(Please Note: This is a serialized follow-up essay to, and meant to be read after reading “Peep Show.” If you missed ’em, here’s part one and here’s part two)
The next week, before her Tuesday shift, we meet at Mr. Bing’s. At first we’re both shy. This is all so backwards. We have interacted sexually, but never platonically. We laugh about that. I am wary that we’re sitting behind a plate glass window facing the street. I think of the former jock in the gray suit, his affair. I will not be him. I don’t want to have to explain this, to introduce Triste to someone I know who might see us from the street. I’ve never told anyone but my wife and three therapists about any of my furtive habits, have always been mortified that someone would see me coming out of a club, first in New York, now in San Francisco. Regardless of whether this thing with Triste remains platonic, my sexual habits are still a dirty secret, and if I were to have to introduce her to anyone who happened by and saw us from the street and came in, well, Triste might be the kind of person who’d be much too forthright about how we know each other.
After our first drink, conversation eases, I stop sneaking wary glances outside. Dusk fades and streetlights come on. After our second drink, our hands touch on the bar. We leave them touching. They intertwine the way hands do. We talk about both being nervous, about poetry, about theater, about life. Somewhere in the middle of our third drink, she moves closer, we kiss – she moves closer still, and we kiss some more. Then checks the time, powders her nose, leaves for work. She leaves behind her a sweet smell, from powder or perfume. It stays with me as I go to the club and we have a session, boundaries more blurred than ever. I am dizzy with it.
That day it became adultery to me, even though we didn’t have sex. We met maybe eight times after that over the course of several months. In Mr. Bing’s, in another bar in her neighborhood (both of which were thankfully very remote from where I lived, from most people I knew), in Golden Gate park, in her apartment. We first had sex in her apartment. It was immediately disappointing in the way that almost any fantasy turned reality must become disappointing, at least at first. The real person, Triste-not-Sassafras was, well, a real person, a young, troubled, often sad person. A college educated, literate/literary, smart, damaged, creative person. A sexual adventurer, a risk-taker; an abused child, raised largely in communes by hippie lesbians; a person I was fascinated by but whom I knew – in the various substantive and amorphous ways that one knows such things – I would never want to be in a relationship with and who didn’t seem terribly interested in anything more from me than whatever I had to offer. A person who often cried during and after sex, but didn’t want me to stop.
While the sex was disappointing, in part because of her sadness, in part because of my guilt, in part because our bodies just didn’t connect somehow, there were still thrills when we would meet, the most torturous of which was that she always wanted to make out in public; she’d put my hand up her shirt in bars, try to get me to have sex in the car scary things for anyone, all the more so for married-man me. Once, while we were parked in her neighbor’s driveway, a cop pulled up and tapped on the window (which was actually fogged up just like in the movies!) at a very awkward moment. He just told us to move on, but it was a fucking nightmare, literally.
What surprised me most was that I still enjoyed seeing her at the club more than anything else. It surprised me twofold: that the reality of Triste didn’t become better than interludes with Sassafras; and that I could still recreate the fantasy of Sassafras (made better by Triste’s existence lurking somewhere behind Sassafras’ eyes although she never discernibly altered her stage persona as I’d always known it) as soon as there was that little window between us.
In large part, I was also unable to enjoy the sexual part of the affair because it was just that, an affair, and I am a miserably guilty person – I am not built for affairs. I told my wife, finally, that we had gone out for drinks, but never about the sex. I didn’t tell her about the sex out of guilt and fear sure, but also out of greed: Sassafras, my wife and I could share; Triste was mine.
About three months in, I cut things off with Triste. Or rather, I imagined having to cut things off, but it was much more ambiguous than that – I just stopped calling and she didn’t try to reach me. (She had my pager number, which I found endearingly cliche and trashy.) I was just one of several sexual adventures she was pursuing at the time, in addition to having a serious boyfriend of over a year’s standing; she was in a stage of sexual self-discovery that I envied but could never have indulged in. After the calls faded out, we still exchanged emails every now and then, and I would see her at the club and it would be what it had always been, if a little newly tinged with a vague sadness, and that was it. A few more months later, she moved to New York. We still exchanged emails, but with less and less frequency.
