New Yorkers can tell a lot about someone by their neighborhood. Or at least, we think we can.
East Village. Bushwick. Bay Ridge. Murray Hill. Flushing. Upper East Side. Each one conjures a little persona. A type. A set of assumptions about where somebody shops, what they drink, how much money they make, what kind of apartment they live in, what music they like, and probably what they’re like in bed.
Unfair? Sure. But we all do it. I’d venture to say that these geographical tells were much more pronounced in years gone by, even as recently as September 2015, which is when this incident took place.
I’d just moved back to New York from Vancouver. I was freshly separated from my wife and close to finalizing a speedy divorce, but I wasn’t exactly emerging from a monastery. Our marriage had been open and, for about seven years, it had worked well. Then, in its seventh year, Mika met a man who inspired her to give monogamy and even procreation a shot. I made a half-hearted counterproposal full of concessions, compromises, and capitulations, but we both knew I was deep in the throes of abject promiscuity and would have felt chafed by the bargain she was driving.
During our marriage, during which we lived on either side of the North American continent, I’d been flinging it about with reckless abandon. I had a body count far higher than my charms and visage could conceivably achieve; I’d been to countless sex parties, enjoyed numerous threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes. All in all, I’d lived a pretty libertine, bohemian existence because I was married, not in spite of my marriage. After all, being open had been her idea.
I was no longer shy. I was no longer green. And, probably more importantly, I thought I knew how to read people. I knew the tells, particularly as they appeared on their Hinge profiles.
I was good enough at spotting sex-positive explorers to know that a longtime Upper East Side resident who designed dresses for a living was probably not one of them. But she was extremely attractive, and when the action slows, and your wife has left you for another man, you’re a little more apt to roll the dice.
Cara came downtown. She was every bit as lovely-looking as her profile package had promised. She was half Anglo, half Filipina, with glossy black hair in a side braid, and was very well put together.
By the time she arrived at The Ten Bells, I’d already secured a spot for us to sit, drink, and get to know each other. The Ten Bells was dark and intimate, with flattering lighting. We hadn’t been there long when I made some self-effacing joke about having deliberately chosen a place where the low lighting obscured my age. I’d made that joke a lot, and it always had the same effect.
She laughed. Her body language became more open. Things were going well.
We started talking about relationships. She told me she’d basically spent her adult life in two enormous ones: five years with one guy, seven with another, without too much time in between. She added that both relationships had eventually fizzled sexually. She seemed smart, self-aware, if a little wounded, a little twitchy, neurotic.
Then she asked about me. I mentioned that my marriage had been open. Her eyes widened. Clearly she’d skimmed my profile and had no clue that she was enjoying a drink with a sexual stuntman.
She looked genuinely stunned, as though I’d just revealed some exotic sexual practice I’d picked up while living among an isolated tribe in the Amazon. Her body language reverted to a more guarded position.
“Um. What am I getting myself into?” she asked.
“You’re not getting yourself into anything,” I said, firm, slightly confrontational, icy cool. My assured delivery sticks in my mind because I don’t think I’ve ever been so nonchalant about anything before or since.
A few minutes later, with a little more flirtation, she said, “Wait. What am I signing up for?”
I explained that having previously been in an open marriage didn’t mean I required anything unusual from her. I wasn’t recruiting. I wasn’t trying to initiate her into some secret downtown sex cult. I was just a newly divorced guy having a drink with a woman I thought was attractive.
At some point she told me something else: If she went home with a guy on the first date, she said, she never saw him again. Maybe it was a rule. Or perhaps just an observation about herself.
I told her I’d like to see her again. So if that was how it worked for her, no pressure. We could finish our drinks, say goodnight, and see each other another time.
Twenty minutes later she looked at me.
“Actually, I want to go home with you.”
“We don’t have to,” I assured her. “I’d like to see you again.”
For all of my sexual adventuring, I didn’t get a lot out of one-night stands. I liked to get to know someone; I liked to be kept around. I saw myself as a sort of sexual reservist you might know over the course of years, as I’d filled that role for several women.
We went back to my place, all 260 square feet of it. I poured us drinks. We talked some more, made out on my IKEA couch.
“Take me to your bed,” she said.
I carried her the four feet into my little alcove bedroom and laid her on the bed. More kissing. I removed some of her clothing until she was only in her underwear.
And I took my time. I like taking my time. Not as some magnanimous gesture. It isn’t something I do as a favor. It’s genuinely for me. I like anticipation. I like the process of getting there. It turns me on. Slowly touching, huffing, kissing, and licking pussy work like instant Viagra. But apparently, I would be doing very little of any of that tonight.
“Okay, okay,” she said in a frustrated tone.
“Huh,” I said, running the bridge of my nose up and down her slick, waxed vulva.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she asked.
“Um, I’m nuzzling your pussy,” I answered, quite confused by her line of inquiry.
“Well, hurry up. Put it in.”
Put it in? Was she doing a bit? I laughed a little and asked what the rush was.
“Fuck me!” she screamed. “Let’s fucking go!”
I told her that I liked to get turned on a little more, that this wasn’t my first rodeo.
That was the wrong answer.
And that was when the entire evening detonated.
“This is fucking ridiculous!” she said.
Suddenly she was furious.
“You need therapy.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“You’re a freak!” she hissed.
There was clearly no recovering from this.
One minute we were naked in bed. The next she was pulling her clothes back on in a rage.
I was completely bewildered.
I offered to walk her downstairs and get her a cab.
“Don’t bother.”
I went down with her anyway. The thirty seconds that elapsed before a yellow cab pulled over felt like an hour, especially since she would not say a word or even look at me. She got in and disappeared into the New York night. I went back upstairs, rattled.
Not because she’d left. Dates go badly. People change their minds. Sex gets weird. That was nothing new to me. What rattled me was how completely I’d misread what was happening.
In the eleven years since that evening, I’ve often wondered what the fuck was going through her head. I’ve arrived at two plausible explanations.
One: She changed her mind but wasn’t comfortable simply saying so, and manufactured a reason to make a sudden exit.
Two: She absolutely did want to have sex, but my failure to immediately ravage her registered as rejection. After twelve years in relationships that had eventually fizzled sexually, maybe my idea of enthusiasm looked to her exactly like the beginning of the end.
There are probably other explanations. What sticks with me is how certain I’d been that I knew what was happening.
I thought taking my time communicated desire. She apparently heard something else entirely. Same apartment. Same bed. Two completely different realities.
That was the humbling part. I’d gone into the evening thinking seven years of an open marriage and countless sexual adventures had made me an astute reader of people. Maybe experience teaches you a few things. It can also make you more confident when you’re completely fucking wrong.
I’d clocked Cara before she’d even arrived: Upper East Side. Wedding dress designer. Two long relationships. A little conventional. Over the course of the date, she’d undoubtedly clocked me too: divorced, open marriage, downtown, sexually adventurous.
We’d both constructed entire people from a handful of clues.
Eleven years later, I still don’t know exactly what happened in my apartment that night. I guess I couldn’t read the room.
