The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  Henry rolled over and sat up. “It’s perfectly clear you can never sleep with me again. This sort of exclusivity will get you nowhere. You should get on the phone the minute I walk out the door. You could get those numbers up into the respectable range in no time.”

  “How many would be respectable?” I said. “These days, I mean. For a woman my age.”

  “Nine,” said Henry.

  “Nine?”

  “Every woman I sleep with, I seem to be about number nine,” said Henry.

  “Really?”

  “Come to think of it, I’m always number nine,” he said. “Those sluts have been lying to me.”

  Henry got out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

  “Don’t ask me how many people I’ve slept with, because I’ll be forced to lie to you,” he called from the bathroom. “We’re operating with an unprecedented amount of honesty here, and I’d like to maintain that as long as possible.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Three,” I could hear Henry saying. “Jesus Christ.”

  Ten

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, MY PHONE RANG.

  It was Bonnie.

  “You’re sure in a good mood,” said Bonnie.

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  “So it went well?”

  “It was unbelievable.”

  “Honey,” Bonnie called to Larry. “Alison liked Bob.”

  “No. Actually—shit.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t like Bob. Or he didn’t like me,” I said. “It didn’t go well.”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  Sleeping with Henry is not normally the sort of thing I would tell Bonnie, at least not right away, for reasons which the upcoming conversation will make glaringly apparent. But I was trapped, and so I told her.

  “He just rang your doorbell and you had sex with him?” said Bonnie, her voice trilling up an octave as she hit the last three words.

  “No,” I said. “He called me from a pay phone first. He only wanted to talk to me, anyway. The sex part just happened.”

  “Alison, you can’t let your boss call you up from a pay phone in the middle of the night and come by and have sex with you.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said, although I realized as I said it that it was exactly like that.

  “It’s just not smart,” she said.

  “Well, maybe I’m tired of being smart.”

  Bonnie didn’t say anything.

  “Maybe that’s my problem,” I said. “Thinking five moves ahead all the time.”

  “I’m not saying you should think five moves ahead. But how about one move. The move where he stops sleeping with you and he’s still your boss.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to think at all. Maybe I’m just going to let things happen for once in my life.”

  “Alison, I know you’re upset about Tom. It’s okay to be upset about it. The rest of this isn’t you. Maybe you should work on being alone for a while.”

  “I am alone, Bonnie.”

  “I mean alone in the way that you’re by yourself and you’re not having sex with anybody else.”

  I could hear Larry say to Bonnie, “Alison had sex with Bob? Go, Alison.”

  “Tell him I didn’t,” I said to Bonnie.

  “She didn’t have sex with Bob. She had sex with her boss.”

  “Still,” Larry said. “Go, Alison.”

  “Why can’t you be like that?” I said to Bonnie. “I think this is a good thing for me.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m just worried about you,” she said.

  “What are you worried about, exactly?”

  “I’m worried that this guy could just be using you for sex, and when it’s over you’ll end up even more hurt than you already are,” said Bonnie.

  “Has it crossed your mind,” I said, “that maybe I’m just using him for sex.”

  “Are you?” said Bonnie. She sounded intrigued.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. If I were going to use somebody for sex, I’d use him.”

  Later that day, I met Cordelia for lunch. She told me about her new boyfriend, Naldo, who was a waiter at Bookbinders and grew up in Wisconsin.

  “He has a very big penis, which is a problem,” she said.

  “His penis is so large it’s actually a problem?” I said.

  “It doesn’t interfere with the act itself,” she said. “It’s just, I’m suspicious of men with big penises.”

  “How come?”

  “I think it’s hard for them to be faithful, because they keep wanting to show it to people.”

  I considered this for a moment. “It’s like having a really great car that you can only drive on a closed track,” I said.

  “And men like other people to see their cars. That one fact explains the entire city of Los Angeles. So for a man to have a really big penis and settle down with just one woman goes completely against his nature. Doubly against it.”

  “Maybe we should look for men with such tiny penises that they’re ashamed of them,” I said.

  “Even men with tiny penises aren’t ashamed of them,” said Cordelia. “God knows they should be, but they never are.”

  I love Cordelia. The two of us are alike in a lot of ways, but one of the truly oddest ways that we are alike is that she was brought up with the same degree of maniacal religious intensity as me, only she was raised as a Mormon, not a Christian. Cordelia’s family is so Mormon that her great-great-grandfather actually shook hands with Brigham Young. That is, in fact, how her grandmother introduces herself when she meets other Mormons: “You’re shaking the hand of someone who shook the hand of someone who shook the hand of Brigham Young.” And while it might not seem obvious that that would make us have much in common, the truth is it’s frightening the degree to which the two teams are reading from the same playbook. It was actually kind of upsetting when Cordelia and I finally sat down and compared notes. That bit I told you, about being told that no man would want a flower that was plucked before it had a chance to bloom? Well, this is how they did it in Cordelia’s church. First, each teenage girl was handed a long-stemmed white rose. Then there’d be a little chastity lecture by one of the young married women in the church. (And it’s always the women who do this sort of thing; people are shocked when they find out that the hand that wields the clitoridectomy scalpel belongs to a woman, but it doesn’t surprise me one bit.) Then, the chastity lady would walk around the room and—with a dirty hand—scrunch up each girl’s rose and pull off a clump of the petals and ask her if that’s what she wanted to be, if that’s how she wanted to end up, if that’s what she wanted to present to her husband on her wedding night. Which could explain why Cordelia’s rebellion has managed to outstrip even my own.

  I would like to take a moment here to make a point about women and the church. Every so often, I will find myself in a conversation about what the church sees as the role of women, which is not high on my list of conversations I like to have, but when it comes up I try to deal with it. At some point, whoever I’m talking to (and again, it’s always a woman who ends up saying this sort of thing, although I suppose if a man said something like this to me I would probably punch him) will try to explain why it is that she doesn’t mind that in her tradition women are not allowed to preach, or to serve communion, or to teach men, or to be elders. Why she doesn’t mind that her primary task is to have babies and submit to the leadership of her husband. Why she doesn’t even see any of this as a problem. “One isn’t worse than the other,” these women always say; “the roles are just different.” And what I say to them is this. I say, that is not true. One is worse than the other. It is worse to be the follower, the submitter, the perpetual number two. Not just different from being the leader, the boss, the God-ordained number one—actually worse. And I suppose that one of the best things to come out of my friendship with Cordelia was this: I saw that on this particular subje
ct, the Mormons and the evangelicals got along perfectly. The language they used was not just similar, it was identical. The metaphors they employed were not just similar, they were identical. Never mind the truly monumental theological distinctions. Never mind that they thought we were going to hell and we thought they were going to hell. When it came to controlling their women, the two sides agreed just fine.

  “I’m not sure if your big penis theory is correct,” I said to Cordelia. “Tom has a reasonably sized penis. Nothing to write home about.”

  “‘Dear Mom and Dad, I just met a man with a reasonably sized penis,’” Cordelia said. “You’re right. Nobody would write that letter.”

  “Anyhow, Kate had already seen it back in college, so I don’t know how their affair can be pinned on his desire to show it to her.”

  “Unless”—and here Cordelia got quite animated, the way she does when she’s talking nonsense—“unless it grew.”

  I took a bite of my salad.

  “So he needed to show it to her again,” she said.

  I gave her a look.

  “I agree it’s unlikely,” she said.

  “I don’t think penises grow much late in life,” I said.

  “Which is a shame, really,” Cordelia said. She looked across the table at me. “You realize you’re probably never going to understand this.”

  “You mean Tom?”

  She nodded her head yes.

  “But I have to,” I said. “I can’t stand not understanding it.”

  “That’s what I thought when my marriage fell apart. But at some point I had to accept that I was never going to understand it, it was never going to make sense to me, I couldn’t blame myself and I couldn’t even blame him.”

  “You blamed him for a while,” I pointed out.

  “I know. But the man was just such a crazy sex fiend I knew it wasn’t fair to blame him for it. So I started blaming life instead. Now I’m working on a new approach.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Accept life as it is. No,” Cordelia said. “Affirm life. As it is.”

  This reminded me of those self-help books that tell you to accept your body as it is, and how I find it absolutely impossible to do so, because accepting my body as it is means that I’ll be stuck with it as it is, and that I can’t accept. I said as much to Cordelia.

  “Which is why I can’t affirm life as it is,” I said. “If I affirm life as it is, I’m going to be stuck with it the way it is.”

  “You are stuck with it the way it is,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “But I don’t want to accept it.”

  Eleven

  I HAVE A THEORY THAT MOST MEN TREAT THE WOMEN THEY’RE dating badly, for at least part of the time. With the good ones, this period of bad treatment is just a phase, a working out of their conflicting feelings about commitment and mortality, until they finally come to terms with the idea of having sex with the same woman over and over and over again for the rest of their lives and then dying. The bad ones, well—therein lies the problem. If the good ones treat you bad and the bad ones treat you bad, it makes it kind of hard to tell the difference, right? My friend Angie met a guy through the personals, and after they’d been dating for seven months and were (she thought) very much in love, she discovered he was periodically driving by his ex-girlfriend’s house and leaving little love notes in her mailbox. Angie never would have found out about it if she hadn’t gone to her cousin’s baby shower and overheard some woman going on about her old boyfriend and the notes and how pathetic he was and what did she ever see in him in the first place. The pathetic guy’s name was Julian, and the woman’s name according to her place card was Gennifer with a G, and Angie thought, isn’t that funny, her Julian used to date a Jennifer, and so she went home and asked how Jennifer spelled her name and Julian said “with a G” and Angie kicked him, twice, once in each shin. But—and here’s the perplexing part—he confessed and apologized and stopped doing it and now Angie and Julian have been married for two years and they seem very happy. Okay, they seem reasonably happy. They seem happy the way most of my married friends seem happy: the women seem relieved, like giant sea turtles who have found a suitable beach for their eggs and managed to lumber past the high tide line without getting sucked back into the ocean, and the men, well—the men seem to have made their peace with the sheer inevitability of it all.

  Two days after Henry and I had sex that second time, I walked into his office and shut the door.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “What’s up?” said Henry. He was searching through a pile of papers on his desk.

  “I was wondering if we could talk about our relationship,” I said.

  (I know. I know. I have no excuse for myself. In fact, I’m desperately trying to come up with an excuse, some sort of reasonable explanation for the conversation I am about to recount, and the truth is I have none. This is the part of myself that I’ll never understand, that will never make sense to me, and that I’d like to see led out behind the barn one night and shot.)

  “Relationship?” Henry said, still busy with the papers. “What relationship?”

  “You know,” I said. “This.”

  Henry looked up from his papers.

  “What?” I said.

  “I just, I guess I didn’t know we were involved in a relationship,” said Henry.

  “Well, what would you call it?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. I didn’t know it needed a name.”

  “We’ve slept together four times,” I said.

  Henry furrowed his brow. “We’ve slept together two times.”

  “We’ve slept together a total of four times, but on two separate occasions,” I said.

  “I’m not an expert, but if we’re talking about our relationship”—he leaned mightily on the word, like it was one I’d invented solely for the purposes of this conversation—“I think that counts as two.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is this conversation seems a little premature.”

  “Fine. Okay. I have my answer,” I said. I headed for the door.

  “What answer is that?” said Henry.

  “This is just a fuck. Which is perfectly fine. I just wanted to know.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” Henry said.

  “Then what would you call it?”

  “It’s, ah, let me think.” He leaned way back in his chair and gazed off into space. “It’s a bit of fun. That’s somewhere between ‘just a fuck’ and ‘a relationship.’”

  “Okay,” I said. I felt slightly better.

  “Excellent. So. We all clear here?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, and went back to his papers.

  I turned to go. This is what you get for sleeping with your boss, I thought. This is what happens when you let your new boss call you from a pay phone at eleven o’clock at night and come over and have sex with you two times, for a total of four times on two separate occasions. You wanted fun. You wanted amazing. You wanted to be like the girls on Sex and the City, and Henry had played his part, he had delivered the goods, and it wasn’t fair to him to act like a lunatic after the fact. He did not sign on for it. The man did not sign on for it.

  “Well, I don’t . . . I’m not interested in a bit of fun,” I said.

  “You aren’t,” said Henry.

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you asking me to marry you?” said Henry.

  “No.”

  “Are you asking me to ask you to marry me?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to move in together?”

  “No.”

  “So I don’t see the problem,” said Henry.

  “There’s no problem,” I said.

  There was a long pause.

  “Alison,” Henry said, kindly. “Just because I happened to be Number Three doesn’t mean you have to be in love with me.”

  “I’m not in
love with you,” I said.

  “I know that,” Henry said. “But you’ll feel better if you keep reminding yourself you’re not.”

  Is it inevitable, I ask you, that a girl like me will end up thinking she’s in love with every man she goes to bed with? Is it simply unavoidable? I guess what I’m asking is: did you see this coming? Because I didn’t. I honestly didn’t. I think I honestly thought that I could have meaningless sex with Henry, that he could be my greasy pancake, and that I could just go on about my life, clipping along, taking him or leaving him, without so much as a backwards glance. And is that even possible for me? I’m not asking if it’s optimal or desirable or good—simply if it’s possible. I wonder. I wonder if I had jumped into bed with somebody else, somebody who, say, didn’t speak English, would that have made my experiment in meaningless sex meaningless enough to avoid this sort of complication?

  (Mind you, I am not speaking for all women here. I never presume to be speaking for all women, but I feel I have to point out that on this subject that is particularly true. I know there are women out there who manage to participate in this sort of activity without getting tangled up in feelings, without thinking they’re in love with a man just because he’s seen them walk naked from the bed to the bathroom and then back again. I know for a fact that such women do exist. Cordelia is one of them. Cordelia has had sex with eighteen men, a figure which I acknowledge is not at all astonishing for a woman thirty-four years of age and yet truly astonishes me. Eighteen men. At last count! But my point is this: she didn’t fall in love with all of them. She fell in love with some of them.)

  If the falling in love part is inevitable—mind you, I have not landed on this conclusion definitively, on the grounds that I have not yet collected enough data (I’m not even sure how many data points would be sufficient, but I’m thinking I need more than three)—then what does that mean for the respective parties involved? When I said that Henry did not sign on for my lunacy—is that in fact true? What exactly was he signing on for, having sex with me, if it wasn’t a relationship and it wasn’t lunacy? I have to believe that, even before the Number Three conversation, it must have been fairly obvious to Henry what he was dealing with, and I can’t help but wonder what in the world he was thinking. What was he thinking? A few years ago, my friend Eric told me that the summer he turned thirteen, he used to have eight or nine orgasms a day, most of them by pressing up against one of the water jets in his neighbor’s pool. A small part of me didn’t believe him, a small part of me thought, okay, he must have some sort of problem, and a very big part of me thought I’m never going swimming with Eric ever again. I mention that now because it stuck with me—you watch, it’ll stick with you, too—but also because, well, maybe it’s as simple as that. Maybe that’s what Henry was thinking—meaning, maybe he wasn’t thinking anything at all. Maybe what I ought to keep in mind when I find myself trying to find some sort of logic and reason where men and sex are concerned is simply Eric humping his neighbor’s pool.