Walden didn't see her again for a few months. He went back to his torment. If she was better-looking, he would have gone out with her. Instead, he waited two months, then he called her for lunch. He'd been fantasizing about her. They had lunch, and then they blew off the afternoon and went back to her place and had sex. They began seeing each other a
couple of times a week. They lived in the same neighborhood; they'd go to local places for dinner or she'd cook. "I found it incredibly easy to talk about my emotions," Walden said. "I could cry in front of her. I told her my deepest sexual fantasies and we'd act them out. We talked about having a threesome with one of her friends.
"She'd tell me her fantasies, which were tremendously elaborate," Walden continued. "She asked me to spank her. She had secrets, but she was incredibly practical. I've always wondered if it was because she wasn't datable that she'd constructed this complicated inner life. You know, if you're not in the beauty Olympics, you can become a very interesting person."
In the meantime, Libby was being pursued by, in Walden's words, "some shlumpy guy." Walden didn't feel threatened.
He met all her friends but wouldn't introduce her to his. He never spent a whole weekend with her—or even a whole day. They never went to a party together. "I didn't want her to get the wrong idea," he said.
But she never protested, never made demands. One time she asked him if the reason he kept her hidden was because she wasn't pretty enough. "I lied and said no," Walden said. "You know, if I closed my eyes, there was no way she didn't satisfy me in every way."
Walden ordered another drink. "She used to make me wonder if I felt ugly inside, and that was the bond."
"Well, every man secretly hates pretty girls because they're the ones who rejected him in high school," Stephen said. He had a similar story.
Ellen's grandfather was famous in TV. A real big deal. Stephen met her at a work party. They'd both gone outside on the balcony to smoke cigarettes and started talking. She was funny. A real firecracker, a wiseacre. She was dating somebody else. After that,
she and Stephen would run into each other at work events.
"We became actual friends," said Stephen, "which for me is rare with women. I had no sexual designs on her. I could go out with her and shoot the shit hke a guy. She could talk about movies, Letterman, she knew TV—and most women don't understand TV. If you try to talk about TV with a pretty girl, her eyes glaze over."
They went to the movies, but "just as friends." She might have been secretly angling for him; but if she was, Stephen didn't notice. They'd talk about their relationships. Their dissatisfactions. Stephen was seeing someone who had gone to Europe for three months, and he was writing her forced, unenthusiastic letters.
One afternoon, they were having lunch, when Ellen began describing a recent sexual encounter with her boyfriend. She had given him a hand job using Vaseline. Stephen suddenly popped a woody. "I began to see her as a sexual being," he said. "The thing about these girls who aren't beauties—they have to put sex on the table. They can't nuance it."
Ellen broke up with her boyfriend, and Stephen began dating lots of women. He would tell Ellen about these women. One night they were at a restaurant, having dinner, and Ellen leaned over and gave him a tongue kiss in his ear that got him thumping his foot.
They went to her place and had sex. "It was great," Stephen said. "I performed, on an objective basis, better than I had with other women. I was going back for seconds and thirds. I was giving her the forty-five-minute fuck." The «relationship» progressed from there. They would watch TV in bed and then have sex with the TV on. "A pretty woman would never let you have the TV on during sex," Stephen said. "But it's relaxing somehow, with the TV on. You're not the focus. Women hke Ellen allow you to be yourself."
Stephen admitted that from Ellen's point of view, their relationship probably wasn't so great. "During the six months we went out, well, we had probably gone to more movies
back when we were friends. Our dates became the worst kind of dates—takeout food and videos. I felt tremendously guilty. I felt shallow. She wasn't quite up to snuff in the looks department, and I felt shallow for thinking of her looks. She was a great girl."