A Writer's Secret Life

Still, I was wary. I was a happily married woman. I told myself we would just be very good friends, friends who had shared the amazing experience of being truly in love with each other, friend whose concern for each other had transcended our once-passionate sexual connection.

The next spring Warren was in New York for a visit; he was writing a column for the San Francisco Examiner. His boss, Will Hearst, had become a good friend and was a generous employer. We arranged to have lunch, and I said I’d pick him up at the Essex House, the hotel where he was staying on Central Park South.

I would have lunch with him, but I would not sleep with him. I had many good reasons not to sleep with him; I was married and I did not want to jeopardize my marriage and my beloved family. I left our apartment in a glow of certainty.

I took a cab down to the Essex House and went up to the desk. Warren had said he would meet me in the lobby. Of course, he wasn’t there. The man behind the desk gave me the room number and directed me to a house phone. I stood in the alcove and picked up the phone, and that’s the last thing I remember. I seemed to go into some kind of brownout.

I can hardly reconstruct what happened. Warren told me to come up to his room and I did. It was a big sunny room strewn with intriguing magazines, newspapers, and books. I made myself comfortable while he got dressed to go out.

Then, somehow were on the bed. Before I was back in command of my own actions, we were, indeed, having lunch under very different circumstances than what I had imagined. How did that happen?

I experienced the same thing with eating and drinking. When an addict says that she didn’t mean to do it, when the addict says that something else took over, she isn’t kidding. It sounds like an excuse, but it’s a dreadful fact of the way addiction works. Giving in to the substance is as involuntary as breathing; you can hold your breath for a while. But in the end you give in.

Addicts throughout history have struggled to describe this out-of-body feeling that takes over when they abuse their substance after making many promises that they won’t. In Alcoholics Anonymous, newcomers who are still at risk for this trance state are said to be mocus—a word created by combining “mind” and “out of focus.” In Debtors Anonymous this fugue state is called “terminal vagueness,” and it’s a good description.

“Every Thursday at noon I have sex with Rick in room #213 of the Rainbow Motel. Today, even though I promised my therapist I wouldn’t come here again, I pull into the lot and park besides Rick’s black Ford Bronco. I cut the engine and listen to stillness, to nothing, to heat,” writes Sue William Silverman in her sex addiction memoir, Love Sick.