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“I've been thinking about your relationships,” my friend Mia told me during one of our regular morning coffee breaks. “I have the perfect solution.”
We were sitting on a patch of grass, taking in the sun, sipping on our coffees and smoking. I looked up at her from under the brim of my oversized hat.
“You've been thinking about my relationships?” I asked her, a little surprised.
“Yes,” she responded. “I think what you need is to date someone in New York.”
“What?”
“Maybe not New York, but someone outside of Los Angeles,” she clarified. “What you want is a low-maintenance relationship that fills you but doesn't take up all your time, right? The distance will force it to go slowly and not take over your life.”
As I walked home after our coffee, I thought about this. There is something incredibly unsettling about having to cross the country to have the sort of relationship I want. Mind you, I know incredible men in Manhattan, but to actively seek a lover across the country to have a functional relationship is more than a little weird.
Speaking of Manhattan—at around the same time, my friend Atherton was having a jazz brunch at the Algonquin's Oak Room. This is a new tradition of his, what he calls his “little staycations,” a time to disconnect from the web, work and the demands of his life and focus on himself.
But today, Atherton was having a hard time disconnecting. His baby arugula salad sat untouched before him as he examined the page of the daily he had picked up on his way to the hotel. There, on one of the regular columns, was a man he'd recently become involved with.
“I don't think he's out,” he said to me when I picked up my phone.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, I don't think he's told anyone he's gay.”
“Oh, dear,” I replied.
“I can't do it,” Atherton told me. “I can't be with someone who isn't going to be able to really be with me.”
Their affair had started innocently enough—don't they always?—with a couple of comments across a largely empty venue about Atherton's ironic choice of the traditionally English Bubble and Squeak for brunch on the Fourth of July.
“So what's a nice little American bloke like you doing on this Independence Day?” the stranger had asked Atherton, walking toward him until he was standing before him, his crotch nearly in Atherton's face. “Watching the fireworks over The Hudson?”
“No,” Atherton had replied. The stranger's body language had been undeniable; without hesitation, Atherton had a finger hooked on one of the man's belt loops. Tug. Tug. Tug. “I'm just hanging out in my suite all day.”
A few hours later, Atherton found himself hanging in a swing from the chandelier of his suite engaged in sex so intense and so desperate, it needs a whole new word to describe it.
And now, there he was, avoiding his salad at brunch, with a gossip column in his hands.
“Are you going to see him again?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “Tonight. I can't help it. I like him.”
It was another night in Los Angeles and the line outside the Falcon was epic—just looking at it threatened to give me a nosebleed.
I walked to the front of the line and past the velvet rope. Inside, the patio was considerably less crowded. Los Angeles' young, beautiful and purportedly talented were lounging on couches and standing around smoking, drinking and talking.
I bumped into a couple of friends on the steps. They introduced me to the founder of a charitable organization whom I already knew parasocially—that is, by watching what he's been doing on the internet. My friend Zack was there, too. He looked distracted.
“Can you talk?” he asked me after a brief round of chit-chat.
“I was just stepping away for a cigarette,” I replied, taking his hand and pulling him aside. “What's going on?”
“I need relationship advice,” he said quietly.
“Oh, well, you've come to the right place,” I joked, lighting a cigarette. “There is no advice like that imparted by a woman at the tail-end of her divorce.”
He laughed.
“Where's Hannah?” I asked, referring to the woman he's seeing.
“She had another thing,” he said. “That's fine. I mean, we're busy. But I don't know. We've been seeing each other for months and I don't know where it's going. I don't know if we're an item or if we're seeing other people—I mean, I'm not. But I don't know if she is?”
Zack sipped his drink nervously.
“Have you talked to her about
