Good in Bed (4 page)

The Times
still leads the way when it comes to ignoring or deriding books written by, and for, women, and its practice has been adopted by
many non-
Times
book critics, who enjoy lecturing lady writers with the nerve to complain about the lack of coverage they receive that they should be content with popular and financial success and should not look at, for example, a John Grisham or a Stephen King and wonder why they get to the top of bestseller lists and get reviewed, too. Sometimes, as an added bonus, these lectures are delivered in French.

Of course, popular female writers have plenty of readers, even if we don't get plenty of respect, and I'm not minimizing that for a minute … but what message does it send when the paper of record refuses to acknowledge that an entire category of popular books does not even exist, as far as its critics are concerned, because the popular books are read almost exclusively by women?

And as for plus-size people in America, it's one step forward, two steps back. On TV, women larger than a size 2 are still, too often, the funny best friend, the sidekick or the sideshow, comic relief, never the heroine, never the star. Plus-size models in the fashion world are still such a rarity that when one showed up in Glamour—naked, seated, smiling, with a bit of a belly on display—it turned into a national news story, with the model appearing on morning talk shows to justify her love handles.

Derision and revulsion are much more common than acceptance. Earlier this year, a major women's magazine published a blog post from a writer who was disgusted watching the plus-size characters on the sitcom
Mike and Molly
embrace. She found it “aesthetically displeasing” to watch a “very, very fat person simply walk across a room,” she wrote, “just like I'd find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine [sic] addict slumping in a chair.”

So fatties equal drunks and drug addicts. Got that, magazine readers?

As the mother of two young daughters, I feel these attitudes and prejudices more acutely than I did when I was single and only had my own self-esteem to worry about. What messages will my girls absorb as they see yet another airbrushed image of yet another skinny starlet, as they read about actresses being shamed for gaining weight or not shedding their pregnancy pounds quickly enough? I do what I can. I explain how photo shoots and Photoshop work. I
tell them, long after they've quit “being interested” and “listening,” that the pictures they see are not real, that not even the most beautiful nineteen-year-old supermodel on the best day of her life looks as perfect as she does in that picture designed to sell you diamonds or hand lotion or a car. I tell stories where the big girl, the plain girl, the girl in the corner, unnoticed, is the hero of the story, the one who gets the guy, who solves the mystery, who tells off her mother-in-law in spectacular fashion, who gets the baby, the best friend, the happily ever after. It's a drop in the bucket, a whisper in the scream of Biggest Loser and Bridalplasty and magazines where double digit sizes pretty much don't exist.

But I hope that the work I've done has made a difference in the world, and in my readers' lives. I hope that the books I've written have been diverting and uplifting and, above all, entertaining, because, when I was a weird, lonely kid and then when I was struggling through young womanhood, that was the quality I appreciated the most in the books I loved the best: that they took me out of my own world and brought me someplace better.

And what about Cannie?

This forty-year-old author has to struggle with the impulse to take her twenty-eight-year-old creation by the shoulders and give her a good shake, to tell her that her worries are small potatoes, first-world problems, and that she'll never be this free and unencumbered—let alone this thin—again.

But she's so young and hopeful, with so much life and so much more heartbreak in front of her. How can I do anything but wish her well?

“Have you seen it?” asked Samantha.

I leaned close to my computer so my editor wouldn't hear me on a personal call.

“Seen what?”

“Oh, nothing. Never mind. We'll talk when you get home.”

“Seen what?” I asked again.

“Nothing,” Samantha repeated.

“Samantha, you have never once called me in the middle of the day about nothing. Now come on. Spill.”

Samantha sighed. “Okay, but remember: Don't shoot the messenger.”

Now I was getting worried.

“
Moxie.
The new issue. Cannie, you have to go get one right now.”

“Why? What's up? Am I one of the Fashion Faux Pas?”

“Just go to the lobby and get it. I'll hold.”

This was important. Samantha was, in addition to being my best friend, also an associate at Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick. Samantha put people on hold, or had her assistant tell them she was in a meeting. Samantha herself did not hold. “It's a sign of weakness,” she'd told me. I felt a small twinge of anxiety work its way down my spine.

I took the elevator to the lobby of the
Philadelphia Examiner
, waved at the security guard, and walked to the small newsstand, where I found
Moxie
on the rack next to its sister publications,
Cosmo
and
Glamour
and
Mademoiselle.
It was hard to miss, what with the super-model in sequins beneath headlines blaring “Come Again: Multiple Orgasm Made Easy!” and “Ass-Tastic! Four Butt Blasters to Get Your Rear in Gear!” After a quick minute of deliberation, I grabbed a small bag of chocolate M&M's, paid the gum-chomping cashier, and went back upstairs.

Samantha was still holding. “Page 132,” she said.

I sat, eased a few M&M's into my mouth, and flipped to page 132, which turned out to be “Good in Bed,”
Moxie'
s regular male-written feature designed to help the average reader understand what her boyfriend was up to … or wasn't up to, as the case might be. At first my eyes wouldn't make sense of the letters. Finally, they unscrambled. “Loving a Larger Woman,” said the headline, “By Bruce Guberman.” Bruce Guberman had been my boyfriend for just over three years, until we'd decided to take a break three months ago. And the Larger Woman, I could only assume, was me.

You know how in scary books a character will say, “I felt my heart stop”? Well, I did. Really. Then I felt it start to pound again, in my wrists, my throat, my fingertips. The hair at the back of my neck stood up. My hands felt icy. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears as I read the first line of the article: “I'll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.”

Samantha's voice sounded like it was coming from far, far away. “Cannie? Cannie, are you there?”

“I'll kill him!” I choked.

“Take deep breaths,” Samantha counseled. “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

Betsy, my editor, cast a puzzled look across the partition that separated our desks.
“Are you all right?”
she mouthed. I squeezed my eyes shut. My headset had somehow landed on the carpet. “Breathe!” I could hear Samantha say, her voice a tinny echo from the floor. I was wheezing, gasping. I could feel chocolate and bits of candy shell on
my teeth. I could see the quote they'd lifted, in bold-faced pink letters that screamed out from the center of the page. “Loving a larger woman,” Bruce had written, “is an act of courage in our world.”

“I can't believe this! I can't believe he did this! I'll kill him!”

By now Betsy had circled around to my desk and was trying to peer over my shoulder at the magazine in my lap, and Gabby, my evil coworker, was looking our way, her beady brown eyes squinting for signs of trouble, thick fingers poised over her keyboard so that she could instantly e-mail the bad news to her pals. I slammed the magazine closed. I took a successful deep breath and waved Betsy back to her seat.

Samantha was waiting. “You didn't know?”

“Didn't know what? That he thought dating me was an act of courage?” I attempted a sardonic snort. “He should try
being
me.”

“So you didn't know he got a job at
Moxie.
”

I flipped to the front, where contributors were listed in thumbnail profiles beneath arty black-and-white head shots. And there was Bruce, with his shoulder-length hair blowing in what was assuredly artificial wind. He looked, I thought uncharitably, like Yanni. “‘Good in Bed' columnist Bruce Guberman joins the staff of
Moxie
this month. A free-lance writer from New Jersey, Guberman is currently at work on his first novel.”

“His first
novel
?” I said. Well, shrieked, maybe. Heads turned. Over the partition, Betsy was looking worried again, and Gabby had started typing. “That lying sack of shit!”

“I didn't know he was writing a novel,” said Samantha, no doubt desperate to change the subject.

“He can barely write a thank-you note,” I said, flipping back to page 132.

“I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser,” I read. “But when I met C., I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.”

“I'll KILL HIM!”

“So kill him already and shut up about it,” muttered Gabby, shoving her inch-thick glasses up her nose.

Betsy was on her feet again, and my hands were shaking, and suddenly somehow there were M&M's all over the floor, crunching beneath the rollers of my chair.

“I gotta go,” I told Samantha, and hung up.

“I'm fine,” I said to Betsy. She gave me a worried look, then retreated.

It took me three tries to get Bruce's number right, and when his voice mail calmly informed me that he wasn't available to take my call, I lost my nerve, hung up, and called Samantha back.

“Good in bed, my ass,” I said. “I ought to call his editor. It's false advertising. I mean, did they check his references? Nobody called me.”

“That's the anger talking,” said Samantha. Ever since she started dating her yoga instructor, she's become very philosophical.

“‘Chubby chaser?'” I said. I could feel tears prickling behind my eyelids. “How could he do this to me?”

“Did you read the whole thing?”

“Just the first little bit.”

“Maybe you better not read any more.”

“It gets worse?”

Samantha sighed. “Do you really want to know?”

“No. Yes. No.” I waited. Samantha waited. “Yes. Tell me.”

Samantha sighed again. “He calls you … Lewinsky-esque.”

“With regards to my body or my blow jobs?” I tried to laugh, but it came out as a strangled sob.

“And he goes on and on about your … let me find it. Your ‘amplitude.'”

“Oh, God.”

“He said you were succulent,” Samantha said helpfully. “And zaftig. That's not a bad word, is it?”

“God, the whole time we went out, he never said anything …”

“You dumped him. He's mad at you,” said Samantha.

“I didn't dump him!” I cried.

“We were just taking a break! And he agreed that it was a good idea!”

“Well, what else could he do?” asked Samantha. “You say, ‘I think we need some time apart,' and he either agrees with you and walks away
clinging to whatever shreds of dignity he's got left, or begs you not to leave him, and looks pathetic. He chose the dignity cling.”

I ran my hands through my chin-length brown hair and tried to gauge the devastation. Who else had seen this? Who else knew that C. was me? Had he shown all his friends? Had my sister seen it? Had, God forbid, my mother?

“I gotta go,” I told Samantha again. I set down my headset and got to my feet, surveying the
Philadelphia Examiner
newsroom—dozens of mostly middle-aged, mostly white people, tapping away at their computers, or clustered around the television sets watching CNN.

“Does anybody know anything about getting a gun in this state?” I inquired of the room at large.

“We're working on a series,” said Larry, the city editor—a small, bearded, perplexed-looking man who took everything absolutely seriously. “But I think the laws are pretty lenient.”

“There's a two-week waiting period,” piped up one of the sports reporters.

“That's only if you're under twenty-five,” added an assistant features editor.

“You're thinking of rental cars,” said the sports guy scornfully.

“We'll get back to you, Cannie,” said Larry. “Are you in a rush?”

“Kind of.” I sat down, then stood back up again. “Pennsylvania has the death penalty, right?”

“We're working on a series,” Larry said without smiling.

“Oh, never mind,” I said, and sat back down and called Samantha again. “You know what? I'm not going to kill him. Death's too good for him.”

“Whatever you want,” Samantha said loyally.

“Come with me tonight? We'll ambush him in his parking lot.”

“And do what?”

“I'll figure that out between now and then,” I said.

I had met Bruce Guberman at a party, in what felt like a scene from somebody else's life. I'd never met a guy at a social gathering who'd been so taken with me that he actually asked me for a date on the spot.
My typical MO is to wear down their resistance with my wit, my charm, and usually a home-cooked dinner starring kosher chicken with garlic and rosemary. Bruce did not require a chicken. Bruce was easy.

I was stationed in the corner of the living room, where I had a good view of the room, plus easy access to the hot artichoke dip. I was doing my best imitation of my mother's life partner, Tanya, trying to eat an Alaskan king crab leg with her arm in a sling. So the first time I saw Bruce, I had one of my arms jammed against my chest, sling-style, and my mouth wide open, and my neck twisted at a particularly grotesque angle as I tried to suck the imaginary meat out of the imaginary claw. I was just getting to the part where I accidentally jammed the crab leg up my right nostril, and I think there might have been hot artichoke dip on my cheek, when Bruce walked up. He was tall, and tanned, with a goatee and a dirty-blond ponytail, and soft brown eyes.