Not that all this fighting did me any good. He just kept on having lunch with her. He even wanted me to have lunch with her! He gave her my work number and everything. “Kate’s going to call you next week. She wants to have lunch with you,” he said. I spent an entire weekend mulling over my plan. I decided I wouldn’t call her back. I wouldn’t answer my phone and when I got her message I’d just never call her back and she’d get the picture and then do you know what happened? She never called! I should have known then what I was dealing with. Not that knowing would have done any good. When a woman like Kate Pearce wants your boyfriend, I don’t think there’s much you can do to stop it.
I don’t mean to make it sound like Tom had no part in this. I warned him. “She doesn’t just want to be friends with you,” I’d say. “That’s not how women like that operate,” I’d say. “She’s not going to stop until she has sex with you.” Tom had even wanted to invite her to our dinner party that night! “She doesn’t have many friends,” he said. Right, I thought. First I invite her to a dinner party and then she insinuates herself into my circle of friends and the next thing you know she’s nailing my boyfriend. I know how these things work, I thought. Unfortunately I didn’t know how this particular thing was working, because Kate had skipped the preliminaries. She already was nailing my boyfriend. She’d been doing it for five months!
“We don’t have enough chairs for Kate and Andre,” I said to Tom when he suggested the dinner party invitation.
“It would just be Kate,” Tom said. “And I’ll sit on a folding chair.”
“What happened to Andre?” I said.
“He’s not in the picture anymore,” Tom said.
“What do you mean he’s not in the picture anymore?” I said.
“They broke up. I thought you knew that.”
“How could I possibly know that?”
You’re probably wondering, if this affair had been going on for five months, how come Tom hadn’t moved out earlier. Which is an excellent question. We weren’t married. We didn’t have any kids. He could have broken up with me and then moved out and then started seeing Kate and through it all kept his moral compass pointing north. But, as it turned out, Tom hadn’t done any of those things in the proper order because
Kate wanted to take it slow!
And he didn’t want to scare her off! Like she was a baby deer in a forest clearing or something! The most disturbing part, however, is the
reason
Kate wanted to take things slow. Apparently, Andre’s mother was sick, very sick—sick with advanced pancreatic cancer in fact—and Kate didn’t think it would be fair to walk out on him in his time of need. So there was Tom, waiting for Andre’s mother to die from pancreatic cancer and for a suitable amount of time to pass so that Kate could drop the hatchet on Andre with a clear conscience and then, only then, was he going to get around to breaking up with me. I’m thirty-two years old, people! I don’t have that kind of time!
I didn’t know any of that stuff the night of the mustard, though. That first night all I really knew for sure was that Tom had been having lunch with his ex-girlfriend all summer and he’d been reading a book of Japanese death poems called
Japanese Death Poems.
If nothing else, the whole death poem thing should have tipped me off. A happy person doesn’t read a book of poems about death, particularly poems about death that were written only moments before each poet’s actual demise, which is what this book was full of.
Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death
happens to be the subtitle. Tom would read a bunch of these poems before bed each night and then he wouldn’t be in the mood to have sex. Sometimes he’d even read one aloud to me, which at the time I thought was nice—Tom and I were never a read-aloud-to-each-other kind of couple, we were a read-it-when-I’m-done kind of couple—although I now suspect he was only doing it so I wouldn’t be in the mood to have sex either. These poems were unbelievably depressing.
Like a rotten log / half-buried in the ground—my life, which / has not flowered, comes / to this sad end.
Anyhow, I was in bed, flipping through the death poem book, drinking my wine, trying not to think about Tom, or Tom and Kate, and what it was precisely that they did together, and whether or not they were doing it at that very moment, when the phone rang.
My heart leapt.
I let the machine pick it up. It was Nina Peeble, one of the people who’d been in my living room earlier, calling from her cell phone.
“I just want you to remember one thing, Alison,” Nina said into the machine. “They
always
come back.”
T
HE LAST THING TOM SAID TO ME BEFORE HE HUNG UP THE
phone that night was, “Don’t write about this.” He thought I might be tempted to take the mustard and the dinner party and the phone call and whip it into seven hundred words and run it as my column for the week. I’d been writing essentially the same column since college, but by the time Tom and I broke up, it was running in an alternative newspaper called the
Philadelphia Times.
The
Philadelphia Times
would like to be the
Village Voice,
only this is Philadelphia, not New York, and that can make it kind of difficult. My friend Eric grew up around here and now lives in Manhattan, and what he says is that Philadelphia is the kind of city where the local newscasters are celebrities. Eric is always saying things like that, things that are true in some obvious and fundamental way and yet nonetheless surprisingly depressing.
Anyhow, as far as not writing about Tom, I really couldn’t see how I was going to manage to avoid it. Tom Hathaway was a recurring character in my column, and it simply wouldn’t be possible to have him just drop out of it altogether. I was going to have to tell the truth, and there were several general problems with that, and one specific one. First of all, this was not the sort of breakup that reflected well on the victim. I realized that the second I hung up the phone. In fact, it strikes me that if I hadn’t had a living room full of witnesses, it’s entirely possible I would have changed the story around a little—made Tom’s behavior seem slightly less appalling—not because I wanted to protect him, but because I wanted to protect me. Also, there was the question that always comes up in a situation like this, the what was she (me) doing with him (Tom) in the first place question. Too many pieces of the puzzle were missing, and if that much was clear to me—the person who had been living in the midst of all the puzzle pieces and yet apparently missing them entirely—I could just imagine how it would look to somebody from the outside. So those were the general problems. The specific problem was this: Tom is an attorney, and it crossed my mind that if I wrote about what happened that night when he asked me not to, I might end up getting sued. In my experience, there is a certain type of writer who wastes a lot of energy worrying about getting sued, and usually it’s just self-aggrandizing nonsense, but the truth is in this case I’m not so sure. I suppose it doesn’t help that I always give people the same names they have in real life. I can’t help it. Otherwise I can’t keep everybody straight. I really don’t believe in changing details much, either. That’s what the writing books always tell you to do—“change the identifying details” is how they put it—but I can never bring myself to do it.
I feel I should point out that I became the kind of columnist I became before it was a cliché, before the
Suddenly-Susan
ness of it all hit the culture full force, before the whole thing became boring, and silly, and obvious. By the time all that happened, it was too late. I was hooked. I suppose if I had been exposed to Dorothy Parker at an impressionable age she would have been who I wanted to grow up to be, but we didn’t get Dorothy Parker in Arizona when I was growing up; we got Nora Ephron. Who I proceeded to want to grow up to be. I didn’t find out until years later—after I’d been exposed to Dorothy Parker myself and had begun to idly contemplate attempting to become her—that Nora Ephron had wanted to grow up to be Dorothy Parker, which made me quite pleased.
Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for somebody like me to become somebody like Dorothy Parker, or somebody like Nora Ephron for that matter, because I’m not Jewish. Not only am I not Jewish, I am the opposite of Jewish. I was raised as an evangelical Christian, a real born-again, a tribe which completely lacks a comedic tradition and is almost entirely missing an intellectual one. We also don’t have much in the way of a self-hating tradition, come to think of it, although God knows everybody else in the world wishes we would hurry up and develop one. Because—and I realize I don’t have to tell you this—people hate evangelical Christians. They hate, hate, hate them. They hate the Christian right, they hate the Moral Majority, they hate Jerry Falwell, they hate the pro-lifers, they hate people with the little silver fish on the back of their minivans, they hate the guy at the office with the weird haircut who won’t put money into the football pool. Of course, the guy at the office with the weird haircut could be a Mormon, but for some reason people don’t hate Mormons. Most people think of Mormons as just sort of inoffensive super-Christians. The only people who don’t think of Mormons as Christians, in fact, are Mormons and Christians. A few years ago, my mother called me and told me that the people who’d moved in next door were Mormons.
“Do they have a trampoline?” I said.
“How did you know?” said my mother.
“Mormons love trampolines,” I said. “I don’t know why, but they do.”
Anyhow, my mother befriended her counterpart next door, and the two of them spent the next three years swapping one-dish recipes and trying in vain to convert one another. Which brings us to people’s fundamental problem with born-again Christians, which is that they don’t want to be converted. They don’t even want to entertain the notion that they might need to be converted. The problem is that at some point in the conversation, the person being converted is going to say something like, “What happens if I decide to take a pass?” and the person doing the converting will get a drippy, painfully sincere look on his face and say, “Then you’ll spend eternity in hell.” This is upsetting, even if you think they’re completely full of shit. And, well, the rest of it sure doesn’t look like any fun. Even when I was a kid I knew it wasn’t any fun. In high school youth group, no matter what we were doing some kid would say, “See, we don’t need to
drink
to have
fun
”—even then I suspected what I now know is true—namely, that it is more fun to drink and do drugs and have sex than to not do so. It is much more fun.
You’re probably wondering, if I was an evangelical Christian, what I was doing living with my boyfriend Tom in the first place. Well, the truth is I haven’t been much of a Christian for quite some time—since college, really, although some of the more glaring aftereffects lingered well into my twenties, the pink sweaters, the bad hair. If I’d stopped to give the matter any thought I would have jumped ship before I got to college, because being an evangelical Christian in college is unbelievably tedious. Everybody around you is busy drinking and smoking and trying psychedelic mushrooms and experimenting with lesbianism and sucking Jell-O shots out of the navels of strangers in Cancún during spring break, while you sit around, trying to be good. The worst possible thing to be is an evangelical Christian at an Ivy League university—which is what I was—because you’re not only trying to be good, you’re trying to be smart. You end up fighting the Scopes Monkey Trial over and over again on your dorm room floor—only guess whose side you’re on? Guess who you have to be? Plus, there’s all that time spent sitting around in small circles with other Christians, pondering imponderable questions. Would it be possible, the classic one goes, for God to make a rock so big that He couldn’t lift it? Could He make a black cat that’s white? Could He make a square circle? Then you move on to important matters. Like how far you can go and still be considered a virgin. This is a matter of contentious debate, but let me assure you: it is all true about Christian girls and blowjobs. (It is not, however, true about Christian girls and anal sex, with a few truly pioneering exceptions, only one of whom I happen to have met.)
It strikes me that a bit of clarification is in order, and that is that there is no real halfway with evangelical Christianity. Blowjobs notwithstanding. It is possible, for example, to be raised as a Catholic and then to grow up and stop obeying the rules and stop going to church and generally have nothing in your life that would remotely indicate to any reasonable human being that you are a Catholic, and yet still be considered, by yourself and everybody else, a Catholic. Not so with evangelicalism. You’re either in or you’re out. You’re either with them or against them. And so, before we go any further here, I would like to make the point that I am currently out. Another point I’d like to make is that this is just the sort of thing I found really irritating about evangelicalism in the first place.
I hate going on record with that sort of thing, because of my parents. My poor parents. My kind, good, devoutly Christian parents. They really did nothing to deserve this. I mean, I’ve been in therapy for eleven years, so presumably they did
something
to deserve
something,
just nothing to deserve this. I hesitate to mention my eleven years of psychotherapy, because you’ll undoubtedly think I’m really screwed up. The question of how a person with normal-sized problems can end up in therapy for eleven years is one that only a person with nothing much wrong with them who’s been in therapy for a long time can understand, so there’s really no use in me trying to explain myself here. The more interesting question is how I managed to afford it. Well, when I graduated from college I was broke and depressed and I started going to a public clinic where they only charged me thirteen dollars a session, and before I knew it eleven years had gone by. I didn’t make much progress, mainly because it was a teaching clinic where graduate students worked for a year before heading off into private practice, which meant that every September, my current therapist would hand over my file to the new guy, and the two of us would have to start all over again, at the beginning, with my childhood.