The Unexpected Swain

by Gwen Cooper — April 4, 2007

When I first moved to New York five years ago, my best friend in the whole world, Lisa (who was already living in New York), had just become engaged. One of the greatest things about moving to New York at that specific time is that I was able to be there with her every step of the way during her engagement.

It was perhaps inevitable that, during the subsequent year of engagement parties, showers, and wedding-plan caucuses, I would be thrown together quite a bit with her fiancé’s closest friends. I ended up bonding particularly well with a groomsman named Robert. At the time, Robert had a serious girlfriend of some five years’ standing, and I think we also both found the idea of dating somewhat incestuous—not to mention potentially awkward if things were to end up not working out. After all, given that our best friends were marrying each other, there was a possible lifetime of awkwardness in store if a relationship between us went south—years of uncomfortable encounters at parties, holidays, housewarmings, and children’s birthdays.

Nevertheless, a close friendship was formed—one that existed independently of the two friends through whom we’d met. I dated other men and, after Robert eventually broke up with his girlfriend, he dated other women. These things were always discussed freely between us, as were any number of other personal matters. It would hardly be overstating the case to say that, in the five years that have elapsed since we first met, Robert has become one of my closest friends in New York, if not in life—a friend I talk to several times a day, see several times a week, and who has become one of the first two or three people to get a phone call when some momentous circumstance (a promotion at work, for example) occurs.

Robert and I saw each other last night at a Passover Seder at our friends’ home. They remain among the happiest couples we know, and now have two beautiful children as well. It was a wonderful evening of food and friends, after which (the existence of two children meaning an understandably early end to the evening), we walked over to Robert’s apartment to have a drink before calling it a night.

We were sitting next to each other on his couch, and somehow my hand ended up in his. Well, not in his hand, exactly, but more like he was holding my wrist and turning my hand around slowly, as if he’d never seen it before.

“What do you think it would be like if we were married?” he asked.

It’s been my experience that this isn’t the kind of question that straight men, especially straight men over the age of 40, throw out with no real intent behind it. I didn’t respond immediately and there was silence for a moment, a moment in which things between us subtly shifted. I knew, intuitively, that if I looked directly into his face, he would kiss me. And a kiss between two people as close as we are is a kiss that would change everything.

These days, I have a brand-new relationship with a man I’m really into. I have a book coming out in less than a week. The prospect of sudden emotional turmoil interfering with either of those things struck me as profoundly terrifying. And it also seemed to me that having just spent several hours in the blissfully happy home of our blissfully married friends might make coupledom—with anybody—seem temporarily more appealing in the abstract than it normally would.

So I took the easy way out. I gently pulled my hand from his and said (in a flip tone that I still kind of hate myself for), “Oh, I think we’d end up killing each other!” And then I got up from the couch to pour us each another glass of wine, and left to head home about 15 minutes later.

And yet…I can’t stop playing the moment over in my mind, that feeling of being so sure that he was about to kiss me.

And I think, if I’m completely honest with myself, that I wanted him to.

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster.