Dating Big Bird Read Online Free PDF Page B

We were both PMS and ravenous, as it turned out, and were momentarily distracted by all that meat.
    “Why did you start to wonder then? I mean, you’d been together since eleventh grade or something.”
    “Ninth grade, actually,” she said, trying to suppress an uncontrollable laugh.
    I still couldn’t believe that people had boyfriends in ninth grade. Or in twelfth grade, for that matter. But since I wanted to hear the rest of her story, I let it drop. “So you suddenly realized …”
    “Something had been missing for a long time, and I suddenly realized I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”
    “What was missing?”
    She shrugged, then looked a little sheepish. “In a nutshell?”
    I nodded.
    “Sex.”
    I could relate to that. The absence of it, that is.
    “We never did it anymore. I mean, maybe once in a while, after I chased him around the bed, which would make me feel completely pathetic.”
    I put my knife and fork down. No one would believe this either: Amy Jacobs chasing Jonathan Glebe around the bed for sex.
    “Did you ever talk about it?”
    “I tried to, but he never seemed to think anything was wrong with our relationship. He didn’t seem to think that never having sex with the person you were with was abnormal.”
    Wait till she heard my story.
    “So it wasn’t that he didn’t want to get married.”
    “No. In fact, he was incredibly enthusiastic about it. I mean, of the two of us, he was definitely much more engaged in the details and mechanics of it. What the date was going to be. Where it was going to be. How many people there would be. What the food would be. Please. He could have told Martha Stewart a thing or two.
    “So then about two months before the wedding—the invitations had been printed but not sent yet—I finally found out what the problem was. He was gay.”
    I blinked wildly.
    “How did you find out?”
    “Jonathan told me.” She smiled and pushed her plate away. “One night after chasing him around the bed—and getting nowhere—I called him a faggot.” She looked embarrassed suddenly, as much by her use of the word as what had provoked her to use it. “And he sat down on the bed and said, ‘Yes, I am a faggot.’ And that was it. Twelve years over, just like that. I moved out two days later. Back to my parents’ house on Long Island. Where I stayed for six months until I could face starting all over again.”
    I’d heard about women actually marrying men they didn’t know were gay, but I had never personally known anyone who had had such a close call. How you would ever again trust your judgment about people, how you would ever trust your perceptions enough to think that you were probably right, or at least not completely, incredibly, out-in-left-field wrong—not to mention how you got to the point where you could tell your story with a modicum of dignity the way Amy just had—seemed to me to be an amazing achievement. But … how long had he known? Had he been planning on telling her? If so, when had he planned on telling her? After the waiter cleared our plates, I asked her.
    “I don’t know. He wouldn’t really say. But I think he’d known for a long time, probably since high school. Which makes the whole relationship even more of a farce than it already was.” We each leaned away as the waiter brought us our coffee. “Needless to say,” she continued, “I canceled the wedding and returned the ring. But I still have the dress. You know, in the unlikely event that somebody ever asks me to marry them again.”
    I wondered how she could have been with Jonathan for so long and not known this crucial element of his being, of his personality, but maybe it wasn’t that hard to believe. Hadn’t I been involved with someone for about a year before finding out that he had a twin brother? Hadn’t I not known twice, with two different men, that I was being cheated on? When you’re young and naive and you want something or someone badly enough—in Amy’s case,