Free The Big Love by Sarah Dunn Page B

Really great sex is like movie sex. If you watch people having sex in movies and you say to yourself,
“Oh, nobody has sex like that except in movies,”
then you should know that you’re not having great sex. I tried to call Cordelia on this once, back when I first started sleeping with Gil-the-homosexual. “What about
Fatal Attraction
?” I remember saying to her. “With the water running? And the dishes in the sink?” Cordelia just raised one of her eyebrows in the way that she does, and I knew that if Cordelia felt that way there had to be something to it.
    “Okay, I’ve just had this amazing time,” I said. “Twice. I’ve had two amazing times. And I’m lying there, staring up at the ceiling, and do you know what I’m thinking?”
    “What are you thinking?”
    “How long before we reach the point in our relationship where I can go into the bathroom afterwards and put on my moisturizer.”
    “You’re sick,” Cordelia said. “You do realize that.”
    “I do.”
    “This guy is not that guy,” Cordelia said. “Trust me.”
    “I know.”
    “It would take
a lot
to turn this guy into that guy,” she said. “But maybe he can be your greasy pancake,” she said.
    “My what?” I said.
    “When you’re making pancakes, the first one soaks up all the grease on the griddle, so you have to throw it away,” said Cordelia. “Henry can soak up all the grease left over from Tom. Then your griddle will be ready to go.”
    “I don’t think that’s a very good metaphor,” I said, “but I like it.”
    “It’s my mom’s,” she said. “Only she
married
her greasy pancake. ‘Don’t make the same mistake I made,’ she says whenever they have a fight. ‘Throw away your greasy pancakes.’”
    “So what am I supposed to do?” I said.
    “That’s easy,” said Cordelia. “Enjoy your greasy pancake. And then throw him away.”
    I’m worried that I’ve given you the impression that I was upset about what had happened with Henry, and I should probably take a moment here to correct that impression. I was not really all that upset. I mean, I knew that on a purely objective level I should be offended—Henry slinking off in the middle of the night, the “fine work” note, the fact that he did not call me later that Saturday or even on Sunday—but I also must admit that I felt a certain undeniable thrill. I mean, the man didn’t even know my middle name! It was like I was suddenly living a life I’d only read about in books, like I woke up one day and was suddenly a rodeo cowboy or a sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer or a geisha girl. That’s how big it felt. Having lived my life with a certain set of restrictions and expectations and admonitions—most of which boil down to the idea that sex is to be used to extort a lifelong commitment from a man, and anything less than that is considered a tactical failure on the part of the woman, with the direst of consequences—there I was, finally throwing caution to the wind after years and years of almost throwing it. And say what you will about the perils of sexual freedom, nobody had ever told me the whole truth, which is that it feels an awful lot like actual freedom.
    On Sunday afternoon I wrote a column about the Chinese restaurants and the tiramisu. I realize this isn’t much of a transition, but that’s the problem with trying to tell a story like this: you need too many transitions. I’m used to writing columns, very short columns, and as a result I’m not very good at transitions. A good column explores one idea, boom, you’re in and then you’re out, and then the reader makes his own transition, to another article or tying his shoelaces or getting off the bus or whatever. But I have to keep everything moving forward here, and all you need to know about the rest of that particular weekend is that I wrote my column on Sunday afternoon, the way I always do, and on Monday morning I walked to the office, the way I always do, with my column