The Big Love (12 page)

The door to the bathroom swung open, and I could hear voices. Two women I didn’t know came in, talking about a sous chef at Treetops who had apparently tried to influence the judging. I did my best to calm down. This was not the time or the place. I would have to do this later, someplace other than a refurbished train station brimming with Philadelphia’s culinary and media elite.

The women left. I unlocked the stall and went over to one of the sinks. I splashed cold water on my face and carefully blotted it with a paper towel. Why am I always having my big emotional moments in bathrooms? I asked myself. A good shrink could make something of this sort of pattern, although I’m not sure I want to know what they’d come up with. I wondered if it would still be considered repression. I suppose feeling things in bathroom stalls is less repressed than not feeling them at all. I looked at my face in the mirror over the sink and tried to think about Henry, to keep myself from thinking any more about Tom. Henry, who had proven himself to be a worthy distraction, Henry, who for about sixty seconds I thought I was in love with even though I really wasn’t, but who nonetheless I was interested in going to bed with again, later that night if at all possible, only now I saw that there were two problems with that plan. The first was the scene earlier that day in his office. The second was that now I looked like a raccoon. I opened up my purse and calmly set about fixing my face.

By the time I finished in the bathroom, the party was in full swing. The lights were low enough that I thought I could pass for normal.

“Jesus, Alison,” Matt said when he saw me. “What happened to you?”

“Is it that bad?”

“It’s hardly noticeable,” said Matt. He grabbed two glasses of wine from a roaming waitress and handed me one. “Here. Drink.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re not still upset about Tom, are you?”

I nodded my head yes.

“Talk to me.”

We leaned up against a thick pillar in the middle of the room. We watched the rest of the partygoers milling by while we talked.

“It’s like I was two people in the relationship,” I said. “Part of me was down there, in the middle of it, and another part of me was evaluating everything from a distance.”

“Like Napoleon watching the battlefield from the top of a hill,” said Matt.

“Exactly,” I said. “And there was going to be a winner, and there was going to be a loser.”

“How do you mean?”

“If we got married, that meant I won,” I said, “and if we didn’t, then Tom won.”

“What did he win?”

“He got the best years of my life, and then he got to go start over with somebody else,” I said.

“For a person with high self-esteem, you have awfully low self-esteem.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Then I realized a man can
always
go start over with somebody else. He can do it when he’s eighty. So, really, the only way I can win is if he’s dead. If he’s with me for a long time and then he dies. Then I win.”

“Marry me,” said Matt.

“I realize I’m insane,” I said. “That’s something, right?”

“I mean it,” he said. “Marry me. Although I might want to still be allowed to date girls like her.”

“Girls like who?” I said.

Matt motioned to a woman wearing a fringy halter top. She looked Matt up and down and then coolly turned her back to him. It was one of those flawless, bony-yet-fleshy backs, but still.

“She’s like one of those statues that guards a Japanese temple,” Matt said to me. “Her right hand is up here, going stop. But her left hand is down below, coyly beckoning me in.”

“Is that what that was?”

“Yes. But I don’t have time for that tonight,” said Matt. “Tonight I’m going to pick the low-hanging fruit.”

Olivia walked over to us, carrying a tiny plastic plate heaped with wontons. I cocked an eyebrow at Matt.

“Not that low-hanging,” said Matt.

“What?” Olivia said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I don’t want to alarm you,” Olivia said to me. She motioned to one of the risers that had been set up in the back. Sid Hirsch and Mary Ellen were huddled together at a cocktail table, deep in conversation.

“Which one of us should be worried?” I said to Olivia.

“That I don’t know.”

It wasn’t until much later that I finally saw Henry. He was standing at a makeshift bar that had been set up alongside the fish market, and he was talking to a woman who threw her head back whenever she laughed. She had an unbelievably long neck. I couldn’t stop staring at it. That’s what I was doing, in fact, when Henry caught my eye: I was staring at this woman’s neck. I watched as he touched her arm, and then walked over to where I was standing.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi there,” said Henry.

“Your date has a disturbingly long neck,” I said.

“Her?” Henry said. He looked over his shoulder at the woman. “She’s not my date.”

“Well, if you like her, you should try not to look at it,” I said, “because once you look at it you won’t be able to stop. It’s hypnotizing.”

Henry looked at her, and, as if on cue, she did the neck thing.

“Mesmerizing,” he said.

“That’s the word,” I said.

“Alison,” said Henry.

“Yes?”

He smiled with only half of his mouth and didn’t say anything.

“What is it?” I said.

He took a breath. “I can’t handle you.”

I just stood there.

“I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided that I can’t,” said Henry.

“Oh,” I said.

“I’d like it if there wasn’t any weirdness,” he said.

He’d like it if there wasn’t any weirdness.

“Not a problem,” I said. I smiled, in an attempt to indicate my ability to not be weird.

“Good.”

He put his hand on my right shoulder. He squeezed it. And then he went back to the bar and his drink and the girl with the neck.

I went home that night and wrote a column about Romantic Market Value. I’d been meaning to write that particular column for years, but I’d been holding off, for two reasons. First of all, it wasn’t my idea. I’d stolen it from someplace and added it to my repertoire, and in the process I’d changed it around a bit, and the whole thing had happened so long ago that I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d stolen it from or just how much I’d changed it, which is the sort of thing that’s okay to do in life but makes me nervous to do in print. Second of all, it’s sort of offensive. After I turned in the column the next morning, Olivia barreled over to my desk and said, “What are you saying? Men would like me more if I were
thinner
and
prettier?
” It’s more complicated than that, of course—but yes. That’s what I was saying. Romantic Market Value is just that: a person’s value in the romantic marketplace. It’s that thing that makes you think two people go together, that they fit, that one isn’t going to run off and find someone better, because they’re both more or less the same, that is, they have roughly the same RMV. And the girl with the neck had, objectively speaking, a higher RMV than me, because she was beautiful. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am, beautywise, not everybody’s cup of tea, and for the most part I’m fine with it (it’s enough that I am some people’s cup of tea), but it does lower my Romantic Market Value, and there are times when it really pisses me off.

It was an easy column to write. I simply crafted into paragraphs various things I’d infuriated my friends with over the years. The infuriating part, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, is that men and women’s Romantic Market Value is based on different things; women are valued for youth and beauty, men for wealth and power. This is insulting to members of both sexes, but—as women are quick to point out—it is not
equally
insulting to members of both sexes. And one is not exactly overwhelmed by the roar of complaints coming from young, good-looking men.

Anyhow, like I said, this was one of my pet theories, and it felt good to finally get it down on paper, but later, as I read it over one last time while I was lying in bed, I was struck by something really quite odd. I suddenly saw, with a sort of otherworldly clarity, that this was stuff I actually believed. I believed it way down in the place where I was supposed to believe in love. And I’d like to be one of those people who live in the moment, who don’t plot and plan and scheme and control, but I don’t know if my brain could take it. What on earth would I think about all day long? My brain plays with relationships. That’s what it does. I see a happy couple and I immediately want all the facts. How did they meet? How does it work? Who loves who more? Who has the power?

Because that, in the end, is what I was talking about—power.
Who has the power?
And I suppose the thing I’d always liked most about the concept of Romantic Market Value was that it was an attempt to quantify the thing I found most fascinating. I liked the almost mathematical logic of it all, the simple fact that after a while in certain relationships, the power imbalance becomes so extreme that there needs to be a rebalancing of the scales. But the truth is, power is much more elusive than that. I’ll tell you who has the power. The person who loves less has the power. The person who is most willing to leave has the power. I’ll tell you something else. Infidelity is power. No matter what has gone on in a relationship, the person who fucks around takes all the power back.

All along I’d been thinking that my problem was that Tom had left me, but I see now that it’s possible my problem was much more fundamental. Maybe love shouldn’t be about power. Maybe confusing the two was getting me into trouble.

Thirteen

“THE OLDER I GET, THE FURTHER AWAY FROM THE URINAL
I start unzipping my pants,” Sid Hirsch said to me as he walked into his office.

It was late on Friday afternoon, and I was already inside Sid’s office, waiting for him. I’d been summoned. Sid summoned one to his office and then tended to disappear, because he liked to make an entrance. He walked over to his desk and sat down on top of it with his legs folded Indian-style. “Yoga,” he explained. He took a long, cleansing breath and then looked me in the eye and said, “We have a problem.”

Oh shit, I thought. Sid knows about me and Henry. How could he know about me and Henry? I considered the possibility that Sid subscribed to Olivia’s theory that if you think two people are sleeping together, they are (with the corollary that if you think a person is gay, he is).

“What is it?” I said.

“I heard about what happened with you and your boyfriend,” said Sid.

“Oh.”

“And I’m really sorry about it.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m going to be fine.”

“Of course you’ll be fine,” he said.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

Sid pressed his hands into a power teepee and rested his chin on his fingertips. “Your column was about a nice girl trying to trick some poor schlub into marrying her. There was an arc there. We were all waiting for the ring. Now the guy turns out to be a complete shit. Fine. Write that last column. That’s the end of the story.”

I just looked at him.

“You’re giving Mary Ellen my column,” I said.

“Number one, it isn’t your column. My paper, my column,” Sid said. “Number two, yes I am.”

Now, I had given some thought to what I would do when I was through working at the paper. I had devoted a great deal of time to fantasizing about it, in fact. There were several versions of this fantasy, the gist of all of which involved me getting paid a great deal of money for something I’d written on the side. Sometimes it was a book. Sometimes it was a screenplay. Sometimes it was a book that sold to the movies and I was begged to write the screenplay. The fact that I wasn’t actually doing any writing on the side did surprisingly little to interfere with this particular fantasy. Someday I would, and when I did, the fantasy would be there, waiting for me. But this particular scenario was one I had never considered. It had never entered my mind that I would be fired.

“I can’t believe this,” I said.

“Don’t take this personally,” he said.

“I’m being fired, Sid. It feels personal.”

“It’s not about you,” he said. “It’s the trend.”

“What trend is this exactly?”

Sid slid off of his desk and began to pace around behind it. “You know,” he said. “Hot girls in bars talking about dildos. Unashamed of their sexuality. They are woman, hear them roar.”

“I’m a woman,” I said.

“Your column is about a nice girl. People love you, but they don’t want to fuck you. I’m speaking metaphorically of course. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d like to fuck you,” Sid said. “I’d fuck you.”

“Fuck you, Sid,” I said.

He held up his right hand like he was willingly taking the blow.

“This girl is twenty-seven,” said Sid. “She’s bi-curious. I’m pretty sure her parents are dead.”

“Mary Ellen’s parents aren’t dead,” I said. “Her mother sends in those letters.”

“Well, she writes like her parents are dead,” said Sid. “If she were my daughter, I’d kill myself.”

“What about when I start dating new people?” I said. I considered telling Sid about what had happened with Henry—not that it was Henry, simply that I’d already had sex with somebody four times on two separate occasions and I’d be willing to write about it. “I could be more explicit.”

“I’ve thought about that,” he said. “It won’t work. You can’t turn Mary Tyler Moore into a whore and expect people to feel good about it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Never mind that it’s pathetic,” he said. “There’s nothing to root for.”

“There is something to root for,” I said. “Me. People can root for me.”

“I’m sorry, Alison. But you’ve got your whole future in front of you.”

“Everyone has their future in front of them, Sid. That’s why they call it the future.”

I got up to leave.

“I’m going to give you a piece of advice,” Sid said.

“What.”

Sid picked at a tuft of chest hair that was peeking out of his V-neck. “Move to Pittsburgh.”

“Pittsburgh?”

“They have a nice weekly. Smallish. You might have to waitress a little on the side. I’ll put in a call to the publisher for you. His name is Ed,” Sid said. He got a quizzical look on his face. “Ted? I’ll look it up.”