The Big Love

by Sarah Dunn

  Tom parked the car in the driveway and we walked up to the front door. There were pumpkins and gourds heaped artfully on the brick stoop, and yellow and purple mums in a huge stone pot, and shutters on every window painted a glossy forest green, and, as I stood there, in the soft glow of the antique porch light, I had a feeling that I associate with Nina Peeble, which I can only describe as a vague dissatisfaction with life. Which is not to say that I want Nina’s life; that’s not it. It’s more that, Nina Peeble epitomizes a certain problem I have with being a woman. One of the things my mother likes to say is that women these days have too many choices. You girls have too many choices, is what she would say to my sister Meredith and me. I don’t know how you’re going to do it, with all these choices, she would say. And it’s true, I do feel like women my age have a lot of choices. But here’s my problem: nobody’s choices look that good to me. And whenever I see Nina, with her house and her kid and her husband, with her garden and her projects and her dinner parties, with her casually discarded career and her perfectly toned upper arms, I see a woman who has made her choices, and she’s fine with them. Not only is she fine with them, she’s convinced that if you had half a brain, you’d make exactly the same ones.

  The door swung open, and there was Victor, holding a margarita. Apparently it was Mexican night. He kissed me on both cheeks, and shook Tom’s hand, and trailed behind us as we made our way into the kitchen.

  The party was already in full swing, mostly in the kitchen. Grace, the new baby, was introduced to Tom. Drinks were offered and accepted.

  “I met a guy,” said Cordelia.

  “Tell us about him,” said Larry.

  “Well, he’s Canadian,” said Cordelia. “And he has this way of putting his hands in his pockets.”

  “What can you possibly mean by that?” said Larry. He turned to Bonnie. “What can she possibly mean by that?”

  Larry pressed a button on the blender and the sound of ice hitting metal blades filled the kitchen.

  “I know what she means,” Bonnie said when Larry was finished. “Lanky, right?”

  “With oiled joints,” said Cordelia. “And crow’s-feet. The kind that look like they came from too much skiing.”

  “These are the requirements now?” said Larry. He started refilling glasses. “A Canadian who is capable of putting his hands in his pockets?”

  “I don’t have requirements,” said Cordelia. “I don’t believe in them.”

  “Come on,” Nina said. “You must have something.”

  “Define ‘requirements,’” said Cordelia.

  Nina cocked her head to one side thoughtfully. “Non-negotiable, front-end deal-breakers.”

  “I don’t think I do,” said Cordelia.

  “I don’t believe you, Cordelia,” said Nina. “Just like I don’t believe people who say they never watch television. It sounds good, but there’s simply no way that it’s true.”

  Cordelia and Nina don’t really get along. Well, that’s not entirely true. Nina gets along with Cordelia all right, but Cordelia nurses all sorts of low-grade grievances against Nina of which Nina is entirely unaware. What Cordelia says about Nina is that she’s self-satisfied, she’s condescending, she’s manipulative, and she thinks she’s figured everything out. What Nina says about Cordelia is that she ought to extend her brows. Cordelia has a wideish face, and her eyebrows stop directly over the outside corners of her eyes, and Nina thinks her entire face would look different if she just penciled in another half inch or so. Nina Peeble is the kind of woman that other women spend a great deal of time thinking about, but she does not return the favor.

  “I don’t watch television,” said Victor.

  “Honey,” Nina said to Victor, “you watch television. You watch baseball.”

  “Does that count?” said Victor.

  “That’s my point,” said Nina. “A person can say they don’t watch television, when actually they do, just like a person can say they don’t have requirements, when clearly, on the face of it, they do.”

  “I suppose I’d have trouble with a drug addict,” Cordelia said. “Or a felon.”

  Nina looked at Cordelia. “Well, you’ve been through it once already,” she said. “I’m sure you’re not in any hurry to do it again.”

  “Been through what?” said Tom.

  “Marriage,” said Nina.

  “I don’t know,” said Cordelia. “I liked being married. And I like being single. What I didn’t like was getting divorced. That I could have done without.”

  Everybody brought bowls of food into the dining room. It was Make Your Own night. Tacos, tostadas, burritos. Every so often, Larry would get up and blend a fresh batch of margaritas. The conversation tripped along nicely.

  “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you,” Bonnie said, when we reached the public breast-feeding portion of the evening. She had angled her chair a bit away from the table and was busy trying to get Grace to latch on. “Alan and Lizzie are splitting up.”

  “No,” said Cordelia.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Who are Alan and Lizzie?” said Victor.

  “Bonnie’s old friends from college,” Nina said to him. “I met her at a shower.”

  “What happened?” said Cordelia.

  Bonnie gave Victor a little background. Alan and Lizzie had been living together for eight years. Alan doesn’t believe in marriage, and he’s never been all that sure about having kids. It had been that way for as long as Lizzie had known him.

  “So, they’re in couple’s therapy,” Bonnie said. “Lizzie has given up on the idea of getting married. All she wants is to have a baby. Alan sits there each week in front of the therapist, and all he ever says is, ‘you’re not going to win this one.’ Lizzie’s crying, she’s making promises like, only one baby, not two, and she’d do all the work, he wouldn’t have to change a single diaper, like it was a dog she wanted to take home from the pound or something, and Alan just keeps saying to her, you’re not going to win this one. That’s his entire argument.”

  The burp cloth Bonnie had tossed over Grace’s head slipped, and for a moment the table was treated to a clear view of Bonnie’s enormous breast. Larry said, “Sweetie.”

  “Sorry about that,” Bonnie said. She rearranged herself and then continued. “This goes on for six months. Nothing changes. Lizzie finally decides she’s going to leave him. They’re fighting, she’s crying, and she’s standing at the front door of their house with her bags packed, and the very last thing she says to him is ‘I’m thirty-eight years old, we’re not married, I don’t have a baby—YOU WIN!’”

  “Wow,” said Cordelia.

  I glanced at Tom. He was busy constructing one last miniature tostada.

  “And she left,” said Bonnie.

  “Where’d she go?” I said.

  “She’s staying with her sister.”

  “Poor girl,” said Cordelia.

  “Well, I for one have very little sympathy for her,” said Nina.

  “How can you not have sympathy for her?” said Victor.

  “I mean, it’s sad,” said Nina. “I’ll give you that. But I could have told you five years ago that this is how it would end.”

  “You did tell me that five years ago,” said Bonnie. “I just didn’t believe you.”

  “Yes,” Nina said. “I remember. You said she loved him and he loved her and it would all work out.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” said Cordelia.

  “You can’t act like the rules don’t apply to you,” said Nina. She stood up and started to clear the plates from the table. “You can’t just wake up one morning and be surprised that the man you’ve been living with for eight years, who refuses to marry you, who’s been telling you all along that he’s not sure about having kids, suddenly doesn’t want to impregnate you. I mean, the woman was a fool. I’m sorry to be the one to say it, but it’s true. She should have gotten out of that situation years ago.”

  Nina went into the kitche
n with the dinner plates. Victor got up and cracked one of the windows open. He kept a pack of cigarettes on the sill, and, every night after dinner, he would perch on the ledge with his hand dangling out the window. Every so often he would hunch down, take a drag, and blow the smoke out into the cool night air.

  “It’s strange,” said Larry. “I always thought they seemed really in love.”

  “Yes, well, love is not enough,” Nina called out from the kitchen.

  “What are you talking about?” Victor called to Nina. “It’s enough for me.”

  Nina came back into the dining room and started getting the coffee cups out of the sideboard.

  “Which is one of the things I love about you,” Nina said to Victor. “You think that love is enough. But what happened with Alan and Lizzie just proves that it isn’t, and the sooner two people accept that it’s work and compromise and accommodation and sacrifice, the better, and the only reason to do it is because the alternative is so damn grim.”

  “I don’t want to accept that,” said Victor.

  “And you don’t have to, sweetheart. I do all the rest of the stuff, so you can go along in your happy little world, thinking that love is enough. But it isn’t,” Nina said. She put a coffee cup on its saucer with a clatter. “Love is overrated.”

  “Please, dear God, let us stay off the subject of sex,” Victor said. “I don’t want to sit at a dinner party and find out that my wife thinks sex is overrated.”

  Well, Nina Peeble does think sex is overrated. That is, in fact, the exact word she uses whenever you engage her on the subject. But Nina just walked up behind Victor and folded her arms across the front of his Brooks Brothers shirt and kissed him warmly on the neck.

  “That,” said Nina, “is something you will never, ever hear me say.”

  Nina went into the kitchen to get the dessert, and the conversation splintered into smaller conversations. I looked across the table at Tom. I tried to catch his eye, but he was looking down at his paper napkin, folding and refolding it. What was he thinking? How was it possible that I never had any idea what he was thinking?

  I wondered if Nina was right. I wondered if love was not enough, and if the problem was that Tom and I were missing all the other stuff. The accommodation and the sacrifice. The work and the compromises. The communication and the negotiations and the counseling sessions. Then something weird started to happen to me. My heart started to pound, I felt dizzy, and, for a moment, I was certain I was going to faint. This is not hyperbole, for I am a fainter. It is the most ladylike thing about me, and even though it usually only happens in doctors’ offices, it has occurred just often enough in ordinary life to remain a real threat. I closed my eyes and felt the blackness wash over me. I tried to concentrate on my breathing, on slowing down my racing heart, but I kept hearing Nina’s words inside my head. Love is overrated. Love is not enough. And then, suddenly, my heart skipped a beat: maybe this isn’t love. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it started out as love, but somewhere, somehow, something happened to it, and it became something else.

  I want the big love. I opened my eyes and looked over at Tom. He was still busy with the napkin. And I am not going to find it here. I saw it with a shimmering clarity. It didn’t matter that I could finally see that there are worse things in life than having a person sleep with somebody else when they’re supposed to be sleeping with only you, there are worse things than not knowing, there are worse things than being humiliated. It didn’t matter that I was almost thirty-three, or that my eggs were curdling inside of me, or that there were no men left in Philadelphia, there were no men left anywhere, except maybe in Alaska, which meant I’d have to go to Alaska for a man and to China for a baby, which meant a lot of time on the Internet, and long-haul flights, neither of which I’m particularly fond of. None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was that this wasn’t love. It wasn’t the big love. And I realized that I could spend the rest of my life trying to hold on to Tom. I could do my best to cement him in place. I could work hard to convince him that he couldn’t live without me. But I suddenly saw that I had another option. I could just let go. And, just like that, I could feel something shifting inside me, something that had been a certain way as long as I could remember.

  All of this was so startling, really, that I felt like I was waking up from a dream. I realize that’s a terrible cliché, but that’s exactly what it felt like. I shook my head, and then I looked across the table at Tom, and it was like I was seeing him for the first time. He was leaning back in his chair so he could talk to Victor, who was still perched on the windowsill. They were talking about mortgage rates. The light from one of the wall sconces hit the back of Tom’s head, and his blond hair glowed. I always loved Tom’s hair. Whenever I ran though the features I wanted our children to inherit, I’d always mix things up a bit to keep it interesting, but that part never changed; the hair was always his. The nose was always mine and the hair was always his.

  “I think,” I said to no one in particular, “that love should be enough.”

  “What’s that?” said Larry.

  “I think, love should be enough,” I said, quite loudly this time.

  “Run away with me, Alison,” Victor said to me. He blew a large cloud of smoke into the dining room. “We can be romantics together.”

  “I’ve never been a romantic before,” I said. “But I’m thinking of becoming one.”

  I looked at Tom.

  “I think it’s time to go,” I said.

  Twenty-two

  TOM AND I WERE OVER THAT NIGHT. IT WAS ALL VERY GROWN up and very final. I felt I owed him that much. I left first thing the next morning and moved in with Cordelia. The plan was that I would find a new job and then get my own apartment.

  “To your new life,” said Cordelia, clinking my glass.

  “To my new life,” I said.

  When Cordelia came home from the gym the next day, I was lying in her bed in the fetal position.

  “I thought you said you were fine with this,” said Cordelia.

  “I am fine with it,” I said.

  She sat down on the bed next to me.

  “Conceptually,” I said.

  She nodded her head.

  “I just need to catch up with myself,” I said.

  By Monday, all the shades were down, and I had moved the television in from the other room and put it on top of a trunk at the foot of the bed. I was propped up with pillows against the headboard, listlessly flipping through the channels.

  “I don’t understand people who say there’s nothing to watch on TV,” I said to Cordelia when she came home from work.

  Cordelia walked across the room and cracked open a window.

  “My theory,” I continued, “is that people who say there’s nothing to watch on TV don’t watch enough TV.”

  Cordelia bent down and picked up a few stray magazines and put them back on the nightstand.

  “There’s a whole world in there,” I said.

  And so I retired to Cordelia’s bed for a while. I must say, she handled it exceedingly well. Her mother had shut herself up in a darkened second-floor bedroom for most of the seventies, so my behavior didn’t alarm her nearly as much as it might have. She mashed me potatoes and scrambled me eggs. She brought me my favorite sick snack—Saltine crackers and blueberry jam—and didn’t even flinch when a blob of blueberries landed on her duvet. I can’t remember much of what we talked about. I do remember thinking, while Cordelia was rubbing my feet with peppermint lotion one evening, that I was beginning to understand why Cordelia’s mother found it so appealing to stay in bed for months at a time. I never would have put up with myself.

  I lay there for hours, for entire days, going over all that had happened between Tom and me, churning it through my brain. I circled around to the same thought again and again. When I was sitting in the cab, flipping through my desk calendar, trying to figure out whose hypothetical child I was carrying, what had happened was this: I kept picturing Hen
ry’s ears. On the baby’s head. Then, very deliberately, I had put the thought out of my mind. I was with Tom. Tom’s ears were fine. But lying in bed at Cordelia’s, I kept coming back to that moment, and, in a weird way, it made me feel better. I wasn’t supposed to wake up next to those ears for the rest of my life. The truth is, I didn’t want to spend my life with those ears. And something inside me had known it, even if it took the rest of me a while to catch up.

  “I think I’m depressed,” I finally said to Cordelia.

  “You’re molting,” she said kindly.

  “I want to die,” I said.

  “You’re in your cocoon,” said Cordelia.

  “I can’t move my limbs,” I said.

  “That’s what happens in a cocoon,” she said. “Limbs don’t move.”

  And then one morning I opened my eyes, and all I could see were the dust motes sparkling in the sunlight, and I knew I was done with that. The molting, I mean. I got out of bed and took a shower. I put on my running shoes and went for a run. I called up a temp agency. The woman I met with knew me from my column, and she quickly found me a truly plum job, in the temp world at least, copyediting at an advertising agency in place of a woman on an extended maternity leave. (“Triplets. At forty,” the temp lady reported when she phoned with the offer. “Fertility drugs, anyone?”) I cut off most of my hair, which turned out to be a mistake, but I also accidentally lost seven pounds, so I ended up about even.

  The first apartment I looked at was just down the street from Cordelia’s. It was cheap and tiny and, to my eyes, perfect. The windows were huge and the late-afternoon light poured in, and it was just high up enough to give a sort of Mary Poppins perspective of rooftops and chimneys and the tops of really tall trees. Nina Peeble came apartment hunting with me that day, and while I swooned around the windows, she wrinkled her nose at the avocado-colored bathroom tile and the two puny closets and said, “You can’t live in a view, Alison.” Well, I thought about it and decided that I could. So now I live in a view.

  And I started to get that feeling, that great feeling, where the world starts opening up again, where you notice a flier for Italian lessons stuck to a lamppost, and you pull off the little tag with the phone number and slip it in your wallet, and when you come upon the tag again a week later you impulsively make the call, and you end up spending two hours every Wednesday night with six strangers in the back of a café being drilled by Alessandro, who wears leather pants and calls you Principessa when he talks to you after class. You know the feeling I’m talking about. Life, which had shrunk down to mundane and predictable proportions, suddenly exploded with, well, life. I bought lacy bras and hiking boots. I kept Keats on the back of the toilet and decided it was time to finally tackle Proust. I pored over the travel section of the Sunday Times with the intensity of a person who believes that anything, anywhere, is possible. I went to the opera and I took up yoga and I taught myself how to make a chocolate soufflé.