Really Good, Actually(35)

This was more information than I’d wanted, about the dog or his emotional history. He looked away wistfully, and it seemed like he might cry. I really, really didn’t want him to.

“All I’m hearing is that dog food’s been in there for three months at least,” I said.

Simon pursed his lips in mock-annoyance. “Do you want this beer or not?”

I took it and thanked him, leaning over to awkwardly clink the base of my beer with his. He was farther away than anticipated, and the amount of effort expended to reach him was made immediately pathetic by the dull thud of glass barely tapped against glass.

“What about you?” he asked. “When was your last relationship?”

I paused for a moment, then said it had been a while since I’d seen anyone. Even so, my love life wasn’t that interesting. Nothing major to report.

“Really?” he asked. “No big loves? No ‘one that got away’?”

“Nope.” I shrugged. “Not a relationship person, I guess.” I told him I’d recently deleted Tinder for the fourth time and hoped it would stick.

Simon had not ventured onto the apps. He had been casually seeing a friend of a friend, and their time together seemed to be running its course. She had been asking, with increased frequency, for him to slap her in the face while they had sex.

“I want to give her what she wants, obviously,” he said. “But it feels a bit . . . soon maybe? I’m trying to figure out how to do it in a respectful way.”

I told him that might be missing the point. There was an unpleasant moment in which Simon was obviously thinking over how to say something, and then he came out with it: “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to sleep together.”

“You don’t have to slap me,” I said. “I mean, you could. I’ve never tried that, but I’m sure it’s, like, a step up from hair pulling, which at this point in the discourse is basically kissing, right?”

“It’s not that,” he said.

I was starting to feel embarrassed. He was the one who invited me here! What had he thought was going to happen? I recalled a phrase I had been shocked to learn was common parlance in Australia: “I’m not here to fuck spiders.” I had first heard of this saying from a bisexual polyamorist from Melbourne, with whom I’d shared a drink and a conversation about whether I’d be an appropriate participant in the threesome she and her husband were hoping to arrange. We did not have the threesome, in the end, but it’s always fun to learn something new about language.

It occurred to me that I had read the entire situation wrong. Maybe this man did not find me incredibly compelling, as his behavior, speech, and body language had suggested. Maybe he was only trying to avoid a lawsuit for 6Bites. Maybe he was “too nice,” and this kind of misunderstanding happened to him all the time, his friends always warning him to stop inviting strange women back to his place for a long talk and no sex over one beer. Maybe he had a bad penis. Maybe he was gay. I was about to make my excuses to the overly polite homosexual company man with the busted dick when he put his hand on my leg and my brain stopped working.

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.