Susan Cheever
Growing up in the 1950s, I heard many stern warnings about one-night stands. Men don’t respect you afterward. They won’t buy the cow if they can get the milk for free. Personally, I don’t like being compared to a cow. Furthermore, stern warnings often inspire me to do the opposite of what I am told. Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved one-night stands.
I never was one for picking up men in bars or in the next seat on an airplane. I usually met them at parties—New York is a city of parties. The two of us would start to chat, and the chat would become something more serious. We talked about work and our ambitions. We’d find a common interest in Edith Wharton or the Boston Red Sox. Soon we were sitting somewhere private in a corner. We would have another scotch or another glass of wine.
Then we would begin to touch each other—a hand on a shoulder to make a point, a light squeeze of the knee if a joke was particularly funny. I felt that familiar hot and cold feeling, that soaring and sinking, which I knew was my mind being overwhelmed by my physical excitement. I let it happen. Sometimes we would leave for a drink at a neighborhood bar; sometimes we simply took a taxi back to my apartment. In the cab, we kissed. I wondered about the condition of my apartment—had I made the bed? We kissed again and I forgot about housekeeping. Soon, we would be in my unmade bed, embracing each other and experiencing the awkward, thrilling moments of sex with a stranger.
If you are looking for love, sexual intimacy can be a shortcut. It is among the fastest ways to get to know another person. During sex, we literally and figuratively expose ourselves. We show physical parts that are usually kept covered; we display our private likes and dislikes. In its moments of unconscious response to physical pleasure, the body reveals a great deal of information: a need to dominate, a difficulty following suggestions, an inability to express desires. If we have trouble letting go or if we are painfully uncomfortable with how we look, it often shows up in the two-person drama of the sex act.
It’s scary to do something that lets another person in on so much private information, so many fears and discomforts, but it’s also ruthlessly efficient. Dinner in a fancy restaurant or even a long conversation in a dimly lit bar can be completely misleading. In e-mails and letters and telephone calls, people can act their way into being someone different. It’s easy to fool someone with a turn of phrase. Sex tells the truth.
Most erotic fantasies are about one-night stands. In my own, I imagine having sex with someone I’ve started dancing with at a party. We end up in a bedroom on a pile of coats left there by other partygoers. I smell the scent of someone’s perfumed lining and feel the softness of mink against my naked legs.
Somehow, I never fantasize about sex with my husband in a marital double bed that I’ve neatly made with hospital corners, or with a man who has just changed our baby’s diapers or emptied the dishwasher. Marriage can be sexy, too, but in my experience, it is never the stuff of fantasy. I think this is nature’s way of telling us that sexual intimacy is distinct from emotional and financial and domestic intimacy. What’s wonderful in bed can be disastrous in the nursery or the kitchen.
My deepest connections to men have often been at times when sex seemed like an impossibility, or at least an unpleasant afterthought. Two weeks after the birth of my beloved son, his father went to my favorite lingerie store and bought me a fabulous black lace teddy. I oohed and aahed politely as I unwrapped the layers of pink tissue, but the truth was that the skimpy fabric looked like an artifact from another life. Childbirth and its aftermath had given me enough discomfort for a lifetime. I could no longer imagine why a woman would ever wear such an impractical thing.
When my husband and I finally did have sex after the baby was born, it was without the seductions of black lace. It was clumsy. Tentative. It felt like sex between two people who had just had their first conversation. It was, in many ways, like a one-night stand.
When I was a young woman in the early 1960s, I knew my life wouldn’t really start until I was married. Abortion was illegal, and we all knew horror stories about what could happen to women who tried it anyway. Birth control was unwieldy and difficult to get—a visit to Planned Parenthood with a fake engagement ring one afternoon yielded me nothing but embarrassment. Given the situation, I planned to sleep only with men who were willing to marry me. The trouble is, my sexual enthusiasm far outweighed my desire to be a twenty-year-old housewife. Still, I managed to restrain myself: By the time I did get married at what I thought was the ripe old age of twenty-three, I’d been sexually intimate with only a few men I’d assumed I would be with for the long haul. What we think of as the swinging 1960s didn’t really begin until the early 1970s, and it wasn’t until the sad end of my first marriage that I was released into the wild, fevered sexual freedom of that time. By then, abortion was legal and birth control was available and easy to take. No one had heard of AIDS.
A one-night stand is the erotic manifestation of carpe diem—only we are seizing the night instead of the day. Though sex with a long-term partner is many things, it is not that. With a husband or a boyfriend, there is the delicious certainty that pleasure will be both given and received. Sex feels like a series of shared secrets, a passage through a maze leading to the most wonderful feelings available to human beings. With a long-term partner, I can relax. He is not surprised by the moles on my back, nor is he self-conscious about the hair on his shoulders. There’s a kind of transcendence to married sex, a connection that is more than the sum of body parts linked and flesh responding, as if this most physical of acts was also the threshold to spiritual intimacy.
One-night stands can be spiritual in another way: they can be sex without expectations. They are a leap of faith because you never know quite where they will lead. My one-night stands were never planned, and they were always, in their own ways, mysterious. Occasionally they took place in the afternoon in a hotel. Once, there was a dazzling ten-minute interlude bent over a washing machine with a fellow Sunday luncheon guest in someone else’s suburban laundry room. When I was an editor at Newsweek, they sometimes happened early in the morning in the little infirmary room next to the copy machine. At the time, staying at the office until the next morning and editing in the same clothes was a rite of passage for anyone with ambition. One night, a writer I admired was also working late, and we ended up walking out of the lobby together and into the romantic early-morning streets. Remember Marlon Brando singing about that time of day in Guys and Dolls? “The street belonged to the cop, and the janitor with the mop . . .” The writer offered to see me home.
When we got there, I opened a bottle of wine. “Let’s drink this in bed,” he said. Afterward, we both fell asleep for a few hours, and I woke up thinking about how much happier I’d be if he wasn’t there. I admired his work, not his body. He snored. He took up a lot of space in my bed. When he finally roused himself, he halfheartedly asked if I wanted to go out for breakfast, and I pleaded a headache. After that, we went back to being friendly office mates. We had tried out a different kind of relationship and found that it didn’t work.
One-night stands can be nothing more than a few hours of pleasure, or they can be the beginning of something much more important, and it’s impossible to tell until it’s too late. Another man I slept with, never intending anything serious, was married to an acquaintance of mine, but she was far away. It was summer in New York City, when wives and children stayed in the country and all domestic rules seemed breakable. It was too hot to feel guilty as I should have felt. Slowly, with a lot of laughter and in the kind of emotionally woozy state that results from staying up too long, we repaired to my bedroom. The sex wasn’t particularly memorable; we were both tired and quite drunk. I fell into a fitful sleep and woke to find myself sheltered in his arms. His flesh was pleasantly warm. He smelled good. I drifted off again, feeling buoyant and safe.
When we officially woke up a few hours later we tried to pretend that everything was normal. I made coffee and changed the sheets. He got on the telephone with an editor, then called his wife and checked on his children. It was no use. By the time we wandered out to lunch we both knew something huge had happened. Our connection felt capricious, as if there had been a potion in my nightcap, or as if a rascally little boy had aimed an arrow in our direction. We sat in a bar, holding hands, reveling in our exhilaration at having found each other and in our suffering at having to part. It was as if we had been together forever; I felt an uncanny sense of destiny fulfilled. The world, however, didn’t care. I had to be in Boston for dinner. He had a plane to catch.
That one-night stand led to a thirty-five-year love affair—the most enduring love of my life. Some kind of deep intimacy between us had been released, an intimacy that remains decades later. After more than fifteen years of obstacles—my guilt, his guilt and pain, limited resources, our own confusion—we eventually married and had a wonderful son. I had no idea what was going to happen when I casually invited him up to my apartment. If I had known, would I have gone home alone?
That is the real danger of a one-night stand. Not that it will lead to nothing, but that it will lead to everything. In this way, casual sex is excruciatingly hazardous. Those who are not ready to have their life changed should probably abstain.