The Big Love (6 page)
“I’m not saying they’re right,” Bonnie said. “You have plenty of time. Wendy Wasserstein had a baby when she was forty-eight.”
“The last thing I want to do when I’m forty-eight years old is have a baby with some defrosted sperm and my mother holding my hand in the delivery room,” I said.
“Your mother will be almost eighty by then,” Bonnie said. “Maybe she’ll be dead.”
“The women in my family live a very long time.”
The women in my family do, in fact, live a very long time. My great-aunt Ellie was still mowing her neighbor’s lawn when she was a hundred and seven years old. My grandmother—who everybody calls Grandma Texas even though she lives in Idaho—is ninety-four, and she still drives her 1984 Chrysler LeBaron every day (although as an accommodation to her age she more or less exclusively limits herself to right turns), and she still volunteers at St. Luke’s Hospital, even though St. Luke’s Hospital is no longer affiliated with the Catholic Church and is owned instead by a large HMO that nonetheless happily lets her run the information desk for three hours every Tuesday morning, for free. I called Grandma Texas a few days after Tom left. I told her what had happened, and at some point I made what I thought was a little joke. What I said was, “Now I’m the family old maid.” “Oh, don’t be silly,” Grandma Texas said, in a kind, grandmotherly tone; “Claire is.” Now, it is true that my cousin Claire is thirty-eight years old and not married. It is also true that Claire is a lesbian, although nobody has gotten around to telling Grandma Texas that fact, who thinks that Claire and her roommate, Karen, are just two career girls who are down on their luck in the man department. Claire and Karen have lived together for eleven years, and every December they send out Christmas cards featuring a photo of the two of them hugging some stray dog they found limping around behind an Exxon station, and they both have let themselves go to such an extent that the consensus is that they’re incredibly lucky to have one another. It was precisely this line of thinking that made me realize, after I got off the phone with Grandma Texas, that you couldn’t really consider Claire an old maid, seeing as she’d found what appeared to be lasting happiness with another human being, which in turn made me face the following fact: I was the family old maid. It was such a depressing thought, really, that I didn’t even stop to think how truly idiotic it was. But something happens to a person in a situation like this. At least, something happened to me.
“I’ll go out with him,” I said to Bonnie when the check came.
“Great. I’ll have Larry give him your number.”
“What’s his name?” I said.
“Bob.”
“Bob?”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting.”
“Larry says he’s a very nice guy.”
“Is there anything I should know?”
“Like what?”
“Is there anything that will cause me to call you up and say I can’t believe you didn’t mention that?”
“He’s starting to lose some of his hair.”
I was silent.
“Hey, I wish Larry would go bald,” Bonnie said. “Then I could
relax.
”
“Is there anything else?” I said.
“No.”
“Okay.”
We went outside. It was a beautiful day. Bonnie gave me a hug.
“Do yourself a favor, Alison. Don’t mention this whole thing with Tom on your date.”
“I thought the whole point of this date was that I could act like myself.”
“There’ll be plenty of time to act like yourself later, if things go well and he likes you,” said Bonnie. “Right now you should act like Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
You know, light. Airy.”
B
Y FRIDAY, IT WAS STARTING TO SEEM A LITTLE STRANGE TO ME
that Tom hadn’t called. I’d been preparing for his call all week, for the follow-up call, for the call that would give me a chance to say all the things I hadn’t been able to say during the initial call because I’d been so stunned. I was going to tell him that he was a schmuck and an asshole and a fuckhead and an idiot, and I didn’t know what I’d ever seen in him in the first place. I was going to say that he and Kate Pearce deserved each other. I was going to warn him that she was going to leave him again, just like she had the first time, and he’d better not come crawling back to me, because I won’t take him back, not in a million years, not for all the tea in China, not if he was the last man on Earth. I was going over this stuff again in my head while I was sitting at my desk late on Friday when it hit me: maybe Tom wasn’t going to call me, ever. Maybe he thought “I’m in love with somebody else” covered everything. Maybe he wasn’t even going to give me the satisfaction of telling him what a schmuck and an asshole and a fuckhead and an idiot he was. That would be just like him, the bastard.
Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I had to call him. I had to call him and tell him that we needed to have a talk, a face-to-face talk, that I deserved at least that much consideration. If nothing else, we had the business of cohabitation to discuss. I mean, was he planning to pay his half of the rent for the next month? Did he expect me to warehouse his personal effects indefinitely? Tom might be hoping to swoon around in a sex haze a while longer, content to wear his friends’ old suits to work so he could put off a confrontation with me, but I had details to attend to, plans to make.
I looked at my watch. It was six-fifteen. I realized I had to make the call right away, because if I didn’t catch him before he left work, I’d be forced to wait until Monday, because I didn’t know where he was sleeping. I knew who he was sleeping with, but I had no idea where. I grabbed my purse and headed for the stairwell, in search of a pay phone. I couldn’t wait until Monday. If I waited until Monday, I’d explode.
“Hey there,” Henry said. He was heading out the door.
“Hi, Henry,” I said.
“Where are you off to?”
“Nowhere.”
“You want to grab some dinner?”
“With you?” I said.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
I looked at my watch. Tom had probably left the office already, anyway. He was probably hurrying home to have sex with Kate. That’s what you do in the beginning, you hurry home. The shithead.
“Fine,” I said. “That would be fine with me.”
So we went out to dinner. Henry and me. And I was so distracted by thoughts of Tom not calling and Tom fucking Kate and Tom in bed with Kate, spent, thinking idly about not calling me, that it wasn’t until my second glass of wine that I looked across the table at Henry, really looked at him. He was telling me a story about his first apartment in New York. He’s really good-looking, I thought. He was too good-looking, in fact. I’ve always thought that dating a really good-looking guy would be like buying a white couch: it might be nice to have, but you’d waste all that time
worrying
about it. (Tom isn’t bad-looking, if you’re wondering, but he isn’t particularly good-looking either—Tom is the equivalent, I’d say, of a subtly patterned beige couch.)
Anyway: Henry. At some point, and I don’t know exactly when it happened, the conversation turned, and Henry and I were no longer two coworkers talking about careers and apartments, but a man and a woman, slightly drunk, in a Chinese restaurant with a candle in the middle of the table. Actually, I do know when it happened. Henry had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and when he came back he had to kind of squeeze behind my chair to get back into his, and in the process of squeezing by he leaned down and said, “You smell good.” That’s it, just “You smell good,” but all of a sudden we were laughing a little more conspiratorially and touching each other’s forearms to punctuate our sentences and casually mentioning movies we’d like to see and then agreeing that we ought to go see them together.
“Won’t that be a problem for, what’s his name, the guy in your column?” Henry said.
“We broke up,” I said.
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Well,” I said. “Yeah.”
“What happened?”
And so I told Henry what had happened with Tom, but I left out the more humiliating details, and the truth is there wasn’t much of a story left without the humiliating details. I said that Tom and I wanted different things, for example, but I didn’t indicate that what I wanted was Tom and what Tom wanted was Kate Pearce. And while I didn’t exactly lie, it’s safe to say that by the time I was through, Henry was left with the impression that Tom and I had sat down together one day and decided that our relationship, while wonderful, had run its course; that we’d arrived at this decision in a supremely rational and healthy manner, without the aid of sex with third parties or marital ultimatums or anything like that; and that we’d both walked away with no hurt feelings, only a little bit of self-knowledge and a twinge of fond regret. Even worse, though, I managed to imply that all of this had happened quite some time ago, and that I’d had a chance to gain perspective and—I’m ashamed to admit it, but I actually used this word—
closure.
“Have you ever noticed that the Chinese don’t have a good dessert?” Henry said when the check finally came.
“What do you mean?”
“Think about how much more money people would spend in Chinese restaurants each year if they had a halfway-decent dessert. They should just adopt something. Just, pretend it’s theirs and start serving it.”
“Tiramisu,” I said.
“Perfect. It even sounds Chinese.”
“Pretty soon people would be saying, ‘I’m in the mood for tiramisu, let’s get Chinese.’”
“You know what?” Henry said.
“What?”
“I’m in the mood for tiramisu.”
So we paid the check and we walked to an Italian restaurant a few blocks away and sat at the bar and shared a tiramisu and some sambuca, and Henry told me about growing up in Florida and I told him about growing up in Arizona, and what with all the alcohol it started to feel like we had a lot in common, citrus fruit playing a prominent role in both of our childhoods, the disorienting absence of seasons, the longing for a life with snow days and fireflies and art museums displaying more than just shards of Native American pottery. I could end up having sex here, I thought. This is how people do it. They go out, they get drunk, they talk, one of them says that the other one smells good, and then they go home and have sex. Of course, here we had the added complication that Henry was my boss, but that sort of thing has been known to happen. Maybe not to me, but it happens. Did I want to be the kind of girl who has undefined-yet-presumably-meaningless sex with her boss? Could I be that girl? Was it even possible? Could I be the kind of girl who has undefined-yet-presumably-meaningless sex with her boss and regrets it the next morning but still wouldn’t do anything different if she had the chance to do it all over again? You have to understand that up until this point in my life, the part of my brain devoted to Sexual Regret was populated entirely with people I
didn’t
go to bed with. If I’d broken down and had sex with Lance Bateman, for example, when I was seventeen and desperately wanted to, I’m convinced that my entire life would have turned out differently. I say this not because I’m under some sort of delusion about Lance’s sexual prowess, but because sleeping with him would have gotten me over the hump, so to speak, and then I would have gone on through my life and slept with all the other people I regret not sleeping with, or most of them anyway, and I’d be a little harder now, and a little more damaged, and sort of a slut—but I’d be wiser, too. I’d be a wise slut.
I find I’m trying to explain how it is that Henry ended up back at my apartment.
I think one of the reasons I’ve had sex with so few people is because it took me so long to figure one simple thing out: men ask once. They don’t even ask, really. They try. Men try once. That’s why Holly Hunter was so upset when she got stuck at Albert Brooks’s house and couldn’t go have sex with William Hurt after he’d groped her left breast in front of the Jefferson Monument. She knew she might not get a second chance. And she was right—she didn’t get a second chance, because the plot got in the way. A part of me knew that if I didn’t go ahead and go home with Henry that first night, then it was never going to happen between us. The window of opportunity would close forever. And so, when Henry asked if he could come up and see my apartment after he walked me home, I said yes.
When we got inside, I went into the kitchen to get us some drinks. I could hear Henry poking around in the other room.
“Beer okay?” I called.
“Perfect,” said Henry.
“Good.”
“You play golf?” he said.
“No. Do you?”
“A little.”
Henry materialized in the doorway to the kitchen. He leaned against the door frame with his arms folded across his chest and looked at me.
“You have a brother who plays golf who by chance stores his clubs in your entry hall?”
“No,” I said.
“I’m starting to get the feeling that maybe I shouldn’t be here.”
“Why not?”
“He’s been gone, what, a week?”
Was it that obvious?
“Longer than that,” I said.
“No man who golfs often enough to keep his clubs in the entryway would leave them for much more than a week.”
“He hasn’t been gone for very long, but it’s been over for a while.”
“Ah.”
“You with your ahs.”
“They give me time to think,” Henry said.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m just wondering when you’re going to write about it.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to.”
“It seems like just the sort of thing you write about.”
“I’m going to write about the Chinese restaurants and the tiramisu.”
“I think you’re not going to write about it until you’re sure it’s over.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Which means you’re not sure it’s over,” Henry said. “Which means I should probably go.”
“I’m not sure that’s absolutely necessary,” I said, throatily. The second the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Maybe he was looking for a graceful way out, and I’d just made that impossible. Maybe I’d blocked his escape route. “If you want to leave, you should go,” I said, and then, in a panic—fearing that he might now think I
wanted
him to leave—I amended it with this: “But don’t not stay because of, you know, him.”