Free The Big Love by Sarah Dunn Page A

what part of that wasn’t turning out to be true?
    I see that in trying to address the topic of my faith I have focused almost exclusively on sex. Surely there is more to the spiritual tradition of St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther than that, is probably what you are thinking. There is. I will not bore you with any of it here, however. The truth is, I have complicated feelings about the whole thing. Certainly many of them are negative, and the ones that aren’t negative are hard to put into words. And I suppose if I had been raised as a Christian Scientist, all of this craziness would revolve around something completely different, like going to the doctor. The way it would work would be like this: I wouldn’t go to the doctor for a very long time, and when I finally did go, it would be a result of doubt and curiosity and a desperate need for medical attention, and when the world didn’t stop turning because of my trip to the doctor it would create even more doubt, and pretty soon I’d be going to the doctor all the time and I wouldn’t be a Christian Scientist anymore. Of course, I can see the ridiculousness of that. It’s not always easy to see your own ridiculousness, though.

Eight
    W HEN I WOKE UP THAT SATURDAY MORNING, HENRY HAD already left. I lay in bed by myself for a while, trying to feel my feelings. That was one of the things I had worked on in therapy. The problem with feeling my feelings lately was that whenever I actually sat down and tried to feel them, I felt like throwing up. I tried to remember what Janis Finkle had said to me.
Let them pass through you like a wave. Watch them the way you watch clouds floating by.
    I sat up. I’m not going to be a lunatic about this, I decided. It was casual sex. I’m going to be casual about it. I got out of bed and headed for the bathroom, which is where I found the note. It was propped up against the mirror over the sink. I immediately picked up the phone and called Cordelia. (Cordelia is my friend for situations like this, not Bonnie.)
    “What did it say?” Cordelia said when I got to the part about the note.
    “Keep in mind that he’s my boss,” I said. “So I think it’s meant as some kind of office joke.”
    “What did it say?” she asked again.
    “Fine work.”
    “Fine
work?
”
    “Yeah,” I said. “It said, ‘Alison. Fine work. Henry.’”
    “Okay, I can see how he meant that to be funny,” Cordelia said. “Witty. Something other than offensive.”
    “Me too.”
    “Still.”
    “I know.”
    “But you shouldn’t worry.”
    I was worried. “It seems to me, if you have amazing sex with a person, and not just once but twice, you stick around for the morning part, right?” I said. “That just seems logical to me.”
    “You did it twice?” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “Twice, one right after the other, or twice, two separate times?”
    “Two separate times,” I said. “He fell asleep in between. Does that matter?”
    “Not really,” said Cordelia. “I just like to have all the information.”
    “What do you think?”
    “Okay,” Cordelia said. She took a breath. “It’s possible that you were having amazing sex and he was just, you know . . . having sex.”
    I didn’t say anything for a moment. “That happens?”
    “The whole time I was with Jonathan, I was having the time of my life,” Cordelia said. “He was just lying there, wishing I was an underwear model.”
    “He told you that?”
    “We had a very honest relationship,” Cordelia said. “The fuckhead.”
    Jonathan really was a fuckhead, and he did some truly horrible things to Cordelia, and she always says that she stayed with him for so long because of the sex. Sex is very important to Cordelia. She’s had a lot of it, and she has a number of interesting theories about it. In fact, the real reason I knew I wasn’t having great sex with Tom before I finally had great sex with Henry was because of one of Cordelia’s theories. Here’s the theory.