The Big Love (13 page)

“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.”

“That’s a good story.”

“I know. I’m thinking of using it when I’m out on dates,” said Matt. “How do I come off?”

“Funny. Perceptive,” I said. “Slightly unbalanced.”

I got up to get a glass of water. I stood at the sink, filling it up. I looked over my shoulder at Matt, who was sitting at the table. He had a look on his face.

“What?” I said.

“Your ass is looking good these days,” said Matt.

“Don’t say that,” I said.

“Why not? It’s a compliment.”

“I just don’t like the idea that somebody I know is monitoring my ass,” I said. “Good or bad. I just don’t like it.”

“Fine. I’ll discontinue my entire Alison’s-ass monitoring program,” he said.

I sat back down at the table.

“Why don’t you monitor Olivia’s ass instead.”

“Oh, I do.”

Later, we went upstairs and sat on the couch. Matt had opened a second bottle of wine, which we were most of the way through. I tucked the edges of an afghan under my legs.

“There’s nothing worse than a Jewish funeral,” Matt said, “because we have no afterlife.”

“You must have something,” I said.

“When I was a kid I asked my dad, Dad, when I die, will I go to heaven? No, he says. Jews don’t believe in heaven. Well, what do we believe in instead? I asked him. Nothing, the man tells me.”

“He really said that? Nothing?”

“Nothing,” said Matt. “I was nine years old at the time. Which means that the existential crisis brought on by that ‘nothing’ has passed the quarter-century mark. And most of the time they manage to gloss over it. But at a funeral, you know, the question’s gonna come up.”

“So what do they say?”

He swirled the wine around in his glass. “Apparently Aunt Mitzie is going to live on in my memory. Which is unfortunate for her, because I spend very little time thinking about dead people,” Matt said. “You’re Catholic, right?”

“Protestant, actually.”

“Same thing,” he said. “At least you get heaven. At least you get angels and tiny harps and ‘follow the white light.’”

In point of fact, I don’t think we get to follow the white light, but that seemed to be quibbling, so I didn’t say anything.

“Even if it’s not true,” said Matt, “sometimes it would be nice to think it was true.”

We were both quiet for a moment. My head was starting to spin from all the wine.

“So,” Matt said. He got a very serious look on his face. “Wanna fuck?”

I gave a short, surprised laugh.

“No,” I said. “But thanks for asking.”

“I’m nothing if not a gentleman,” said Matt. “Have some more wine. You might change your mind.”

“I think I need to sleep,” I said. I remembered something Matt had said about the girl with four cats. “I might get in your bed and sleep with you but not sleep with you.”

“I knew you were that girl,” said Matt.

We went upstairs. Matt loaned me a T-shirt and a pair of boxers. I went into the bathroom to change, and then I got into bed. Matt has a surprisingly comfortable bed. It’s huge, and it takes up so much space that when you want to get in or out you can’t come in from the sides, because the walls are so close; you have to climb up from the foot. Matt turned out the light and crawled up into bed beside me. He put his arms around me, and after a few minutes I started to drift off to sleep.

“When you were in grade school,” Matt said, “were you one of those girls who, when you loaned somebody a pencil, said, ‘make sure I get that back’?”

“No.”

“Just checking.”

Fourteen

I
MET TOM HATHAWAY AT A DINNER PARTY GIVEN BY MY FRIEND
Nina Peeble. Nina used to be my very best friend, and then for a while she wasn’t my friend at all, but by the time she threw the dinner party where I met Tom, we were friends again. I remember thinking that night when I got home how happy I was that Nina and I were friends again, because if we hadn’t made up I wouldn’t have been invited to her dinner party, and if I hadn’t gone to her dinner party I wouldn’t have met the man I was going to marry, and if I hadn’t met the man I was going to marry at that particular party I quite possibly never would have met him at all, and the rest of my life would have been wasted, searching for him.

“I don’t know,” Nina said the next day, when I called her up and asked about Tom.

“What’s wrong with him?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Nina.

“What is it,” I said.

“That thing with his nose doesn’t bug you?” she said.

“What’s wrong with his nose?” I said.

“If you didn’t notice it, then that’s great,” said Nina.

“Notice what?” I said.

“Nothing,” Nina said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Two weeks later, Tom Hathaway called me and asked me out to dinner. Nina had arranged the whole thing. It’s impossible to convey, really, just how good Nina Peeble is at that sort of thing. She managed to fix up her brother Jack with an OB/ GYN he saw on the
Today
show doing a segment on perimenopause; six months later they were engaged. Anyway, it was very kind of her, and it was certainly more than I had a right to expect, given our complex history.

It is my belief that all successful female friendships fall into the same basic paradigm: one person gets to be the girl and the other one has to be the boy. I was just about to claim that this has nothing whatsoever to do with lesbianism, but now that I think about it, I don’t think that’s true; what I’m talking about, in fact, is a nonsexual version of the same agreement you see in lesbian couples, where the girl is the girl and the boy is the boy and both parties are more or less fine with it. Now, the interesting thing about me is that in some friendships I’m the girl and in others I’m the boy. With Bonnie, for example, I’m the girl—mainly because she’s married and has three kids and isn’t really interested in being the girl anymore; and with my friend Angie, I’m the girl—because Angie is much too sensible to want to be the girl; but with Nina Peeble, I’m the boy. I always have been. It was clear to me that if Nina and I were going to be friends I’d have to be the boy before I even met her, because I happened to see the inside of her underwear drawer. She was assigned to be my roommate my freshman year in college, and by the time I showed up on move-in day she was already settled in and off to the campus bookstore, and while I was looking for a place to put my stuff I pulled open what turned out to be her underwear drawer. There were rows and rows and rows of perfectly folded pastel underpants, lovingly arranged with little dividers and satin sachets and tiny boxes holding God knows what, and I knew immediately that this was a woman with whom I could not compete.