Good in Bed (5 page)

“Um, excuse me,” he said, “are you okay?”

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Fine.”

“You just looked kind of …” His voice—a nice voice, if a little high—trailed off.

“Weird?”

“I saw somebody having a stroke once,” he told me. “It started off like that.”

By now my friend Brianna had collected herself. Wiping her eyes, she grabbed his hand. “Bruce, this is Cannie,” she said. “Cannie was just doing an imitation.”

“Oh,” said Bruce, and stood there, obviously feeling foolish.

“Not to worry,” I said. “It's a good thing you stopped me. I was being unkind.”

“Oh,” said Bruce again.

I kept talking. “See, I'm trying to be nicer. It's my New Year's resolution.”

“It's February,” he pointed out.

“I'm a slow starter.”

“Well,” he said, “at least you're trying.” He smiled at me, and walked away.

I spent the rest of the party getting the scoop. He'd come with a
guy Brianna knew from graduate school. The good news: He was a graduate student, which meant reasonably smart, and Jewish, just like me. He was twenty-seven. I was twenty-five. It fit. “He's funny, too,” said Brianna, before delivering the bad news: Bruce had been working on his dissertation for three years, possibly longer, and he lived in central New Jersey, more than an hour away from us, picking up freelance writing work and teaching the occasional bunch of freshmen, subsisting on stipends, a small scholarship, and, mostly, his parents' money.

“Geographically undesirable,” Brianna pronounced.

“Nice hands,” I countered. “Nice teeth.”

“He's a vegetarian,” she said.

I winced. “For how long?”

“Since college.”

“Hmph. Well, maybe I can work with it.”

“He's …” Brianna trailed off.

“On parole?” I joked. “Addicted to painkillers?”

“Kind of immature,” she finally said.

“He's a guy,” I said, shrugging. “Aren't they all?”

She laughed. “And he's a good guy,” she said. “Talk to him. You'll see.”

That whole night, I watched him, and I felt him watching me. But he didn't say anything until after the party broke up, and I was walking home, feeling more than a little disappointed. It had been a while since I'd even seen someone who'd caught my fancy, and tall, nice hands, nice-white-teeth grad student Bruce appeared, at least from the outside, to be a possibility.

But when I heard footsteps behind me, I wasn't thinking about him. I was thinking what every woman who lives in a city thinks when she hears quick footsteps coming up behind her and it's after midnight and she's between streetlights. I took a quick glance at my surroundings while fumbling for the Mace attached to my keychain. There was a streetlight on the corner, a car parked underneath. I figured I'd Mace whoever it was into temporary immobility, smash one of the car windows, hoping the alarm would go off, scream bloody murder, and run.

“Cannie?”

I whirled around. And there he was, smiling at me shyly. “Hey,” he said, laughing a little bit at my obvious fear. He walked me home. I gave him my number. He called me the next night, and we talked for three hours, about everything: college, parents, his dissertation, the future of newspapers. “I want to see you,” he told me at one in the morning, when I was thinking that if we kept talking I was going to be a wreck at work the next day. “So we'll meet,” I said.

“No,” said Bruce. “Now.”

And two hours later, after a wrong turn coming off the Ben Franklin Bridge, he was at my door again: bigger than I'd remembered, somehow, in a plaid shirt and sweatpants, carrying a rolled-up sleeping bag that smelled like summer camp in one hand, smiling shyly. And that was that.

And now, more than three years after our first kiss, three months after our let's-take-a-break talk, and four hours after I'd found out that he'd told the entire magazine-reading world that I was a Larger Woman, Bruce squinted at me across the parking lot in front of his apartment where he'd agreed to meet me. He was blinking double-time, the way he did when he was nervous. His arms were full of things. There was the blue plastic dog-food dish I'd kept in his apartment for my dog, Nifkin. There, in a red wooden frame, was the picture of us on top of a bluff at Block Island. There was a silver hoop earring that had been sitting on his night table for months. There were three socks, a half-empty bottle of Chanel. Tampons. A toothbrush. Three years' worth of odds and ends, kicked under the bed, worked down into a crack in the couch. Evidently, Bruce saw our rendezvous as a chance to kill two birds with one stone—endure my wrath over the “Good in Bed” column and give me back my stuff. And it felt like being punched in the chest, looking at my girlie items all jumbled up in a cardboard Chivas box he'd probably picked up at the liquor store on his way home from work—the physical evidence that we were really, truly over.

“Cannie,” he said coolly, still squinching his eyes open and shut in a way I found particularly revolting.

“Bruce,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “How's that novel coming? Will I be starring in that, too?”

He raised his eyebrow, but said nothing. “Remind me,” I said. “At what point in our relationship did I agree to let you share intimate details of our time together with a few million readers?”

Bruce shrugged. “We don't have a relationship anymore.”

“We were taking a break a break,” I said.

Bruce gave me a small, condescending smile. “Come on, Cannie. We both know what that meant.”

“I meant what I said,” I said, glaring at him. “Which makes one of us, it seems.”

“Whatever,” said Bruce, attempting to shove the stuff into my arms. “I don't know why you're so upset. I didn't say anything bad.” He straightened his shoulders. “I actually thought the column was pretty nice.”

For one of the few times in my adult life, I was literally speechless. “Are you high?” I asked. With Bruce, that was more than a rhetorical question. “You called me fat in a magazine. You turned me into a joke. You don't think you did anything wrong?”

“Face it, Cannie,” he said. “You are fat.” He bent his head. “But that doesn't mean I didn't love you.”

The box of tampons bounced off his forehead and spilled into the parking lot.

“Oh, that's nice,” said Bruce.

“You absolute bastard.” I licked my lips, breathing hard. My hands were shaking. My aim was off. The picture glanced off his shoulder, then shattered on the ground. “I can't believe I ever thought seriously for even one second about marrying you.”

Bruce shrugged, bending down, scooping feminine protection and shards of wood and glass into his hands and dumping them back into the box. Our picture he left lying there.

“This is the meanest thing anyone's ever done to me,” I said, through my tear-clogged throat. “I want you to know that.” But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasn't true. In the grand, historical scheme of things, my father leaving us was doubtlessly worse.
Which is one of the many things that sucked about my father—he forever robbed me of the possibility of telling another man,
This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me
, and meaning it.

Bruce shrugged again. “I don't have to worry about how you feel anymore. You made that clear.” He straightened up. I hoped he'd be angry—passionate, even—but all I got was this maddening, patronizing calm. “You were the one who wanted this, remember?”

“I wanted a break. I wanted time to think about things. I should have just dumped you,” I said. “You're …” And I stood, speechless again, thinking of the worst thing I could say to him, the word that would make him feel even a fraction as horrible and furious and ashamed as I did. “You're small,” I finally said, imbuing that word with every hateful nuance I could muster, so that he'd know I meant small in spirit, and everywhere else, too.

He didn't say anything. He didn't even look at me. He just turned around and walked away.

Samantha had kept the car running. “Are you okay?” she asked as I slid into the passenger's seat clutching the box to my chest. I nodded silently. Samantha probably thought I was ridiculous. But this wasn't a situation I expected her to sympathize with. At five foot ten, with inky black hair, pale skin, and high, sculpted cheekbones, Samantha looks like a young Anjelica Huston. And she's thin. Effortlessly, endlessly thin. Given a choice of any food in the world, she'd probably pick a perfect fresh peach and Ryvita crisp-breads. If she wasn't my best friend, I'd hate her, and even though she is my best friend, it's sometimes hard not to be envious of someone who can take food or leave it, whereas I mostly take it, and then take hers, too, when she doesn't want any more. The only problem her face and figure had ever caused her was too much male attention. I could never make her feel what it was like to live in a body like mine.

She glanced at me quickly. “So, um, I'm guessing that things with you two are over?”

“Good guess,” I said dully. My mouth tasted ashy, my skin, reflected in the passenger's side window, looked pale and waxen. I
stared into the cardboard box, at my earrings, my books, the tube of MAC lipstick that I thought I'd lost forever.

“You okay?” asked Samantha gently.

“I'm fine.”

“Do you want to get a drink? Some dinner, maybe? Want to go see a movie?”

I held the box tighter and closed my eyes so I wouldn't have to see where we were, so I wouldn't have to follow the car's progress back down the roads that used to lead me to him. “I think I just want to go home.”

My answering machine was blinking triple-time when I got back to my apartment. I ignored it. I shucked off my work clothes, pulled on my overalls and a T-shirt, and padded, barefoot, into the kitchen. From the freezer I retrieved a canister of frozen Minute Maid lemonade. From the top shelf of the pantry I pulled down a pint of tequila. I dumped both in a mixing bowl, grabbed a spoon, took a deep breath, a big slurp, settled myself on my blue denim couch, and forced myself to start reading.

I'll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.

She was out on a bike ride, and I was home watching football, leafing through the magazines on her coffee table, when I found her Weight Watchers folder—a palm-sized folio with notations for what she'd eaten, and when, and what she planned to eat next, and whether she'd been drinking her eight glasses of water a day. There was her name. Her identification number. And her weight, which I am too much of a gentleman to reveal here. Suffice it to say that the number shocked me.

I knew that C. was a big girl. Certainly bigger than any of the women I'd seen on TV, bouncing in bathing suits or drifting,
reedlike, through sitcoms and medical dramas. Definitely bigger than any of the women I'd ever dated before.

What, I thought scornfully. Both of them?

I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser. But when I met C., I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.

Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome. Holding her felt like a safe haven. It felt like coming home.

But being out with her didn't feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it was the way I'd absorbed society's expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C. was a dedicated foot soldier in the body wars. At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker's build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team's roster, C. couldn't make herself invisible.

But I know that if it were possible, if all the slouching and slumping and shapeless black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant. She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft.

As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn't matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world's voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world:
fat.

And I knew it wasn't paranoia. You hear, over and over, how fat is the last acceptable prejudice, that fat people are the only
safe targets in our politically correct world. Date a queen-sized woman and you'll find out how true it is. You'll see the way people look at her, and look at you for being with her. You'll try to buy her lingerie for Valentine's Day and realize the sizes stop before she starts. Every time you go out to eat you'll watch her agonize, balancing what she wants against what she'll let herself have, what she'll let herself have against what she'll be seen eating in public.

And what she'll let herself say.

I remember when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and C., a newspaper reporter, wrote a passionate defense of the White House intern who'd been betrayed by Linda Tripp in Washington, and betrayed even worse by her friends in Beverly Hills, who were busily selling their high-school memories of Monica to
Inside Edition
and
People
magazine. After her article was printed, C. got lots of hate mail, including one letter from a guy who began: “I can tell by what you wrote that you are overweight and that nobody loves you.” And it was that letter—that word—that bothered her more than anything else anyone said. It seemed that if it were true—the “overweight” part—then the “nobody loves you” part would have to be true as well. As if being Lewinsky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.