Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online Page A

Lewinsky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.
    Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it’s even an act of futility. Because, in loving C., I knew I was loving someone who didn’t believe that she herself was worthy of anyone’s love.
    And now that it’s over, I don’t know where to direct my anger and my sorrow. At a world that made her feel the way she did about her body—no, herself—and whether she was desirable. At C., for not being strong enough to overcome what the world told her. Or at myself, for not loving C. enough to make her believe in herself.
    * * *
    I wept straight through Celebrity Weddings, slumped on the floor in front of the couch, tears rolling off my chin and soaking my shirt as one tissue-thin supermodel after another said “I do.” I cried for Bruce, who had understood me far more than I’d given him credit for and maybe had loved me more than I’d deserved. He could have been everything I’d wanted, everything I’d hoped for. He could have been my husband. And I’d chucked it.
    And I’d lost him forever. Him and his family—one of the things I’d loved best about Bruce. His parents were what June and Ward would have been if they were Jewish and living in New Jersey in the nineties. His father, who had perpetually whiskered cheeks and eyes as kind as Bruce’s, was a dermatologist. His family was his delight. I don’t know how else to say it, or how much it astonished me. Given my experience with my own dad, watching Bernard Guberman was like looking at an alien from Mars.
He actually likes his child!
I would marvel.
He really wants to be with him! He remembers things about Bruce’s life!
That Bernard Guberman seemed to like me, too, might have had less to do with his feelings about me as a person and more to do with my being a) Jewish, and hence a marriage prospect; b) gainfully employed, and thus not an overt gold digger; and c) a source of happiness for his son. But I didn’t care why he was so nice to me. I just basked in his kindness whenever I could.
    Bruce’s mother, Audrey, had been the tiniest bit intimidating, with manicured fingernails painted whatever shade I’d be reading about in
Vogue
the next month, and perfectly styled hair, and a house full of glass and wall-to-wall white carpeting and seven bathrooms, each kept immaculately clean. The Ever-Tasteful Audrey, I called her to my friends. But once you got past the manicure, Audrey was nice, too. She’d been trained as a teacher, but by the time I met Audrey her working-for-a-living days were long past and she was a full-time wife, mother, and volunteer—the perennial PTA mom, Cub Scout leader, and Hadassah president, the one who could always be counted on to organize the synagogue’s annual food drive or the Sisterhood’s winter ball.
    The downside of parents like that, I used to think, was that it killed your ambition. With my divorced parents and my collegedebts I was always scrambling for the next rung on the ladder, the next job, the next freelance assignment; for more money, more recognition, for fame, insofar as you could be famous when your job was telling other people’s stories. When I started at a small newspaper in the middle of nowhere, covering car crashes and sewage board meetings, I was desperate to get to a bigger one, and when I finally got to a bigger one, I wasn’t there two weeks before I was already plotting how to move on.
    Bruce had been content to drift through graduate school, picking up a teaching assignment here, a freelance writing gig there, making approximately half of what I did, letting his parents pick up the tab for his car insurance (and his car, for that matter), and “help” with his rent and subsidize his lifestyle with $100 handouts every time he saw them, plus jaw-droppingly