Barbara the Slut and Other People Read Online Free PDF

was not actually her age. He was still in college. He was the head of the campus conservatives, a group that we had not taken seriously when we went there.
    Back when we lived together I would have given her a lecture about both of these guys. Now I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like the lectures had worked. All of Beth’s lovers were basically the same. Good in bed but deeply morally flawed. In college she had been less discriminating, but she had developed this particular taste in the last four years. It seemed like she thought good men and good sex were mutually exclusive. They probably had been back in college. Good guys didn’t know what they were doing, and bad guys did. I didn’t do an anthropological study on this or anything. But I know that I thought I knew what I was doing and I definitely didn’t. The one nice thing that Tiffany did for me was to tell me that I didn’t know what I was doing, although I have never been more ashamed in my life. And obviously I didn’t improve quickly enough to not get cheated on. But Tiffany taught me that you have to assume you know nothing. I do think that makes me better in bed. At least less arrogant. Basically this is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever thought about.
    I didn’t want to talk to Beth about sex, but I did want to tell her about the girls I had been meeting on the internet. I wanted to ask her if she thought I had tried hard enough and could give up. I had been on eleven first dates and two second dates. I had sex with two of the first-date girls. The first girl I wouldn’t have slept with, except her grandma died between when we were e-mailing and when we got together. When she halfheartedly suggested we go back to her place, I felt like I should take her up on it. I pretended I was really into it. There wasn’t anything wrong with her. But nothing made me feel drawn to her, other than how cheerful she was trying to be despite obviously being so sad. It ended up being very high energy, very good sex. But we both understood that that was that. The second girl I had higher hopes for. The sex was good in a more routine way, but I think she dated a lot. My friends might have called her a slut, but I didn’t have any friends. And when I was in high school my mom sat me down to talk about the word “slut” and to give me a general lecture about how to make her proud despite my being a man.
    That girl never called me back. But before I could talk to Beth about any of this, we got to SoHo.
    Beth wanted to go to the jeans store first. She tried on about a hundred pairs. She didn’t like the way any of them looked because she was still a little bit fat.
    “This brand does not fit well at all,” she said. “Maybe they fit Kelly but she’s a lot shorter than me.”
    Because Beth was thin and then fat and now almost thin again, it was like she didn’t remember being fat. She didn’t even act fat when she was fat. When we were living together she found out she had high cholesterol and said, “But I thought that was for fat people.”
    We left the store and walked down Greene Street. Beth grabbed my arm and took a couple of bouncy steps.
    “If I lived in New York, I would live in SoHo,” she said.
    “Oh really,” I said. “Do you even know how much apartments here are?”
    “They’re expensive, huh?”
    “They’re like four grand for a hundred square feet.” Sometimes Beth seemed to know nothing about how the world worked.
    “Well I like it here, it’s my favorite neighborhood.”
    “What other neighborhoods have you been to?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You can’t even walk down the sidewalk, there are so many people. I like my neighborhood.”
    “I like your neighborhood too. Calm down. I don’t not like your neighborhood. I just like this neighborhood too.”
    “Fine,” I said. “Live here when you move to the city.”
    “Maybe I will,” she said.
    The sporting goods store didn’t really have any sporting goods. Unless