He removed it almost as quickly, but the idea, let’s say, had been planted. I moved toward him, and he shifted slightly backward, saying, “I need to tell you something first.”
I leaned back on the couch, tucking my legs underneath me in an effort to look understanding and ready to listen and also, probably, small. Simon took a deep breath and launched into a long, emotional story, the short version of which was that he had cheated on his girlfriend.
Of course! Of course he had. Naturally he was not just some super-bachelor who appeared out of nowhere, rescuing divorced women from low-stakes lawn game accidents. He was a classic bad man, a dirty dog. He had met someone at a vodka-sponsored food festival （for god’s sake） and slept with her and lied about it for several months, until confessing and getting kicked out of his apartment by a woman who had done nothing but love and support him （probably） for the last four years of her now-wasted life.
It was a classic tale, and one I knew well, having talked many friends through near-identical scenarios in recent years. For straight women in their late twenties, getting cheated on by a partner is basically jury duty.
I told him this made me think 40 percent less of him but did not particularly impact my feelings about whether to spend the night in his bed. The relief that spread across his face seemed unrelated to sex.
“Really?”
“You caught me at a good time,” I said. “I’ve been reading a lot of Esther Perel.”
He seemed, again, like he might cry. I patted his back and considered telling him about my breakup, but decided it was not enormously relevant and might even, in this instance, be bragging. After all, neither Jon nor I had broken the one mandatory condition of contemporary romantic coupling; we had done the noble thing and slowly fallen out of love over time.
I considered saying something like do you want to talk about it? though this proved totally unnecessary. He did want to talk about it. A lot. It was interesting to hear him wrestle with so many things at once: whether the relationship would have ended on its own some other way （probably）， whether he was a good person （unclear）， whether he should be dating again yet （unclear but . . . probably not）， and what to do about the “toxic male paradigm” （his words） in which he had been raised and socialized. His sentences were full of conditions, deferments to his various privileges. He used a lot of therapy terms. This was clearly a man who journaled.
I told him it seemed like a positive sign that he felt bad, that he was doing all this therapy and asking all these slightly lame questions about morality and love and manhood.
“I hope so,” he said.
He looked sweet and nervous and shy, the casually confident man from the bar punctured and deflated by the great lawn dart of life. I tried to temper some of the empathy I felt by thinking about how mad his girlfriend probably was and would remain for some time. If I was her friend I would have suggested we burn him in effigy. But I did not know her, so instead I was in his living room, waiting for him to stop moping and go down on me.
He finished his beer and said, “I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m fundamentally a worse person than I thought I was. How can you tell if something you did was a stupid mistake or a real sign of your character?”
I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I suggested we go to his room.
The sex was more intimate than I was hoping for—I could see how this man’s style might require some lead-up to a slap—but also significantly better than average. Like everything else about him, it was sincere and engaged and purposeful. I wondered if this was because he didn’t know I was divorced; as far as he was concerned I was just some woman, single for normal reasons. Maybe what I was feeling was the absence of pity, the way someone touched you when they didn’t know your life was in shambles. Whatever it was, I felt connected to him in a way that I hadn’t with anyone else I’d been out with since Jon. This was annoying, to be sure, but you can’t argue with technique. After a combined four orgasms we fell asleep, the streetlamps outside shining directly into the bedroom.
The next morning, I woke up spooning Simon tightly—a position borrowed from my married life, and something I had been humiliated to find myself doing instinctually with several recent dates. It never felt right: the familiarity of the feeling and the strangeness of the people brought on an unsettling emotional vertigo. I tried to remove my hand without jostling him. He muttered something, half asleep, then turned me over, the crook of his elbow on my waist, his forearm coming to rest between my boobs. I lay there awkwardly, wondering how long it would take for him to get up so I could leave.
When my eyes opened an hour or so later, I was alone. I dressed quickly and came out into the kitchen, my mouth tasting stale and feeling textured. Simon was making coffee in a robe.
“Morning,” he said amiably. The robe was monogrammed.
“I think I’m late for work.”
I walked into his weirdly clean bathroom and rinsed my mouth with toothpaste, jamming my finger clumsily around my gums and teeth and the sides of my tongue.
“You can use my toothbrush if you want,” Simon yelled from the kitchen.
“What? That’s . . . no thank you.”
Simon popped his head around the door: “Doesn’t seem less hygienic than anything else we got up to, but suit yourself. Coffee?”
“I have to get going.”
“Sorry for oversharing last night,” he said. “I’ve been struggling with how to be transparent about my past with new people while also being conscious not to, you know, emotional dump.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“It’s really, um, don’t worry about it,” I said distractedly, my eyes scanning the living room for things I’d dropped the night before. I grabbed my phone from where he’d plugged it in （！） on his nightstand and put my hair up in a bun. When I came back out to the kitchen, there was coffee on the counter in a to-go cup.
“You just have these in your apartment?”
“A friend of mine manages a coffee shop,” he said. “Slips me a sleeve every now and then. I mostly use them to take beer to the park.”
I picked it up and took a sip. It was delicious.
“Are you a serial killer?”
He laughed and leaned toward me, pressing his lips to mine with a surprising amount of force for eight a.m. and pushing me up against his open front door. For a second, I thought he might try to take me back to the bedroom, but he pulled away, looked at me, and said, “That was nice. I’d like to see you again.”
This was very off-putting.
“Were you raised in a cult?” I asked. “Are you American, or something?”
A neighbor opened the door across the hall, and I was suddenly conscious of my smudged mascara, my conspicuously backcombed hair. Simon made a conspiratorial face at me, then waved at the neighbor, a hip dad who looked put together, if sleepy. It struck me that this man was probably five years older than me at most, and yet I felt like a teen caught necking at the movies by a grown-up. I wondered if he considered me a peer or a young person, if he waved at a lot of women in this hallway. The neighbor disappeared down the stairs and I turned to Simon, my ridiculous paper cup hot in my hand.