywhere, by forcing them to look at every friend of the gender towards which they are drawn and wonder: is that who I’m going to end up with? And most of the time, this is not a hopeful, happy question, because if you wanted to end up with that person, you’d already be dating them. Imagine if somebody had told Meg Ryan on that drive from Chicago to New York that she would spend the next twelve years of her life single, punctuated by a handful of relationships that would be both unfulfilling and short lived, and then, finally, just as she is about to give up all hope, who will she be happy to see waiting for her at the end of the aisle? The idiot who just spit grape seeds on her window.

  Which brings me to Matt. Matt, my dear friend Matt, who chose this particular moment in time to tell me that he was in love with me.

  The whole thing came as something of a shock, of course, but it was not nearly as big of a shock as you might think. I did not know that Matt had feelings for me, I really had no earthly idea, but I do suffer from an affliction in which I believe that all of my male friends are secretly in love with me. I think that some of them are conscious of this fact and some of them aren’t. There are women who have a variant of this affliction—women who go through life convinced every man they know wants to sleep with them—but that’s not my problem. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible that my male friends who are in love with me have little or no interest in sleeping with me, which is why these friendships manage, year after year, to continue apace. Anyhow, to have it finally happen, to have one of my friends proclaim his love for me, to have my intuition in this particular area verified pleased me the tiniest bit, but that bit was completely overshadowed by the rest of it, which was awful.

  It happened at Doobies, and we had been drinking. Fine: we were drunk. Doobies is the kind of bar you go to to get drunk, and that’s what we were doing. We each did a shot of tequila at the bar, and then we played a few games of darts. There was tequila involved with the dart games, too, and, due to a series of miscalculations in the number of points I was spotted, as well as my freakish ability to rise far above my natural gifts in competitive situations, Matt repeatedly lost. And drank.

  After a while, a couple of off-duty waiters came in and wanted a game, so we moved to a booth. Matt went to the bar. He came back with a pitcher of Rolling Rock and a pack of Marlboros.

  He took a cigarette out and lit it.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “What does it look like?” said Matt.

  “You don’t smoke,” I said.

  “I don’t smoke anymore,” said Matt. “I quit on January 1, 1995.”

  I looked pointedly at the cigarette in his hand.

  “It is one of my few real accomplishments in life,” he said. “And the other day, as I was reflecting on that fact, I decided to reward myself with one month of unlimited cigarette smoking.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” I said.

  “And then I’ll quit again,” said Matt. He took a long drag. “Although I do love these bad boys.”

  “Well, give me one too, then,” I said.

  Matt lit another cigarette and handed it to me.

  “You know,” said Matt, “sometimes I forget how sweet you used to be, but then I see you holding a cigarette like a twelve-year-old and it all comes back to me.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m still sweet.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  He shook his head no.

  I sat with this for a moment. “Well, I don’t want to be sweet,” I finally said. “Sweet, after a certain age, is just drippy.”

  “I don’t know,” said Matt. “Julie was sweet.”

  “Julie?”

  “The nurse,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “The drippy one.”

  Matt got a wistful look on his face. “She was so into me. She was always doing things for me. Bringing me little presents. She would bake me these perfect miniature loaves of zucchini bread”—here he mimed the dimensions of the loaf, tenderly, thoughtfully, and I realized he was quite drunk—“and I thought there must be something wrong with her, to be that nice to me all the time. But the real problem was, I kept looking for something better.”

  “Why don’t you call her?”

  “She got married two years ago,” he said. “She married a dentist. They live in Oregon.”

  “Maybe there’s a lesson here,” I said.

  “The lesson of Julie,” Matt said. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then he said, “The next time I find someone nice who can stand me, I’m just going to holdon.”

  He opened his eyes. He blinked at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Let’s get married,” said Matt. He stood up. His voice rose above the sound of the jukebox. “I’m serious. Marry me, Alison.”

  “Matt, sit down.”

  “If you won’t marry me, at least come home with me,” said Matt.

  “Right.”

  “I don’t want to be the guy who tries to get a woman into bed by promising how great it will be, but here I am, I’m doing it,” he said. “It’ll be great. I promise.”

  There were a couple of people sitting at the bar, and I could see them turning to watch.

  “Matt, you’re embarrassing me,” I said in a low voice.

  “I’m embarrassing you? I don’t think so. If anyone ought to be embarrassed by this, it’s me. But I don’t care. And do you know why? Because I love you.”

  I leaned forward and hit him hard on the chest. I don’t know why I did that, really, I’m not sure what the intended effect of the blow was, but whatever it was, it didn’t work. Because Matt was merely emboldened.

  “I am in love with you, Alison Hopkins,” Matt said, truly loudly now, and I thumped him again.

  One of the dart players called to the bartender, “Steven, get that gentleman another pitcher.”

  “Thank you, no,” I called, and waved my hand in the direction of the bartender. “We don’t need any more alcohol here.”

  I looked up at Matt. “Please sit down.”

  Matt sat back down. He reached across the table and grabbed both of my wrists in his hands. I could feel our pulses bouncing off each other.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  I looked at him. His hair was sweaty around the edges, but his eyes were clear and bright and locked on mine.

  “I love you, Alison,” said Matt. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m drunk.”

  And with that, a feeling came over me that I can’t for the life of me describe, but I knew he was telling me the truth. My heart dropped for him.

  “Well, I’m probably saying it because I’m drunk
,” he continued, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t mean it. I do. I’ve loved you as long as I’ve known you.”

  I was stunned. I had no idea how to respond. In all those years of suspecting various friends of nursing secret feelings for me, I had never envisioned it going quite this far. Now that the actual moment was upon me, now that the declaration had been made, now that there was a man sitting before me with his heart in his hands, I just felt unbelievably sad.

  “Oh, Matt,” I finally said, somewhat lamely. “Matt.”

  He looked at my face. He let go of my wrists. “Say no more.”

  I felt horrible. It really was an awful moment. I was not remotely in love with Matt, you understand. And I knew that that was not going to change. And that simple truth—the utter impossibility of the situation as it was presently constituted—struck me as incredibly unfair. Unfair to whom? To Matt? Well, yes, obviously; but it felt bigger than that. It felt monumentally unfair, it felt cosmically unfair, it felt unfair to every last human being who ever walked upon the earth. Shouldn’t love be simpler than this? Shouldn’t this thing, this most fundamental of things, be easier and more predictable and less capricious and random and cruel? And if somewhere along the line I’d begun to confuse “falling in love” with “finding an appropriate man who is willing to let me work on my relationship with him,” well, who could blame me? What exactly was the alternative? Well, I was looking at the alternative. And it was a very risky alternative.

  The bartender set a fresh pitcher of beer in front of us and said, “Mazel tov.”

  Matt refilled his glass. He downed it dramatically, in a single breath, and then he set the empty glass back on the table with some force. I stood up to go to the bathroom. “Will you excuse me for a moment?”

  “No, I won’t,” said Matt. “I’d like you to marinate in this awkwardness with me for a while.”