The best-laid plans

I had all these romantic notions about one-night stands. Who knew it would be so difficult to actually have one?

Editor's note: Excerpted and adapted with permission from "I Was Told There'd Be Cake" (Riverhead, 2008)

By Sloane Crosley

Read more: Life Features, Life

March 25, 2008 | The second I was old enough to know what sex was, I knew I wanted to have a one-night stand. To me, it seemed the most deviant, cool, subversive and flat-out dirty thing there was. I wanted to do it immediately. Largely because I had no idea what it entailed. I figured a one-night stand happened when two people, one of whom was a woman, went to a man's apartment for martinis and stood on the bed the entire time, trying not to spill them. Sometimes they bounced on the bed until they hit their heads on the ceiling, and that's how the girl (a) passed out or (b) knew it was time to go home. This accounted for the sound of mattress springs creaking as well as any exhaustion the next morning. It was how hair became tousled. It also accounted for a very specific image I had, one of a woman in a silk teddy seen from behind. She's facing a window and it's probably nighttime. We zoom in on her hip, where she is resting her expensively manicured hand, with a pair of red sling-back stilettos hooked on her pinkie. Like a few notes of a song stuck in my head, that's all I got. I don't know who or where this woman is, only that between all the drinking and the bed bouncing and the near-concussion getting, the heels had come off. That explained why there was a lot of morning-after tiptoeing in movies and why no one ever had sex with their shoes on -- it would puncture the mattress and twist the ankle.

It's remarkable, the logic we'll build around a misapprehension. Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality. For example, I never asked my mother where babies came from but I remember clearly the day she volunteered the information. My sister was taking a nap, my father was out back developing an elaborate pulley system for firewood using a laundry basket, and my mother called me to set the table for dinner. She sat me down in the kitchen and, under the classic caveat of "loving each other very, very much," explained that when a man and a woman hug tightly, the man plants a seed in the woman. The seed grows into a baby. Then she sent me to the pantry to get place mats.

As a direct result of this conversation, I wouldn't hug my father for two months.

Eventually, I realized that bouncing on hotel beds was only "sexual" in teenybopper movies and short stories. I now saw one-night stands for what they were: a strange penis and a strange vagina getting to know each other fairly well, very quickly. But my original fascination with the one-night stand remained intact, even if the logistics had changed. And why not? Here was one last thing I could single-handily save from being muddied by adulthood. Here was one small innocent dream from my childhood brain. A dream there was no harm in believing (provided one kept their wits and prophylactics about them). It is so rare that we get to realize as adults what we imagined ourselves doing as children. Granted, this rule is generally applied to more wholesome activities like, say, intergalactic space travel or a career in the ballet. Nevertheless, I suspect this is why I hung on to my one-night stand dreams.

But by now, time was running out. Another decade and my invitation to the reckless sex-and-drug-abuse club would get revoked. Then people would be compelled to spit words like "floozy" into my face and they would have every right. It was suggested that perhaps I was not trying hard enough. That's probably true. It's not as if I had chronic bad breath or a neck goiter or other blatant physical obstacles to overcome. A couple of guy friends generously offered to help me remedy the situation, but their candidacy was null by virtue of the fact that they'd met me. And I wasn't about to walk into a crowded sports bar and scream, "I've got twenty minutes and one expired condom. Who's in?" Adventure within reason was key. Still, it seemed that it shouldn't be this hard. Who do you have to sleep with to get laid in this town?

My first legitimate attempt came during the spring of my freshman year of college. Armed with the knowledge that oral sex had nothing to do with talking, I met a prep school-issued member of the sailing team at a keg party. It was such a small college that the simple fact that we had never seen each other before was enough to get the conversation going. After eliminating all the telltale TV signs that he was a potential rapist, I went back to his dorm room. It was below freezing that night, and I had decided to wear taupe-colored stockings beneath my jeans and flannel socks over that. This is not a look that lends itself to a sexy undraping. It's also supermodel-proof, meaning that even a supermodel would look unappetizing in taupe-colored stockings and jeans. I tried to keep my new friend busy by kissing him while he began unzipping, but nothing gets past the human hand these days. He put a massive callused paw on my synthetically silky thigh, stopped, said "huh," and excused himself to the bathroom where he vomited (presumably from alcohol). Then we both crawled into bed and he passed out, drooling on my arm as it went numb from the weight of his head.

I felt relieved that he had gotten sick. Now the social scales of mortification were even. I watched him until six a.m. at which point I felt I had put in my time. I got up and wrote him a Post-it Note, apologizing for leaving. When I realized I had crammed in all I could on one yellow square, I grabbed another and filled that one with more witty remarks about seeing him around for some delectable cafeteria cuisine. Though one consisted of just my signature, in the end I filled six Post-it Notes, which I stuck on his computer monitor over a screen saver of rotating catamarans.

Three months later, he graduated and I purchased my first pair of candy red high heels.

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