by Sarah Dunn
“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.”
Six
BY 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 b
oss, 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.”
Okay, people: this is what I’m talking about. If you don’t have sex somewhere between the ages of, say, sixteen and twenty-two, it seems to me that you miss out on some very important things. There’s a whole lot of crucial stuff I never learned, like, for example, how you get from a meaningful stare over the tiramisu into bed without completely humiliating yourself. Sometimes I think that there’s a whole world of signs and signals and maybe even secret handshakes that I completely missed out on, and the rest of humanity is busy indicating to one another over water coolers and in supermarket checkout lines whether or not they want to have sex, and if they do, whether they’re in it for just a good time or whether they think it might lead somewhere, and I’m just walking along, completely oblivious.
Henry, fortunately, saved me. He put his beer on the kitchen counter and took my face in his hands and gave me a kiss, quite a kiss if you must know, and then he said, “What do you want me to do?”
“I think you should stay,” I said.
“Good.”
“So.”
“So.”
We moved to the couch. Things progressed. When it became glaringly apparent where this all was headed, I felt something approaching panic. I did the only thing I could think of, which was excuse myself to go to the bathroom.
I shut the door and sat down on the toilet. I’m embarrassed to tell you what I was thinking—Okay, I’ll tell you: “What if I cry afterwards,” is what I was thinking. Then, even more alarming: “What if I cry during.”And while I might be accused of overthinking things, crying was a distinct possibility. Not only was I about to have sex with someone I wasn’t in love with, I was about to have sex with someone I wasn’t in love with while I was in love with somebody else. I’d never done anything remotely like that in the past, and for all I knew my central nervous system wouldn’t be able to take it. Fuses would blow. Plus, I’d been doing a lot of crying in that bed in the past seven days, and it was quite conceivable that I’d developed some sort of Pavlovian response to the sheets. Perhaps we should do it on the floor, I thought. Yes, the floor. I felt better for a moment, until I realized that it was entirely possible that Henry was already in the bed—just how adult were we being here?—and if he was, there was no way I could get him out of it and onto the floor without appearing to be completely out of my mind. All of this made me think of the last time I’d had sex on the floor, with Tom, of course, many, many months before this, back in my old apartment. I remembered how I’d opened my eyes midway through and found myself staring at the underside of my kitchen table (yes, this was sex on the floor in the kitchen) and I’d noticed that somebody had stuck a wad of green chewing gum under it, and when I realized I was thinking about who put that gum there instead of about what was going on, sexually speaking, I’d gotten incredibly depressed. I told Bonnie about it the next day, and she assured me it was no big deal, that sometimes she found herself mentally packing her kids’ lunch boxes while she was having sex with her husband Larry, which only served to depress me further. Now, of course, sitting in the bathroom all these months later, I realized that the reason Tom and I had been having sex on the kitchen floor in the first place was probably because Tom was trying to gauge the state of passion in our relationship, and I’d been lying there, thinking about gum. She’s like a drug.
I stood up. I looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. It seemed clear to me that something was about to change, and I didn’t know if it would be a good thing or a bad thing. I didn’t know anything, really, except that I was going to go out there and have sex with Henry, and while it wasn’t necessarily going to blot Tom from my mental landscape completely, it would probably make him recede a little into the distance, for a while anyway, and that was fine with me.
I opened the door to the bathroom. Henry had indeed made his way into the bedroom, and while he wasn’t physically in the bed, he was close enough to it that the f
loor wasn’t an option, which turned out to be fine. We kissed awhile, and then we did it, and then Henry fell asleep while I stared at the ceiling moonily for an hour and a half, and then I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back Henry was awake and we did it again, and then I fell asleep too, happy.
(Okay, I know you want details. I know you want to hear about dimensions of penises and descriptions of orgasms and positions and maneuvers and blowjobs and all that, but here’s the problem: my mother is still alive. And as much as I’d like to tell you all that, if I did, I’d have to kill her. And my poor fathers, both of them, I don’t think they could take it either. I’d have to kill them too. And my Grandma Texas. And any children I ever get around to having, once they learned how to read, I’d be forced to put them out of their misery. Still, I realize you’ve come a long way with me here, and you deserve to know a few things. You deserve to know that Henry turned out to be what is commonly described as Good In Bed. You also deserve to know that I realized for the first time why that particular quality in a man is so prized among women, if you get my drift, and I think you do . . .)
Seven
MAYBE YOU THINK I JUMPED INTO BED WITH HENRY AWFULLY fast for a person who was supposed to be in love with somebody else, I don’t know. I mean, I think I jumped into bed with him awfully fast myself, so I can just imagine what you must be thinking. I feel I should point out that the whole thing was completely out of character. It was so far out of character, come to think of it, that it’s entirely possible it circled all the way around back to being in character again. One of the hardest things about having a religious background like mine is that it makes it exceedingly difficult to figure out which parts of you are actually you and which parts aren’t. That’s where my eleven years of thirteen-dollar-an-hour psychotherapy inevitably ran into a brick wall. Whenever I faced a moral dilemma, whichever therapist I happened to be seeing at the time would say, “Trust yourself.” That was the mantra. Trust yourself. Trust yourself. And I’d sit there in one of the clinic’s orange molded-plastic chairs and I’d try to get into it, really I would, but I’d always come back to the fact that the one thing I’d learned in church was that I was not to be trusted.