The Big Love Read Online Free PDF

manly way with me, maybe not twelve times, but definitely more than three, which was the only other denomination that condoms came in. Gil, however, did not throw me down on the kitchen floor. He just sat there, polishing his shoes with a new soft-bristle toothbrush, and told me he needed some time to think about it. He wasn’t sure he was completely on board.
    I would like to report that I broke up with him right then and there, that I said something withering and cruel and never looked back, but I didn’t. I had a job for the man to do. I’m very practical that way. I’m not the type to throw away a perfectly good blender just because you’ve got to jiggle the cord a little to get it started. The idea of starting over completely from scratch, of meeting someone new and going out with him once and then twice and then three times and then telling him about my sexual status and watching him slowly back out of the room, explaining that he wasn’t interested in getting involved in anything serious and, let’s face it, having sex with a twenty-five-year-old virgin is nothing if not serious—that was more than I could bear. So after some jiggling of the cord, Gil-the-homosexual and I had sex, and then not only did I not break up with him, I stayed with him for eight more months, my brain addled not by the sex—the word
perfunctory
applies—but by the thought that now that I’d slept with him I had to marry him.
    I did not know at the time we were dating that Gil-the-homosexual was in fact gay. I mean, I had my suspicions—you should have seen the man make a bed—but I did my best to ignore them, largely because I was so relieved to have met somebody who was willing to be my boyfriend without having sex with me. You can’t imagine what a find this was. We’d go out about three times a week, and then I’d go sleep over at his place, and we’d make out and cuddle and fall asleep, and the second my feet touched the floor in the morning he’d start in on the bed. He’d pile the pillows and the shams and the bolsters with such precision and flair that it looked like one of those department store beds that you’re not supposed to sit on. That’s another thing—he didn’t like for me to sit on it once it was made. Not even if I needed to put on my shoes. He also made me drink out of paper cups at night because he claimed he couldn’t fall asleep if there were dirty dishes in his sink. I myself have been known to fall asleep when there were dirty dishes in my bed. Let’s just say, it became a point of contention.
    That’s one of the things that happens when you wait so long to have sex: you end up dating men who aren’t all that interested in having it. With you, anyway. And then, if you’re a certain kind of girl, you end up marrying one of them, and he still isn’t all that interested, only now you’re stuck with him because he’s your husband. You do things the right way, by the letter of the law, and then in the end you get totally fucked. That’s one of the things they don’t tell you at church camp. That, and the fact that all this pledging never to have sex gives you hang-ups. I’ll tell you how big my hang-ups are: I’m not even in my own sex fantasies. And by this I don’t mean to suggest that I’m, say, sitting in the corner in an overstuffed armchair smoking a cigarette and watching—I’m not even in the room! I’m someplace else entirely! Quite possibly shopping! And the truth is, the incredibly sad, pathetic truth is, I’m lucky I can even manage to have any sort of sex fantasies at all. It seems to me that most people’s really juicy sex fantasies have their roots in adolescent obsessions, and my adolescent obsession was Jesus, and even I am not screwed up enough to have a sex fantasy about Jesus.
    I started out telling you all of this because I wanted you to understand why sexual confidence wasn’t exactly my strong point, and why Kate being like a drug was precisely the thing that