Good in Bed (2 page)

I remember dipping into my father's chemical-smelling medical books, because—duh—there were pictures of naked people in them. As a result, to this day, I know way more about “genitalia, comma, afflictions of,” than anyone without a medical degree should.

In between continuing my sex education, I was reading novels and essays,
The New Yorker
and
The New York Times
, the science fiction and Star Treks and Stephen Kings that I'd buy with my own money at the used bookshop in Canton. I'd max out my library card, loading up paper grocery sacks with books. I would read whenever I could, even times when I wasn't supposed to be reading—for example, between the words of a spelling quiz in second grade.

I might have been a world-class reader, but I struggled to fit in with my peers. I went from second to fourth grade, in an era where it was more about challenging a child academically than helping her fit in socially. My new classmates, all seemingly glossy and gorgeous, at ease with each other and in their own skin, didn't laugh at my jokes. They didn't get me, and in return, I was probably pretty scornful and dismissive of them.

Some of my teachers did get me, and encourage me. I can remember
the first-grade teacher who gave me extra paper and let me stay inside writing stories, instead of going out for recess, where the other kids would stare at me like I was a meteor that had recently come crashing out of space to land, smoking and stinking, by the dodgeball court. But, when you're twelve and thirteen and fourteen, being appreciated by your teachers and doing well on standardized tests is cold consolation, when what you really want is to be popular (or at least have a few friends), to have boys think you're cute (or at least not completely horrific), to believe, in your heart, unshakably, that there's at least one man in the world—your father—who thinks that you are beautiful and worthy of love.

By the time I was sixteen and a senior in high school, I was starting to figure things out. I had friends who did laugh at my jokes, mostly because I'd learned to temper my behavior for public consumption. I had my first boyfriend, and finally got my driver's license, and rowed on the crew team and skied, in the winter, on the cross-country ski team (my high school was one of the few public schools in the country to offer both rowing and cross-country skiing). College was on the horizon and life—real, grown-up life—loomed tantalizing past that. I knew I'd find even more of my people. I'd escape the suburbs, I would travel, live in cities, have adventures, fall in love.

That fall, on our way home from visits to Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, my mother told me that my father was leaving. At home, my father amplified that announcement by explaining that not only did he no longer want to be married, he no longer wished to be a father. “Think of me more like an uncle,” he instructed us, before vanishing for months, sometimes years, at a time. Occasionally he'd pop up in person, voice slurring, to rant about how my mother had mistreated him … or, once, when I was twenty-five, to invite me to his wedding to a woman closer to my age than his. Sometimes he'd get in legal trouble, and we'd find out where he'd been and what he'd been doing in the papers. Once he wound up in jail. It was a slow, unhappy slide from married-with-children normalcy to being the guy you'd cross a street to avoid. How much of his unraveling and decline and eventual death, in 2008 at the age of sixty-six, had to do
with mental illness and self-medication and addiction, I'll never know. When he left, when I was sixteen, he made himself a stranger. He never met the man who would become my husband, never saw either of my children, never knew me as an adult at all.

Not to be outdone, my mother had, at the age of fifty-four, found a younger love of her own, a woman she'd met at the pool at the West Hartford JCC. (I have not been in the water there since. Every time I come home my mother asks, “Jenny, want to go swimming?” I say, “Hell, no.” She says, “It's not catching!” I say, “They haven't proven it yet.”) My youngest brother discovered the new romance when, home from college to do his laundry, he went rummaging through her bathroom to look for nail clippers and found a stash of love letters instead. This has made gift buying for Joe incredibly easy—every year, the rest of us give him nail clippers.

That was my parents, my history, but it wasn't me. I thought that hard work and diligence would eventually bring me to a place where a fucked-up family wouldn't matter, couldn't hurt me, anymore. Through my early twenties, I'd made my way from a small paper to a medium-sized one to the
Inquirer
, where I wrote features and opinion pieces about television and pop culture, Generation X and Hollywood and my undying, inexplicable love for Adam Sandler. I wrote short stories that were published and attempted novels that were not, as well as screenplays and magazine pieces and anything else I could find, or imagine, a market for. I was professionally successful, productive and, from all outward appearances, happy. I'd made it through a turbulent childhood. I'd survived my parents—my father's absence, my mother's new life. I could, I thought, survive anything.

The thing that almost undid me was a completely routine, run-ofthe-mill breakup. It was a little like winning a marathon, then ending up in the hospital because you tripped over the curb on your way home.

I'd been dating a guy for a few years. The breakup had been a long time coming, and I'd been the one who'd initiated it, suspecting that our outstanding chemistry would not be enough to overcome the fact that, for large portions of the time we were together, I didn't enjoy his
company. He was a newspaper reporter in a neighboring state, a nice guy, cheerful and warmhearted, but, for whatever unknowable reasons two people who should fit together fine simply don't, he kind of drove me nuts.

So we parted and I was, briefly, fine … except a few weeks later, my mind played the terrible trick of convincing me that I had to get back together with this guy. That this guy was in fact the only guy who would ever love me or understand me or want to see me naked. That if I failed to convince this guy to take me back, I would be by myself forever, and I would die one of those terrible, clichéd single-girl deaths, alone in my single-girl apartment, and my dog would eat my face … and, remember, I had a very small dog. The face-eating would probably take a long, long time.

I made my pitch. Understandably, the guy had no interest in starting up with me again. He'd moved on. He was happy. I, meanwhile, was a wreck. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't stop thinking about him. At work, I'd dial my voice mail a dozen times a day to see if he'd called. I'd check his horoscope and weep if it said he'd be having a good day for love. I scoured his newspaper's nascent website for clues about what he might be doing and who he might be doing it with. I'd instruct myself not to think about him, which only made me think about him more.

Late one night, after months of white-knuckled 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 sounded
a 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 third-floor apartment in a brick rowhouse on Monroe Street in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia. I had, thanks to my recent breakup, a lot of free time.

So I set out to write a story of a girl who was a lot like me and a guy who was a lot like Satan; a story in which the girl gets a fairy-tale happy ending, fame and fortune and a man who loved her, because at the time I had serious doubts as to whether I'd ever get any of those things myself. I had all the confidence that goes along with never having written an entire novel before: no editor, no agent, no readers waiting to see what I'd come up with. Just me and my computer and the characters in my head.

I had an idea of what the story would be, loosely based on the underpinnings of
Shining Through
, one of my favorite Isaacs novels: young woman pines for the wrong man, while the right guy is waiting in the wings … and, in between the romantic whiplash, young woman becomes a hero. Isaacs's Linda Voss saved the world as a spy in World War II era Germany. I had no such grand ambitions for my heroine, Cannie Shapiro. If I gave her happiness and success with friends, career, and romance, that would be plenty. I'd make her a big girl, too, a size 16 who gets a happy ending, whose weight loss is a tragedy as opposed to the key to happiness. In 1998, the year of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, where the party who got the most grief was not the president, for lying and cheating and abusing his power, but the girl he cheated
with, for the unpardonable sin of not being skinny. The notion that a big girl could be the star of her own story without undergoing a magical makeover was (and, sadly, remains), a pretty radical one.

Oh, and I had one more thing: a title.

A year or two before, I'd dated a fellow freelance writer who ended up getting a gig with
Cosmopolitan
, writing one of those columns that all lady magazines seem required by law to have, the column in which a Man Tells All, revealing the Ten Spots You Should Touch Him, or Five Moves That Will Have Him Yelping Like a Dog, or Three Tricks to Try in Bed Tonight (for whatever reason, numbering the tricks and moves and heretofore unrevealed erogenous zones have become a necessary component of these stories). I remember glancing at the article, noticing the byline, giving a shrug and thinking that if the guy was some kind of sexual savant, he'd done an excellent job of hiding it when we'd been together.

But then I started wondering: What if you were a girl who'd broken up with a guy who'd then landed the man-tells-all column at a Cosmo-like magazine? What if he started writing about you—your lovemaking, your body, your issues with sex and your body—and everyone who knew the two of you recognized you in the columns? How would you survive it? What would you do?

It seemed like a promising basis for a book; a book that would take its title from the title of the man-tells-all column in my fictitious magazine:
Good in Bed.

It took about nine months, start to finish, to complete the five-hundred-page single-spaced rough draft that I wrote in great, furious bursts in my spare bedroom, with the primary goal of making myself feel better, of clawing out of the black hole of my breakup and dragging myself back into the light.