We had sex a second time
Dear friends —
This love note is about a date I went on, some months before the quarantine.
We were to meet in Los Feliz. According to Waze, I was running late for the 5 pm date — that was the time he’d suggested when I’d told him I had to get to a party by 8:30. I texted with apologies to push the date back 15 minutes, blaming the rain. Then I arrived five minutes after that.
The first thing I noticed as I walked into the restaurant was that his hair had more gray than in his photos. He got up, and immediately I felt disappointed, he hadn’t lied about his height but five seven was shorter than I’d remembered. He had a somewhat stocky build, and I thought about all the stocky, shorter men I’d known, I ran through them in my mind, noting I’d never been attracted to any of them, they’d all just been friends.
But he had kind eyes I liked. We said our hellos. I started chattering away the way I usually do when I meet someone, making small, inane comments about the traffic, the rain. And as I did I studied his face. I thought, he’s not a bad-looking man, in fact he’s a fairly good-looking man, just not one I’m attracted to.
He had picked an unfancy sushi spot, the kind with plasticky tables and plasticky menus, slightly dim, slightly dank. A couple other tables were taken up with early diners. I said I liked the rolls with lots of fish and no tempura, and he was very agreeable, we ordered three different kinds. We talked about food, then self-care, then exercise. He said he worked out three hours a day.
“That’s a lot!” I said. “Every day?”
He nodded. He clarified he didn’t work out for three hours straight, he usually drove to a forty-five minute spin class, then he drove to the gym where he lifted weights, with the travel time the whole thing took about three hours. He said he tried to eat healthy too, a lot of sushi and salads.
“I went through this period where I gained a bunch of weight, and then had to lose it,” he said. “I’m just not the kind of person who can eat what I want, or not exercise. I have to work out three hours a day, just to maintain it. ”
“How long ago was this, when you’d gained weight?”
“Not that long ago. Last July.”
I liked his energy — we’d had a nice conversation on the phone a few days before, and the calm openness he’d exuded then came through in his manner in person. The rolls arrived. I realized I was hungry then, and we ate quickly, I ate as much as he did.
After the last roll I glanced at my phone and said, “It’s like, barely six.” I still had two and a half hours until the party, but I couldn’t imagine us lingering at the restaurant, with our plastic cups of ice water. I regretted, vaguely, that I’d come so early, that I had created a schedule that made me anxious, rushing from Venice to Los Feliz.
It was still raining. We talked about going up the street for coffee at Bru, then about the House of Pies. “We could split a piece of pie,” he said, and I agreed to that, though as soon as I started discussing what pie, he seemed to lose his enthusiasm for it. “Is this about the weight thing again?” I asked, and he gave an ambiguous nod, and by the time he signed the check, it was clear, he didn’t want to get pie, he wanted to go to the coffee shop.
We got up. Because of my heels, he was just my height. I noticed the top of his head again, more salt than pepper, just starting to bald at the crown. I felt another little pang of sadness.
We stepped out into the drizzly street, jaywalked across Vermont in a half run. “So you’re really serious about eating healthy,” I said as we got to the other side. I asked him what the catalyst had been, for deciding to lose weight, and he grinned, a bit embarrassedly. He crinkled his nose.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be talking about this on a date,” he said, “but what happened was, there was this woman I was dating. And when we had sex, the first time we did it, I just felt gross.”
“Really?” I asked with genuine interest. “Gross?”
“Right. I mean, not the sex itself. It was great sex. But I just felt gross about myself. After that, just to see how it would go, I had sex with her a second time, and then I just felt gross again. So I told her I didn’t want to see her anymore.”
“What? You stopped seeing her?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t about her, I just — You can’t really go backwards, after you have sex. You can’t like, stop having sex and just hang out. And I didn’t want to keep having sex.”
“So you told her you didn’t want to see her anymore.”
“I told her I just didn’t want to date anyone right now. That it wasn’t about her, I just wasn’t in that place. I didn’t feel like I could really tell her what was going on. So that’s what I said — ”
“This poor woman.” I was quiet for a bit, lost in a sudden surge of empathy for this person I didn’t know. I felt I knew how she’d felt, though I would never feel how she’d felt about this particular man. “What did she say?”
“She said — I guess I don’t fit the image of what you’re looking for, or something like that.”
We continued discussing her during the two-block walk. He said after he’d lost weight he’d tried to look her up again, but that either she’d blocked him on Facebook or, more likely, deleted her profile. Despite the rain there were people on the street, walking briskly to the three-screen neighborhood theater, to Skylight Books, to Figaro Cafe, and as we talked he didn’t lower his voice as we passed them, he seemed unconscious of anyone else, he kept saying sex this, sex that, the repeated mention of sex made sense in the context of the conversation, he was just parsing out his thoughts, but as we passed people I could sense them pricking up their ears.
“It’s starting to make sense,” I said. “When we talked on the phone you made it seem like the reason you hadn’t had a serious relationship in eight years was just due to bad luck, and circumstance, but — clearly there were other issues going on.”
He made a what-can-you-do gesture. “It’s not like I just slept with her and dumped her right away,” he said. “We had sex a second time.”
At Bru he got a tea, and I got a turmeric latte. We sat looking at each other across a second plasticky table, white this time, in the brightly lit coffee shop, sleek and modern with local vegan cookies and fancy pastries and a fridge full of cold-pressed juice. A scatter of people clacked away on their laptops.
He asked me a bunch of questions, one right after the other so that in moments, it had the feel of an interrogation: did I have siblings and where did my sister live and what did she do, where did my mother live and why was I estranged from her and was my sister similarly estranged, what was the name of the novel I’d written and what was it about and was it autobiographical. He asked me a whole bunch of questions about Korea until I finally said, “I’m Korean, but that doesn’t mean I actually know a lot about Korea or Korean culture,” and he let it go.
Somehow we got to talking about what we’d done over the previous holidays. He said that Thanksgiving hadn’t been great, and that Christmas had been worse — without work to occupy him, he’d gotten lonely. But the day after Christmas, he’d made the sudden decision to go to Baja, and then he’d immediately started feeling better, like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He’d driven down and spent four days there. “It was beautiful. Perfect,” he said.
He had the air of a man at an interview for a job he believed he was well-qualified for. He sat straightbacked, knees apart, feet firmly planted on the floor. A strong defensive posture. A man determined to look decisive, capable, undesperate. His expression seemed to say, this is who I am, I’m hiding nothing, there’s nothing I’m ashamed of, take it or leave it, but it’s your loss if you pass, I know it and you know it.
The coffee shop emptied, it was just us and one guy in the small balcony area up the stairs. I went to the restroom and checked my phone. It was almost eight. When I came out I didn’t sit back down, and he got up too. “It’ll be nice to get to the party early, and actually have a chance to talk to my friend before everyone else gets there,” I said.
Outside the drizzle was heavier than before, but he walked me to my car. When we hugged he had this uncertain, questioning look in his eyes, like he was asking, well, how did I do?
Love,
Siel
P.S. This is an excerpt from a longer autofiction piece I’m working on, so if you have comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them along!
P.S.S. Hope you’re all staying healthy during these strange times. Three links you might enjoy:
Skillshare’s offering two months free for new members. You can take Roxane Gay’s personal essays class or live simpler or learn to draw.
I’ve been trying to do these 6-minute workouts at the end of each hour. They’re good breaks from sitting!
Who else is watching Succession right now? A number of HBO shows are streaming for free, in case you haven’t already heard.
P.P.S. Two books I’ve read recently that I recommend: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and Sarah Hepola’s memoir Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget.