The Big Love (17 page)

It’s a miracle, really, that I am capable of anything even remotely normal after all that. When you start out where I started—waiting for Jesus to return to earth to herald the end of time—and end up where I was at this point in the story (lying in bed after having had sex with your live-in boyfriend after he has spent the past five months screwing around on you behind your back), you find yourself in a tricky position, which is that you cannot trust your instincts. Forget trusting them—you can’t even find them. You have no idea where they are. Even now, I’m not sure what a woman with healthy instincts would have done in my situation. I’m always fascinated by women who seem to know things in their bones, women who possess that earthy, feminine wisdom that flies in the face of logic and reason and rational thought. Any instincts I might have had were wrung out of me a long time ago, and I’m afraid I’m left with a system in which everything has gone a little haywire.

Seventeen

I
WOKE UP THE FOLLOWING MORNING WITH A START. I’D HAD A
nightmare. I looked over and saw Tom asleep beside me, and seeing him there was such a shock that I almost forgot the dream entirely, but as I lay still, it slowly came back to me.

When Tom woke up, I told him about the dream. Then I began to interpret it—using Jungian principles I’d picked up from Janis Finkle—but Tom interrupted me before I could really get going.

“You’re every person in the dream,” said Tom.

“Parts of me, yes,” I said.

“You’re a young black man,” he said. “And an old woman, and a baby that is really just an enormous head.”

“And I’m the boat and I’m the water,” I said. “And I will have achieved mental health when I can accept the fact that I’m the shark, too.”

Tom gave me a look.

“What?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Tom.

He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

“What?” I said again.

“Maybe a person shouldn’t be their own hobby,” Tom called from the bathroom.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I called back.

Tom didn’t answer. I got out of bed and walked over to the bathroom. I leaned against the doorjamb and watched as he brushed his teeth.

“I’m my own hobby,” I finally said.

Tom cocked his head at me in the mirror.

“I don’t read self-help books,” I pointed out.

“
Anymore,
” Tom said. He spat. “You don’t read self-help books
anymore.
But it’s all in there.” He tapped on my temple with his forefinger.

“Don’t you think it’s a little early in the game for you to be insulting me?”

“I didn’t mean it as an insult,” said Tom. “I meant it as an observation.”

I raised an eyebrow at him but decided to let it go. “Tell me one of your dreams,” I said.

“We’ve been through this before,” said Tom.

“Just a teeny tiny one.”

“I don’t have dreams,” he said.

“Everybody has dreams.”

“I don’t remember my dreams,” said Tom. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter, because I’d wake up and I’d say to myself, it was just a dream.”

This brings me to something about Tom that I’m not sure I’ve quite adequately conveyed: the fact that he is completely non-neurotic. I am fascinated by non-neurotic people, but not for any healthy reason, not because I want to try to become more like them. I have but one goal: to make them as crazy as I am. I think that happens a lot. I think that when a neurotic person gets involved with a non-neurotic person, the neurotic one inevitably believes that the normal one is repressing all of their inner turmoil and then, quite deliberately, sets about letting it loose. And I tried with Tom. Believe me, I tried. Now that I think about it, that’s just about the only positive thing I can say about Tom’s affair with Kate Pearce. It gave the man some much-needed subtext. It gave him underbelly. All along I’d been thinking that Tom was just going about his life, going to work and reading his science magazines and playing golf and trying not to get married to me, and here it turned out that wasn’t true. Here there was suddenly all this new stuff to pick apart.

Of course, it’s possible that I’m not being entirely fair to Tom. It’s possible that he was deeper and more complicated than he appeared, and I just missed it, like I apparently missed so many other things that were going on between us. One problem was that I could never figure out what he was thinking. I never really knew what he was feeling either, but the thinking part is what gets me, because it seems so basic. And if I’m completely honest with myself, I suppose the truth is that Tom was always a little bit fuzzy to me. It’s not that he was constantly surprising me, showing new and unexpected sides of himself; it’s more that he was sort of a blank. That sounds much worse than I mean it to sound, but I can’t think of how else to put it. When Tom and I first started dating, I told my sister Meredith all about him over the phone. A few months later, she flew into town on business, and the three of us went out to dinner. When Tom excused himself to go to the bathroom, I turned to Meredith and said, well? He seems nice, she said. I nodded my head for more. He’s not quite what I pictured, she said. I pressed her to elaborate, and she finally said, well, he’s really nothing like you described him. Now, my sister can get like that sometimes, but still.
Nothing
like I described him? How was that possible? I haven’t thought about that for years, but now that I do, it makes me wonder.

There’s something else I haven’t thought about in a long time, but now that I’m thinking it I suppose I ought to tell you. It has to do with Kate Pearce. I suppose you could call it the history of Kate Pearce as she pertained to my relationship with Tom. It started, as these things so often do, with a photograph.

A few weeks after Tom and I first started dating, I was over at his apartment, looking through his photo album. Tom has a man’s photo album. It completely skips over vast periods of his life, and there are still a lot of empty pages in the back. It gives the impression that he’s going to go on through his life, slowly sticking in random pictures that his friends send him in the mail, and then, when he gets to the final page, he’ll die.

“Who’s she?” I said to Tom when I got to the picture.

“That’s Kate.”

“She’s beautiful,” I said. She was, too. She had big brown eyes and long brown hair and a sort of little-girl frailty that made me want to puke.

“How long were you guys together?” I said.

“Three years,” said Tom.

“That’s a long time.”

“It was college.”

“Three years in college is a very long time,” I said. “What’s she doing now?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to her in ten years.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Things ended badly,” he said.

“Badly how?”

“I don’t feel like talking about it right now,” he said.

I kept flipping through the album. Later that evening, though, I brought things around to the subject of Kate again, and Tom and I had the following exchange:

“So, do you still have feelings for her?” I said.

“I think it would be strange if I didn’t have any feelings for her,” said Tom.

“Are you still in love with her?” I said.

“I don’t even know what that means,” he said.

Of course I should have immediately said, “What do you mean you don’t know what that
means?
”I should have at least tried to pin him down on what part he didn’t understand. But this was early on in our relationship, maybe four weeks in, and you don’t say things like that at the beginning of a relationship. I’m not even sure you say them in the middle of one. Maybe you could get away with it at the end, I don’t know, but if you’re anything like me you just file away the information somewhere in the back of your brain and then do your best to forget that it’s there. And I had pretty much forgotten about it—Kate Pearce was nothing more to me than a name, a name that had elicited a wistful, faraway look in my new boyfriend’s eyes a long time ago, a look that I decided to interpret as his longing for youth, for freedom, for college girls swinging lacrosse sticks across impossibly green fields—for the past
in general
rather than for her
in particular.

Two years later. A Saturday. Tom and I were buying groceries at the little place on Pine Street. They were his groceries; I was just along for the ride. We got up to the register and Tom swiped his card in the card swiper. He punched in his secret code. It was 5-2-8-3. “Did you pick your secret code or did the bank give it to you?” I said, in a completely innocent, making-conversation-while-in-line-at-the-grocery-store kind of way. “I picked it,” Tom said, and then he got a strange look on his face. That’s all it was, just a strange look, but at that moment I knew. I
knew.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Tom took his groceries and walked out of the store. I followed him.

“I can’t believe this,” I said.

“Alison,” he said. “Please don’t make a big deal out of this.”

“I’m not making it a big deal,” I said.

“I’ve had it since college. It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

“It spells Kate,” I said. “It means Kate.”

“It’s just a pattern to me now.”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“What is the point?” said Tom.

Well, I knew what the point was. I knew perfectly well what the point was. The point was that Tom’s punching in Kate’s name every time he visited the bank machine was representative of a certain sort of devotion, a certain quality of love that I’d spent the past two years thinking he was incapable of, and here it turned out he was capable of it, only, it would seem, not for me. That was the point. But I wasn’t going to tell Tom that. No sir-ee. Because I didn’t want him to realize that that was the point. Tom loved me. I knew he loved me. He loved me, but he had his issues. He had his baggage. Well, we all have issues, right? We all have baggage. And you must keep in mind that Kate Pearce was, at the point when this disturbing little episode took place, a relatively abstract problem. The man hadn’t spoken to her in over
ten years.
And I had long given up on the idea of being somebody’s first, last, and only. You have to give that up, it seems to me, unless you marry your high school sweetheart, and there is nothing in the world more boring than a person who is married to their high school sweetheart.

“I don’t know what the point is,” I said to Tom. I started to cry. “It just makes me feel bad.”

Tom changed his secret code to my birthday, and our relationship resumed its course.

Perhaps you’re wondering whether or not the thing between Tom and Kate Pearce was in fact true love. That possibility had crossed my mind on more than one occasion. I mean, ten years after they broke up, the man was still punching her name into the bank machine every time he needed cash. It is, I suppose, the modern-day equivalent of carving somebody’s initials over and over again into the bark of oak trees. And I like to think that I’m not the kind of person who would stand in the way of true love, even if it meant that the person I was involved with ended up in true love with somebody else. Tom and I only had one real conversation about Kate after he came back, only one conversation that had any meat on it, and it dealt with precisely this subject. I sat him down on the couch one night that first week back and I said to him, you should think about this. Because maybe you will regret it. Maybe you love her, maybe you need her, maybe she is who you’ve wanted all along. And Tom assured me, no. It wasn’t about love, he said. It wasn’t about Kate. Come to think of it, he said it wasn’t even about sex. Then what was it about? you’re wondering. He didn’t really say. I do remember that he took my hand in his, and he kissed it several times. He said that he loved me. I said I loved him back. We sat in silence for a moment, breathing.

“Are we through now?” said Tom.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”

He let go of my hand and turned on the TV.

Eighteen

T
HE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, ON SATURDAY, I WENT BACK TO
the office to clean out my desk. I was trying to avoid people, and at first it looked like I’d succeeded, too, but I hadn’t. Because in walked Henry. He walked in and, without a word, flopped down on the beat-up couch that Matt had found propped up against the curb a few blocks from the office.

“That couch used to have fleas,” I finally said.

“So did I,” said Henry.

I fished my arm way back into my top drawer and pulled out an old checkbook from Mellon Bank. I started ripping up the checks and throwing them into the garbage can.

“When?” I said.

“What?”

“When did you have fleas?”

“Actually, I’ve never had fleas,” said Henry. “I was just trying to make conversation.”

He stretched out on the couch. “In college, this guy I knew named Judd had a couch with crabs.”

I didn’t respond.

“And, once, I found a tick on my uncle,” he said.

I ripped up the last check. Then I looked over at Henry.

“You don’t find this at all strange?” I said.

“Not really, no.”

“It should be strange,” I said. “You should find this strange.”

“I think you’re a little strange,” Henry said, with a smile.

“I’m the normal one here, Henry,” I said. “And I’m rarely the normal one.”

I pulled out the bottom drawer of my desk and upended it into the garbage can. A few of my old clips fell to the linoleum, and I bent down to pick them up.

“Do you always analyze things while you’re in the middle of them?” said Henry.

“We’re not in the middle of anything anymore,” I said. “And yes, I do.”

“I’m sorry about your job,” said Henry.

“That is not the thing to which I am referring.”

“The Reading Terminal thing.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I see.”

“I especially liked the part where you squeezed my shoulder,” I said.

“Did I do that?”

I nodded. “I’ve never had someone break up with me and squeeze my shoulder before.”

“I didn’t break up with you,” said Henry. “I told you I didn’t think I could handle you. There’s a difference.”