I liked her well enough to think about being in love with her. We’d been on two dates.
Later that afternoon, over coffee, halfway through our third date, she told me I had a great face but weighed thirty pounds too much.
Get skinny, she said, like we could wear each other’s jeans, and then maybe I’ll have sex with you.
I knew I’d never be thin enough. So we dumped our coffees and I walked her home. We didn’t talk. What needed to be said? I probably should have let her walk home alone, but I faintly hoped she’d change her mind about me.
It was a security building, and she didn’t revise her opinion of me, so I said goodbye on the sidewalk.
She apologized for rejecting me.
I said, Apologies offered and accepted are what make us human.
She laughed and walked into her building. Through the lobby window, I watched her step into her elevator and disappear behind the closing doors.
I knew she was rising away from me.
I wasn’t angry. I was lonely. I was bored. And I half-remembered a time when I’d been feared.
Nostalgic, I pressed my mouth against the glass and chewed.
If somebody had filmed me and posted it online then I would have become that guy with the teeth. I would have become a star.
FAITH
A few months ago, my wife, Sarah, and I went to a dinner party at Aaron’s house. He’s a longtime friend of Sarah’s. They were counselors at a summer Bible camp in the ’70s. I suspected they fell in love, but I doubt they’d consummated that teenage infatuation. Or maybe they did it in a boathouse and felt elated and guilty. I never asked them. Who wants to know such a thing? Both of them had grown up in strict Evangelical families. Aaron was still a Jesus freak, but Sarah had become an American Catholic. Like me, she was disinterested in the Pope and in love with Eucharist, that glorious metaphoric cannibalism of our Messiah. We had baptized our daughter, Jessica, but she hadn’t been confirmed. And we only went to Mass on Easter and Christmas and maybe three other random Sundays during the year.
Aaron’s dinner party was less about pot roast and more about group prayer. He’d called for a gathering of his old and new Evangelical friends. And he’d invited Sarah despite her conversion to my religion. I’ve always hated any party, but was especially wary of one that included conservative Christians. My wife had an Evangelical streak that surfaced when she was around Jesus freaks, and I thought it was ugly and unsexy.
“If they start faith-healing,” I said to Sarah, “I am out of there.”
“It’s just dinner,” she said.
Five minutes after we arrived at the party, and one minute into a conversation with a couple we’d just met, a fifty-something blonde said, “I have an artificial leg.” Just like that. Boom. After somebody says that, you have to work hard to not look down and try to figure out which leg was which. And if I’d been in any other environment except for that bunch of repressed Christians, I would have said, “Cool. Which one?” And probably asked to touch it. But all I could do was sort of stammer. She was wearing a knee-length black skirt, black stockings, and long black boots, so it was impossible to tell which leg was which. I suspected she’d often tried to shock people with sudden announcements about her prosthetic limb. Perhaps she was self-conscious about it. Or maybe she was just funny. Maybe she used humor, consciously or subconsciously, to gain power over the situation. Fair enough.
Carefully balancing my plate, I sat next to her on the couch during the dinner party and kept taking quick glances at her legs. I could not contain my curiosity. She had great legs, by the way, both very shapely, so I thought, Damn, that is an awesome artificial leg. And then I wondered if it was okay to call it an artificial leg. She used it in all the ways that a person uses a leg, right? And she was so natural, so practiced, that her two legs seemed to work in exactly the same ways. So wasn’t the prosthetic leg, philosophically speaking, as real as the other one?
Anyway, she eventually caught me staring, and while it’s not unusual for a woman to catch a man staring at some part of her, this particular moment wasn’t about passion. She was a very attractive woman, but I wasn’t looking at her legs out of sexual interest. I mean, while I noticed the shapeliness of her legs and of her in general, I was only interested in solving the mystery of which leg was made of plastic and metal. But my glances had become longer and more obvious, so she defensively crossed her legs, and then I felt sure the right one was flesh-bone-and-blood because it moved in ways that I assumed you can’t move a prosthetic. I looked up at her eyes. I wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t exactly blurt out at a dinner party, “Hey, I’m really sorry for objectifying you there, and I do respect you as a human being, even if you are a crazy fundamentalist Christian, and if you want to stare at my legs or any other part of me, that’s okay, because men love to be objectified.” But instead of being, you know, insane, I decided it was best to have a normal conversation with her.
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“I’m a guidance counselor at an elementary school in Rainier Valley,” she said. Rainier Valley was the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in Seattle — actually, the only ethnically diverse neighborhood — and therefore had the most poor people and/or first-generation immigrants.
“That must be pretty tough,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Education isn’t always the first priority. And there is a lot of poverty, as you know. And drug use and domestic violence. And sometimes kids come to school hungry.”
“Wow, that must be heartbreaking,” I said.
“Sometimes,” she said. “But it’s good work. Sometimes, you can save a kid’s life. Or at least give them a chance to save their own lives. I’ve had about a dozen kids who’ve gone on to graduate from college. One of them is a teacher at my school, so that’s pretty amazing. Every time I see him, I’m reminded of why I do this work.”
Okay, so she had a bit of a Messiah complex, but what Christian doesn’t? And, hey, I thought, she’s one of those crazy religious people who actually lives up to her ideals, so I liked her all of a sudden. I liked her too suddenly and too much.
“So what do you do?” she asked me.
“I’m a firefighter,” I said.
“You ever pull anybody out of a burning house?” she asked.
“A few times,” I said.
“Oh, so we have the same jobs,” she said, and leaned a bit closer to me. I could smell her perfume and it reminded me of every woman I had ever slept with.
And then she told a series of very funny and entertaining stories about her husband, who was sitting on another couch five feet away from us. She was performing for everybody at the party. Most of the stories were gently mocking — like most of the stories that spouses tell about each other — but there was also a current of cruelty. The basic theme of each story was, “My husband is the omega wolf in any pack.” And her short, bald, chubby husband quietly sat there and accepted the abuse.
“Do you know that SkyMall catalogue?” she asked all of us.
Of course we did. Anybody who has ever traveled by airplane has glanced through that catalogue of garden gnomes, quick-drying polyester pantsuits, and cell phone chargers that work in countries no one’s ever heard of.
“Have you ever seen that bug vacuum?” she asked.
None of the others remembered it, but I did.
“You mean that red thing with the long tube?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, and explained it to the others. “You put the nozzle over the bugs, hit the go button, and it sucks them up. And it has these extender tubes that are, like, thirty feet long. You can reach the top of a church to vacuum up bugs. And you can supposedly dump them outside, still alive.”