On Thursday night, Susan and I braved the wilds of NoVa to attend a CD release party for one of her old boyfriends, Bill. He sings a kind of goofy folk-rock that isn't far from the musical tradition of my friend Doug; appealing when you're in good spirits, but not the kind of gloomy emotional salve I often use to appease my moods. I've met Bill and his new wife a few times on the street, and he radiates the kind of selfless good humor that I occasionally would like to have myself. Because it's important to put one's lover's exes into some kind of context, I compare him to my former girlfriend Jennifer, whose sheer, unselfconscious goodness was a perpetual amazement to me. She stretched to see the viciousness and fallibility in humanity that seemed depressingly plain to me, even as I reached painfully for her vision of human virtue and essential morality. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister, and in the moments of questioning her faith she approached my moments of greatest optimism and spirituality. In the end, the distance was too much, and I moved on to badder girls again.

I like Bill, and easily perceive his more obvious appeals. He's a full-time musician, who has put 250,000 miles on his car cruising up and down the musical byways of the east coast. (The attraction of musicians, as well as essentially nice people, is well documented.) Tonight he was playing at Iota Club and Cafe in Arlington, and the house was well-packed with friends and fans. Iota's small performance space was roughhewn and allowed patrons to plop down at the bar while viewing the stage, allowing the simultaneous usage of both of its primary functions. The stage was festooned with chains of license plates and other automotive memorabilia. What is it about Northern Virginia bars and car imagery? It's like some unconscious tribute to their dependence on a mobile populace.

We came in towards the end of Bill's set and stationed ourselves at the bar. I saw his wife sitting at the table just in front of the stage, and for a moment in the dim lights I thought she looked remarkably like my Peace Corps ex, Elizabeth. A second look dispelled the resemblance, but my mind was primed with thoughts of old lovers, as I was watching one (by proxy) singing at that moment. Elizabeth also sang, with a gorgeous voice, and some of my fondest memories among Americans in Senegal are of singing with her and other volunteers. Unlike me and most of my former flames, Susan and Bill have remained friends. This is an achievement that perplexes and impresses me.

Later, we discussed how she has managed to pull off this transfer of affections. My time-tested attitude has been that once you have had really fabulous sex with someone, it tends to paint later interactions with a patina of lesser-ness. There you are, sitting across a table in some cafe somewhere, chatting with your former lover about your job or life or new love. What goes through my mind in that moment, sadly, is that I have intimate and delicious knowledge of this person's every square-inchage, and they of mine, and all that hard-won intelligence is just sitting there like a third person at the table, while we ignore it. It feels like there is a mutually acknowledged gag order restricting the freedom of our personal presses. Past passions tend to make the everyday nature of the conversation seem embarrassingly banal.

This isn't a particularly flattering trait of mine, this inability to recede from the tempestuous waves of a romance back to the more stable tidal pools of friendship. I've never managed to make it feel like more than half of something else. So I'm a little envious of this skill of Susan's. After Bill's set, the bar started to thin out and we wormed into a small booth. Bill eventually found his way over to us and sat down to chat. Blessedly, there was none of the degrading chest-thumping that occasionally develops when ex meets new. Such are times when being a boy feels like the result of a giant celestial prank. But no, just as Susan and Bill have managed to navigate this more mature relationship, we were able to sit as mature adults in the booth, me and Bill side-by-side on the bench seat, not even kicking each other under the table. I considered it a valuable first step towards my growth towards a kind of maturity, the kind of wisdom that I see in book characters sometimes and sense in the voice of James Earl Jones.