The Big Love by Sarah Dunn

Author:Sarah Dunn [DUNN, SARAH]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780759511866
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2004-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

“THE OLDER I GET, THE FURTHER AWAY FROM THE URINAL I start unzipping my pants,” Sid Hirsch said to me as he walked into his office.

It was late on Friday afternoon, and I was already inside Sid’s office, waiting for him. I’d been summoned. Sid summoned one to his office and then tended to disappear, because he liked to make an entrance. He walked over to his desk and sat down on top of it with his legs folded Indian-style. “Yoga,” he explained. He took a long, cleansing breath and then looked me in the eye and said, “We have a problem.”

Oh shit, I thought. Sid knows about me and Henry. How could he know about me and Henry? I considered the possibility that Sid subscribed to Olivia’s theory that if you think two people are sleeping together, they are (with the corollary that if you think a person is gay, he is).

“What is it?” I said.

“I heard about what happened with you and your boyfriend,” said Sid.

“Oh.”

“And I’m really sorry about it.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m going to be fine.”

“Of course you’ll be fine,” he said.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

Sid pressed his hands into a power teepee and rested his chin on his fingertips. “Your column was about a nice girl trying to trick some poor schlub into marrying her. There was an arc there. We were all waiting for the ring. Now the guy turns out to be a complete shit. Fine. Write that last column. That’s the end of the story.”

I just looked at him.

“You’re giving Mary Ellen my column,” I said.

“Number one, it isn’t your column. My paper, my column,” Sid said. “Number two, yes I am.”

Now, I had given some thought to what I would do when I was through working at the paper. I had devoted a great deal of time to fantasizing about it, in fact. There were several versions of this fantasy, the gist of all of which involved me getting paid a great deal of money for something I’d written on the side. Sometimes it was a book. Sometimes it was a screenplay. Sometimes it was a book that sold to the movies and I was begged to write the screenplay. The fact that I wasn’t actually doing any writing on the side did surprisingly little to interfere with this particular fantasy. Someday I would, and when I did, the fantasy would be there, waiting for me. But this particular scenario was one I had never considered. It had never entered my mind that I would be fired.

“I can’t believe this,” I said.

“Don’t take this personally,” he said.

“I’m being fired, Sid. It feels personal.”

“It’s not about you,” he said. “It’s the trend.”

“What trend is this exactly?”

Sid slid off of his desk and began to pace around behind it. “You know,” he said. “Hot girls in bars talking about dildos. Unashamed of their sexuality. They are woman, hear them roar.”

“I’m a woman,” I said.

“Your column is about a nice girl. People love you, but they don’t want to fuck you.

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