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“And ‘that bar’ means an utterly squalid spot on the map of your life, to which only your most depraved and disreputable self is ever drawn.

“Now, the highly nuanced ‘whoever’ — this part is really ominous. It means that if you were really out at a bar with a friend when you could just as well have been in the apartment and ready to take her call, then you might just as well have been with a woman too. Because nothing about you is respectable or trustworthy at that point.”

He shoots the plume of smoke luxuriously toward the glittering bottles lined before the mirrors. “And you want to say, ‘I didn’t have to tell you I was at the bar with the friend — and if I had been at a bar with a woman, honey baby, believe me, I wouldn’t have told you I was at a bar at all’.”

For my part, I can see the moment precisely in my mind’s eye, the scales of justice weighing the two sides of the conversation. I say: “To which she would reply, ‘So you want some kind of credit for telling the truth?’ ” “Exactly,” my friend says.

“Possibly they lie as much as we do: the difference is that most of the time, unless they’re sleeping with someone, we don’t give a shit what they have been doing, spending, seeing, hearing, being tempted by, when we’re not together. Aren’t we awful?” “Are you going to report that we had a drink tonight?” I ask him. “Shit no,” he says.

“What happens when you tell the truth,” he says, “is that now this incident of you being at the bar, this historic betrayal, actually can be called upon at a moment’s notice, for years, long after you would think it had any moral weight whatsoever, simply to wipe out whatever argument you might be making in favour of yourself and your priorities at the present moment. So guess what — you lie. They teach you to lie.” I tell him that not all women are like that. “Yeah?” he says. “That’s a very interesting theory. That would mean there are some women who don’t really care if you have a job or make any money or occasionally have meaningless ego-boosting affairs either. I just haven’t met any yet.”

What my friend is talking about, essentially, is that word, power. And in the power struggles that every relationship goes through, the terrain fought upon is frequently one of moral authority. In each relationship we identify the most significant parts of our lives — sex, money, loyalty, social desirability, affection, humour, kindness — and invest them with precise moral values. When we’ve come to some fluid agreement about the values assigned to each, we commence adding up. Men know that women almost always are ahead in this valuation; we are, generally speaking, comfortable with the idea. Even back when men were invariably the major earners and were allowed to act like lords of the manor, women’s suffering gave them a certain moral standing. Of course, now most women have jobs, our valuation in the power equation has fallen significantly, even though on the whole our behaviour has improved. My friend’s point is that, without any special handicap or privileges, in the struggle for moral legitimacy, we have to lie even to stay close.

I am most intrigued by the seeming necessity of the mild and constant colouration of the world that men do in order to get along with women, in order to make the world as we understand it palatable and understandable to them. For instance: say you’re a man, and you run into an old acquaintance on the street and you end up talking and joking around for 25 minutes. This throws off a tight schedule of errands and later commitments. So you make up some reason for it, even though you’re not really asked to do so — “You should have seen the queue at the market!” — because you’d feel foolish, and you’d probably be chided, if you simply reported that, guess what, I ran into so-and-so and we ended up talking for 25 minutes.

So-and-so is relatively insignificant in your life. Wouldn’t five or seven minutes have done just as well? And you peel back the outer skins of your own motives and you find that you were in good spirits and so was the acquaintance and you managed to make each other feel slightly more vital and significant in the flow of world events that day.

I doubt if any man, put on the spot, could possibly explain such a minor transaction in the economy of his ego in a way that would make it easily comprehensible to a woman.

Given, of course, that when a woman is waiting for a man to run some errands, there is already established a certain moral platform for her expectations: that he will screw up somehow, or come back late or blow some engagement he has promised to go on with her; something that she knows, in the depths of her heart, he doesn’t want to do. She knows that what he really wants is to hang around on the couch and read magazines or watch movies and not even speak for the remainder of the day — and she doesn’t want that to happen. The manoeuvring begins. Or it never ends.

My wife and I had a dog, years ago. It was a male dog, a dog whose entire being screamed out “Get me fixed”. We didn’t fix him, though, seemingly out of laziness but really because we liked him the way he was — sweet but totally out of control. My wife especially loved him; he signified everything she actually likes about men — he was relentlessly exuberant and strong. The crucial point was that she was able to enjoy his generally compulsive, single-minded, uncooperative (and relentlessly horny) nature because she associated him with none of the disappointed social expectations or emotional pain that she associated with actual male humans, such as me. I envied him, frankly.