Good in Bed Read Free

abstinence, where I’d make a big red X through each calendar square that represented a day I’d managed to refrain from calling him, I dialed his number. He answered on the first ring, which meant he was in bed (this was the era before portable phones were common, and he kept his phone plugged into the wall, on his nightstand). From the sound of his voice, even before he told me, I knew he wasn’t alone.
    I stammered out some kind of apology, hung up, and sat, fully dressed, on the toilet, hunched over, clutching my knees and crying, convinced that I was going to die and that death would be a welcome improvement over the pain that I was feeling. How did people survive this? I wondered. How did they get through it, and go on to try to love again?
    After six months of misery and tears and endlessly obsessing—six months during which I was convinced that God Himself was programming my car radio and playing songs to specifically address my romantic condition; six months of singing along, in a bad French-Canadian accent, to “My Heart Will Go On”—something inside of me rose up and said, clearly and firmly,
Enough.
    I had to do something to get over him, to stop playing back every conversation we’d had, every night together, every decision we’d made that had brought us to the point of him being happy with a social worker (a social worker? Seriously?) and me being alone.
    So I asked myself a question: what do I know how to do? And the answer came back: I know how to tell a story.
    I’d been a reader all my life. In college, I’d majored in English, happily sampling everything from Milton to Shakespeare to modern British poets, and taking every creative and nonfiction writing course I could get into. From the day I’d started working at that first small paper, where my duties included typing school lunch menus and covering topics from school board meetings to a bear that was ravaging local cornfields, I had loved being a reporter, going out into the world with my notebook, paying attention to what people said, what they wore, what kinds of cars they drove, their posture and their accents, how they stood and how they sounded when they were lying.
    In the first few awful months after the breakup, I’d read a
New York
magazine story—I’m sure I’ve still got it, in a box or a folder somewhere—about the first wave of single-girl-in-the-city novels. On the cover, beneath the headline “Meet the Lit World’s New It Girl,” was a Roy Lichtenstein style comic-book woman, a sassy blond holding a glass of red wine with the thought bubble that read, “Husband? What I really need is an agent!”
    The article discussed
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Otherwise Engaged, A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing
, and
In the Drink
, books about young women and their adventures; books that, in that dim and distant time, were—imagine it!—simply novels, not yet saddled with the odious label “chick lit.” They were funny and breezy, with relatable plotlines and great heart, written in a frank, chatty style that soundeda lot like the emails I’d just started trading with my girlfriends (email having recently been invented), or the essays I’d devoured by Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz, whip-smart, sarcastic, East Coast journalists turned essayists, whose mordant, dark-but-hopeful view of the world mirrored my own.
    I read and reread all the books I’d loved, paying special attention to one of my all-time favorites, Susan Isaacs. In her novels, intelligent, not necessarily gorgeous Jewish girls took on the world, had great adventures, and always got their man at the end. I thought, with the hubris unique to twenty-eight-year-olds,
I could do that.
    I had a Mac Classic, purchased during my final year of college. I had a folding metal-legged card table, draped with a blue-and-white Indian print cloth, set up in the second bedroom of my