We all laughed.
“My husband bought one of those things,” she said. “Right from the airplane. He went on the in-flight Wi-Fi and ordered it at thirty thousand feet.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone buying anything from SkyMall.” I said. “It’s so goofy.”
And then I realized that I’d called her husband goofy. I wanted to pretend that I did it by accident, but no, I was competing for his wife’s attention. They’d been married for decades and I was flirting with her in front of his friends. And I was also doing it in front of my wife, whom I hadn’t even thought of since I’d sat down beside that woman. I glanced over at her husband and he was staring down at his open hands. I wondered if he wanted to make fists.
“Yeah, so my dear husband buys this bug vacuum,” she said. “And has it shipped overnight to our house. Overnight! And he opens it right away, puts it together, and goes looking for bugs. Like he’s on safari.”
“Was he wearing khaki?” I asked.
“He should have been,” she said. “He could have ordered that from SkyMall, too.”
More laughter from the gathered Christians.
“So he finds this big spider in his man cave in the basement,” she said. “One of those scary ones that look like a piece of popcorn. It’s on the ceiling, but the ceiling is low, seven feet high, so my husband puts on the extenders. He’s standing thirty feet away from the spider. Thirty!”
The Christians howled.
“So he sucks that thing up. And runs to the front door, flings it open with one hand, and runs out to the street. I follow him out and I see him trying to reverse the vacuum so it shoots that spider out instead of sucking it in. But he does something wrong, so the whole thing falls apart. The extensions drop off and the storage chamber thing is open and the spider comes roaring out and jumps onto his shirt.”
Her husband smiled. It wasn’t real.
“And he starts screaming. This high-pitched wail that sounds like a nine-year-old girl. And he’s jumping around trying to knock that spider off his shirt. He’s slapping his chest trying to smash it. And then it crawls up onto his neck and his face. And, there he is, my tough husband, slapping his own face trying to kill a spider. And then he gets it. So he has giant dead popcorn spider all over his chin.”
The Christians applauded. I wondered how often she told stories that humiliated her husband. And I realized that her meanness made her more attractive. It was my turn to cross my legs.
“Can you believe my husband?” she asked. “Afraid of spiders.”
She laughed, shook her head, and put her hand on my thigh. Women often touch other people during conversation. Women enjoy that slight affection but it’s always a touch to a safe area: knee, elbow, shoulder. Touching a joint is a polite way to establish connection. There are fewer nerves. If you want to stay friendly, touch the place with the fewest nerves. But that woman touched my thigh with her whole hand and squeezed just a bit, and it was high enough up my thigh to be on the border between “Friendly Female Gesture” and “Do You Want a Hand Job?”
I looked around the room, but nearly everybody, my wife included, was too busy laughing to have noticed the thigh grab. Of course, the husband had noticed. And he stared at me with such a blank look, I couldn’t read him. I didn’t know what he was thinking. But I immodestly knew I’d always been the alpha male in any room and he’d probably always been the omega. His wife had chosen to flirt with me and insult her husband. And I still hadn’t bothered to look at my wife. Jesus, I felt like I was having a swift and very public affair.
And then, I saw real emotion in the husband. A flash of pain. Male vanity is so sad because it goes against our macho training and does not receive much sympathy from anybody. I bully myself when I am in periods of male vanity.
And now the other folks began to tell stories, none of them particularly interesting or cruel, and they prayed together. I opened my eyes and stared at the woman. I fought the urge to reach out and touch her prosthetic limb. I wanted to prove to her that I wasn’t afraid of her disability, that I could be affectionate about it. I wanted to whisper in her ear and tell her that her thigh touch had made me shudder, and that if she had moved her hand ever so slightly, I would have orgasmed.
And I kept thinking such sinful thoughts until they ended their prayer.
“Oh, wait,” she said to me. “We’re having a career day for the third graders at my school next week. You have to come. Every kid loves a fireman. Give me your e-mail address so I can send you an official invitation. To come speak.”
But it felt like an official invitation to commit adultery. Or maybe I was just fooling myself. Maybe she was just a flirt. Maybe she was one of those repressed Christian women who are blind to their own sexuality. Maybe she wasn’t aware that she’d touched my thigh.
I looked at my wife for the first time but she was talking to another woman and there were no signs that she felt threatened, that she’d even been aware of what was (or wasn’t) happening.
“Will you come to my school?” the wife asked. “You have to come.”
“I’m kind of an asshole,” I said. “I’m really not appropriate for third graders.”
Then, because I’d driven myself to the party, straight from work, I made excuses that I had to fill in for a sick guy and work the graveyard shift.
“It’s a firefighter’s life,” I said. “Always on call.”
My wife looked at me and smiled. She knew I was lying about work, but I assumed she thought I was just fleeing the fundamentalists. I don’t think she was aware that I was fleeing temptation. She was unaware that I was being an iron husband, strong and faithful.
I said my goodbyes and hurried out the door and into my car. But I took the long way, around the lake, so I could think more about that woman. I promised myself that I’d only think about sex with her as long as it took me to get home. And I have mostly kept that promise. Mostly.
So, damn.
SALT
I wrote the obituary for the obituaries editor. Her name was Lois Andrews. Breast cancer. She was only forty-five. One in eight women get breast cancer, an epidemic. Lois’s parents had died years earlier. Dad’s cigarettes kept their promises. Mom’s Parkinson’s shook her into the ground. Lois had no siblings and had never been married. No kids. No significant other at present. No significant others in recent memory. Nobody remembered meeting one of her others. Some wondered if there had been any others. Perhaps Lois had been that rarest of holy people, the secular and chaste nun. So, yes, her sexuality was a mystery often discussed but never solved. She had many friends. All of them worked at the paper.
I wasn’t her friend, not really. I was only eighteen, a summer intern at the newspaper, moving from department to department as need and boredom required, and had only spent a few days working with Lois. But she’d left a note, a handwritten will and testament, with the editor in chief, and she’d named me as the person she wanted to write her obituary.
“Why me?” I asked the chief. He was a bucket of pizza and beer tied to a broomstick.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s what she wanted.”
“I didn’t even know her.”
“She was a strange duck,” he said.
I wanted to ask him how to tell the difference between strange and typical ducks. But he was a humorless white man with power, and I was a reservation Indian boy intern. I was to be admired for my ethnic tenacity but barely tolerated because of my callow youth.
“I’ve never written an obituary by myself,” I said. During my hours at her desk, Lois had carefully supervised my work.