The Big Love (8 page)
I see that in trying to address the topic of my faith I have focused almost exclusively on sex. Surely there is more to the spiritual tradition of St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther than that, is probably what you are thinking. There is. I will not bore you with any of it here, however. The truth is, I have complicated feelings about the whole thing. Certainly many of them are negative, and the ones that aren’t negative are hard to put into words. And I suppose if I had been raised as a Christian Scientist, all of this craziness would revolve around something completely different, like going to the doctor. The way it would work would be like this: I wouldn’t go to the doctor for a very long time, and when I finally did go, it would be a result of doubt and curiosity and a desperate need for medical attention, and when the world didn’t stop turning because of my trip to the doctor it would create even more doubt, and pretty soon I’d be going to the doctor all the time and I wouldn’t be a Christian Scientist anymore. Of course, I can see the ridiculousness of that. It’s not always easy to see your own ridiculousness, though.
W
HEN I WOKE UP THAT SATURDAY MORNING, HENRY HAD
already left. I lay in bed by myself for a while, trying to feel my feelings. That was one of the things I had worked on in therapy. The problem with feeling my feelings lately was that whenever I actually sat down and tried to feel them, I felt like throwing up. I tried to remember what Janis Finkle had said to me.
Let them pass through you like a wave. Watch them the way you watch clouds floating by.
I sat up. I’m not going to be a lunatic about this, I decided. It was casual sex. I’m going to be casual about it. I got out of bed and headed for the bathroom, which is where I found the note. It was propped up against the mirror over the sink. I immediately picked up the phone and called Cordelia. (Cordelia is my friend for situations like this, not Bonnie.)
“What did it say?” Cordelia said when I got to the part about the note.
“Keep in mind that he’s my boss,” I said. “So I think it’s meant as some kind of office joke.”
“What did it say?” she asked again.
“Fine work.”
“Fine
work?
”
“Yeah,” I said. “It said, ‘Alison. Fine work. Henry.’”
“Okay, I can see how he meant that to be funny,” Cordelia said. “Witty. Something other than offensive.”
“Me too.”
“Still.”
“I know.”
“But you shouldn’t worry.”
I was worried. “It seems to me, if you have amazing sex with a person, and not just once but twice, you stick around for the morning part, right?” I said. “That just seems logical to me.”
“You did it twice?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Twice, one right after the other, or twice, two separate times?”
“Two separate times,” I said. “He fell asleep in between. Does that matter?”
“Not really,” said Cordelia. “I just like to have all the information.”
“What do you think?”
“Okay,” Cordelia said. She took a breath. “It’s possible that you were having amazing sex and he was just, you know . . . having sex.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. “That happens?”
“The whole time I was with Jonathan, I was having the time of my life,” Cordelia said. “He was just lying there, wishing I was an underwear model.”
“He told you that?”
“We had a very honest relationship,” Cordelia said. “The fuckhead.”
Jonathan really was a fuckhead, and he did some truly horrible things to Cordelia, and she always says that she stayed with him for so long because of the sex. Sex is very important to Cordelia. She’s had a lot of it, and she has a number of interesting theories about it. In fact, the real reason I knew I wasn’t having great sex with Tom before I finally had great sex with Henry was because of one of Cordelia’s theories. Here’s the theory. Really great sex is like movie sex. If you watch people having sex in movies and you say to yourself,
“Oh, nobody has sex like that except in movies,”
then you should know that you’re not having great sex. I tried to call Cordelia on this once, back when I first started sleeping with Gil-the-homosexual. “What about
Fatal Attraction
?” I remember saying to her. “With the water running? And the dishes in the sink?” Cordelia just raised one of her eyebrows in the way that she does, and I knew that if Cordelia felt that way there had to be something to it.
“Okay, I’ve just had this amazing time,” I said. “Twice. I’ve had two amazing times. And I’m lying there, staring up at the ceiling, and do you know what I’m thinking?”
“What are you thinking?”
“How long before we reach the point in our relationship where I can go into the bathroom afterwards and put on my moisturizer.”
“You’re sick,” Cordelia said. “You do realize that.”
“I do.”
“This guy is not that guy,” Cordelia said. “Trust me.”
“I know.”
“It would take
a lot
to turn this guy into that guy,” she said. “But maybe he can be your greasy pancake,” she said.
“My what?” I said.
“When you’re making pancakes, the first one soaks up all the grease on the griddle, so you have to throw it away,” said Cordelia. “Henry can soak up all the grease left over from Tom. Then your griddle will be ready to go.”
“I don’t think that’s a very good metaphor,” I said, “but I like it.”
“It’s my mom’s,” she said. “Only she
married
her greasy pancake. ‘Don’t make the same mistake I made,’ she says whenever they have a fight. ‘Throw away your greasy pancakes.’”
“So what am I supposed to do?” I said.
“That’s easy,” said Cordelia. “Enjoy your greasy pancake. And then throw him away.”
I’m worried that I’ve given you the impression that I was upset about what had happened with Henry, and I should probably take a moment here to correct that impression. I was not really all that upset. I mean, I knew that on a purely objective level I should be offended—Henry slinking off in the middle of the night, the “fine work” note, the fact that he did not call me later that Saturday or even on Sunday—but I also must admit that I felt a certain undeniable thrill. I mean, the man didn’t even know my middle name! It was like I was suddenly living a life I’d only read about in books, like I woke up one day and was suddenly a rodeo cowboy or a sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer or a geisha girl. That’s how big it felt. Having lived my life with a certain set of restrictions and expectations and admonitions—most of which boil down to the idea that sex is to be used to extort a lifelong commitment from a man, and anything less than that is considered a tactical failure on the part of the woman, with the direst of consequences—there I was, finally throwing caution to the wind after years and years of almost throwing it. And say what you will about the perils of sexual freedom, nobody had ever told me the whole truth, which is that it feels an awful lot like actual freedom.
On Sunday afternoon I wrote a column about the Chinese restaurants and the tiramisu. I realize this isn’t much of a transition, but that’s the problem with trying to tell a story like this: you need too many transitions. I’m used to writing columns, very short columns, and as a result I’m not very good at transitions. A good column explores one idea, boom, you’re in and then you’re out, and then the reader makes his own transition, to another article or tying his shoelaces or getting off the bus or whatever. But I have to keep everything moving forward here, and all you need to know about the rest of that particular weekend is that I wrote my column on Sunday afternoon, the way I always do, and on Monday morning I walked to the office, the way I always do, with my column about the Chinese restaurants and the tiramisu on a computer disk. I looked good. I mean, I looked better than I usually do, although I didn’t realize how much better until I got to the office and Olivia and Matt couldn’t stop commenting on it. I suppose I looked the way a girl who’d slept with her boss on Friday night would look on Monday morning, but I didn’t want Olivia to figure that out, which is why I ended up telling the two of them about Tom. Olivia can smell these things a mile away. She’s a big believer in the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” school of human sexuality—namely, if you think two people might be sleeping together, they are (with the corollary that if you think a person might be gay, he is).
“Why are you all dressed up?” said Matt.
“I’m not,” I said.
“Yes you are. Olivia,” Matt said, “don’t you think Alison looks exceptionally good this morning?”
Olivia looked me up and down slowly and nodded her head.
“Tom and I broke up,” I said.
“What?” Olivia said. “When did this happen?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “You just wanted to know why I look good, and now you know.”
“Because you’re back on the prowl,” said Matt.
“I’m not on the prowl,” I said. “I just felt bad, so I figured I should try to look as good as possible so I wouldn’t end up seeing myself in a mirror and feeling even worse.”
“What happened?” said Olivia.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“Of course you want to talk about it,” said Olivia. “Tell us what happened.”
I looked at the two of them. It was clear I wasn’t going to get away with not talking about it. “He thinks we’re growing apart.”
“Bullshit,” said Olivia.
“Why is that necessarily bullshit?” Matt said to Olivia. “Maybe they were growing apart.”
“That’s just the kind of bullshit excuse men always come up with,” Olivia said. “It means he wants to fuck strangers, that’s what it means.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure he knows who he wants to fuck,” I said.
“Who?” said Olivia.
“Her name is Kate Pearce,” I said. “And he’s already fucking her.”
“How do you know that?” said Olivia.
“It’s been going on since May,” I said.
“He told you that?” said Olivia.
“He said he was in love with somebody else. I figured out the rest.”
Olivia walked over and sat one of her haunches on my desk. “Who is she?” said Olivia.
I told them a little about Kate. I said she was bony, and her hair stuck to her head like a helmet. I said she had a little-girl frailty that made me want to puke. I told them she had given Tom a lasagna for his birthday, and I should have known then where this all was headed, but I didn’t. (I’m tempted to leave the lasagna out of this, because it’s kind of a confusing detail, as details go—Kate Pearce is not the lasagna-making type—but Kate did in fact make a lasagna for Tom, early on, before the sex part of their affair started, and I’ll tell you something: it was a very crafty move.)
“What do you mean, bony?” Matt said. “You mean thin?”
“She means bony,” Olivia said. “There is still such a thing as bony.”
“No. He’s right. She’s thin,” I said. “She’s beautiful. She’s thin and beautiful.”
“She’s
new,
”said Olivia.
“That’s the thing. She’s not new,” I said. “They went out for three years in college, and then she dumped him.” Then I told Matt and Olivia my theory, which I had spent the greater part of the past week developing. When Tom was two years old, his mother ran off to Hollywood to become a movie star, although the closest she got was a small recurring role as a nurse on a show called
Daniel Denby, Medical Doctor.
Tom’s grandmother, who ended up raising him, would put him in his pajamas and sit him down in front of the television set every Thursday night to see if he could catch a glimpse of his mother, although even that often ended in disappointment, because her part was so small and she got cut out of episodes at random. All of which, it seemed to me, explained a few things about Tom’s psychology. He had a certain amount of anger towards women. He had a pronounced unconscious longing for the lost mother. And my theory was that Kate’s reentry into Tom’s life after all these years had triggered those feelings and he was powerless to resist them.
“Yes,”
said Olivia. “He’s reenacting his childhood psychodrama.”
Matt turned to me and said, “And guess who’s Grandma.”
I slumped my head down on my desk.
Olivia started to pace around the office. “It’s perfect. He wants the woman who abandoned him. He can’t help it. It’s hardwired into him. His seeming inability to commit to Grandma —”
“Please,” I said.
“This time, though, Mommy wants him too. They start having that incredibly hot sex that you can only have when it’s really about something else, something primal, something transgressive, only Tom doesn’t know that is what’s going on. He just thinks he’s found his soul mate. He thinks he’s found his missing piece.”
“I feel sick,” I said.
Olivia looked at me. “Then again, I could be wrong,” she said.
“I’m going to kill myself,” I said.
“God knows I’ve been wrong before,” said Olivia.
“Guys want to have sex with their old girlfriends. End of story,” Matt said. Then he turned to Olivia. “And I can’t believe you get paid to write an advice column.”
Olivia left to get a cup of coffee, and after a bit Matt came over and sat on the edge of my desk.
“You realize you’re much better off this way,” Matt said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“When somebody leaves you, it’s always better if they leave you to be with somebody else,” said Matt.
“Why is that?” I said.
“Because otherwise it means they just really, really can’t stand you.”
I just looked at him.
“It’s much less personal this way,” said Matt.
“It feels pretty personal,” I said.
“Trust me,” he said.
“I’ll try,” I said.
I
MET BOB, MY BLIND DATE, AT AN ITALIAN RESTAURANT ON
Tuesday night after work. I walked in and spotted him instantly. He was the bald guy sitting at the bar. He paid for his drink, and then we sat down at a table.
“How old are you?” said Bob. “Do you mind if I ask?”
“Thirty-two,” I said. “And no, I don’t mind. How old are you?”
“Forty-six,” he said.
“You’re forty-six?” I said.
“Yes,” said Bob.