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Sleeping with someone you're not sleeping with can be a tricky proposition, partly because the need to desexualize the relationship often emphasizes the possibilities. One person showers while the other person dresses, and all that separates two mostly naked people is a hollow, wood-veneer bathroom door. "Don't turn around" is as much a dare as a warning. Sharing a bed in a Cambodian hotel room, two platonic friends in t-shirts and pajama bottoms discover that their modesty is no match for the Southeast Asian heat, and off come the nightclothes. Even waking up to a strange face provokes the question: What exactly happened last night?
Sometimes, the tension is almost unbearable. Once, in Ho Chi Minh City, I invited Mary Ellen over to check out the ultramodern hotel room I was reviewing. She had been living with a Vietnamese family, and was amazed at the bathroom I had access to, so she asked to take a multi-nozzle shower. Fifteen minutes later she emerged in a fluffy white bathrobe and climbed under the covers next to me, where I, too, was naked but for my own white robe. I cracked open a bottle of soju, poured us each a glass and turned on the TV. The movie that had just begun was, of course, Lost in Translation.
Reunion sex usually takes a while to get going.
Even being the "good friend" fosters a kind of intimacy that can be disconcerting. I now know all about Bonnie's addiction to dental floss, while Sandra stood by me during some humiliating moments of gastric distress in northern India. It's even recognizable to outsiders: At the end of a weekend in Palm Beach, my friend Sara and I had brunch with my wacky great aunt, who told us after the meal, "I know you're both involved with other people, but you're really cute together." We laughed her comment off, trying not to wonder whether it might be true.
The reward for all of this repression is coming home to my wife. No, we don't tear our clothes off the second I walk through the door. Instead, reunion sex usually takes a while to get going. After months apart, our faces seem unfamiliar, my presence unnatural in our home. We are foreign to each other; the intimacy I've found with other women on my travels is missing here.
But eventually, after several hours or even days, when we've relaxed enough to take showers or get dressed with the other person in the room, it happens. And then we then have to remember how sex actually works for us — what goes where, and when, and why, and for how long. It's almost like sex with a stranger. n°
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Born in Massachusetts, Matt Gross has lived everywhere from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. When he's not on the road writing the Frugal Traveler column for the New York Times, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jean.
