In Manhattan, in 2002, meeting someone from the internet was still something you might lie to your friends about.
There were no dating apps because there weren’t any apps. Your decidedly unsmart phone was mostly useful for calling/texting people and playing Snake. If you wanted to meet strangers online, you went home, sat down at a computer, logged onto a website, and kept that shit to yourself.
That had changed with the advent of the Nerve Personals, the dating section of an online sex-and-culture magazine called Nerve. It attracted the kind of downtown people who wanted to meet someone online but didn’t necessarily want to think of themselves as the kind of people who met someone online.
Yumi was half Japanese, half Scots-Irish, with an amazing smile, an incredible body, and oodles of charisma. Much later, I found out she worked at Flashdancers, the famed Manhattan strip club. But that’s another story.
We immediately got along. She was so charming, so funny, and within a couple of drinks we were telling stories and laughing like people who’d known each other for a while.
This was a while back. I was pretty green and definitely wasn’t one of those guys who went into every date expecting to convert. I was just thinking: This is great. I’d really like to see her again.
Again, this was pre-dating apps, pre-smartphones, pre-shoving your tongue into a stranger’s asshole within an hour of meeting them becoming more or less normal.
So I was taken aback when Yumi said something like, “So, you live right around the corner, huh?”
I wasn’t so green that I couldn’t pick up on what she was putting down. The ball was in my court.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to roll with the sudden escalation and up the ante. “But don’t you live even closer?”
Then something changed. She got cagey. It took a little wheedling before she finally explained the situation.
“Well, my boyfriend is home.”
Your what?
Apparently, this was not information Yumi had considered important enough to include in her profile or mention at any point in the last hour or so.
Before I could process it, she started reassuring me.
“No, no, no. He knows I’m here.”
So her boyfriend knew she was on a date with me? He knew what might happen afterward? This was all apparently permitted? Even if it was true, this didn’t make me feel better.
These days we have an entire vocabulary for this stuff: open marriages, ethical non-monogamy, polyamory. But this was in like, 2002 and all very novel to a kid a few years out of college.
I regained my composure and started asking questions. I wanted to understand what was going on.
Yumi explained that her boyfriend did his own thing. He slept with other women. While she insisted that everything was above board, I groked that there was clearly some history there, maybe some hurt feelings. Her position seemed to be: If he’s going to get his, I’m going to get mine. Her story was: He’s actually fine with that. In fact, he encourages it.
I think she even mentioned that her boyfriend had picked out the underwear she’d come to meet me wearing. While I found the whole thing fascinating, I also suspected that, as hot as Yumi was, quite literally inserting myself into their marriage might be a terrible idea.
Yumi, meanwhile, was still perfectly happy to come back to my place.
I let her know that I wasn’t up for it. At least not right now.
“Oh, bummer,” she said. “So the date’s over?”
“No!” I said. “I’m having a great time with you.”
I explained that I just wasn’t sure I wanted to sleep with her until I’d had time to process this novel setup. Somehow, I arrived at the most wholesome way to continue the date without drinking more alcohol, possibly reversing my decision, and living to regret it.
“Wanna watch a movie?”
I’m not sure if we grabbed a Village Voice or called Moviefone, but those were definitely the two ways you found out what was playing on the fly before 2006. We stumbled into a late screening at the Angelika, watched a movie together – I can’t remember what it was – and afterward I walked Yumi home. We hugged. That was that.
I went to bed very happy to have met Yumi but feeling like I had successfully avoided getting mixed up in something potentially very complicated.
The next day, while I was having my lunch in a park not far from where I’d dropped Yumi off the night before, my phone rang.
It was an unknown number.
“Hello?”
“You don’t know me. I’m Yumi’s boyfriend.”
Oh, fuck.
His name was Max.
“Listen,” I immediately said. “Nothing happened between us.”
“That’s what she said.”
Great. Except Max didn’t sound convinced.
“She says you guys went to a movie?”
“That’s right.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, seriously. We went to a movie.”
Max kept asking questions. Where had we gone? What had we done?
While I scrambled to give an answer, a fire truck went screaming past me.
Max stopped.
“Wait. Where are you?”
“What?”
“I heard that fire truck. Are you in Soho?”
“Er, yeah.”
“What park?”
I told him.
“I’ll be there in two minutes.”
Part of me considered fleeing the scene, but a slightly larger part was excited to see what would happen next.
Two minutes later, the live-in boyfriend of the woman I had declined to sleep with was coming to find me.
Then Max appeared. He was about 5’8” in his mid-thirties and had a comically exasperated expression on his face. Almost immediately, the situation became less threatening and considerably stranger. He shook my hand. He shrugged theatrically. He wasn’t there to punch me. He really wanted to talk.
Once he became satisfied that Yumi and I really had gone to a movie – I may have even offered the ticket stubs for him to inspect – his suspicion turned into something closer to bewilderment.
“She’s smoking hot, man!” he insisted.
I was being interrogated by a boyfriend who apparently found the idea that I had not fucked his common-law wife deeply suspicious.
I told him that I agreed but that being even tangentially involved in some strangers’ bizarro marriage was exactly the sort of interaction I was trying to avoid.
Eventually, after about 20 minutes of this farcical conversation, Max seemed to accept what hadn’t happened and strolled off.
We began bumping into each other around the neighborhood, then hanging out intentionally. Yumi came along too. Suddenly we were all friends.
Max was wildly eccentric, always up to some new scheme to get money or bring a hot new girl into their home, to make money materialize absent of effort. It was becoming clear that encouraging Yumi to go have fun with other people was a way to get her to give him a pass on his bullshit. It seemed messy, unsustainable, but interesting to hear about from just outside the splash zone.
Before long, they were fully integrated into my social circle.
They eventually got married. A few years later, as pretty much everyone who knew them had predicted, they got divorced.
I remained friends with both of them and got roped into countless wacky situations with each over the years.
Then, about a decade after our first G-rated date, Yumi and I finally slept together. Many times, actually.
The funny thing was that by then, it didn’t seem remotely complicated. In the intervening years I’d really gotten some experience under my belt, been in open relationships and even an open marriage myself. The arrangement Max and Yumi had tried to explain to me in 2002 – the one that had seemed so strange and potentially disastrous that I’d taken an incredibly hot woman to the movies rather than sleep with her – had become pretty unremarkable.
I hadn’t become Max. I still thought their particular version of it was a fucking mess. But somewhere along the way, the part that had once seemed so exotic – the idea that two people could love each other and still sleep with other people – had stopped seeming exotic at all.
By the time I finally slept with Yumi, I wasn’t entering some strange new world. I already lived there.
