The Big Love (19 page)

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

T
HE 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
hold
on.
”

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.”

I sat back down. I stared at my hands. They looked old. They looked too old for this.

“I really have to pee, Matt,” I finally said. “And I’m not just saying that.”

“Fine. Go. I’ll just marinate by myself,” said Matt. “You urinate, and I’ll marinate.”

When I came back from the bathroom, Matt was sitting quietly, shredding a napkin into long, thin strips.

“I’ve given some thought to what just happened here,” said Matt.

“What did you come up with?” I said.

“My internal censor, which never works that well to begin with, was temporarily totally disabled,” said Matt.

“I see.”

“Due to the alcohol,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“The smoking makes me thirsty,” he said. “And I forgot to eat dinner.”

I nodded my head.

“We can just forget it, if you’d like,” I said.

“That would be good,” he said.

“Done,” I said.

Somebody put “Love Hurts” on the jukebox.

“But I meant every word,” Matt said, solemnly. “And you can’t end up with Tom. He isn’t worthy of you. He’s worse than not worthy. He’s a worthless god-awful prick.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “And apparently the censoring mechanism is still disabled.”

We sat in silence for a moment.

“We should probably go,” I finally said.

“A good idea.”

Matt walked me home. We walked through Fitler Square, past the turtle sculptures, and turned onto Delancey. When we got to my building, we stood on the sidewalk. The lights inside were out.

“It’ll happen again, you know,” said Matt.

“What are you talking about?”

“Tom. He’ll do it again.”

I dug around in my purse for my keys.

“It’s a very fundamental thing, the way a person comports themselves in that particular department,” said Matt.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“He’ll do it again, and you’ll have to decide if this is what you want.”

The following Tuesday, I went to New York for an interview for a job at a magazine. I took the train up, had the interview, and on the way back, the train was very crowded. A woman who was about my age sat down in the seat beside me, and we started talking. It turned out that she had gone to Wheaton College—the one in Illinois, the Christian one—with my sister Meredith. It turned out her father was the pastor of the church my friend Angie goes to down in Atlanta. It turned out, in short, that she was an evangelical Christian, and due to a small accretion of details, she got the impression that I was much more of an evangelical Christian than I currently am. Now, when I find myself in such a situation these days, I do my best to honor my own experience of things, and I try not to get involved in an inordinate amount of hypocrisy and personal misrepresentation; at the very least, I try to avoid telling any outright lies. Which isn’t easy. This time, the conversation degenerated into me making the usual complaints about evangelicals. How they’re self-righteous. How they’re close-minded and judgmental and legalistic. The lack of intellectual rigor, the fear of art and culture and ideas, the near total disconnect from any sense of Christianity’s historical roots. The bad hair, the bad clothes, the ugly churches, the cloying singsong public prayer voice. And the smugness. Dear God, the smugness. “Forget all that,” this woman said to me. “Forget
Christians.
” And she put her hand on my forearm, and she got one of those painfully sincere looks on her face, and she had a southern accent (and I think this is one of those things you can really only say if you have a southern accent), “Are you
in love
with Jesus?” And that kind of took me aback. Partially because people don’t say things like that to me anymore. Partially because it made me think. And the truth is, I’m not in love with Jesus at the moment. That’s not quite the right word for it. I’m haunted by Jesus, but I’m not really in love with him.

It would be wrong for me to suggest that I have lost my faith entirely, but I have lost a certain kind of faith, and I hope I haven’t left you with the impression that losing it was anything less than a very big loss. I am left to deal with the remains of it all, to pick through it, to run from it, to rail against it, but I keep finding that even the remains of what I once had are powerful stuff. A certain sort of person would say this. A certain sort of person would say that what is really going on is that I’m running away from God. And you know what? That’s exactly what it feels like. The truth is, my heart is restless, and I’d like some peace, and I’m starting to suspect that it is pride that keeps me where I am, but I can’t seem to go back. Not yet anyway. Not just yet.

Twenty