The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

“Her?” Henry said. He looked over his shoulder at the woman. “She’s not my date.”

  “Well, if you like her, you should try not to look at it,” I said, “because once you look at it you won’t be able to stop. It’s hypnotizing.”

  Henry looked at her, and, as if on cue, she did the neck thing.

  “Mesmerizing,” he said.

  “That’s the word,” I said.

  “Alison,” said Henry.

  “Yes?”

  He smiled with only half of his mouth and didn’t say anything.

  “What is it?” I said.

  He took a breath. “I can’t handle you.”

  I just stood there.

  “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided that I can’t,” said Henry.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’d like it if there wasn’t any weirdness,” he said.

  He’d like it if there wasn’t any weirdness.

  “Not a problem,” I said. I smiled, in an attempt to indicate my ability to not be weird.

  “Good.”

  He put his hand on my right shoulder. He squeezed it. And then he went back to the bar and his drink and the girl with the neck.

  I went home that night and wrote a column about Romantic Market Value. I’d been meaning to write that particular column for years, but I’d been holding off, for two reasons. First of all, it wasn’t my idea. I’d stolen it from someplace and added it to my repertoire, and in the process I’d changed it around a bit, and the whole thing had happened so long ago that I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d stolen it from or just how much I’d changed it, which is the sort of thing that’s okay to do in life but makes me nervous to do in print. Second of all, it’s sort of offensive. After I turned in the column the next morning, Olivia barreled over to my desk and said, “What are you saying? Men would like me more if I were thinner and prettier?” It’s more complicated than that, of course—but yes. That’s what I was saying. Romantic Market Value is just that: a person’s value in the romantic marketplace. It’s that thing that makes you think two people go together, that they fit, that one isn’t going to run off and find someone better, because they’re both more or less the same, that is, they have roughly the same RMV. And the girl with the neck had, objectively speaking, a higher RMV than me, because she was beautiful. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am, beautywise, not everybody’s cup of tea, and for the most part I’m fine with it (it’s enough that I am some people’s cup of tea), but it does lower my Romantic Market Value, and there are times when it really pisses me off.

  It was an easy column to write. I simply crafted into paragraphs various things I’d infuriated my friends with over the years. The infuriating part, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, is that men and women’s Romantic Market Value is based on different things; women are valued for youth and beauty, men for wealth and power. This is insulting to members of both sexes, but—as women are quick to point out—it is not equally insulting to members of both sexes. And one is not exactly overwhelmed by the roar of complaints coming from young, good-looking men.

  Anyhow, like I said, this was one of my pet theories, and it felt good to finally get it down on paper, but later, as I read it over one last time while I was lying in bed, I was struck by something really quite odd. I suddenly saw, with a sort of otherworldly clarity, that this was stuff I actually believed. I believed it way down in the place where I was supposed to believe in love. And I’d like to be one of those people who live in the moment, who don’t plot and plan and scheme and control, but I don’t know if my brain could take it. What on earth would I think about all day long? My brain plays with relationships. That’s what it does. I see a happy couple and I immediately want all the facts. How did they meet? How does it work? Who loves who more? Who has the power?

  Because that, in the end, is what I was talking about—power. Who has the power? And I suppose the thing I’d always liked most about the concept of Romantic Market Value was that it was an attempt to quantify the thing I found most fascinating. I liked the almost mathematical logic of it all, the simple fact that after a while in certain relationships, the power imbalance becomes so extreme that there needs to be a rebalancing of the scales. But the truth is, power is much more elusive than that. I’ll tell you who has the power. The person who loves less has the power. The person who is most willing to leave has the power. I’ll tell you something else. Infidelity is power. No matter what has gone on in a relationship, the person who fucks around takes all the power back.

  All along I’d been thinking that my problem was that Tom had left me, but I see now that it’s possible my problem was much more fundamental. Maybe love shouldn’t be about power. Maybe confusing the two was getting me into trouble.

  Thirteen

  “THE OLDER I GET, THE FURTHER AWAY FROM THE URINAL I start unzipping my pants,” Sid Hirsch said to me as he walked into his office.

  It was late on Friday afternoon, and I was already inside Sid’s office, waiting for him. I’d been summoned. Sid summoned one to his office and then tended to disappear, because he liked to make an entrance. He walked over to his desk and sat down on top of it with his legs folded Indian-style. “Yoga,” he explained. He took a long, cleansing breath and then looked me in the eye and said, “We have a problem.”

  Oh shit, I thought. Sid knows about me and Henry. How could he know about me and Henry? I considered the possibility that Sid subscribed to Olivia’s theory that if you think two people are sleeping together, they are (with the corollary that if you think a person is gay, he is).

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I heard about what happened with you and your boyfriend,” said Sid.

  “Oh.”

  “And I’m really sorry about it.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m going to be fine.”

  “Of course you’ll be fine,” he said.

  “What’s the problem?” I said.

  Sid pressed his hands into a power teepee and rested his chin on his fingertips. “Your column was about a nice girl trying to trick some poor schlub into marrying her. There was an arc there. We were all waiting for the ring. Now the guy turns out to be a complete shit. Fine. Write that last column. That’s the end of the story.”

  I just looked at him.

  “You’re giving Mary Ellen my column,” I said.

  “Number one, it isn’t your column. My paper, my column,” Sid said. “Number two, yes I am.”

  Now, I had given some thought to what I would do when I was through working at the paper. I had devoted a great deal of time to fantasizing about it, in fact. There were several versions of this fantasy, the gist of all of which involved me getting paid a great deal of money for something I’d written on the side. Sometimes it was a book. Sometimes it was a screenplay. Sometimes it was a book that sold to the movies and I was begged to write the screenplay. The fact that I wasn’t actually doing any writing on the side did surprisingly little to interfere with this particular fantasy. Someday I would, and when I did, the fantasy would be there, waiting for me. But this particular scenario was one I had never considered. It had never entered my mind that I would be fired.

  “I can’t believe this,” I said.

  “Don’t take this personally,” he said.

  “I’m being fired, Sid. It feels personal.”

  “It’s not about you,” he said. “It’s the trend.”

  “What trend is this exactly?”

  Sid slid off of his desk and began to pace around behind it. “You know,” he said. “Hot girls in bars talking about dildos. Unashamed of their sexuality. They are woman, hear them roar.”

  “I’m a woman,” I said.

  “Your column is about a nice girl. People love you, but they don’t want to fuck you. I’m speaking metaphorically of course. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d like to fuck you,” Sid said. “I’d fuck you.”

  “Fuck you, Sid,” I said.

  He held up his
right hand like he was willingly taking the blow.

  “This girl is twenty-seven,” said Sid. “She’s bi-curious. I’m pretty sure her parents are dead.”

  “Mary Ellen’s parents aren’t dead,” I said. “Her mother sends in those letters.”

  “Well, she writes like her parents are dead,” said Sid. “If she were my daughter, I’d kill myself.”

  “What about when I start dating new people?” I said. I considered telling Sid about what had happened with Henry—not that it was Henry, simply that I’d already had sex with somebody four times on two separate occasions and I’d be willing to write about it. “I could be more explicit.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” he said. “It won’t work. You can’t turn Mary Tyler Moore into a whore and expect people to feel good about it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Never mind that it’s pathetic,” he said. “There’s nothing to root for.”

  “There is something to root for,” I said. “Me. People can root for me.”

  “I’m sorry, Alison. But you’ve got your whole future in front of you.”

  “Everyone has their future in front of them, Sid. That’s why they call it the future.”

  I got up to leave.

  “I’m going to give you a piece of advice,” Sid said.

  “What.”

  Sid picked at a tuft of chest hair that was peeking out of his V-neck. “Move to Pittsburgh.”

  “Pittsburgh?”

  “They have a nice weekly. Smallish. You might have to waitress a little on the side. I’ll put in a call to the publisher for you. His name is Ed,” Sid said. He got a quizzical look on his face. “Ted? I’ll look it up.”

  “Fuck you, Sid,” I said. And I left.

  I walked down the hallway in a state of escalating panic. Writing a column for an alternative newspaper is not much to cling to, but it was all I had. And now I didn’t have it anymore. I felt completely humiliated. When I got to Henry’s office, I found myself looking at the door, which was closed. The irony, of course, of having embarked upon a clandestine affair with one boss and then being fired by the other one because nobody wants to fuck you was not lost on me. (Is that irony? I always get messed up with irony. Even if it is irony, I suppose it becomes considerably less ironic when you toss in the fact that apparently Henry didn’t want to fuck me anymore, either. That’s no longer irony, really—that’s just sad.)

  And there was the problem of money. I don’t like to get into this particular area, because it reflects so poorly on me, but the truth is that my plan to be paid a great deal of money for something I’d written on the side had had an unfortunate repercussion, which is that I had managed to accumulate a small mountain of credit card debt which I had no conceivable, non-pie-in-the-sky means to pay off. I’d had no possible means to pay it off when I was gainfully employed—now that I’d lost my job, I couldn’t see how I’d be able to handle the minimums. Why do they give credit cards to people like me? Why, why, why? My logic at the time of amassing this debt—and perhaps the word logic is ill chosen—was that I was like one of those renegade filmmakers who make entire movies using nothing but their credit cards as financing. Only I had skipped over the whole “making a movie” part. I’d gone to Morocco. I’d bought shoes.

  When I reached the editorial office, I opened the door. Matt was sitting behind my desk, reading over my column.

  “Camilla Parker Bowles,” Matt said, without looking up.

  “What?” I said.

  “If your Romantic Market Value theory is correct, how do you explain Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles?”

  “I don’t really know, Matt.”

  Matt stood up and walked towards me. He fixed me with a serious look.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Sid just fired me,” I said.

  “Impossible.”

  I nodded my head.

  “Not possible.”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “Oh my God. This is madness,” Matt said. “If you can get fired, I could be, I don’t know, summarily executed in the hallway. Did he say why?”

  I thought back to my conversation with Sid. “Apparently I don’t write about dildos often enough.”

  “Which is true. Completely true,” Matt said. “Although I didn’t realize that was a fireable offense.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “You could sue him,” said Matt.

  “Nobody would believe it,” I said. “I hardly believe it, and I was in the room at the time.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  We walked downstairs and stood outside on the sidewalk. After a minor consultation, we headed towards his place. I went over everything that happened in Sid’s office, while Matt made the appropriate interjections. I started out really upset, and then I got incredibly angry, but by the time we reached Matt’s place I felt almost normal again. Matt has this effect on me, and I have never been able to figure out why.

  “I’m going to cook for you,” Matt said when we got inside.

  “I didn’t know you cooked.”

  “I cook. Of course I cook. I only know how to make one thing, but I do it better than anybody else.”

  “What’s the one thing?”

  “Eggs Florentine.”

  “I’ve never had eggs Florentine.”

  “Do you know what’s in eggs Florentine?”

  “No idea.”

  “Good.”

  Matt cleared off a space at the kitchen counter for me, and I sat down on one of his bar stools and started picking at a bowl of pistachio nuts. He opened up a bottle of red wine and poured two big glasses. He handed one to me and then raised his glass to make a toast.

  “Can I tell you my new theory?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “I think that toasting is the new prayer,” I said. “It’s the socially acceptable way of indulging the impulse for communal prayer. That’s why nobody just says ‘cheers’ anymore.”

  “In that case,” Matt said. “Holy-Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph-help-us-dear-God-help-us.”

  We clinked and drank.

  Matt started chopping a big bunch of basil. “You know,” he said, “this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s the kind of thing people say when something really bad happens to you, and it has no basis in reality whatsoever,” I said. “Plenty of bad things happen that are just plain bad, and people never recover from them, and their life never gets back to where it was, and it’s impossible to tell at this point whether or not this is that kind of thing or the other kind of thing.”

  “The other kind of thing?”

  “The bad thing that becomes the good thing.”

  “I think you’ll recover from this,” said Matt.

  “Thank you.”

  “And I think you’ll recover from the Tom thing,” he said.

  “I might recover from that, or I might not,” I said. I took a big swallow of wine. “You can’t really understand it, because you don’t have to worry about getting too old to have babies.”

  Matt looked up from his chopping. “Well, I’d like to have kids before I’m too old to molest them.”

  I laughed at this. I couldn’t help myself.

  “See, that’s a good sign. Your life is falling apart, and yet you’re capable of laughing at molestation jokes. All is not lost.”

  “A lot is lost.”

  “But not all.”

  I went upstairs to use the bathroom. Matt lives in one of those row houses that was built in the middle of the nineteenth century, when people in Philadelphia were apparently very small. The kitchen is in the basement, the bedroom is on top, and in between there is a living room. It reminds me of a dollhouse in an extreme state of disrepair.

  When I came back down, we sat down at the table to eat. Matt’s eggs Florentine turned out to be
indistinguishable from a tomato and basil omelet.

  “Do you mind if I get drunk tonight?” I said.

  “Why would I mind?”

  “I just like to warn whoever I’m with when I’m planning to get drunk that I’m planning to get drunk. I don’t want them to think it’s an accident.”

  “You are consciously surrendering consciousness.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Which I think might be classified as alcoholic behavior, but I’m not sure.”

  “I went out with this woman who was in AA, and according to her, everything I did was alcoholic behavior.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Matt. “Getting drunk all the time.”

  I smiled.

  “Not trusting life. You have to trust life, she kept saying to me. Trust your life. And, I mean, if my life proves one thing, it’s that life should not be trusted.”

  “What’s wrong with your life?”

  Matt leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Last weekend, I had to go to my aunt Mitzie’s funeral.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No, it’s fine,” said Matt. “Not for her of course, she’s dead. But I’m fine.”

  “Good.”

  “Anyhow, my uncle, who’s seventy-six and not in the greatest health himself, is all alone now. My aunt had been taking care of him, but then one day—pffft—she just goes in her sleep. So, we’re at the synagogue. And my uncle is sitting in the front in his wheelchair, and during the entire ceremony you can hear him moaning, ‘I just want to die. Please, somebody help me die. I don’t want to live anymore, I just want to die.’ It was unbelievably depressing. I mean, the man has no kids, he’s really sick, and his wife of fifty years just dropped dead in the middle of the night. She was in bed when it happened, so I suppose she didn’t technically drop dead, since she was lying down at the time —”

  “Anyway.”

  “Anyway. Then we all drive out to the cemetery. The casket is in front, about to be lowered into the ground, and people are saying the things they say in that situation, only they almost can’t because the wind is blowing really hard and there’s so much wailing coming from my uncle. ‘I just want to die, please, somebody, anybody, help me die. I can’t go on anymore. Put me out of my misery.’ Then, on a dime really, he turns to the attendant who’s been pushing his wheelchair and says, ‘I’m cold. I want to go sit in the car.’” Matt took a big gulp of wine. “Which sums up my psychological situation perfectly. I want to die, but I’m also cold, and I want to go sit in the car.”