151 posts from 2007

Who is ringing in the New Year with you?  Who do you wish could be with you, but isn't there?

Strangely, the answer to both questions is the same: no one.

I'm by myself tonight, and I'm very happy about that.  The night is peaceful and I'm glad of the chance to think things through a little bit.

The past years has been wild.  The whole Reluctant Adulterer project has taken me to some pretty strange places, some of them pretty fucking evil, but is finally starting to move.  The new year looks promising.  Even if it doesn't work out, even if it all turns to crap, Non, je ne regrette rien, I regret nothing.  I've met some interesting people, I've met some really bent people, I've learned some things about myself, I've had some fun.  A life, online.

And what I laughingly call my Real Life -- well, I'll have to omit the details, but it's going fine too.  Money situation is looking up, family's healthy and happy, dog is finally house-broken.

I have the distinct pleasure of being able to say to all of you, my readers, my friends, my lovers, I hope that your lives have been and continue to be as joyous, as surprisingly, as rewarding, as lively as mine.

LA Somebody writes:

so you know she didn't want to but couldn't stop herself (in short you know she's out of control with it) but you want to do it with her anyway, even though you know she doesn't want to do it with you either? Is that really very friendly of you?

Second, it isn't like Kaitlin, or anyone, is homo economicus, rationally balancing her conflicting goals, deciding on a course of action, and then single-mindedly following that course.  Like all of us, she is torn between short-term and well-understood emotional fulfillment and long-term, but potentially unreachable, long-term well-being.  She likes the pleasure and intimacy of sex but is concerned that it is interfering with the formation of a permanent long-term relationship.

In a university study, 88% of all New Year's resolutions were broken.  Are seven out of eight people really "out of control"?  I don't think so.

Third, doesn't she want to do it with me?  Certainly, she knew the odds that she would lose the bet better than anyone else, and the value of the countervailing wager wasn't particularly high.  It isn't as if she doesn't like me or that she finds me repugnant or (certainly) that she doesn't enjoy sex.  She only turned me down because I wasn't a good prospect for a long-term monogamous relationship.

Fourth, is it friendly of me?  Even from the outside, you can see it is at least as friendly for me to sleep with her as for her to not sleep with me, maybe friendlier.  And the more I think about it, and the more I talk to her about, the more it seems like she really does want to do this.  Honestly, if I thought she really didn't want it, I wouldn't go through with it.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me, but this time, things are going to be a little different.

Many years ago, I met a beautiful, slightly mysterious woman.  It was at a party.  Mikaela, she was very attractive and her face managed to look both sad and happy at the same time.  When the party broke up at about two, she asked me to walk her home, which I did.  At her door, she offered me a cup of hot chocolate, which I accepted.  I sat on her couch, sipping cocoa, while she told me about her life.  She told me personal stuff -- her problems with her family, what kind of birth control she used, why she broke up with her boyfriend.  She asked me personal questions, about my sex life and dating situation, and since I was optimistic about sleeping with her, I answered in all candor.

So I was surprised when about 4:30 she said, "Well, I'm putting myself to bed.  You can sleep on the couch if you don't feel like walking home."  I was not the glutton for punishment I am now, so I thanked her for the drink and left.

But I continued to hang out with her and was quite surprised when a few days later, she told me she had a new boyfriend, an electrical-engineering student that my friends and I called The Gnome.  I had given him that nickname solely for his physical appearance -- he was stubby and beetle-browed with tiny sneaky eyes; underneath, he was very bright and funny and an all-around good guy.  I felt bad often, in the weeks and months that followed, for how much I wanted to screw his girlfriend.

And I guess I wasn't fooling Mikaela because she brought it up once.  She asked me, almost laughing, why I had ever thought she might sleep with me.  I reminded her of the night we met, the intimate conversation, what I had taken for barely veiled hints.

Her memory thus jogged, she apologized profusely for leading me on.  I shrugged it off, but she insisted.  She went further: she told me that if she ever were to break up with The Gnome (she didn't call him that, of course) she would sleep with me at least once.

I laughed at this but she assured me solemnly.  She did not want to be a tease.  She couldn't sleep with me then because she was in a committed relationship, but if that restriction were lifted, I was in.

Fine.  Great.  I didn't believe it would happen, but whatever.

We continued to spend a lot of time together.  The Gnome was very studious, usually working all hours in the lab, so I became a proxy-boyfriend.

And about six months later I was stunned, for several reasons, when she casually mentioned that she had broken up with The Gnome.  I hadn't known there was trouble in paradise and I made the usual sympathetic noises for the usual amount of time and was just about to ask -- "You remember that promise..." -- when she dropped the second bomb: she had a new boyfriend.

It turned out this new boyfriend bore a faint physical resemblance to the previous one -- and we quickly nicknamed him Gnome Jr. -- but without the intelligence or sweet spirit.  He was dull and sluggish but Mikaela seemed quite stuck on him.

Like a gambler riding a losing streak all the way down, I continued to hang around with her, and after another six months there was a familiar scene.  She again asked me why I thought she might sleep with me.  I reminded her of the night we met and also of the subsequent conversation where she promised to sleep with me if she ever broke up with The Gnome.

She gasped in shock -- I guess she had a poor memory, because she obviously had completely forgotten both of these events until I brought them up -- and when she recovered, did two very surprising things.  First, she came over to me, embracing me and kissing me passionately.  Then after a few minutes, she let me go and went over to her bed, sat down, and began to sob.

I of course tried to make her feel better -- I had never really thought was serious, I was honestly her friend, she hadn't hurt my feelings, yadda, yadda -- but she managed to explain herself through her tears: she wasn't upset because of me, but because how much it would hurt her boyfriend if he ever found out she had slept with me.

I pointed out that she hadn't slept with me and was extremely unlikely ever to do so.  No, no, she told me, a promise is a promise.

Tilt.  Never before or since have I been so utterly stymied.  This was a girl, a lovely, sexy, brilliant girl, that I had wanted like mad for almost a year, and she was inviting me to sleep with her.  On the other hand, she wasn't sleeping with me from desire -- at least not overtly -- but a sense of tragic obligation.  On the other-other hand, turning down a woman for sex is really, really rude. On the other ... auugghh!

I was standing probably six feet from her bed and six feet from her door.  I was rooted to the spot for what seemed like forever.  In what might have been an effort to seduce me, Mikaela smiled, wet-eyed, warm.

I got to the doorway, turned to look back at her, she was still smiling.  I deliberately banged my head on the door jamb a few times, knocked enough sense into me that I was able to keep walking.

The punch line to all this is that a few weeks ago, I googled her name.  She's now the president of a research company in Austin.  In her corporate photo, she looks almost exactly as she did 20 years ago.

And her name is different of course, she has a second last name.  It's a very common name and it could be entirely coincidence that it's the same last name as the guy we used to call Gnome Jr.

Kaitlin has been making an effort to be more reserved sexually.  She has a date tonight with a man she has known for a week or so.  Saturday, she had a bit too much to drink and went down on him in his car, so to an extent the ship has already sailed, but she told him, no more nookie until the sixth date.  Maybe the fifth, but in any case, not tonight.

So I made her a bet she couldn't go the whole date without having sex with him.  You know, to bolster her will-power.

The stakes?  Well, she sleeps with him, she has to sleep with me too.  If she doesn't sleep with him, I have to stop asking her to sleep with me.

Let me just say, I have never been rooting for some other guy to get laid this much in my whole life.

Wish us luck.

Andy finally came through, invited me to a party.

It wasn't, by party standards, a good party.  There wasn't enough to eat or drink, it was held in an unheated loft downtown, the host never did host-y things like introduce guests to each other.

But I'm not there for booze, of course, nor the ambiance.  I met three women.  First was Beth, a nice lady, but studying divinity at UNC.  Out-of-town, probably God-squad, so nope.

Second was Carole.  My age, charming, smooth.  She had shown up with what she called her "almost-boyfriend", a tall, gray-maned fellow who looked like a CEO but was in fact a piano tuner.  We talked for a while and she managed to work into the conversation a tremendous amount of information about her sexual preferences, including her taste for bondage.  I told her a fairly fictionalized version of Ariel, leaving out my own relationship with her  but including one authentic detail, which was that while Ariel seems to be enjoying her open marriage a great deal, her husband seems to be struggling with it, not necessarily emotionally, but practically.  As I interpreted his problem, it's easy enough for a woman to get laid, because men mostly want sex, but the reverse doesn't work.  Women mostly want a relationship, permanence, marriage, children, whatever.

Carole disagreed at this point, saying that she at least liked sex for sex's sake and had no particular opposition to adultery.  You can guess what my next line would have been, but her piano-tuning almost-boyfriend chose this moment to wander back.  He wanted to talk to me about something, I don't remember what it was but it wasn't my getting his girlfriend into bed.

Later in the evening I gave Carole my card, told her to email me, but I'm not optimistic there.

Finally, there was Yvette.  There's one Yvette at every party, too much to drink, too loud, too friendly.  Normally, this is not the girl I want to meet, but she took a shine to me and dragged me to a far corner, had me sit down, started asking me pointless questions, and I noticed something.  She talked a lot about drinking, certainly acted drunk, but never actually drank much.  She had a vodka and tonic in her hand, but I had seen her pour it and it was mostly tonic.  She didn't smell of alcohol and her face wasn't flushed or sweaty.

And this odd, crazy girl kept it up all night.  Extravagant behavior, wild talk, hugging everybody.  Towards the end, she asked me to give her a ride home.  No problem.  Well, one problem: I was Andy's ride home, and while she lived on the way, Andy lives near me.  There was no way to drop him off and then talk to her alone.

In the car it was worse.  Andy and Yvette had at some point been an item and had drifted apart.  She wanted him to call her, she gave him her phone number, he tested it out and they jokingly chatted by cell-phone while still in my car.

I remembered this same scene with Liam and Candy -- she had given him her number as she was getting into a cab.   I was with work friends so my asking a single woman for her number wasn't going to play.  I had later finagled Liam's phone away from him and got the number but either I miscopied it or she had given him a bogus number to begin with.

This time, I was in ear-shot.   I committed her phone number to memory and as I soon as I dropped Andy off, dialed it.

God is starting to re-use material.  The number -- which I knew worked for Andy -- didn't work for me.  In the 15 or so minutes, I had managed to get one of the digits wrong.  Under any other circumstances, I could just ask Andy for the right number -- he knows, more or less, about this project -- but he wants Yvette for himself (when I was alone with her, it was Andy who came over to interrupt us).  He even knows the story about Liam and Liam's phone, so I would have to be extra-sneaky to get his away from him.

What was the one thing that you wanted badly that made you do something ridiculous? 
Submitted by estell.

Anyone who doesn't know my answer to this one hasn't been reading my blog.

Mary is having the three of us, her, me and Helen, meet tomorrow.

We sat in Mary's tiny office, Mary babbling about "the working environment" and "putting this behind us", Helen spouting post-feminist cant about "feeling disempowered".  I sat mortified into silence.  Eventually, I grasped the important points: Helen wanted to row back from however far she had gotten from her emotional shoreline and Mary wanted the company not to get sued.  Mission accomplished.

I suppose I should feel relief.  It could have been worse, much worse.  But I just feel sickened and sad.

I guess there is some balance in life.  I had a nice weekend and Monday, our HR director, Mary the Clueless, asked me to come see her.  We don't call her that in the spirit of irony, like calling a tall guy "Shorty".  She really is pretty clueless.  But a nice lady, so today I dropped by her office.

She had some questions about one of my subordinates.  I thought the conversation was over and stood to leave.  "Oh, one more thing," she said, and pretty casually added:

"Helen says you are sexually harassing her."

Mary kept talking.  I barely heard, but once in a while I would register, she would be repeated something else I told Helen that night on the pier.

I was, am, just devastated.  I really, honestly thought we were friends.  She told Mary that she was afraid I would get her fired for not sleeping with me.

Wow.  It's just so ... so everything.  I am humiliated that Mary, that dimwit, now knows things I would never have told anyone but a close friend.  I am hurt that I so misjudged -- and apparently mistreated -- Helen.  I am depressed that I don't have Helen for a friend.  It's baffling and painful.

Oh, and to make it perfect, Mary is having the three of us, her, me and Helen, meet tomorrow.  What good is supposed to come out of this I have no idea.  I hope to keep my dignity or my job, but I'm not optimistic about keeping both.

Of course, it's never the trouble you are expecting.

The weather was terrible, people in the terminal were talking about 16 inches of snow in Chicago, they might close the airport.

The airport closing would be disastrous for me.  Not only would I miss the assignation, but I would have to concoct some elaborate explanation how what was supposed to be a trip into the still-snowless Sierras ended up with my being stranded somewhere in the snow-choked Midwest.

We took off on-time, the pilot cheerily assuring us that we would arrive on-time as well.  I watched the whitened landscape slip past 30,000 feet below and fully expected never to see Chicago.

The cluster of skyscrapers around the Sears Tower came into view.  The cheery pilot announced we were on final descent. I felt the gears lower -- it was now too late to be diverted, but not too late to crash!  We landed smoothly, barely a bump and I relaxed.  I'm really here.  The pilot came back on the PA -- the gate wouldn't be available "for a few minutes".

A "few" turned out to be 60.  If you have only 60 minutes to live, that's "a few minutes", but when you are sitting on the tarmac, knowing that a woman is waiting for you, it's a prison sentence.  I writhed, seethed, muttered to myself.  Just open the door, a 737 is a small plane for a jet-liner, I'll jump down.

Eventually, we got to a gate and after a shorter eternity, they got the door open and I was through it like a greyhound out of the gate.  I raced through the airport, through the maze of a parking lot, and found the rental-car kiosk.  The attendant was busy with a conversation on his cell, but after a suitable wait, he deigned to speak to me -- to tell me I had to go to the office first.  I began to tell him I already had a car reserved but a look at his bland bored face told me I would just be wasting more time.  I went back to the office, and a line of five or six people for a single, rather leisurely clerk.

I got through that obstacle and the next and the next and I raced the rental Corolla across a sliver of frozen Illinois from the airport to the Sheraton, finally skidding into the icy parking spot like Gretzky shushing to a stop.

The bar was right off the lobby, and there was almost no one there, so Ariel, with her billows of blonde hair, wasn't hard to pick out, even from the back.  This was the moment of truth.  I had never seen her before, nor she me -- just pictures, but pictures are never really accurate.  I took a breath, slid on to the bar stool next to her.

Hmmm, not bad.  Better than I was expecting really.  She was reading an impressively thick novel and sipping a glass of what was probably water.  She looked young, younger even than the 30 I knew her to be.  She said hi and her voice was a surprise too -- I had spoken to her on the phone and she had had that Midwest twang.  In person, she sounded mellower, her voice had a very warm timbre.

We chatted for a while and then I went to check in.  When I got back, there was an over-aged lounge lizard hitting on her, making her visibly uncomfortable.

Perfect.  Now she wanted to leave the bar and where else was there to go?

"You got your stuff?"  I asked as if we had an agreed time to leave and she grabbed her purse.  We were in the elevator in a second.

Now, my plan had been, to play it cool, to get her warmed up emotionally before even touching her.  No, even before the elevator doors closed, I took in my arms.  She made quiet wet noises of satisfaction as I kissed her, like a little girl who smells her favorite cookies baking.

We found the suite, sat on the couch, talking and kissing, she pulled my belt off and I pulled up her skirt.  She was wearing lace-topped stockings and very sheer panties. She smiled shyly but opened her legs lasciviously.

We moved to the bedroom and big bed, lay head-to-tail on the duvet.  She pulled off all my clothes but from her I just removed her boots and her panties.  We each nuzzled into the other's groin.  She had the most curious disability, she couldn't really participate in soixante-neuf -- either she paid attention to giving me pleasure and ignored her own, or got lost in her feelings and just stopped any movement of her mouth.  I had her just lie passive and brought her off with my mouth, then she did the same for me, the seed spattering her mouth and cheek.  I sat up to take a closer look.  I wiped her off with the edge of my hand and then she licked at my hand.

I undressed her and we got into the tiny tub.  First we showered, soaping each other off -- and sucking each other off -- then sat in the tub and talked, kids, spouses, the regular stuff you'd talk about with someone who wasn't a complete stranger you'd just had sex with.

We put on our swim-suits on and took the elevator down to the pool.  On the ride down, I rearranged the material of her suit bottom so her vulva was exposed, kissed her there.

The jacuzzi was perfectly situated in a dimly-lit alcove off the pool area.  We sat in the steaming water and made out, ever more passionately.  We were interrupted twice, first by a small group of raucous yahoos, who hooted at our surprise, then apologized archly and left, and then by a middle-aged couple from Minneapolis, who apologized more sincerely for interrupting us, but got in the jacuzzi too.  They obviously took Ariel and me for a vacationing couple, perhaps newlyweds, so we went along.  I did most of the talking, since I know about the West Coast and we could hardly pretend to be from Chicago -- why would we be in a hotel? -- so I told them stories of earthquakes and hippies.  Ariel piped up with helpful details but also snuggled in close, and under the cover of the jacuzzi bubbles groped my crotch.  I think the other couple got the hint that we wanted some privacy, they smiled at each other and excused themselves.  As soon as they were out of the area I pulled Ariel's bottoms down, put my fingers inside her.  She let her body drift out into the center of the pool, her eyes closed, breathing heavily but her face looking dreamy.

Back in the elevator, I told her to blow me and she did.  Note to self: next time get a room higher up in the building.

We went back to the room and spent hours in bed.  We would talk for a bit, then have ferocious sex for a while, then go back to talking.   We ate chocolates and drank sparkling water.  She was endlessly, giddily orgasmic.  She was also  charmingly compliant, up for anything I wanted to do.  Well, almost anything, when I wanted to penetrate her with a empty Pellegrino bottle, she laughed and drew the line.

Close to four she wriggled back up from under the covers, wiping her mouth, and told me she had to go.  We dressed and I walked her out to the car.  Standing in the iced-over parking lot, we kissed.  I would have watched her drive off, but it was far too cold.

I went back to the room, caught a few hours sleep.  The trip home was, of course, effortless and I slept most of the way.

My wife was waiting.  She made me a delicious lunch of pork loin with cabbage -- all the more savory for my having eaten nothing but airline snacks and chocolates (and Ariel) for the last 36 hours.  She asked me questions about my trip.

My answers were not, strictly speaking, accurate.

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

I leave in 12 hours.  The plan: fly to Chicago, meet Ariel in a hotel bar, with even the tiniest bit of luck, take her up to the room and have sex with her a lot.  The best plans are always simple ones.  Plus, Ariel's been briefed on the plan and she thinks it's a good one.

I am (consciously) worried about nothing but the weather.  The weather maps show a noose of snow tightening around the Midwest.  A delay would slice hugely into my time: I only have 12 hours total and Ariel might be called away after less than half that.  Please let those airport plow-guys be on the ball....

Helen and I went out for a walk together along the water.  We went to the end of a pier and watched the ships go by in the dark.  She talked cheerfully, almost compulsively, about her ex-boyfriends, her parents, her problems with school and work.  She told me about dance lessons she was taking and she showed me a few steps.  The two of us danced silently on wooden deck of the pier, alone except for a solitary seagull, up past its bedtime.

She asked me about myself, what I was doing with my life, what I wanted.  I told her the easy stuff, but she kept probing, smiling knowingly, as if she had already guessed what I wanted.  Finally, I looked her in the eye and asked her to go to bed with me.

She burst out laughing.  She apologized instantly, but she was, she said, surprised.  No, she couldn't right now.  She was just on the cusp of a relationship and she wasn't the sort to fuck around.  If the relationship didn't work out, she told me, I should ask again.

We walked for a long time, talking about my problems and hers.  I told her a lot about Kaitlin, a little about Spanky, nothing at all about Ariel.  She told me about the boy she liked and her plans to start her own business and I wondered what she might be omitting.  She offered to help me, invite me to parties, that sort of thing.  We'll see.