The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  And another thing. About the data collection process. It’s possible that by the time I’ve collected enough data to come to a conclusion on the inevitability of a girl like me falling in love with every man she sleeps with, I will no longer be a girl like me and the question will be moot. The act of experimentation itself will change the fundamental nature of the sample. So maybe I should just accept it, accept that I will end up in love with every man I go to bed with and, while I’m at it, accept that by the time I’ve slept with enough people for this to no longer be the case, I will have become a different person altogether.

  Twelve

  ONE OF THE BENEFITS OF WRITING A NEWSPAPER COLUMN IN A town like Philadelphia is that one is occasionally called upon to perform the sort of ceremonial duty that, in a larger city, would be performed by somebody who was actually famous. Usually this involves judging something, and usually I say yes.

  That Thursday night was one such occasion. I had been called upon to judge pie. It was a food thing, and there were all sorts of categories, and somehow I got pie. Which was fine. I like pie. And it worked out quite well, really, in that immediately after the “I’m not in love with you” conversation with Henry, I got to leave work and go evaluate fourteen different pies for things like flakiness of crust and tastiness of filling. It was a work-sanctioned binge. Afterwards, I went home to change, and at around eight, I headed back to Reading Terminal for the party where they would announce the winners.

  The Reading Terminal Market is one of the things that everybody loves about Philadelphia, and they’re right to love it. It’s a farmers’ market built inside an old railroad terminal, and it’s filled with Amish women selling honey in jars with those little gingham jar bonnets on top and smiling men offering three-dollar shoe shines. There’s a stall that sells nothing but used cookbooks, and one that sells nothing but powdered doughnuts, and one that sells nothing but handmade pretzels. It manages to do all of this without being precious, which is no small feat. Tom and I used to go there together every Saturday morning for brunch. We’d buy the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times at the newsstand and eat at the Down-Home Diner and then, on the way out, I’d stop by the Salumeria and pick up an interesting cheese. You need things like that in a relationship. You need things that remind you that it’s better to be a part of a couple than to be on your own, because the idea of going to Reading Terminal every Saturday by yourself and reading the paper by yourself and buying cheese to go home and eat by yourself is almost too horrible to bear. As I headed up Market Street that evening, I wondered if Tom had taken Kate there the past Saturday, and if he hadn’t, just how long it would be before he did so. It would be naive to think that he wouldn’t—Saturday morning at Reading Terminal is just too perfect, and just because he’d left me, there was no reason to think he wouldn’t try to salvage what was one of the best things about our relationship. I wondered what would happen if I walked in one day and saw Tom and Kate sitting in a booth at the diner, passing sections of the New York Times back and forth over coffee. I wondered if I’d have the courage to walk up to them and say something biting. I wondered if I could think up something biting to say that wouldn’t sound like I’d thought it up in advance. Probably not, I decided. Then I walked through the big swinging doors and into Reading Terminal and I stopped thinking about Tom. There, standing underneath a large potted palm, was my arch enemy, Mary Ellen.

  I realize it’s wrong to introduce an arch enemy at this point in the story. It violates all sorts of dramatic principles—not that this story has been adhering with any sort of strictness to dramatic principles, but I like to believe that, up until now at least, none have been thrown down on the floor and violated. Oh, well. I have an arch enemy and her name is Mary Ellen. The reason I haven’t mentioned her before now is that she’s the kind of arch enemy that I forget about for long stretches of time. I rarely see her, for one thing. I read her column every week, though, just to see if she’s still taking shots at me. I have, as a point of honor, never mentioned her in print, not once. I’ve always dealt with our supposed rivalry by appearing to rise above it, by pretending publicly at least that she was no more trouble to me than something unpleasant I’d accidentally stepped in, which is why I wish I could skip over this part entirely. I’d love to, but I can’t, simply because I can’t leave out of this story what happened that night.

  I realize that up until now you’ve been thinking that the Philadelphia Times was the most marginal newspaper in Philadelphia, and now you’re going to find out that there was an even more marginal one. It was called Hello, Philly!, and it was given away for free, just like our paper, but the Times was distributed in those metal boxes on street corners, just like a real newspaper, while Hello, Philly! was hung on people’s doorknobs, just like those Pennysaver shopping circulars. This seemed like a huge distinction to us at the time. I realize that it all sounds very small-time, and there is a war going on inside of me, one side of which wants to impress upon you that it was not small-time at all while the other wants to go ahead and give in. I give in. At any rate, like most small-time things, when one was in the middle of it, it felt relatively normal-sized.

  When Mary Ellen got a job writing for the doorknob paper, she immediately caused the sort of sensation I have always been meaning to cause and yet never been able to. Her inaugural column was about the challenges of engaging in oral sex in public places, but that was not the source of the sensation. The sensational part was a letter her paper published the following week. It was from Mary Ellen’s mother, and it was but a single sentence: “Now the entire world knows my daughter is a cocksucker.” And, boom, just like that, Mary Ellen had what every columnist needs, which is a personality. Suddenly she was a human being with a mother who was reading her column each week and then sending in letters with words like cocksucker in them. It was a brilliant shortcut, really, and it went a long way to make up for the fact that Mary Ellen is not much of a writer. You might think I’m just being catty, but it’s the truth. When it comes down to it, she’s just one of those girls who likes to write about how good she is in bed.

  Which is why Olivia hated her even more than I did. Olivia thought she had cornered that particular market, at least in Philadelphia. I should probably take a moment here to draw what will undoubtedly seem like an overly fine distinction. Olivia is a writer who answers letters about sex, while Mary Ellen writes columns about her life, and it just so happens that her life includes an awful lot of sex. As I said, this probably seems like a fine point, but without giving away where all this is headed, you should know that it is still rare to see two regularly recurring sex columns in a single alternative newspaper, although God knows the people in power are eager to find a way to do so without appearing to be too tacky, too bottom-feeding, too pandering. I suppose they don’t want to appear to be too pandering because it might draw attention to the fact that that’s what they’re actually doing. It took me a very long time to realize that the ads in the back of the newspaper I wrote for were for prostitutes. I’m not sure what I thought these ladies were selling; I just didn’t think prostitutes were allowed to advertise. Well, whether or not they are, the truth is they do. In fact, the real boom time for alternative newspapers in the United States were the years between the deregulation of 976 numbers and the emergence of Internet porn.

  One of the problems with writing a humor column on deadline is that occasionally it doesn’t quite go off. Now, when it is your job to write a column, and it doesn’t go off, and you end up just throwing something down that begins one place and winds up someplace entirely unrelated, it doesn’t bother you nearly as much as it should, largely because you are so relieved to open up the newspaper the next day and see actual words there instead of the enormous gaping empty white space that, the night before, you felt certain you’d be reduced to running. You did it. You pulled it out. And the fact that what you pulled out happened to be trivial or self-indulgent or embarrassing or idiotic—well, you figure you’re t
oo close to judge. There is something to be said for that sort of creativity, creativity with a gun at your head, in that you end up writing things which under normal circumstances you never would have written, and that can produce the occasional jewel. Most of the time, though, it doesn’t. Most of the time it produces something other than a jewel. And I suppose my real problem with Mary Ellen was that reading her column reminded me of that fact, reading her column reminded me that the line between refreshing and shameless is dangerously thin. I would read Mary Ellen’s column, and I would think: there is a silly girl writing silly things.

  And yet. And yet, she is not a good person either. That is the other part of it. She is neither good nor nice. I realize I probably care too much about being good and nice. I also realize that there are many other qualities that a person ought to develop, that goodness and niceness should probably be beaten out of people like me, and perhaps I would be better off if I were a little more bad and mean, but still. Like my issue with any woman who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about being good or nice, my real problem with Mary Ellen was simply this: she scared me. I did not understand the rules she was playing by, and I secretly believed she was playing with no rules whatsoever.

  “What did you judge?” Mary Ellen asked me when she saw me walk in.

  “Pie,” I said. “Fourteen pies, actually. You?”

  “Muffins,” she said. “They gave us the girl food.”

  “Matt ate twelve cheesesteaks,” I said.

  Mary Ellen twirled a long strand of her blond hair around a forefinger. “I’m sorry about you and Tom,” she said.

  I nodded my head.

  “Kate feels horrible about everything,” she said.

  It took me a moment to take this in.

  “You know her?”

  “She’s a friend.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course. She would be.”

  “She really doesn’t believe in this sort of thing,” said Mary Ellen. “I told her months ago that it was really not cool. You know, not cool.”

  My head was starting to spin.

  “She says Tom only says really nice things about you,” said Mary Ellen.

  “Yeah, well. Excuse me,” I said. “I have someplace to be.”

  I headed for the ladies room in a daze. It took me a minute to put all the pieces together, even though there were only about three pieces and they fit together quite plainly. Mary Ellen had known that Tom was sleeping with Kate Pearce before I did. And—in some ways this was even worse—she wanted me to know that she’d known. It wasn’t enough that I’d been humiliated without my knowledge. She felt the need to bring my humiliation to my attention. I could just picture her, reading my column each week, columns in which I smugly documented the process of moving in with Tom, and buying a couch with Tom, my all-around happiness with Tom, and the whole time she knew that Tom was fucking Kate Pearce behind my back. I felt sick. I honestly wanted to die. A part of me could handle the fact that Kate knew—I mean, I had plenty of reasons to be angry with Kate, and the fact that she knew about her affair with Tom before I did fell reasonably low on the list—but Mary Ellen! My arch enemy! A woman who wished me nothing but ill! I was mortified. And I honestly couldn’t believe that Tom had put me in this situation. I realize this sounds crazy, but a part of me could understand how Tom could end up sleeping with Kate Pearce, and even how he could keep seeing her for several months behind my back, but that he could do it knowing that Mary Ellen would find out, knowing that his doing so would humiliate me like this—that seemed almost impossible. How was it possible?

  He must have really hated me. I sat there, on the toilet seat, tears rolling down my face, as I lit on that thought. Tom must have really hated me. That was the only explanation I could come up with that made any sense. That was the only way things could possibly add up. Just thinking those words in my head, just thinking that sentence made me so sad I could hardly breathe. What had I done to make him hate me so much? I wondered. And how come I didn’t see it? I mean, a part of me could understand how Tom could hide an infidelity, I could sort of appreciate how all the lies stacked on top of each other like bricks—but how on earth did he hide the hate?

  The door to the bathroom swung open, and I could hear voices. Two women I didn’t know came in, talking about a sous chef at Treetops who had apparently tried to influence the judging. I did my best to calm down. This was not the time or the place. I would have to do this later, someplace other than a refurbished train station brimming with Philadelphia’s culinary and media elite.

  The women left. I unlocked the stall and went over to one of the sinks. I splashed cold water on my face and carefully blotted it with a paper towel. Why am I always having my big emotional moments in bathrooms? I asked myself. A good shrink could make something of this sort of pattern, although I’m not sure I want to know what they’d come up with. I wondered if it would still be considered repression. I suppose feeling things in bathroom stalls is less repressed than not feeling them at all. I looked at my face in the mirror over the sink and tried to think about Henry, to keep myself from thinking any more about Tom. Henry, who had proven himself to be a worthy distraction, Henry, who for about sixty seconds I thought I was in love with even though I really wasn’t, but who nonetheless I was interested in going to bed with again, later that night if at all possible, only now I saw that there were two problems with that plan. The first was the scene earlier that day in his office. The second was that now I looked like a raccoon. I opened up my purse and calmly set about fixing my face.

  By the time I finished in the bathroom, the party was in full swing. The lights were low enough that I thought I could pass for normal.

  “Jesus, Alison,” Matt said when he saw me. “What happened to you?”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “It’s hardly noticeable,” said Matt. He grabbed two glasses of wine from a roaming waitress and handed me one. “Here. Drink.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re not still upset about Tom, are you?”

  I nodded my head yes.

  “Talk to me.”

  We leaned up against a thick pillar in the middle of the room. We watched the rest of the partygoers milling by while we talked.

  “It’s like I was two people in the relationship,” I said. “Part of me was down there, in the middle of it, and another part of me was evaluating everything from a distance.”

  “Like Napoleon watching the battlefield from the top of a hill,” said Matt.

  “Exactly,” I said. “And there was going to be a winner, and there was going to be a loser.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If we got married, that meant I won,” I said, “and if we didn’t, then Tom won.”

  “What did he win?”

  “He got the best years of my life, and then he got to go start over with somebody else,” I said.

  “For a person with high self-esteem, you have awfully low self-esteem.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Then I realized a man can always go start over with somebody else. He can do it when he’s eighty. So, really, the only way I can win is if he’s dead. If he’s with me for a long time and then he dies. Then I win.”

  “Marry me,” said Matt.

  “I realize I’m insane,” I said. “That’s something, right?”

  “I mean it,” he said. “Marry me. Although I might want to still be allowed to date girls like her.”

  “Girls like who?” I said.

  Matt motioned to a woman wearing a fringy halter top. She looked Matt up and down and then coolly turned her back to him. It was one of those flawless, bony-yet-fleshy backs, but still.

  “She’s like one of those statues that guards a Japanese temple,” Matt said to me. “Her right hand is up here, going stop. But her left hand is down below, coyly beckoning me in.”

  “Is that what that was?”

  “Yes. But I don’t have time for that tonight,” said Matt. “Tonight I’m going
to pick the low-hanging fruit.”

  Olivia walked over to us, carrying a tiny plastic plate heaped with wontons. I cocked an eyebrow at Matt.

  “Not that low-hanging,” said Matt.

  “What?” Olivia said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I don’t want to alarm you,” Olivia said to me. She motioned to one of the risers that had been set up in the back. Sid Hirsch and Mary Ellen were huddled together at a cocktail table, deep in conversation.

  “Which one of us should be worried?” I said to Olivia.

  “That I don’t know.”

  It wasn’t until much later that I finally saw Henry. He was standing at a makeshift bar that had been set up alongside the fish market, and he was talking to a woman who threw her head back whenever she laughed. She had an unbelievably long neck. I couldn’t stop staring at it. That’s what I was doing, in fact, when Henry caught my eye: I was staring at this woman’s neck. I watched as he touched her arm, and then walked over to where I was standing.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi there,” said Henry.

  “Your date has a disturbingly long neck,” I said.