The Big Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

door, walking up the stairs, unlocking the door to our apartment, putting my purse on the hall table, kicking off my shoes, walking into the bedroom, and catching them having sex. I’d make a little yelp of surprise and then I’d run away, down the stairs and out the front door, because it seemed like what one would do in such a circumstance, but also because I wanted to see if Tom would chase me. I wanted to see if Tom, in my fantasy, would at least have the common decency to get of bed and wrap a towel around his waist and chase me out the front door yelling, “Jesus, Alison! This is not as bad as it looks!” I played this scenario over in my head so many times that I eventually stopped running away; I’d just walk in and stand in the doorway and shoot them a look of cool disgust, just like Gwyneth Paltrow in
Sliding Doors,
so much like Gwyneth Paltrow in
Sliding Doors,
now that I think about it, that I’m pretty sure I stole the whole thing outright. Even so, I considered that progress.
    I realize I’m in danger of attributing too much importance to sex, if that is possible (which I secretly doubt—but perhaps that’s only because I attribute too much importance to it). I’ve always thought that if I’d had a little more experience in that particular area, if I’d slept with more people, I’d be better off. I’d have more points of reference. I didn’t, though. I worry about telling you how many people I’d slept with, so I’ll just put it at less than five. More than one, less than five.
    And not four or three.
    Part of the problem was that I lost my virginity late, absurdly late really—I was twenty-five, which I think you’ll agree puts me at the freakish end of things—and I probably wouldn’t even have done it then if it weren’t for my therapist, who talked me into it.
    “When did you make this decision?” said Celeste, my therapist at the time, when I finally broke down and told her.
    “When I was thirteen. I was at church camp. I made a pledge,” I said.
    “To whom?” said Celeste.
    “What do you mean, to whom?”
    “To whom did you make this pledge?”
    “To God.”
    “To God,” Celeste repeated, and made a little scribble on her yellow legal pad.
    My belief in God was one of the things Celeste was attempting to rid me of. Well, that’s not entirely fair: she didn’t have a problem with my believing in God, she just didn’t want it to interfere with anything important, like my freedom or my choices or my sex life. Of course, that’s pretty much the whole point of God. You give up some of life’s more interesting perks and in exchange you lose your fear of death.
    “A decision that served you well at age thirteen, might, at age twenty-five, be subject to reevaluation,” said Celeste.
    So, we reevaluated. We went around and around. Celeste compared it to the embargo on Cuban cigars. It made a certain amount of sense in the sixties, but now? With the crumbling of the Berlin Wall? A McDonald’s in Red Square? To be totally honest, I didn’t need much in the way of convincing. I’d been toying with the idea myself ever since Lance Bateman put his hand in my pants in the eleventh grade, but I’d managed to hold off. For a long time I was waiting for my wedding night, and then when that started to seem silly and futile and quasidelusional, for some reason I kept on waiting. I guess I was waiting for a good enough reason to stop waiting.
    That night I went over to see my boyfriend Gil-the-homosexual and I told him that I was finally ready to have sex with him. The penis embargo was over. I said I had discussed it with my therapist, and a decision that worked for me when I was thirteen might not make the most sense for me now that I was twenty-five, and since he was my boyfriend he was the logical candidate for the deflowering. I’d even bought a twelve-pack of condoms on the way over, figuring that upon hearing the news he’d throw me down on the kitchen floor and have his