“When did you make this decision?” said Celeste, my therapist at the time, when I finally broke down and told her.
“When I was thirteen. I was at church camp. I made a pledge,” I said.
“To whom?” said Celeste.
“What do you mean, to whom?”
“To whom did you make this pledge?”
“To God.”
“To God,” Celeste repeated, and made a little scribble on her yellow legal pad.
My belief in God was one of the things Celeste was attempting to rid me of. Well, that’s not entirely fair: she didn’t have a problem with my believing in God, she just didn’t want it to interfere with anything important, like my freedom or my choices or my sex life. Of course, that’s pretty much the whole point of God. You give up some of life’s more interesting perks and in exchange you lose your fear of death.
“A decision that served you well at age thirteen, might, at age twenty-five, be subject to reevaluation,” said Celeste.
So, we reevaluated. We went around and around. Celeste compared it to the embargo on Cuban cigars. It made a certain amount of sense in the sixties, but now? With the crumbling of the Berlin Wall? A McDonald’s in Red Square? To be totally honest, I didn’t need much in the way of convincing. I’d been toying with the idea myself ever since Lance Bateman put his hand in my pants in the eleventh grade, but I’d managed to hold off. For a long time I was waiting for my wedding night, and then when that started to seem silly and futile and quasidelusional, for some reason I kept on waiting. I guess I was waiting for a good enough reason to stop waiting.
That night I went over to see my boyfriend Gil-the-homosexual and I told him that I was finally ready to have sex with him. The penis embargo was over. I said I had discussed it with my therapist, and a decision that worked for me when I was thirteen might not make the most sense for me now that I was twenty-five, and since he was my boyfriend he was the logical candidate for the deflowering. I’d even bought a twelve-pack of condoms on the way over, figuring that upon hearing the news he’d throw me down on the kitchen floor and have his manly way with me, maybe not twelve times, but definitely more than three, which was the only other denomination that condoms came in. Gil, however, did not throw me down on the kitchen floor. He just sat there, polishing his shoes with a new soft-bristle toothbrush, and told me he needed some time to think about it. He wasn’t sure he was completely on board.
I would like to report that I broke up with him right then and there, that I said something withering and cruel and never looked back, but I didn’t. I had a job for the man to do. I’m very practical that way. I’m not the type to throw away a perfectly good blender just because you’ve got to jiggle the cord a little to get it started. The idea of starting over completely from scratch, of meeting someone new and going out with him once and then twice and then three times and then telling him about my sexual status and watching him slowly back out of the room, explaining that he wasn’t interested in getting involved in anything serious and, let’s face it, having sex with a twenty-five-year-old virgin is nothing if not serious—that was more than I could bear. So after some jiggling of the cord, Gil-the-homosexual and I had sex, and then not only did I not break up with him, I stayed with him for eight more months, my brain addled not by the sex—the word
perfunctory
applies—but by the thought that now that I’d slept with him I had to marry him.
I did not know at the time we were dating that Gil-the-homosexual was in fact gay. I mean, I had my suspicions—you should have seen the man make a bed—but I did my best to ignore them, largely because I was so relieved to have met somebody who was willing to be my boyfriend without having sex with me. You can’t imagine what a find this was. We’d go out about three times a week, and then I’d go sleep over at his place, and we’d make out and cuddle and fall asleep, and the second my feet touched the floor in the morning he’d start in on the bed. He’d pile the pillows and the shams and the bolsters with such precision and flair that it looked like one of those department store beds that you’re not supposed to sit on. That’s another thing—he didn’t like for me to sit on it once it was made. Not even if I needed to put on my shoes. He also made me drink out of paper cups at night because he claimed he couldn’t fall asleep if there were dirty dishes in his sink. I myself have been known to fall asleep when there were dirty dishes in my bed. Let’s just say, it became a point of contention.
That’s one of the things that happens when you wait so long to have sex: you end up dating men who aren’t all that interested in having it. With you, anyway. And then, if you’re a certain kind of girl, you end up marrying one of them, and he still isn’t all that interested, only now you’re stuck with him because he’s your husband. You do things the right way, by the letter of the law, and then in the end you get totally fucked. That’s one of the things they don’t tell you at church camp. That, and the fact that all this pledging never to have sex gives you hang-ups. I’ll tell you how big my hang-ups are: I’m not even in my own sex fantasies. And by this I don’t mean to suggest that I’m, say, sitting in the corner in an overstuffed armchair smoking a cigarette and watching—I’m not even in the room! I’m someplace else entirely! Quite possibly shopping! And the truth is, the incredibly sad, pathetic truth is, I’m lucky I can even manage to have any sort of sex fantasies at all. It seems to me that most people’s really juicy sex fantasies have their roots in adolescent obsessions, and my adolescent obsession was Jesus, and even I am not screwed up enough to have a sex fantasy about Jesus.
I started out telling you all of this because I wanted you to understand why sexual confidence wasn’t exactly my strong point, and why Kate being like a drug was precisely the thing that would drive me the most out of my mind with jealousy, but you should also probably know that as upset as I was about Tom leaving me for Kate, the thought did cross my mind that I might finally get to have sex with somebody who a) wasn’t Tom, and b) isn’t gay. And the prospect didn’t entirely lack appeal.
W
HEN I WOKE UP ON MONDAY MORNING, I FOUND MYSELF
staring up at the pattern on the pressed-tin ceiling over the bed, wondering what would become of me. And I mean this in the full Jane Austen sense of the term. What on earth would
become of
me? When Gil-the-homosexual and I finally broke up—over a ring my Diet Coke made on one of his cherrywood nightstands—I went straight out the next morning and bought a cheap ticket to Prague. I rented a tiny apartment in the Old Town and stayed there for three months. I felt dizzy with my own independence. I was finally free. I drank Turkish coffee and read thick Penguin Classics and took long, soulful walks over bridges. Well, here I was, free again, and all I could think about was Tom. I started to cry. What if he didn’t come to his senses? What if he never came back? What would I do? Who would I date?
What would become of me?
Four years we’d been together. Four years! Well, it’s better than a divorce is what you’re probably thinking. That’s what everybody kept saying to me. At least it’s not a divorce. It’s better than a divorce. And I would say this back to them. I would say, I’m not so sure about that. A divorced woman at least makes sense to people. A divorced woman has only been rejected by one other human being. Dating a divorced woman is like getting a sweater that’s been hanging in someone else’s closet; it didn’t work for
them,
but maybe . . .
I realize that’s nonsense, of course. Cordelia’s divorce was truly the most horrific thing I’ve ever witnessed, and even as I lay there that morning, the picture of misery, mentally tracing the tin bumps on the ceiling in an effort to calm myself down, I knew there was really no comparing the two. Still, all this felt bad, and it was happening to me. Which is one of the reasons it came as such a shock to my system, come to think of it. Very little had happened to me for quite some time. One of the things about living in Philadelphia is that the same events tick along so predictably, year after year, the Mummers Parade and the Flower Show and the Book and the Cook and the Jazz Festival and the Beaux Arts Ball, that you get lulled into a kind of a coma. You see the same faces at the same parties, you’re struck by the shock of the same perfect crisp autumn day after the same months of muggy, dank summer, you end up with the same stinky gingko things on the bottom of your shoes when you make the mistake of walking down 22nd Street during gingko fruit season, and after a while you stop noticing that nothing is happening to you, because nothing seems to be happening to anybody else. If anything really big ever happens to anyone who lives in Philadelphia, they end up moving to New York.
One big thing that happened to somebody I knew, about eight months before all this, was that the publisher of our paper, Sid Hirsch, ended up in the news because his wife was found dead in the bottom of his swimming pool. Now, I’ve always believed that if anybody over the age of about, say, eight, is found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool, it means they were put there by somebody else, so to have this happen to somebody I actually
knew,
to have my boss’s wife turn up dead at the bottom of the swimming pool behind their Bucks County home—well, it was almost more than I could take. I’d even swum in the pool! We all had. Every August, Sid and his wife had a big pool party for the staff of the paper, and one of the earliest lines of conjecture around the office was whether or not this year’s party would still be on, and if so, if anybody would actually get in the pool. As it turned out, Sid was officially cleared of any wrongdoing, and he permanently canceled the pool party, two facts which should in no way diminish the cloud of creepiness hovering over him in your mind. I’m sorry Sid’s wife is dead, truly I am, but a part of me is almost grateful, because it spares me the bother of having to perform a character assassination on him here.
I sat up in bed. I realized I had stopped crying. The last thing I wanted to do was to sit in bed and think about Sid Hirsch, so I got up and went to the paper.
The
Philadelphia Times
was founded in 1971. It was originally called the
People’s Avenger,
and then for a while it was just the
Avenger,
but at some point in the eighties Sid decided to give it a more mainstream name in order to attract advertisers. There were still a few writers kicking around from the
Avenger
days, and we’d occasionally publish their diatribes on Third World sweatshops and ozone depletion and racial injustice, but mostly we reviewed things. We reviewed books and we reviewed movies and we reviewed albums. We reviewed plays and we reviewed concerts and we reviewed restaurants. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why the voice of my Inner Critic is so loud—too many years spent reviewing things—but the truth is that my Inner Critic sounds just like my mother, so it’s probably not fair to blame my job. Anyhow, along with all the reviews, we printed a bunch of columns and local event listings, and a truly excessive amount of reader mail. We ran so many reviews and columns and listings and letters, in fact, that there was very little room left in the paper for actual news. We probably wouldn’t have bothered with the news at all if it weren’t for Warren Plotkin. Warren had received a National Newspaper Award early on in his career for an eight-part series on teenage welfare mothers that he’d written for the
Philadelphia Daily News.
A week later it surfaced that he’d stolen most of it from a graduate dissertation he’d found online, at which point the
Daily News
fired him, at which point Sid Hirsch took him out to dinner at The Palm and offered him a job as news editor, at two-thirds his
Daily News
pay. We were lucky to have him. We were lucky to have anybody, really, which is not to say that there was nothing to like about working there. The truth is, there were many things I liked about working for the
Times.
Not the pay, and not the prestige, both of which were negligible. But I liked that it was the kind of place where you could bring your dog to the office. Not that I had a dog—I just liked knowing that if I ever decided to get one, I’d be able to bring him to the office. And I liked that I could write pretty much anything I wanted to write and then see it in print a week later, virtually unchanged. This is a very seductive state of affairs for a writer, and the fact that the paper was given away for free in cafés and hair salons and juice bars did little to diminish the pleasure. Most of all, though, I liked that the people who worked there were all a little off-center. They were pot addicts and plagiarists and communists and depressives and alcoholics and neurotics and plain old oddballs, which meant that the one thing that has always plagued me, the quality that, no matter what I do with my hair, I never seem able to shake—my uptight bourgeois suburban normalness—there, at least, made me stand out.
I walked to work. I always walked to work; I got my best ideas that way. I stopped at the Korean market across the street from the office before I went inside. I picked up the
Daily News
and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and bought a cup of coffee. I crossed the street, and when I got to the front door, I had to set the papers down on the sidewalk at my feet so I could fish around in my bag for my keys. Just as I was about to open the door I heard a church bell ring, which made me look at my watch, which happened to be on the wrist of the hand that was holding the coffee, and I ended up spilling coffee all over the newspapers I’d put on the ground. I made a quick hop to the left and managed to avoid most of the mess; still, the whole thing almost started me crying all over again. I threw the wet newspapers away, and then I walked up the two flights of stairs and made my way down the long, poorly lit hallway towards the bathroom so I could clean myself off.
Well, there I was, on my way to the bathroom, when I saw the cute guy in the blue shirt. He was walking down the hallway directly towards me, and he had one of those really great walks. I wondered what a cute stranger was doing wandering around in our hallway. Maybe he’s lost, I thought. He smiled at me. Maybe he’s available, I thought. I smiled back. We passed by each other, and I took about three steps, and then I turned my head and looked over my shoulder at his ass. (To this day, I don’t know exactly why I did that. I am not the sort of person who checks out men’s asses. I’m not even all that interested in asses, as a physical characteristic on a man I mean—I’d put good shoulders and a nice chest higher on my list of priorities; possibly even a really attractive pair of hands.) Anyhow, just as I was turning my head to check out his ass, at that exact moment, the guy in the blue shirt turned his head to check out
my
ass, and we ended up locking eyes, and I laughed twinklingly and he smiled and nodded his head and we both kept right on walking, not missing a beat. I walked past the kitchen and went into the bathroom and locked the door. I did my best with the coffee stains, and then I climbed up on the toilet seat and turned around so I could see my butt in the mirror over the sink. I realized that the cut of my pants made it appear deceptively small (a triumph!), and then I climbed down off the toilet and unlocked the door and headed off to see if I could find out who he was.