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.”
Two
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
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.”
Two
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
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