The Big Love (14 page)

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 first 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.)

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

A
FTERWARDS, 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.”