The Big Love Read Free Page B

university—which is what I was—because you’re not only trying to be good, you’re trying to be smart. You end up fighting the Scopes Monkey Trial over and over again on your dorm room floor—only guess whose side you’re on? Guess who you have to be? Plus, there’s all that time spent sitting around in small circles with other Christians, pondering imponderable questions. Would it be possible, the classic one goes, for God to make a rock so big that He couldn’t lift it? Could He make a black cat that’s white? Could He make a square circle? Then you move on to important matters. Like how far you can go and still be considered a virgin. This is a matter of contentious debate, but let me assure you: it is all true about Christian girls and blowjobs. (It is not, however, true about Christian girls and anal sex, with a few truly pioneering exceptions, only one of whom I happen to have met.)
    It strikes me that a bit of clarification is in order, and that is that there is no real halfway with evangelical Christianity. Blowjobs notwithstanding. It is possible, for example, to be raised as a Catholic and then to grow up and stop obeying the rules and stop going to church and generally have nothing in your life that would remotely indicate to any reasonable human being that you are a Catholic, and yet still be considered, by yourself and everybody else, a Catholic. Not so with evangelicalism. You’re either in or you’re out. You’re either with them or against them. And so, before we go any further here, I would like to make the point that I am currently out. Another point I’d like to make is that this is just the sort of thing I found really irritating about evangelicalism in the first place.
    I hate going on record with that sort of thing, because of my parents. My poor parents. My kind, good, devoutly Christian parents. They really did nothing to deserve this. I mean, I’ve been in therapy for eleven years, so presumably they did
something
to deserve
something,
just nothing to deserve this. I hesitate to mention my eleven years of psychotherapy, because you’ll undoubtedly think I’m really screwed up. The question of how a person with normal-sized problems can end up in therapy for eleven years is one that only a person with nothing much wrong with them who’s been in therapy for a long time can understand, so there’s really no use in me trying to explain myself here. The more interesting question is how I managed to afford it. Well, when I graduated from college I was broke and depressed and I started going to a public clinic where they only charged me thirteen dollars a session, and before I knew it eleven years had gone by. I didn’t make much progress, mainly because it was a teaching clinic where graduate students worked for a year before heading off into private practice, which meant that every September, my current therapist would hand over my file to the new guy, and the two of us would have to start all over again, at the beginning, with my childhood.
    There is really no need for you to try to keep all of my therapists straight. There have simply been too many of them. My most recent therapist was named William, and he had vertigo. I for one had always suspected that vertigo was a made-up condition, the sort of thing moviemakers come up with to explain why the hero can’t cross the bridge to save the girl, but William had actual vertigo. It got so bad that during our sessions he’d sort of worm down out of his chair and lie down on the floor at my feet. “Go on,” he would say. “I’m just having one of my attacks.”
    “Maybe I should go,” I said the first time this happened.
    “Why should you go?” said William. He was staring up at me from the carpet. “Does this make you uncomfortable?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Why are you uncomfortable?” said William.
    “Because my shrink is lying on the floor,” I said.
    “My lying on the floor is a reasonable response to my attack of