The Big Love (22 page)

I lay there for hours, for entire days, going over all that had happened between Tom and me, churning it through my brain. I circled around to the same thought again and again. When I was sitting in the cab, flipping through my desk calendar, trying to figure out whose hypothetical child I was carrying, what had happened was this: I kept picturing Henry’s ears. On the baby’s head. Then, very deliberately, I had put the thought out of my mind. I was with Tom. Tom’s ears were fine. But lying in bed at Cordelia’s, I kept coming back to that moment, and, in a weird way, it made me feel better. I wasn’t supposed to wake up next to those ears for the rest of my life. The truth is, I didn’t
want
to spend my life with those ears. And something inside me had known it, even if it took the rest of me a while to catch up.

“I think I’m depressed,” I finally said to Cordelia.

“You’re molting,” she said kindly.

“I want to die,” I said.

“You’re in your cocoon,” said Cordelia.

“I can’t move my limbs,” I said.

“That’s what happens in a cocoon,” she said. “Limbs don’t move.”

And then one morning I opened my eyes, and all I could see were the dust motes sparkling in the sunlight, and I knew I was done with that. The molting, I mean. I got out of bed and took a shower. I put on my running shoes and went for a run. I called up a temp agency. The woman I met with knew me from my column, and she quickly found me a truly plum job, in the temp world at least, copyediting at an advertising agency in place of a woman on an extended maternity leave. (“Triplets. At forty,” the temp lady reported when she phoned with the offer. “Fertility drugs, anyone?”) I cut off most of my hair, which turned out to be a mistake, but I also accidentally lost seven pounds, so I ended up about even.

The first apartment I looked at was just down the street from Cordelia’s. It was cheap and tiny and, to my eyes, perfect. The windows were huge and the late-afternoon light poured in, and it was just high up enough to give a sort of Mary Poppins perspective of rooftops and chimneys and the tops of really tall trees. Nina Peeble came apartment hunting with me that day, and while I swooned around the windows, she wrinkled her nose at the avocado-colored bathroom tile and the two puny closets and said, “You can’t live in a view, Alison.” Well, I thought about it and decided that I could. So now I live in a view.

And I started to get that feeling, that great feeling, where the world starts opening up again, where you notice a flier for Italian lessons stuck to a lamppost, and you pull off the little tag with the phone number and slip it in your wallet, and when you come upon the tag again a week later you impulsively make the call, and you end up spending two hours every Wednesday night with six strangers in the back of a café being drilled by Alessandro, who wears leather pants and calls you
Principessa
when he talks to you after class. You know the feeling I’m talking about. Life, which had shrunk down to mundane and predictable proportions, suddenly exploded with, well,
life.
I bought lacy bras and hiking boots. I kept Keats on the back of the toilet and decided it was time to finally tackle Proust. I pored over the travel section of the Sunday
Times
with the intensity of a person who believes that anything, anywhere, is possible. I went to the opera and I took up yoga and I taught myself how to make a chocolate soufflé.

I have not yet been able to get this particular feeling when I’m involved with somebody. I’ve just never been able to manage it. I mean, I
do
things when I’m involved with somebody—I go shopping and I cook things, I take trips and I read books—but somehow the enterprise is never fueled by the sense that my life could, at any moment, turn out to be something entirely different than I had anticipated. It is a problem. It is one of the major problems of my life. I’m sure there’s a reason for it—an explanation for why life opens up and closes down around a person—and I started to develop a theory about it, but then I stopped. And I’ve simply decided to fight it. To stop shrinking down. To keep on unfolding, no matter what.

A few months after I moved into my new apartment, something quite unexpected happened. I remember thinking at the time that I wasn’t sure if it was the ending of this story or the beginning of a new one. It was late on a Sunday afternoon, and I was poking around in the map store on Chestnut Street, looking at travel books. I heard a voice behind me.

“Alison?”

I turned around. It was Henry.

“Hello,” I said.

He leaned forward and gave me an awkward kiss on the cheek.

“How are you?” said Henry.

“I’m good,” I said. “How are you?”

“Hanging in there,” said Henry.

“I heard you quit the paper.”

“Quit. Got fired,” said Henry. “I think the distinction becomes meaningless when both parties are screaming profanities down a long hallway.”

“You yelled at Sid?” I said.

“I did.”

“I wish I’d yelled,” I said.

“We got a bunch of letters about you,” said Henry. “Protesting your departure.”

I looked at him. “Define a bunch.”

“Okay,” said Henry. “Six. But you have six extremely loyal, angry fans.”

“Tell me about what’s-her-face,” I said, “that girl who stole my job.”

“Mary Ellen?” said Henry. “What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just say some bad things about her.”

“Well, she can’t write,” said Henry.

“Yeah. Stuff like that.”

“And she bites the heads off of kittens.”

“Give me one more,” I said.

“Deep down, she’s an insecure, unhappy person,” said Henry. “It’s sad, really.”

“You know, I hate that sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?”

“The idea that being insecure and unhappy is an excuse for anything,” I said. “I mean, I’m insecure and unhappy. Everybody I
know
is insecure and unhappy.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Henry. “She’s just a plain old bad person.”

“And untalented,” I said.

“Hugely untalented.”

Henry smiled.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Henry.

“Why are you smiling?”

“I don’t know,” said Henry. “I’m just smiling.”

“What are you going to do now?” I said.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Take a break. Reassess things.”

He showed me the stack of Lonely Planet guidebooks he was holding—Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia, and Tibet.

“I told the guy behind the counter that I wanted to go someplace cheap, where people wear long orange robes,” said Henry. “Apparently I need to narrow it down further.”

“Do you want mountains and trekking or beaches and whores?” I said.

He sighed a big mock sigh. “I guess trekking.”

I took the Thailand and Cambodia guides out of his stack and put them back on the shelf. “There,” I said. “You’re narrowed.”

“Are you going someplace?”

I nodded. “Italy. In two weeks.”

“Why Italy?” said Henry.

I decided to tell him the truth. “It’s a reward for not sleeping with my Italian teacher.”

Henry laughed.

“He was, I don’t know,” I said. “Creepy sexy. And I was intrigued. But then I realized that the sexy part was the Italian part, and the creepy part was just him.”

Henry asked if I wanted to get a cup of coffee. I said yes. We each bought our books, and then we went around the corner to a tiny café. We sat for a long time, talking.

By the time we left, it was dark outside. Henry grabbed my hand as we crossed the street against the light, and when we got to the other side, he didn’t let go.

It was a clear night, and the moon was full and bright and low in the sky. I didn’t know where we were going, but it didn’t matter, because the cherry blossoms were finally out, and the air smelled of the last fire in somebody’s fireplace. I just wanted to stare at the moon. I just wanted to lift my face to that moon, unashamed, like a sunflower to the sun.

About the Author

Sarah Dunn lives in New York City.
The Big Love
is her first novel.

A preview of
The Secrets to Happiness by Sarah Dunn
now on sale!

D
o you want to know the secret to a happy marriage?”

“Tell me.”

“Put your wife on Paxil.”

People told Holly all sorts of things. She didn’t know why, really. Maybe it had something to do with her face, which was
wide open and promised kindness. Holly’s face was much kinder than she actually was. She had big green eyes and extremely
pale skin and an easy, forgiving smile, but the real problem was probably her dimples. Holly was one of the seven grown women
left in Manhattan who still had them, dimples, which meant that strangers were always asking her for change for a twenty or
to watch their laptops in Starbucks. Once, a woman she’d never met before asked her to hold her baby while she strapped a
car seat into the back of a taxi. Part of the reason Holly had trouble with men was they mistook her face for the truth, they
felt she had vast untapped reservoirs of understanding and ended up telling her all of the sordid and shameful bits of their
histories, and when they saw not so much as a flicker of judgment pass over her features, they kept right on going. It was,
Holly found, a great thing for a writer, to have people tell you things, but it could wreak havoc on relationships.

“Amanda’s taking Paxil?” said Holly.

Mark nodded yes and lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “She’s a completely different person. It’s like I woke up one
morning and suddenly found myself married to this sweet and lovely woman. She’s always been a bit of a, well, I don’t want
to say ‘bitch’ but —” He looked up in the air for a second, searching for the word. “Let’s just go with
difficult.
I mean that in the best possible way, she’s really intelligent and impressive and opinionated and I love her, I really do,
but it was getting pretty tough to live with her.”

“Yeah, but, isn’t that kind of alarming? I mean, that a pill could make that much of a difference?”

“Alarming? Are you kidding? It’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Amanda came in from the kitchen carrying a small bowl of black olives. Amanda was one of those women who start out thin and
spend their thirties getting progressively thinner. Holly couldn’t figure out how she did it. It was almost like she’d discovered
a magic pill, or was involved with some sort of spooky voodoo that she insisted on keeping to herself. Amanda kept getting
thinner, and her hair kept getting shorter and spikier, and her eyes, defying all known laws of human biology, kept getting
bigger. Amanda was beautiful, Holly had to admit, but she was in danger of turning into a bony, bug-eyed elf.

“I didn’t know you started taking Paxil,” said Holly.

“I love it,” said Amanda. “You should try it.”

“Why? I’m not depressed.”

Amanda and Mark just looked at her.

“Why is everyone convinced there’s something wrong with me?” said Holly. “Last night I was on the phone with my stepmother,
and I told her I was thinking about getting a dog, and she said, ‘Oh, good, that means you’re ready to receive love again.’
”

“She said that?” said Amanda.

“She did. And I said to her, Oh, Ellen, don’t you worry about me. I’ve been receiving love,” said Holly. She popped an olive
into her mouth. “I’ve been receiving love in, you know, multiple orifices.”

“You did not,” said Amanda.

“I wanted to.”

“What’s she even talking about?” said Amanda. “You’ve
been
ready to receive love.”

Mark was sitting on the edge of the couch with the bottle of Pinot Noir Holly had brought and one of those rabbit-ear wine
openers. “What kind of dog?” he asked.

“I haven’t got that far,” said Holly. “I’ll probably just go to a shelter.”

“When we rescued Peppo,” said Amanda, “I did all sorts of research about dogs that are happy in apartments and breeds that
do well in New York, but when it came down to it, I wanted the kind of dog I grew up with.”

Holly gave Amanda a look.

“What?” said Amanda.

“He’s a pedigreed Portuguese Water Dog. You had to fly to Oregon to pick him up from the breeder. How is that a rescue?”

“That’s how it works with purebreds. People who adopt them have to sign a contract that they’ll return them to the breeder
if they don’t want the dog anymore. Then the breeder finds a rescue home for it.”

“Yeah, but that’s not really a rescue. I mean, you didn’t ‘rescue’ him from anything. That’s just a used dog.”

“Peppo’s a rescue, Holly.”

Holly looked over at Mark to get some backup — he’d spent a thousand bucks plus airfare on the dog, Holly knew for a fact,
because he’d complained quite loudly about it at the time — but he was hunched over the coffee table, fussing with the wine
opener, oblivious. She knew from experience that pursuing this line of reasoning with Amanda was futile, so she decided to
change the subject. “What exactly is your husband wearing on his feet?”

“Oh. You noticed Mark’s slipper socks. Attractive, aren’t they?”

Mark’s slipper socks were just that: oatmeal-colored wool socks with a brown leather outsole stitched onto the bottom, like
feetie pajamas without the pajamas.

“I mean, I know I’m like family,” said Holly, “but I don’t think you should inflict those things on family.”

“The astronauts wear these,” said Mark. “These are
astronaut’s
slippers, standard issue since nineteen eighty-two.”

“Have you become an astronaut?” said Amanda. “Did I miss something? Have you given up investment banking in order to explore
outer space?”

“Hey, I love these slippers,” said Mark. “I want to be buried in these slippers.”

Amanda looked at Holly and gave a little marital “what can you do” shrug of her shoulders.

“Oh. I almost forgot,” said Holly. “I have to show you something. Can I borrow your laptop?”

“Of course.”

Holly sat down on the couch with Amanda’s computer and managed to open up her email. “Listen to this,” she said. “ ‘Dear Holly.
This is going to sound strange, but I’m writing regarding Spence Samuelson. I have been dating him for about eight months,
talking about a serious future together, and now something catastrophic has happened. I don’t know how you might feel about
talking with me about this, but I would love to hear your perspective. Thank you. Cathleen Wheeler.’ And then she leaves her
phone number, with a Colorado area code.”