The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  That’s one of the worst things about infidelity: how stupid it makes you feel. When Nina Peeble and I went out to lunch, she kept saying to me, “You must have known. A part of you must have known.” And I can honestly say that I didn’t. I didn’t know. It’s not a matter of looking the other way, it’s a matter of not seeing anything at all. You’re in the dailiness of the relationship, you’re talking about work and life while you brush your teeth next to another person, and it simply doesn’t occur to you that this other person who is involved in all that dailiness with you has an entirely separate life you don’t know anything about. It just doesn’t seem possible. Wouldn’t it drive a person crazy? Wouldn’t it make you out of your mind? Even now, knowing what I know, I still find it almost impossible to believe. In fact, sometimes I wish I had cheated on somebody just so I could understand the psychology of it, but the truth is I can’t even imagine it. I can’t imagine living with the guilt for sure, but the real problem for me would be keeping the secret. I’m no good with secrets. Six years ago, I was walking along South Street, and I was approached by a little old man who was wearing a turban. He told me how old I would be when I died (ninety-five), and that I would die in my sleep of a heart attack, and that I shouldn’t get my hair cut or my nails clipped on Tuesdays, that, in fact, Tuesdays were extremely unlucky for me, and a big wave of good luck was about to come to me, and in the course of all this, which involved writing things down on little pieces of yellow paper and crumpling them up and putting them into my fist, he took eighty of my dollars, in increments of twenty, and gave me a small orange bead. “You give your good luck away by talking,” he said to me when he was finished. “Do not give away your luck. Do not tell anybody what happened today.” I felt like I was going to explode. Not tell anybody? I’d never done anything in my life and not told somebody. But for some reason this time I didn’t, and for six years I kept that small Indian con man’s confidence, and the secret burned inside me, burned and burned, and here I see I’ve gone and blown it.

  Even without the secret part, though, the truth is I still can’t imagine cheating on somebody. Do I secretly think this makes me a good person? I’m afraid I do. Do I occasionally find myself awash in a warm bath of my own moral superiority? You bet. But there is another way of looking at it. Maybe the only reason I haven’t been a worse person is because I’ve been afraid to be one. If fear is what keeps you good, if fear is what keeps you out of trouble, then it shouldn’t really count, right? You’re just a fearful, timid person living a small, safe life, and the thought that that kind of existence takes some sort of moral courage is just, well, poppycock.

  Sixteen

  AS UPSET AS I HAD BEEN ABOUT THE WHOLE THINGBETWEEN Tom and Kate, you should probably know that, all along, I’d been entirely prepared to take him back. That there was never any doubt in my mind that I would is actually quite odd, because I’d always thought of myself as a one-strike-and-you’re-out sort of woman. I had, on more than one occasion, articulated this position to Tom. What I would say was that I knew that there were women who were capable of forgiving sexual misconduct, women who would be content to throw a dinner plate at the cheater’s head and then try again, but I was not one of them. And I believed it, too. I honestly did. It’s almost as if I had built an entire part of my personality around the idea that I was the kind of woman who would not stand for this sort of thing, only now, here I was, finally faced with the reality, standing it. I felt like I needed to completely reevaluate myself.

  Which is not to say that I planned to make it easy for him. Quite the contrary, in fact. So, at the end of the little scene on the front stoop, I sent Tom away. I went inside and called up Cordelia and Bonnie, and the three of us met for lunch.

  “I told him I needed some time to think about it,” I said to them after we sat down.

  “Which you do,” said Cordelia.

  “And I told him I had sex with somebody, too. After he was gone.”

  “You told him that?” said Bonnie.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What did he say?” said Bonnie.

  “Nothing, really,” I said. “He asked if he could move back in.”

  “He’s out of his mind if he thinks he’s moving back in,” said Bonnie.

  “I know,” I said. “That’s what I said.”

  “Good,” said Bonnie.

  “Then he asked if there was anything he could do, anything at all, and I said, ‘Well, I suppose you could try to win me back.’”

  Bonnie smoothed her yellow sweater over her enormous pregnant belly and nodded her head approvingly.

  “Is that what you want?” said Cordelia.

  “I don’t know what I want,” I said.

  Cordelia looked at me.

  “I don’t think what I want matters,” I said.

  “Of course it matters,” said Cordelia.

  “I want for none of this to have happened,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Cordelia. “What do you want that can be achieved while keeping the laws of space and time intact?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. “It’s like this broken, ruined thing, and no matter how much work we do to fix it, it will never be as good as what we had before.”

  “It’s going to be better than what you had,” said Bonnie. “He was cheating on you.”

  “It might be better than what I had,” I said, “but it’s not going to be better than what I thought I had.”

  And that was one of the things that made me so irritated. I was starting to come to terms with the fact that I’d been living in a dream, that what I’d thought was going on between Tom and me and what actually was going on were two wildly different things, but I couldn’t quite accept that this realignment with reality was such a good thing. I liked the dream. I liked the fantasy. I have a problem with reality under the best of circumstances, and these were not the best of circumstances.

  “At least you got to sleep with somebody else while he was gone,” Cordelia said to me.

  “Don’t you sort of regret that now?” said Bonnie.

  “Why would I regret it?” I said.

  “Because if you get back together with Tom, for the rest of your life you’re going to have a movie in your head starring this other guy.”

  “Hey, I like that movie,” I said. “I would buy tickets to see that movie.”

  Cordelia excused herself to go to the restroom. She took a few steps away from the table, and then she turned right around and came back. She stood beside the table and looked down at me.

  “Just don’t confuse Tom coming back with winning,” said Cordelia.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I made that mistake with Jonathan,” said Cordelia. “He would come back to me, with his tail between his legs, and I’d feel like I won, like I beat the other woman in some sort of contest, when really what had happened was, I’d just gotten back together with a total jackass.” Then she walked off.

  Bonnie reached past her belly and across the table and squeezed one of my hands.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Bonnie said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Promise me one thing,” Bonnie said.

  “What?”

  “Promise me you’ll take it slow.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Slow. Obviously.”

  Tom came over that night to pick up his clubs for an early-morning golf game; eight minutes later we were in bed. I know it was eight minutes exactly because of the digital clocks on the cable boxes, which are synchronized. When the doorbell rang, the cable box in the living room said 9:13, and then, while I was kneeling on the duvet, peeling off my turtleneck, I happened to glance at the cable box on top of the dresser, which glowed 9:21.

  So we had sex. And I was conscious of many things while Tom and I were having sex that first time back, but the main thing I was conscious of was whether or not we were doing everything the way we used to
, and if not, just what exactly had changed. I realize that sounds bad, but I couldn’t help myself. I blame it on Matt, or, more specifically, I blame it on a story Matt tells which deals with this subject. This is the story. When Matt was a junior in college, his girlfriend Daisy went to Puerto Rico with her girlfriends for spring break. Now, Matt and Daisy had started out as one of those weird freshman-dorm couples that reach an almost matrimonial level of intensity and exclusivity by the third week of college and then just keep on keeping on, cooking ramen noodles together and wearing one another’s jeans. So, Daisy comes back from her week in Puerto Rico. She and Matt climb into bed. Midway through the encounter, she flips him over onto his stomach and—and I’m sorry, but there is truly no polite way to describe this, so I will settle for clinical accuracy—she begins to stimulate his anus with her tongue. And, to hear Matt describe it, somewhere in the back of his head, a little bell went off. Which he elected to ignore. He did not ask Daisy how she happened to come up with this daring new trick. He did not immediately call a stop to the proceedings and grill her on just what exactly had gone on in Puerto Rico. He just lay there, really. (You’re wondering how I know this. Well, men can be terribly indiscreet if you press them to be, and I always press them to be.)

  After we were finished, Tom said a few of the things a person says in that situation, and then he fell asleep. I lay awake, staring up at the ceiling. There had been no new tricks. Oh well, I remember thinking. That’s done, then. Maybe Kate Pearce was The Woman Tom Needed To Sleep With To Realize How Much He Loved Me. It looks like I’m stopping at three. Then, this: I wondered if I could marry a man who had cheated on me. I wondered if it would be smart. Probably not, I decided. I wondered if the fact that it wasn’t smart would stop me. Probably not.

  A lot has been said on the subject of women in their thirties who want to get married, and I’m not at all sure that I can add anything new. Still, I consider myself something of an expert in the field, if only because the anxiety that most unattached women start to feel around, say, their twenty-ninth birthday, kicked in for me at age thirteen. And then it began to build. Not getting married had been my worst fear for so long that I almost think I shouldn’t be held responsible for my behavior regarding the subject.

  There is a certain sort of pity and disdain that is reserved for single women in the evangelical subculture that the dominant culture—even with the help of its periodic Time magazine cover stories about escalating infertility rates and six-single-women-for-every-available-man statistics and misogynistic crap about forty-year-old spinsters and plane crashes—can never hope to equal. Because when an evangelical woman doesn’t manage to find a husband, it is viewed as an unmitigated tragedy. For an ordinary single woman, the tragedy appears, to outsiders at least, to be mitigated. It is mitigated by the fact that she’s meeting new men, she’s taking fun trips, she’s kissing in dark hallways at parties, she’s waking up with promising strangers, she’s eating takeout in bed with old boyfriends after sexual encounters that begin with the phrase “This is not a good idea.” Her life might be sad and lonely and scary at times, but at least it’s interesting. Not so, the nice Christian girl’s. She is, at root, a dutiful handmaiden to the patriarchy, with oversize muffin pans in her cupboard and dried flowers arranged on her mantelpiece, always cheerful, always upbeat, always well-groomed and well-spoken and well-behaved. All of this while hoping against hope to meet a man who believes exactly the right thing in exactly the right way and who also happens to be intelligent and kind and funny and handsome and I forget the other twelve. I mean, it’s hard enough to find anybody you might want to spend your life with, but if you are more or less forced to narrow the field down to the six weird bachelors milling around outside the sanctuary on Sunday morning—one of whom looks a little too intentionally like Jesus—things start to feel a little hopeless. And I think it’s no accident, really, that I finally decided to have sex when I was twenty-five, because a part of me decided that if God was going to force me to be a freak, then at least I was going to have sex.

  I keep thinking I have said all I have to say on this subject, that I have thoroughly bludgeoned the life out of it, but apparently I haven’t. I see also that I have once again veered dangerously close to strident—a quality I have been informed is exceedingly unattractive on me—but I can’t seem to help that either. Oh, well. A few months before all this happened, I bumped into an old family friend who has a daughter who is my age. This woman’s daughter and I went to church together, and we sang in the choir together, and we went to camp together, and even though we haven’t spoken in years, I consider her a friend. This person told me, in a very casual way, on a street corner while we were waiting for the light to change in fact, that her daughter always says she hopes Jesus won’t come back before she gets married, because she doesn’t want to miss her chance to have sex. Then she laughed. Now, this raises all sorts of questions—not the least of which is why this woman felt the need to tell me that her thirty-two-year-old daughter was still a virgin—but the reason I bring it up is because, the entire time I was growing up, I felt exactly the same way. I needed to get married as soon as possible, for the simple reason that I didn’t want Jesus to come back before I had sex, and I wasn’t allowed to have sex before I got married, so I needed to get married before Jesus returned, which everyone knew could happen at any moment. Like a thief in the night. Now, this perfectly captures certain suspicions I had about sex—namely, that it was of utmost importance and something I did not want to miss out on—as well as my quite matter-of-fact belief that before too long, Jesus Christ was going to come out of the eastern sky in a blaze of glory, sword in hand, and usher in Armageddon. (Precisely what happens next varies, depending upon one’s theology, but the one thing everyone seems to agree upon is that there will be no sex involved.)

  It’s a miracle, really, that I am capable of anything even remotely normal after all that. When you start out where I started—waiting for Jesus to return to earth to herald the end of time—and end up where I was at this point in the story (lying in bed after having had sex with your live-in boyfriend after he has spent the past five months screwing around on you behind your back), you find yourself in a tricky position, which is that you cannot trust your instincts. Forget trusting them—you can’t even find them. You have no idea where they are. Even now, I’m not sure what a woman with healthy instincts would have done in my situation. I’m always fascinated by women who seem to know things in their bones, women who possess that earthy, feminine wisdom that flies in the face of logic and reason and rational thought. Any instincts I might have had were wrung out of me a long time ago, and I’m afraid I’m left with a system in which everything has gone a little haywire.

  Seventeen

  I WOKE UP THE FOLLOWING MORNING WITH A START. I’D HAD A nightmare. I looked over and saw Tom asleep beside me, and seeing him there was such a shock that I almost forgot the dream entirely, but as I lay still, it slowly came back to me.

  When Tom woke up, I told him about the dream. Then I began to interpret it—using Jungian principles I’d picked up from Janis Finkle—but Tom interrupted me before I could really get going.

  “You’re every person in the dream,” said Tom.

  “Parts of me, yes,” I said.

  “You’re a young black man,” he said. “And an old woman, and a baby that is really just an enormous head.”

  “And I’m the boat and I’m the water,” I said. “And I will have achieved mental health when I can accept the fact that I’m the shark, too.”

  Tom gave me a look.

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” said Tom.

  He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

  “What?” I said again.

  “Maybe a person shouldn’t be their own hobby,” Tom called from the bathroom.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I called back.

  Tom didn’t answer. I got out of bed and walked over to the bat
hroom. I leaned against the doorjamb and watched as he brushed his teeth.

  “I’m my own hobby,” I finally said.

  Tom cocked his head at me in the mirror.

  “I don’t read self-help books,” I pointed out.

  “Anymore,” Tom said. He spat. “You don’t read self-help books anymore. But it’s all in there.” He tapped on my temple with his forefinger.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little early in the game for you to be insulting me?”

  “I didn’t mean it as an insult,” said Tom. “I meant it as an observation.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him but decided to let it go. “Tell me one of your dreams,” I said.

  “We’ve been through this before,” said Tom.

  “Just a teeny tiny one.”

  “I don’t have dreams,” he said.

  “Everybody has dreams.”

  “I don’t remember my dreams,” said Tom. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter, because I’d wake up and I’d say to myself, it was just a dream.”

  This brings me to something about Tom that I’m not sure I’ve quite adequately conveyed: the fact that he is completely non-neurotic. I am fascinated by non-neurotic people, but not for any healthy reason, not because I want to try to become more like them. I have but one goal: to make them as crazy as I am. I think that happens a lot. I think that when a neurotic person gets involved with a non-neurotic person, the neurotic one inevitably believes that the normal one is repressing all of their inner turmoil and then, quite deliberately, sets about letting it loose. And I tried with Tom. Believe me, I tried. Now that I think about it, that’s just about the only positive thing I can say about Tom’s affair with Kate Pearce. It gave the man some much-needed subtext. It gave him underbelly. All along I’d been thinking that Tom was just going about his life, going to work and reading his science magazines and playing golf and trying not to get married to me, and here it turned out that wasn’t true. Here there was suddenly all this new stuff to pick apart.