55 posts from 2008

There is an open question.

I have always justified my (planned) infidelity on the grounds of necessity.  Like almost everyone else, I need sex, and more than that, I need warmth, physical companionship; and given my wife's attitude, this looks like the only way to get it.

But suppose that this thing with Catherine does flower, as now looks extremely likely, and I get to see her a few times a month.  If that does happen, is that it, is that my whole infidelity budget?  A starving man who steals a loaf of bread is caught between conflicting moral imperatives; if he then goes and steals a jar of jam and a six-pack of Corona, he's starting to look like a thief.

On the other hand, there are no sure things and even if I do regularize the relationship with Catherine (knock on wood), it certainly isn't permanent: she explains her infidelity by a need for variety -- I am, in her words, "fresh", but freshness doesn't last, so the clock is ticking and I certainly don't want to weather another long dry spell like the one that is (I hope) just ending.  It behooves me, therefore, to start looking for a backup.

Plus, let me not kid anyone here (especially myself): it's fun.  It's really great.  When I see a pretty girl, I don't think, "Gee, I wish I could get her in bed"; I think, "How do I get her in bed?", which is much more fun.  And when I do actually get her in bed, that's even more fun.  (Well, judging from the back seat -- I'm assuming a real bed would be even better than that.)

Finally, it seems like a shame to waste the opportunity.  Everything I've read and seen indicates that a woman's desire to sleep with you varies inversely with your apparent desire to sleep with her.  Not every woman, but most.  Right now, my ability to be cool and charming is at its zenith.  If any given woman won't have sex with me, that's fine; I know one or two others who will.

This is not purely academic.  Friday, I'm going over to meet with Amelia, a friend-of-a-friend who needs help with some technical article she's writing.  I've never seen her, but my friend says she's pretty and I've talked to her on the phone and (a) she's hugely charming (OK, maybe not the sharpest tool in the shed, but funny and sweet), (b) she has the cutest lisping accent, Hong Kong I'm guessing; and (c) she was chatty and friendly in way that very lonely people are (trust me).

The decision is, for the moment, go with it, softly.  If Amelia is receptive, go as far as the situation permits; otherwise, give her the help she needs and go home.  As for the moral issue -- well, did I mention how much fun I had in the car with Catherine?

It hadn't been a good year.

In January, I tried to redeem a bet I'd won over Christmas.  A woman I liked had bet me she could not have sex on the first date with a man she liked; she couldn't, or at any rate didn't, control herself, and so she owed me.  Specifically, she was supposed to sleep with me too.  As gently as I tried to excuse her from paying off and as earnestly as she insisted that she would be good as her word, I guess she panicked or something, and stopped returning my emails.  I never heard from her again.

In March, I went on a trip, an odyssey really, from New Orleans north.  A lot of interesting things happened, but little that could be unironically described as "good".

In April, I got back to work in time to be betrayed by one of my best friends and thereby lose my job.  I actually made money off the events, and got a better job, but it's hard to feel anything but bitterness about it.

Since then, it's been a treadmill at the new company, 70 hours a week for a boss who has won the Franz Kafka Mental Health Award three years running, and nothing more than tantalizing nibbles on the female front.

Then I attended a party on Christmas Day, the highlight of which was my going down on a hottie redhead lying on the hood of a parked car.  It was like rubbing Aladdin's lamp, because in the five days since:

• I got a check for $1200 in the mail, because I was supposedly overcharged slightly by a bank in 1998.
• I was worried about replacing my decrepit 27" Sony when a friend of mine who was moving to France for a few years asked me if he could store his 65" flat-screen at my place.
• I won an iPhone in a contest (they're great, by the way).
• My boss sent out an email over the weekend saying that the company's revenue had doubled in December, owing solely to the work of the team that I lead.
  
• My wife decided to dress up all sexy for a party -- her new diet-and-exercise program has given her a really slammin' bod -- and then when we got home, put on something sexier and then took even that off.
• The next afternoon, that hottie redhead, Catherine, drove over to see me (a considerable distance, more than 70 miles each way) and we spent a few hours in back seat of my car; it was wonderful in all sorts of huge ways and in the minor way of marking the first time I'd ever had sex with two different women in 24 hours (indeed, I hadn't even had time to shower between them and was still wearing the same T-shirt).

If you had asked me a week ago how I would feel if I stopped, at least temporarily, being the straight-man for God's juvenile sense of humor, I might have have answered either that I would be ecstatic and giddy or panicked that I was being set up for The Really Big Prank -- I don't know, some huge public exposure of my private life, something like that.

But I'm neither.  I feel warmly comfortable.  Sure, there are a few problems: Catherine lives, as I mentioned, some distance away; her weirdo ex-boyfriend Matt is probably out to get me; she has an agreement with her husband Brian that she can sleep with whomever she wants so long as she tells him all the details (she confesses to being unclear on whether this is supposed to be a precaution of some sort or he's just getting off on a barely hidden cuckoldry fetish).

It's no problem.  Somehow, it's as if the last 18 months have been training for these problems, a stretch on Parris Island before being sent into the combat of the actual affair.  I am coolly laying out plans to deal with the issues I know about and am remaining alert -- calmly alert, but alert -- for new ones:

By complete coincidence -- I may title my autobiography "By Complete Coincidence" -- by complete coincidence, Matt is a very good friend of Andy, and Matt doesn't know it, so I plan to ask Andy to keep an eye on him.  I'm going to try to keep some kind of tabs on Catherine's and Brian's relationship; if it blows up, the shrapnel could very well hit me.  The distance thing is a serious logistical issue I'm going to have to work out.

But I can do this.  I can.  The big hurdle was the actual woman.  The other men in her life, the children, the distance -- after all I've been through, I'm more than up to those small challenges.

Catherine had said she might be able to see me today.  I wasn't optimistic, but sure enough, around 3 I get a text message.  I race to a nice little café downtown and she's waiting.  She apologizes for the way she looks, says she hasn't had time to get cleaned up.  Of course, she looks gorgeous.  We talk over coffee, and it's like the best date ever -- well, I guess most dates, the two people don't usually talk about their respective spouses, but we do.  We talk about everything.  It is amazing, invigorating.  We leave the café, walk around in the cold talking.

Turns out, the morning after the party, hapless Matt made his move.  She was still asleep on the couch where I left her and he slipped in next to her.  She roused a little and he professed his undying love.  She just eyed him sleepily and, I suppose in some crack-brained attempt to seduce her, began humping her leg.  His cause, already doing poorly, was completely doomed when after just a few frantic humps, he lost control completely and ejaculated in his pants.

Embarrassed, he slinked away.  Over breakfast, he pretended nothing had happened and asked her to drive him home.  Once in the car, he produced a condom from his wallet and asked if he could use it on her.  She declined and he spent the rest of the ride berating her and listing her personal faults.

As we walk, two days having passed, she is still upset.  She wonders about the truth of the things he said.  I point out that he was just a dickhead who was angry at her because he felt humiliated and what he had to say wasn't worth a tea-cup of warm spit.  That seems to cheer her up.  We are footsore from walking and get in my car (actually, my wife's Subaru station wagon) and drove up to a hilltop with a view of city.  I  put the back seats down and we lie full length next to each other, alternately talking and making out. I bring her off with my hand and she nuzzles in and asks if there was anything special I wanted.  I mention the name of the well-known Hungarian actor, Heywood Jablome.  She laughs at this and sits up.  She tells me she wants a good view and pulls my pants down.  The feel of her tongue on me is exquisite and I realize I am actually thrusting into her mouth.  "Is it OK if I do that?" I ask.

"Don't stop!  Don't stop!" she gasps.  Don't have to tell me twice.  I resume and also slide two fingers into her vagina, which sends her into paroxyms.  She lays her head on my chest, moaning and crying out. Finally, she catches her breath.  "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

"About what?"

"This part was supposed to be about you.  Now you haven't come and I've got to go home."

I check the time and she's right.  She had to be out of here 10 minutes ago.  "It's OK, next time, you can blow me all you want.  I promise I'll even come in your mouth."

She smiles.  "You promise?"

"I promise."

I talked to Catherine.  She was briskly practical, told me the only problems were logistical.  She said she might be able to meet me tomorrow for sex; if not, later in the week.  Well, OK then.

Pacing around, dazed after the conversation, I idly opened what I thought was junk mail.  It turned out to be the settlement from some nonsense class-action lawsuit against the bank that had held my mortgage 10 years ago.  $1200.  That's nice.  Then my wife came downstairs, dressed for the post-Christmas party.

You know that scene in Jerry Maguire, when Tom Cruise says to Renée Zellweger, "That's more than a dress, that's an Audrey Hepburn movie"?  That's what my wife looked like.  I had check in my hand and I let it flutter to the floor.

She was the most beautiful woman at the party.  Even if I hadn't noticed myself, a half-dozen times, one guest or another would whisper the fact in my ear.  The whisperers were older ladies; the men were sneaking peaks at my wife; the younger women were busy keeping tabs on their husbands.

The two of us slow-danced and I told her, "You're the prettiest girl here.  Everybody's looking at you."

She laughed and pushed on my chest, pushing the compliment away.  "Of course you think so!"

Back at home, I was already in bed reading when she came out of the bathroom.  If I'd thought about it, I would have expected her to be wearing the cashmere PJs she got for Christmas, but no.  She was wearing a satin chemise, didn't reach down to her belly-button. And nothing else.  She hadn't dressed like that for bed since before she got pregnant the first time.  She looked down shyly and smiled.

I smiled too.

I realize this is Vox, not Twitter, and I'm not supposed to be posting every goddamn development, but I can't help it -- better to make a fool of myself here than in what I laughingly refer to as "what I laughingly refer to as 'my real life'".

She called.  She got my voicemail because, in comparatively mildly irony, I was here writing my previous post and didn't hear my phone ring.  It's a probably a good thing, because you know what a dog's-breakfast I would have made of that conversation.  She left a message.  Actually, she got cut off in the middle of the first message, and had to call back.  Which means we are tied in communication-count; I might even seem to be ahead if she has not yet seen my ill-advised Facebook friend-request.  So I can call her without seeming like a desperate wank.

But I'm not!  I'm not going to call her right back.  I am going to breathe for a little while, then shower, then breathe some more, then I'll call.  It's called "being cool", dawgs, and you know I'm all about being cool.

Peace out.

She texted me back, she texted me back!  Luckily, neither she nor anyone else could see me racing up and down the hallways out of sheer exuberance.  The message was sweet, said she would call when she could but that little pitchers have big ears, which I took to mean she was with her kids.  Doesn't matter, could be a year off.  She's had 36 hours to think about it, sobered up, did a whole bunch of domestic things with her family, and she still sounds enthusiastic about me, me, me.

I think I'm going to go down to the tattoo parlor and have them put "Be Cool!" on the inside of my eyelids, so I'll remember.  Be cool, be cool.

(Truly attentive and erudite students of Dahlgrenia will notice that, though I had switched from song lyrics to Shakespearean sonnets for my post titles, I switched back for this one.  Somehow, I was just too excited for Elizabethan pentameter.)

I've noticed that the longer and more detailed a post of mine is, the less likely anyone is to read it.  So in the interest of keeping everyone up-to-date on important developments, let me summarize my last post:

1. Uli meets an incredibly pretty woman at a party
2. Uli has oral sex with the incredibly pretty woman at the party
3. The incredibly pretty woman asks Uli to call her

There are two complications to keep in mind.  First, she, like me, is married with two kids (but her spouse, like mine, is aware of her extra-marital intentions); second, well the second complication is complicated.

By the kind of weird coincidence that would make you change the channel if they happened on TV, I had to take Catherine (the incredibly pretty woman mentioned above) away from this irredeemable dick-head, who happened to be the exact same irredeemable dick-head I took Ella away from in the summer of 2007 -- and I stupidly reminded him of that fact.

And I'm worried because I did another stupid thing.  As soon as I got home, I texted her -- which would be fine.  The message was a bit sappy, but at least I didn't send the lines from a sonnet I found, instead deleting them after laboriously punching them into the phone.  Then in the afternoon, I left her a voice-mail -- which is still kind of fine.  I mean, she hadn't answered but what the hell.  But then, tonight, I was on the Facebook page of the person who introduced as and without thinking, clicked on "Add Catherine as a friend".  Oooh, third strike.

I mean, I explained to her, while we were making out in the pantry, that I am desperate and horny, but there's a difference between just telling a woman that and actually bombarding her with irrefutable evidence of your horny desperation; similarly, there's a difference for a woman between hearing what might be charming self-deprecation from the man who is at the moment caressing her g-spot and getting a cloyingly-worded mash-note on her phone while her husband is standing next to her, asking "Who's that, hon?"

And I'm worried that her good friend Matt the irredeemable dickhead has had plenty of time to bad-mouth me.  I don't know what kind of crap he could invent about me -- fortunately, he's not very bright -- but he might think of something really effectively slanderous.

The only thing that's keeping me stable is the realization that things going wrong now, well, they wouldn't make a very good prank at all.  It would be like running one of those Nigerian scams ("I need your help getting $25 million out of the country") by sending the victim $1000 and not sending the rest.  Last night was one of the most unalloyedly pleasureable nights of my life, approximately tied with my trip to Chicago.  Like that day, there was no guilt, no fear, no sorrow.  Unlike that day, most wonderfully unlike it, there was the promise, the potential, the hope of something more.  She lives reasonably close (an hour's drive); her life would be improved, not compromised, by an ardent paramour; she's sweet and smart and funny; and she seemed to really, really like me.

But suppose that potential is not fulfilled, the hope is squashed.  Well, that would suck.  Suck a lot.  But nothing can take last night from me.  Holding her, touching her body, kissing her mouth, was wonderful and erotic and restoring, absolutely everything it was supposed to be.  If nothing else, I get to keep that forever.

Maybe there is a Santa Claus.

An invitation from a half-forgotten colleague to a Christmas party brought me to this crowded little bungalow on the Peninsula.  I was talking to a sweet, slightly odd female computer programmer -- a rarity even in here in the Silicon Valley -- but watching out the corner of my eyes a new arrival: a slender red-head who reminded me of the actress Selma Blair.

The programmer, whose name was Sheila if I had heard correctly over the surf-noise of the party, leans in and agrees with my thoughts:  "She is hot, isn't she?"  I smiled sheepishly in apology for being so obvious.  Sheila continued, "Yeah, I would so do her if she'd let me."  She looked at me coolly.  "You didn't know about me?"

"That you're a lesbian?" I didn't know, but looking at her, wasn't surprised.

"No!  Everybody can tell that."

"What then?  You're a hired killer?  You're Obama's next Secretary of Agriculture?  You used to be a man?"  I jibed.

"That's the one."

"Which one?"

"Used to be a man.  Strictly speaking, still am."  That I wouldn't have guessed.  In fact, before the red-head walked in, I was thinking of trying to put the moves on her.  Thank God for small mercies.

"Really?  Wow.  Stem still on the cherry?"

She laughed.  "Six more months.  Then..."  She made a chopping gesture, which made me cringe.

"Well, while we still have something in common, tell me about the redhead."

"Eh, don't get your hopes up.  In addition to the hot little body, she's got a hubby and two cute little girls in Los Gatos."

"She got a name to go along with the daughters, the husband, and the hot, hot little body?"

"Catherine."

"Catherine, Catherine.   Sheila, cover me, I'm going in."

And I did.  She did have a hot little body, and as I said, neat, Selma Blair feature, and close-cropped red hair.  She was talking to a tall, hipster dude with a soul patch.  Hipster dude clearly thought he was in.  Time to change that.

"Hi.  I'm Uli.  I'm told you're Catherine."  I looked her boldly in the eye.

"I am Catherine.  What else are you told about me?"

"Ooh, lots and lots of good things."

"Did they tell you about the lots and lots of bad things?"

"No, I was hoping to find those out for myself."

"Uli, say hello to Matt," she nodded towards the hipster, but neither of us looked at him.  "He's my oldest and dearest friend."

"Hello, Matt," I echoed, still looking at Catherine.

"Matt, why don't you run and get our new friend a drink?"  Matt's mouth opened but he was too surprised to say anything.  "Run-run-run."  He slumped off gracelessly.

"So, Uli.  Where's your wife tonight?"

"Couldn't make it.  You and I are on our own."

"This tough-guy act, you been working on it long?"

"Yeah, kind of.  What do you think?"

"Eh.  Good try but anybody can see what a good boy you are."

"Everybody?"

"Well, I can."  She leaned towards me and said exactly what I was expecting -- "A very good boy" -- but with the opposite intonation, complete sincerity.  A shot through the heart.

"If I'm such a good boy, why am I clumsily hitting on the hot red-head at the party?"

She liked being called "the hot red-head".  "I don't know, why are you hitting on the very hot red-head?"

"You want to go for a walk?  Do you like cars?"

Earlier, the half-forgotten colleague had taken me in the garage to show me his new baby: a sleek Maserati sedan.  The garage, of course, was somewhat heated and more important, deserted, which made it perfect for us.

I took Catherine there, leaned her against the sleek car.  We chatted casually, standing much too close for casual.  I took a breath.  "Look, I love my wife."

"I know.  You're a good husband and a great father."

I was taken aback: she had seen my one vanity and said it out loud, in perfect sincerity.  "What makes you say that?"

"I can tell.  I bet your wife is awesome."

"She is, she is.  She's 99% perfect."

"But she won't put out."  Wow, this woman is good.  I hadn't said anything about this, but she knew.  Not that far from obvious but still.  "What would she say about this?"

"I asked her.  She said, 'Have fun.  If I find out, I'll kill you.'"  Actually, what she said was, "Have fun.  Use a condom.  If I find out, I'll kill you" but somehow, the middle part, which had seemed so adorable at the time, now seemed slightly scabrous.

"So this is OK."

"It's more than OK, it's good, it's great, it's splendid, it's spectacular, it's..."  I ran out of adjectives, so I kissed her.

The chilly garage was a seraglio.  I kissed her and ran my hands over her body, her sleek torso, her pulpy breasts.  I knelt down, kissed her on the navel.  "Sorry about the garage.  You deserve, I don't know, a mountain top, a meadow, a four-poster bed in a palace.  Somewhere."

She kissed the top of my head.  "It's perfect."

I picked her up, put her on the hood of the Maserati, got her skirt and panties out of the way.  "Wow, you're a natural red-head."

"Of course, did you- oh, oh..."  I bent to my work, kissing and probing.  "What are we doing?" she murmured happily.

"Uh, my Latin is rusty, but I believe it's called cunnilingus."

She laughed at this.  "You're cool."

"I am?"  You know me: I am many things, but not cool.

"You're so cool."

"I guess the last two hours of telling myself, 'Be cool, be cool' paid off."

She laughed again and wrapped her legs around my head, pulled me close, moaning in a gratifying way.  "You can't tell anyone about this."

Muffled as I was, I tried my best to answer.  "I'm planning to blog all about it."  Which, of course, I was.

"Let's go back to the party."

I was enjoying this party, but the lady is always right.  "Give me a few minutes.  I need to, uh, calm down."

She glanced down appreciatively and nodded.  She skipped out, leaving me standing next to the expensive car, trembling slightly from the cold, from the strain of squatting so long, and from nervous excitement.

"Be cool, be cool," I told myself.

I wandered back to the kitchen, where everyone had congregated.  Catherine was the center for a knot of attentive men, flirting and joking.  I didn't even look.  Be cool.  I flirted with Sheila the tranny for a bit.  I spent an half-hour or so in somewhat pretentious dirty talk with two enormously fat women; they said they knew the answer to Freud's famous question, "What do women want?"  I was curious whether the answer was or was not "To have a comparative stranger go down on them while they lie on the hood of a parked luxury car", but I couldn't explain it to them in so many words.  While they relayed their complicated theory, I tried to simultaneously watch and not watch Catherine across the crowded room.  She was by far the prettiest woman there, with the possible of exception of somebody's non-English-speaking French girlfriend, who stood silent, sipping disdainfully from a glass of California red.  Catherine, by contrast, was the life of the party, telling funny stories about her husband and kids.

After what I judged to be enough time, I drifted back to her.  She was talking to the party's host and to the hipster dude with the soul patch, Matt or Mark or something.  We all chatted and Soulpatch kept gesturing to me with his beer bottle.  "I think I know you, bro.  You are very familiar to me."

"I don't think so."  How could we know each other, plus I would remember anyone this annoying.  He was standing way, way too close to Catherine for my comfort.

Her eyes twinkled, from the beer or the sex.  "Uli is very memorable."  She was wearing a tweed jacket draped over her shoulders.  Tweed jacket, tweed jacket, that meant something.

"Catherine, where did you get that jacket?"

Pure casual, it couldn't mean anything to her, she waved a hand toward the hipster.  "It's Matt's."

I understood only as I was saying it aloud: "You were with Ella, at the garden party."

18 months ago, I met Ella at a charity party.  We talked for hours and I almost fell in love with her.  Almost fell in rapturous, excruciating love.  Almost.  Ella did not return the feelings and in any case was in far too precarious a point in her life to consider the married likes of me, but she had been kind and sweet and honest in a way that even now, so long later, I still felt wistful about.  Matt had been her date at the party and I guess she must have ditched him to spend the evening with me.

"Ella, yes," he agreed solemnly.  "Ella and I were friends, close friends, but never lovers, sadly."  Wow, this guy was really an asshole.

"How is she doing?"  I needed to keep the urgency out of my voice, Catherine was standing right there, but Matt heard it -- or just realized that I had lost contact with her while he had not, and that was victory enough.  His chin rose like the bow of a ship coming out of a trough, and his eyes glittered like a lizard's.

"The course of her life led her back to New York."

I resisted the urge to mimic his pompous diction and just nodded.

And the party continued and the crowd thinned.  Matt was reluctant to ever leave Catherine's side but the host, perhaps sensing the situation and trying to help, kept sending him on small errands connected with shutting down the party.  Take this freezer in the basement, will ya, Matt.  Help me carry this.

Perhaps it wasn't the host who was trying to help, perhaps it was the same Jokester who has been toying with me for so long, pranking someone else for a change.  Or maybe mere chance, who knows, but whenever Matt was away, I would take Catherine to a seclude corner and kiss her and explore her body for a few minutes, then she would wander back to the kitchen and I would roam the house, drop in on the Pictionary game in the living room, and eventually circle back to the kitchen myself, where inevitably Matt would be back on duty, hovering around Catherine, who would be preening in his attention, and the cycle could start again.

On perhaps the third or fourth loop, I learned something interesting: almost everyone left at the party, including both Matt and Catherine, were scheduled to sleep there at the house.  I was what I hated to be, the last guest to leave.  Back in the kitchen, Catherine was looking pretty sleepy.  Matt was looking anxious.  Catherine's husband and daughters, I had also learned, were arriving in mid-morning and once Catherine fell asleep, she would certainly sleep until then.  Matt must have known it too; time was running out for him.

"I need to go," I said.

"Don't go yet," Catherine said.  "Stay, have some coffee."

Matt piped up, "Hey, can I talk to you on the porch?"  I knew what was coming -- I know nothing about women, but other men I can read like large-type print.  We went to the front of the house, and he looked up to the lightening sky.    "Catherine's great," he started.

"Great," I agreed.  Her vulva tastes like strawberries, I thought but felt not the slightest urge to say so aloud.  I smiled happily.

"And I haven't seen her for a long time."

"Six months," I supplied.  She had said something about that when one of her pulpy breasts was in my mouth.  I didn't share that memory either, but smiled all the more happily for it.

"Yes, yes, six months since our paths crossed.  I would like some one-on-one time with her, tonight, just the two of us, you understand."

I don't know, maybe if I were a better man, I could have ignored his annoying speech patterns -- and my own considerable vested interest -- and seen it from his point of view.  For the second time, I had appeared in his life and walked away with a woman he was interested in.  Sorry, buddy, no dice.

"You haven't seen her for six months.  I haven't seen her for 44 years, my whole life.  And besides, she asked me to stay."

A display of anger was beyond this capon.  "OK, OK, that's cool."

I left him on the porch and went back in.  In the very short time I was gone, everyone seemed to have sacked out.  The rooms were darkened and every couch and rug had a blanked form.  I found her on sofa in a small office.

"I do have to go," I whispered.

"Call me."  We kissed.  "You're an amazing man, a real man."  I was glad she couldn't see my face for the dark.  "I think you're perfect."

I drove home in the dawn light, laughing and trembling and trying not to weep.

The sailor clings to the wreckage through the night.  Sickened by the waves, brutalized by fear and by the cold of the water, he holds grimly to a single waterlogged plank.  First, he is filled with an airy hope; just hang on, he tells himself, the rescue ship is just over the next breaker, or the next.  Gradually, the hope become desperate, then dwindles, eventually fades utterly, and only stubbornness,a cussed refusal to drown like a rat, keeps his numb and bleeding arms wrapped around the plank. The sailor finally feels seeping in to him the realization that rescue, even the squalid rescue of death, is not his fate -- the future has in store for him only an continuation of the stark black present: the hard saline blows of the waves and the astringent cold.  His split and suppurating lips begin to part, to concede aloud his submission, and his caked eyelids flutter open a last time, just open enough to see the rosy-fingered dawn and the sail on the horizon.

I can't tell you yet what happened to me.  I don't understand it and I can't explain anyway.  Maybe nothing happened -- if my hands didn't still smell of body powder and the sweet taste was not still lingering, you could tell me I was imagining it all -- but I think, I think, I think, everything happened, that this last long long night will divide my life into "before" and "after".  I'll try to sleep, I'll try to think, I'll try.

Several of my on-line friends -- plus Andy, but I'll get back to him -- have been twitting me.  It's been a long time you've been doing this and nothing.  I seem to be becoming the Harold Stassen of adultery.  They've been urging me, just do it.  Pick a girl, get her into bed.

Now of course, there are a few missing steps, most notably: convincing the girl to go along with the plan.  But I've been trying, and I've learned a few things.

First and most important is that the person who usually shoots me down is ... me.  I see a woman and instantly start hunting for reasons not to talk to her.  She isn't looking at me, she's busy reading her book, something.  Screw that, I'm saying hi.

And that has been working.  I've been saying hello to random women and they say hello back.

I told you about Sarah.  That went, mmm, pretty well.  I didn't chicken out, I went through with the whole thing.  It didn't pay off, but it was good practice.

To a woman wheeling a roller suitcase across the street, I said, "How long are you in town?"  She gave me the drop-dead look, but said, "I'm not sure."  You can't let them intimidate you so I pressed on: "How long have you been in town?"  She glared.  "I'm not sure."  I laughed lightly and told her, "Then you've come to the right place."

OK, it was a nonsensical response, but I didn't wilt and I didn't apologize.  So yay me.

I was on the way to Andy's house and saw this stunningly gorgeous Asian girl, maybe -- maybe -- twenty years old.  "Afternoon," I said to her.  She stopped, looked at me, smiled, looked at the sky.  "It finally stopped raining."  "For a bit," I agreed.  She nodded in a friendly fashion and skipped off.

I could have stopped her, but I thought, at the time, "Hey, I'm late for Andy's house."  30 seconds later, the obvious thought -- "uh, forget Andy, he isn't a gorgeous and friendly 20-year-old girl!" -- occurred to me and I realized I had semi-deliberately bobbled another one.

I did one more today.  Retail clerk, I was buying a new light-fixture, she was ringing me up.  "Pretty spiffy, don't you think?" I asked her about the fixture.  "It's beautiful," she agreed quietly, in all sincerity.  "You aren't so bad yourself."  She looked away quickly.

I let that defeat me.  Grrr.  The French have an expression, "l'esprit de l'escalier" -- staircase wit, when you think of the thing you should have said as you're going down the stairs to leave.  I should have said, "I didn't mean to embarrass you.  I have a tendency to say what I'm thinking.  Just then, I was thinking you were pretty, so I said so.  Now I'm thinking how much I'd like to take you to dinner."

OK, maybe it wouldn't have worked.  Maybe she was married.  Or a lesbian.  Or a married lesbian.  Or maybe she just didn't like me.  The important thing is, I need to get shot down at the next level of interaction, not this one.

Andy, by the way, thinks I'm crazy.  He thinks it's absolutely impossible to pick up a stranger.  The only way to meet women, according to him, is at parties.  I don't think he's wrong.  Women respond to confidence and what could show more confidence than my walking up to them on the street and starting a conversation?