After-sex dilemmas

I slept with a good friend and got the Morning-After Speech: We can't do this again or we'll ruin the friendship. Should I be good and stay out of his way, or go for it, like I want to?

By Cary Tennis

Mar 26, 2002 | Dear Readers,

Several of you thought that Ugly Guy got off too easily last week, that he had problems new clothes couldn't solve, that he needed to fix his attitude, get more humble, be less irritating, gain some insight or something like that. That's probably true. A guy who finally realizes at age 38 that he's ugly probably has some things to learn in other areas of life, and buying new clothes is not going to solve all his problems.

But, as will be said often here, this column tries to respond to the question that was asked. The magic, if there is any, happens in addressing the details, the concrete, literal facts of life. I am not optimistic about the possibility of great, overnight change. I celebrate the little things, the buying of a tie, the regular shaving, the better-than-average haircut. I know many Salon readers find it hard to understand the difficulties others face in solving small practical problems. But I rather admire the courage it takes for someone to look in the mirror and admit his displeasure at what he finds there, and set out to see what he can do to improve it.

It's not that I don't believe in the possibility of deep emotional and spiritual change. I just don't think a letter from me is likely to make it happen. But if you like metaphors for self-improvement, be my guest: Having admitted that he's powerless over his own ugliness, he's undertaken steps to change what he can!

Dear Cary,

My smart, good, single male friend, with whom I have been friends since we both began working together two years ago, and I got drunk last Saturday and had some of the best sex I've ever had. We'd been crying in our numerous cocktails about loves that had never panned out, our single-folk loneliness, and then I grabbed his head and planted one on him -- something I'd considered doing long before. At first it was just bodies with a lot of pent up sexual energy going at it. And then, somewhere around Hour 4, I know I was sober enough to know exactly what I was doing. And to feel joy from it, and freedom, and release, and a great deal of gratitude.

And I told him so the next morning. And got that chilling little speech, the one I thought I'd heard for the last time in my 20s: I think we shouldn't do this again. We're going to risk the friendship. It's not wise. All true, true. And I of course was graceful, and nodded my head like the smart girl I am, and said he could have it his way. And it's been little stolen glances but civil conversation ever since.

So now I vacillate between feeling sorry for myself (Why do I always get cast as the chubby comic relief, the sage best friend; why can't I be the ingénue this fucking once?) and just being happy to feel alive again, sexually and emotionally: to be waylaid by sudden lust, to feel the rough place on my thumb where my skin rubbed off from holding on to his headboard for hours. And wondering if the reason we both keep coming to work so early is that neither of us is sleeping very well. Wondering how his own skin is fitting him at exactly this moment.

The truth is, I don't want to think in terms of What's to Come. I don't have big plans. I just want to kiss him sober, once, to see how it feels: to see if what lit the world up so brightly was us, or a bottle. Did I mention we're good citizens who rarely drink, who are responsible and respectable and whose idea of a hot evening usually consists of Scrabble? For fuck's sake, we started the evening playing Monopoly. And we were amazing and decadent and I don't want to stop. I really, really don't want to stop. And if I did what I want to do and ran over there and laid it all on the line like this, I would scare the living hell out of him. Dear him, whose polite, genuine total decency I never dreamed shared a body with someone who could talk so beautifully dirty and make a beggar out of me.

Am I doing the right thing, staying out of his way, letting his declaration that nothing should change stand? Am I wrong to be good? Or should I do what I want to do: tell him I don't care about where it leads us, but that I want him, and all that messy complication, right in my bed, right now?

Losing My Discretion

Dear Indiscreet,

My wife and I went to see "Monster's Ball" and then ate at Fresca, a Peruvian restaurant in San Francisco's West Portal neighborhood, and we sat against the wall, and I had grilled salmon tacos and she had the marinated pork. The waiter tried to give her the fish tacos and me the pork because that's how they assume we eat but it's not like that with us, she likes the pork and I like the fish, and he switched the plates, and it was loud in the restaurant and I told her about your letter, and what a shame it seemed to me, and how I felt for you and thought you should just go for it, how I identified with your desire to be the ingénue for once, to be the babe, not the chubby friend, and how cruel guys can be when they haul out "the speech" if they really like you but you're not the proper babe type, because they care what their friends think, and they want the intimacy but not at the expense of their status in the guy group. And she said, oh yes, guys are cruel, they have the power of selection and they know it, and they don't mind hurting you. And I said, What? because it was loud in the restaurant, and she repeated it, and I said, Why does it always have to be about the friendship? Friends are a dime a dozen when you're young, but great sex! Now that's something! Fuck the friendship! For once why can't it just be about the sex? And people turned because maybe I was shouting but who cares? It's the truth! What a bullshit excuse!

And then the next day we went up to Point Reyes with the dogs and I was still thinking about your letter and I said to my wife, Tell me what was that you said yesterday about that letter and she said she didn't remember, but it was something about guys, and how they want to dump you before you dump them, because they're scared of what the other guys think, and she said she couldn't believe how much people care about status and I said, What? Like you don't care about status? And then she gave me a look and said she didn't, and we had an argument about the distinction between just wanting to be really, really good at something for its own sake and caring about status, and then I admitted I care about status somewhat and I admitted it pleases me when people tell me my wife is beautiful, which they do, no they don't, she said, oh yes they do, I said, and I like that except the way they say it when people tell me my wife is so beautiful they always say it like they're surprised. Which I could do without the note of surprise but that's how people are. They look at me, they look at her, they figure whatever.

So come on, please, just for me, do it again, jump this guy, don't let him weasel out, and don't make a big scene with him like you've got some complicated program he has to sign up for, like I was saying in the restaurant, just get him drunk again and screw him!

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