And Baby Makes Two - Dyan Sheldon [13]
I raised one eyebrow. “And how do you know he hasn’t?”
Amie burst out laughing. “Oh, I get it,” she said. “It’s not Les who’s gay. It’s you.”
Personally, I think life would be a lot easier if it came with instructions. You know, like a video or a stereo system. So you wouldn’t always have to be wondering what was going on and what you were supposed to do about it.
I’d always found magazines very helpful like that, so I went straight home after school and looked through every women’s magazine I had. There were stacks of them, because my mother was always going to take them to the recycling but never did. I reckoned one of them was bound to have something that dealt with my problem. If not a feature, then a letter:
Dear Auntie, My boyfriend and I have been going out for a year now, and he’s never tried to have sex with me. People say I’m pretty. What’s wrong?
There wasn’t much. There was a lot on clothes and make-up and exercise and how men are different to women (in case you hadn’t noticed) and stuff like that, but not anything that was exactly like my problem.
There was a letter in Cosmo, or maybe Marie Claire, from a woman whose husband never wanted to have sex with her any more. It had been four months. He always said he was tired or stressed out from work. The agony aunt said that the husband was probably tired and stressed out from work. She said that women had the idea that all men wanted to have sex all the time, but that this wasn’t true. Men were people, too. Sometimes they felt like having sex, and sometimes they didn’t. If you’d had a hard day at work, she said, you weren’t going to feel like breaking the bedsprings when you got home, and men didn’t either.
Even though I didn’t learn anything very helpful from the magazines, I felt better knowing that men really weren’t meant to be horny all the time. It took off quite a bit of pressure. I mean, it definitely wasn’t him or me, was it? It was just life.
And then I remembered a film I saw once. It was about a man and woman who lived together, but just as flatmates. They became really good friends, but he never made a pass at her or anything. She couldn’t work out why. But it was because he knew she’d been raped once and was nervous of sex. That’s why he’d decided they would just be friends, because he loved her and didn’t want to lose her completely. When she finds out the truth, she seduces him and everything’s OK.
It wasn’t exactly like me and Les, but it was close enough. Les didn’t know I was only fifteen, but he knew I’d never had a boyfriend. He was probably just being sensitive and tactful. He was a very sensitive and tactful person. He didn’t want to take advantage.
It was two nights after the conversation with Amie, Shanee and Gerri before I saw Les again. He rang up on Friday to say he was coming round, but that somebody at work was getting married and they were going for a drink to celebrate, so he’d be a bit later than usual. I’d been pretty certain he would come round. Hilary almost always went to Charley’s on a Friday night.
By then I had made my plan. I reckoned it was time. I mean, since I already knew I was going to marry Les and have his babies I couldn’t see any reason for holding back. The sooner we started, the sooner I’d get away from Hilary Spiggs.
But I wasn’t going to seduce him. I didn’t think I was up to seducing someone yet. It’d be like taking a job as a manicurist when you’d never even had your nails done yourself. Plus, since Les wasn’t exactly experienced with girls, I reckoned he might not be up to it either. Maybe he needed some encouragement. All the magazines agreed that men were not as confident about sex as they seemed to be. Especially someone as sensitive as Les. So I was going to make it possible for him to seduce me without wondering whether or not he was going to be rejected.
As soon as my mother left, I had a bath. I put in three bath pearls and played a George Michael album to get me in a sexy mood. I lay there, using my toes to turn on the hot tap to top up the water, imagining