The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  I don’t like to be in the business of blaming the church for things that have gone wrong in my life. I realize it might seem like I do an awful lot of it for someone who doesn’t like to do it, but my feeling is that the rest of the world is happy bashing evangelical Christians and there is no need for me to pile on. I mean, surely a little low-grade looniness about sex is a small price to pay to go through life with the unshakeable conviction that you’re going to end up in heaven. But the problem with growing up with a highly polarized, dualistic view of the world is that, if you ever decide to go off and do things your own way, all you get left with are the bad parts. The first thing I thought the night of the dinner party was not, as I believe I told you earlier, that the thing with the ring was probably a mistake. That was the second thing I thought. The first thing I thought was, So this is how God has decided to punish me. It was as if God had taken time out of his busy schedule of rescuing flood victims from rooftops and healing holes in newborn babies’ hearts and decided to punish me by having Tom go out for the mustard and not come back. And I realize that I sound very matter-of-fact, very literal, about a thing that, if it exists at all, exists as a metaphysical reality, but that’s another thing about evangelicals. We’re very literal. Just try to suggest to an evangelical that sometimes a symbol is just a symbol and you’ll see what I mean.

  Gil-the-homosexual was an evangelical Christian when I met him—now that he’s gay, I’m not sure what he is. Gil was so Christian back then that we met in a church basement, tutoring underprivileged children. Our church ran an outreach program in which a bunch of kids from the projects were bused in every Tuesday night for us to influence. We sang Jesus songs at them while they threw things at one another, and then we helped them with their homework. The trick was to get assigned one of the sweet seven-year-olds who you could surprise with gifts like coloring books and sticker packs and pencil sets instead of a belligerent fourteen-year-old who greeted you each week with “Whadja bring me?” Why we all did this week in and week out, I don’t know. The kids, I suppose, wanted the sticker packs. I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted a boyfriend who was a Christian but who wasn’t uptight about it, who was good-looking and intelligent and had an interesting job and a sense of humor, who said “fuck” when the situation warranted it, who had attempted but been unable to finish St. Augustine’s City of God, who could argue politics with my mother and talk business with my father, who liked Indian food and had nice friends and knew how to dress and would like someday to live abroad. I took a look around the church basement, and there was Gil.

  I just realized that I haven’t told you Gil’s last name, which means I’ve left out a big chunk of the Gil story. Gil’s last name was Chang. Gil Chang was not, however, Asian—which brings me to the part of the Gil story I haven’t gotten around to telling you. Gil had gone to a tiny Baptist college down in Alabama where, among other anachronisms, the students weren’t allowed to kiss each other until they’d gotten engaged. Well, everyone got engaged. Everyone got engaged and then most of them got married and then a full sixty percent of them got divorced within three years of graduation. Anyhow, to hear him tell it, Gil had wanted to kiss a sweet girl in his New Testament class and the next thing you know he was married to her. Her name was Lily Chang, and she was Chinese, and Gil had figured it would be easier for their kids to go through life with an ethnically appropriate last name, so he’d taken Lily’s, which was remarkably progressive of him, when you think about it. Lily turned out to be progressive, too, in her own way; eight months after they got married, she left him for an Argentinean tango instructor. Gil kept the friends and the furniture and the wedding presents and—in a truly bizarre move for which I never did receive a satisfactory explanation—Lily’s last name.

  That was one of the things I clung to when faced with evidence of Gil’s latent homosexuality: the fact that he’d been married once already. Gay men don’t get married, I’d think, whenever he’d say “righty-tighty, lefty-loosy” while trying to unscrew a lightbulb. Then, about the time that delusion started to wear thin, Gil and I started having sex. Gay men don’t have sex with women, I’d think, every time he got up out of bed in the middle of the night to do his dusting. I had somehow gotten the idea that they couldn’t do it, biologically speaking—that the hydraulics just wouldn’t work. And the fact that Gil had been married before did explain a lot about him. That’s why he had the queen-size cherrywood sleigh bed, in fact—Lily’s parents had given it to them as a wedding present. It took up half of his apartment. The other half was filled with silver platters and brass candlesticks and crystal vases, and there were fourteen place settings of china lovingly displayed in a glass hutch in the living room, and matching coasters on every piece of furniture, all of which was polished to a high sheen.

  I should have known about Gil, of course. I should have known the way you know about a dented can. But this is the thing: everyone has been warned about dented cans, but surely not every dented can is bad, or they wouldn’t be allowed to sell them, right? Someone’s buying those dented cans. Someone’s taking them home and opening them up and examining the contents and then making a bet about whether or not the stuff inside is safe to eat. And let me tell you, when you’re twenty-five, and a virgin, and you refuse to date anybody but a Christian—and not just any Christian but a certain kind of Christian—your options are all dented cans. When Gil and I finally broke up, I took another look around the church basement, and I had the closest thing I’ve ever had to an actual vision. There sat Brian Berryman. Single. Thirty-two. An attorney. Crown prince of the church basement. So morally upright he didn’t believe in dating; he believed in praying. He’d been praying for a wife since he was sixteen. He’d drawn up a list of all the qualities he wanted her to possess, a list which he was continually revising, and then praying about, and then revising some more, and then informally circulating among the single women at the church. A woman of pure heart, the list would go. A gentle and quiet spirit. A submissive nature. Is this what you want in a husband? Iheard a voice saying. Well, not an actual voice, but it was as clear as day. I realized that if I kept searching for husbands in church basements I was going to end up with a seriously dented can. And Gil, for all his faults, had at least relieved me of my virginity, which meant that it was now safe for me to venture out into the world and date normal men who would want to—who would expect to—sleep with me.

  I ask you, what would you have done if you were me? What would you have done? It’s impossible to convey just what I was up against. Years and years of appalling platitudes that were preached at me as if they were gospel. No one wants the secondhand garments that have been pawed over on the sale table. No one wants the flower that has been plucked before it has a chance to bloom. And for a long time this made perfect sense to me. Of course no one would want a pawed-over garment. Of course no one would want a flower that had already been plucked. And then one day it hit me: but I am not a flower, nor am I clothing. I was not an object. It felt really good to finally see through all of that, and to this day I consider that revelation the beginning of my admittedly somewhat stunted feminist awakening. Tom always said that I was traditional when being traditional suited my purposes and liberated when being liberated did, and while he did not intend this as a compliment, I always took it as one. Still, I’ve often wondered why I’ve never been able to become a full-blown feminist. Sometimes I think it’s because, having left one brand of self-righteous orthodoxy, I haven’t wanted to throw my lot in with another, but it’s entirely possible that I’m just too much of a fucking ninny. Oh well. I am feminist enough to be angry about a few things. I mean, it’s one thing to live in a society that views women as objects, and quite another to go to church as a young girl and have it pounded into your head to look at yourself as one. It made me want to get pawed over just to spite them. So I did, and it was fun, and for a while there I thought I was free of all that. But I wasn’t free of it, not really, not in a way that really counted. Because eve
ry time I stopped to think about what happened between Tom and me, a part of me couldn’t help believing that the real problem was simply that Tom had lost interest in the gum he had already chewed. He’d been getting the milk for free, and therefore had not bought the cow, and now he was in the mood for a new cow. What right had I to be surprised? This was, after all, what I’d been warned about my entire life. I’d been told in no uncertain terms just what the fruits of sexual freedom would be—that I’d end up alone and unloved, unmarried and childless, an object of scorn and pity, without even the solace of my faith. And, well, lying in my bed the morning after I’d had sex with Henry, alone (because he’d left), unloved (I think it’s safe to say I felt unloved), I was forced to ask myself—just what part of that wasn’t turning out to be true?

  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.

  Eight

  WHEN 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 th
is: 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).