The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  I sat back down. I stared at my hands. They looked old. They looked too old for this.

  “I really have to pee, Matt,” I finally said. “And I’m not just saying that.”

  “Fine. Go. I’ll just marinate by myself,” said Matt. “You urinate, and I’ll marinate.”

  When I came back from the bathroom, Matt was sitting quietly, shredding a napkin into long, thin strips.

  “I’ve given some thought to what just happened here,” said Matt.

  “What did you come up with?” I said.

  “My internal censor, which never works that well to begin with, was temporarily totally disabled,” said Matt.

  “I see.”

  “Due to the alcohol,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “The smoking makes me thirsty,” he said. “And I forgot to eat dinner.”

  I nodded my head.

  “We can just forget it, if you’d like,” I said.

  “That would be good,” he said.

  “Done,” I said.

  Somebody put “Love Hurts” on the jukebox.

  “But I meant every word,” Matt said, solemnly. “And you can’t end up with Tom. He isn’t worthy of you. He’s worse than not worthy. He’s a worthless god-awful prick.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “And apparently the censoring mechanism is still disabled.”

  We sat in silence for a moment.

  “We should probably go,” I finally said.

  “A good idea.”

  Matt walked me home. We walked through Fitler Square, past the turtle sculptures, and turned onto Delancey. When we got to my building, we stood on the sidewalk. The lights inside were out.

  “It’ll happen again, you know,” said Matt.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Tom. He’ll do it again.”

  I dug around in my purse for my keys.

  “It’s a very fundamental thing, the way a person comports themselves in that particular department,” said Matt.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “He’ll do it again, and you’ll have to decide if this is what you want.”

  The following Tuesday, I went to New York for an interview for a job at a magazine. I took the train up, had the interview, and on the way back, the train was very crowded. A woman who was about my age sat down in the seat beside me, and we started talking. It turned out that she had gone to Wheaton College—the one in Illinois, the Christian one—with my sister Meredith. It turned out her father was the pastor of the church my friend Angie goes to down in Atlanta. It turned out, in short, that she was an evangelical Christian, and due to a small accretion of details, she got the impression that I was much more of an evangelical Christian than I currently am. Now, when I find myself in such a situation these days, I do my best to honor my own experience of things, and I try not to get involved in an inordinate amount of hypocrisy and personal misrepresentation; at the very least, I try to avoid telling any outright lies. Which isn’t easy. This time, the conversation degenerated into me making the usual complaints about evangelicals. How they’re self-righteous. How they’re close-minded and judgmental and legalistic. The lack of intellectual rigor, the fear of art and culture and ideas, the near total disconnect from any sense of Christianity’s historical roots. The bad hair, the bad clothes, the ugly churches, the cloying singsong public prayer voice. And the smugness. Dear God, the smugness. “Forget all that,” this woman said to me. “Forget Christians.” And she put her hand on my forearm, and she got one of those painfully sincere looks on her face, and she had a southern accent (and I think this is one of those things you can really only say if you have a southern accent), “Are you in love with Jesus?” And that kind of took me aback. Partially because people don’t say things like that to me anymore. Partially because it made me think. And the truth is, I’m not in love with Jesus at the moment. That’s not quite the right word for it. I’m haunted by Jesus, but I’m not really in love with him.

  It would be wrong for me to suggest that I have lost my faith entirely, but I have lost a certain kind of faith, and I hope I haven’t left you with the impression that losing it was anything less than a very big loss. I am left to deal with the remains of it all, to pick through it, to run from it, to rail against it, but I keep finding that even the remains of what I once had are powerful stuff. A certain sort of person would say this. A certain sort of person would say that what is really going on is that I’m running away from God. And you know what? That’s exactly what it feels like. The truth is, my heart is restless, and I’d like some peace, and I’m starting to suspect that it is pride that keeps me where I am, but I can’t seem to go back. Not yet anyway. Not just yet.

  Twenty

  NOTHING MUCH HAPPENED FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS—WELL, nothing much happened to me. Bonnie had her baby, so something fairly major happened to her. It was a girl, their first girl, and they named her Grace. Cordelia and Naldo broke up. Matt wrote me a sweet note, and I wrote him one back. Things with Tom and me went more or less back to normal.

  Then, late one Friday afternoon, I was in the bedroom straightening up. I noticed a cash register receipt on the floor beside Tom’s dresser. I picked it up, and I was about to put it back on top of his dresser when my glance happened to fall on the back of it. I froze. There were two initials, followed by a telephone number. I sat down on the foot of the bed and stared at the piece of paper in my hands. I mean, who writes phone numbers after initials? I’ll tell you who. Somebody with something to hide. Somebody who doesn’t want the person they’re living with to know who it is that they’re calling. Somebody who doesn’t want the person they’re living with to know the gender of the person that they’re calling.

  I looked at the clock. Tom would be home in less than an hour. We were driving out to Nina Peeble’s house for one of her dinner parties. Nina was always throwing dinner parties, but this one was special. Bonnie and Larry were going to be there, and Cordelia, and Nina’s husband Victor—everyone, in fact, who had been at the original dinner party, the one that ended so disastrously. Everybody had been instructed by Nina to act like nothing had happened, so we could get all the awkwardness out of the way in one fell swoop.

  Which meant I had to move fast.

  I walked into the kitchen. I put a pot of water on the stove, and I turned the heat on under it as high as it would go. Then I went into living room, over to Tom’s desk. There was a stack of unopened mail on top of it, as I knew there would be. I flipped through the mail until I found what I was looking for. I did this all matter-of-factly, like I had taken a class in the subject, like I had seen some sort of instructional video. I went back into the kitchen with the mail and stared into the pot. Nothing. Nothing, for what seemed like an eternity. Then a few bubbles on the silver bottom. Slowly, slowly getting bigger. Finally, a nice, rolling boil.

  I bent down and opened the drawer that held the rarely used cooking utensils. I searched for a pair of tongs. There was much clattering, but no tongs. The only thing remotely tong-like was a pair of old wooden salad spoons, but the hold wasn’t tight enough; the envelope kept slipping out onto the counter. I took a breath. Maybe this is a sign. Maybe I should stop right now, take the pot off the stove, put the mail back on Tom’s desk, because once I go down this road, I’m down this road. I looked at the clock on the microwave, and that’s when I noticed the oven mitts. Oven mitts would work.

  I held the envelope over the pot with one hand, and I used the other to test the seal. It didn’t take long for the glue to lose its hold. Shouldn’t our postal system be more secure that this? For a moment I had a very particular feeling, the feeling you get when you go through life knowing something—that peanut butter will get bubble gum out of hair, say, or that urine will ease the pain of a jellyfish sting—some bit of cultural wisdom you keep in your back pocket but never find occasion to use, and then, when you finally do, all you want to do is tell every last person you know how well it actually works.

  I opened
the envelope and unfolded Tom’s cell phone bill. Every phone number was listed, along with the length and time of each call. I carefully compared the list of calls to the number on the back of the receipt. It wasn’t there.

  I kept staring at the list of numbers, trying to find a pattern, a clue, anything at all. An unfamiliar area code caught my eye. What’s this? I ran my finger down the list of calls. One, two, three, four—seven. My heart started to pound. Seven calls to the mystery number. Always in the early evening. Always about twenty minutes long. Probably while he was walking home from the office.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the number. It rang once. Then, again. I started to get nervous. Three times. Then, a woman’s voice. “Hello?”

  “Yes,” I said. I hadn’t thought up anything to say. “Hello.”

  “Alison?” the voice said.

  Shit.

  “To whom am I speaking,” I said.

  “It’s Tracy, Alison. Tom’s sister.”

  “Tracy. Right. Hi,” I said. “Is, uh, Tom there?”

  “No. Should he be?”

  “I had the idea he would be.”

  “I didn’t even know he was going to be in Boston,” said Tracy.

  “Yeah. I might have gotten it wrong.”

  “Have him call if he’s in town,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you okay, Alison?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, good-bye, then.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I hung up the phone. My heart was pounding in my chest, and I started to pace around the kitchen. The water on the stove was still boiling. The steam billowed up, tempting me. I eyed Tom’s American Express bill. I fingered the seal on the envelope. Maybe I should just take a little peek.

  Stop it, Alison, I said to myself. This will not do. What is a relationship without trust? You have to forgive him. You have to trust him, or you’ll go crazy.

  I sat down at the kitchen table with my head in my hands. This is completely irrational, I told myself. It is totally unreasonable. And then it struck me: the problem was, it was rational. It was entirely reasonable. For the rest of my life, whenever I see a telephone number written in the margin of a date book, say, or on the back of a business card, I will feel it is my duty to investigate. To ask, at the very least. To make a seemingly innocent inquiry. I will hear a woman’s name, and I will wonder. My head started to churn with the possibilities.

  And what would I do if it happened again? Just what exactly was my plan? I suddenly saw that in a strange way I had been comforted by the fact that Tom and Kate had a history together, I’d been comforted by the belief that she was a truly unique obsession. Certain kinds of men get certain kinds of obsessions, and sometimes it’s best to just ride it out. I never knew that I held to that particular theory, but apparently somewhere down deep, I did. I knew they weren’t going to end up together. Even Tom knew that. That’s one of the things he told me flat out. She’s not the kind of woman I could marry is how he put it. Well? I mean, there could only be one Kate Pearce, right? Once she’s out of the picture . . . right?

  I opened the cabinet underneath the microwave and pulled out the white pages. I found the number I was looking for, and then I dialed.

  “Is this Janis Finkle?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “The Janis Finkle who used to work at Family Services?”

  “Yes. Who’s calling, please?”

  “I used to be one of your patients. Clients. You were my therapist. My name is Alison Hopkins.”

  “Alison. Of course,” Janis said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Not that fine, I guess. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I was wondering if there was something you figured out about me that maybe you could let me in on. You know, a secret.”

  “A secret,” she said flatly, in that therapist way.

  “I mean, I know you’re not supposed to tell me what to do in therapy, but I thought you might have come up with a theory about me that you kept to yourself, that you were waiting for me to figure out on my own. Now that we’re not doing it anymore, I wondered if maybe you could bend the rules.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what it is that’s upsetting you right now,” said Janis.

  So I did. I told her the whole story. I told her about Tom and Kate’s affair, and what had happened at the dinner party, and how Tom finally came back with the mustard two weeks later. I told her about finding the phone number on the scrap of paper, and then steaming open the phone bill, and finding an entirely different number, and calling it, and how I was thinking now that maybe I should call the first number, that I should have called it in the first place, and I went on and on, and by the time I got through, I was sobbing into the phone expectantly, waiting for a moment of sympathy or compassion or understanding, and do you know what Janis Finkle said to me? She said, “How does it feel to not be in control?”

  Fuck you, I remember thinking at the time. I’m not the one who cheated. I’m not the one who went out for the mustard and didn’t come back. I didn’t lie, I didn’t break any promises, I didn’t sneak around, I didn’t diddle a little twinkie, I didn’t ruin everything—I didn’t do anything but paint the kitchen the perfect shade of yellow and buy baskets for the man’s socks. If I’d been in control, none of this would have happened!

  There was a period in my life when I spent a great deal of time arguing about whether or not it would be possible to throw a monkey out of a window. The window in question was on the twenty-third floor of one of the high-rise dorms at the University of Pennsylvania—I think I hardly need mention that this was in college—in an apartment-style dorm room just down the hall from mine, inhabited by four guys who always kept their front door propped open with a shoe. A lot of things got thrown out of that particular window, the most dramatic being a nineteen-inch television set, but there was no debate involved with that one, since there had never been any question about whether or not it would be possible to throw a television out the window. They could, and they did, and then they moved on to the monkey question and never quite got off it. Even now, it is possible to reignite this debate simply by assembling three or four individuals, so long as one of the people present is Lyle Brady. Lyle Brady was somewhat legendary at Penn. He was pre-vet, and he had grown up on a dairy farm in western Kentucky, and he was famous for his pickup line “You’re so cool and pure, you’re like a tall glass of milk.” Lyle had the utmost confidence in the monkey’s strength and reflexes and general will-to-live. Lyle, in fact, contended it would be categorically impossible to throw a monkey out of a window, and, even more essential for this sort of thing, never tired of debating the subject. There were a few agreed upon rules. The monkey in question was to be of the dimensions that his arms, when fully extended, could easily grasp both sides of the window frame, and he could not be physically impaired in any way; i.e., bound up, blindfolded, drugged, etc. But you could, for example, spin the monkey around and around and around and then hurl it out backwards—that was fair. Or you could, say, turn out all the lights. You could wait until the monkey fell asleep, or develop some sort of a high-speed catapult. You get the picture. Anyhow, it seemed to me that if you “made nice” with the monkey, if you held it facing you and cooed at it like a mother to a baby as you slowly made your way across the room to the open window, and then just chucked it, the monkey would be so surprised that it wouldn’t have the wherewithal to grab the window frame and out it would go. To this day, I’m so confident that this particular strategy would work that I’d like to get my hands on an actual monkey and try it out. Not from the twenty-third floor, of course. Perhaps the second.

  Go with me for a minute. One of the major disappointments of my adult life has been finding out just how little being smart has to do with love. I’ve always relied on my brains to get me through, I’ve always secretly believed that I had a leg up in life
because I was, if not the smartest person in the room, at least the one that the smartest person in the room would pick to talk to, and I figured that that would make me good at love. But the truth, the truth that I’m just starting to see, is that being intelligent and being good at love are two entirely different things, and thinking that one thing will make you good at the other is like expecting a world-class juggler to be able to perform brain surgery. It strikes me, in fact, that I was so busy outsmarting Tom that I stopped really loving him. I was so busy trying to turn him from a date into a boyfriend into a fiancé into a husband that I stopped paying attention. I thought that took brains. I thought that took skill. I was so intent on pursuing a tactical advantage that I stopped doing anything else. On some level, I was just trying to chuck him out the window. And do you know what happens when you do that? Do you know what you’ve got on your hands? I’ll tell you what you’ve got.

  A dead monkey.

  I finally figured out what I’d wanted from Tom all along. I wanted him to stay. I wanted him to stay forever.

  Twenty-one

  WHEN I GOT OFF THE PHONE WITH JANIS FINKLE, I WENT INTO the bathroom and jumped into the shower. I was angry. I was angry with Tom for writing a phone number after initials, I was angry at Janis for insinuating that I was controlling, and I was angry at myself for accidentally calling Tom’s sister Tracy. I was preemptively angry at Tracy, because I knew she would report back to Tom about my phone call, and I was angry with myself because I couldn’t for the life of me come up with a reasonable explanation for it. I was even kind of angry at Nina Peeble, for thinking that this dinner party was a good idea in the first place.

  And I was mad at Tom, because he was late.

  Nina and her husband Victor live about twenty-five minutes outside the city, in a huge house in Rosemont. When Tom came home, he changed out of his suit, and the two of us drove out to the suburbs in what I’m certain Tom thought was a companionable silence. By the time we pulled up to Nina’s house, I had calmed myself down.