"So let me get this straight -- you fucked a mute stranger in a hotel utility closet?"
For a brief moment, Sharon stopped playing with her cornrow braid and widened her beautiful brown eyes at me in surprise. She had killer eyes.
"You make it sound so vulgar," I said, feigning affront.
In all honesty, I could scarcely believe it myself. Ordinarily, I would have felt a smug at this unusual carnal interlude, though there was little reason for smugness. I didn't initiate it. It wasn't as though the woman submitted giddily to my irresistible masculine wiles. I mutely went along with it, like a lamb to slaughter, though c.
It was my first bit of action in a long, confidence-eroding desert of chasteness. You see, the wife had left me to follow a Cirque du Soleil acrobat to Vegas. To this day, I didn't know whether the acrobat was male or female. I imagined her lover to be male, but I didn't know for sure. I tried to convince myself that it didn't matter, that an affair was an affair, but it did matter. Leaving me for another guy was one thing. It didn't make me happy, but there was plenty of precedent. Leaving me for an acrobatic uterus was another thing entirely, a devastating body blow to my fragile male ego. Biological imperatives notwithstanding, I would have been accused of turning a perfectly hetero woman into a lesbian. As if that weren't bad enough, flexible females featured in my own hyperextended fantasies. That my wife would appropriate my fantasies and realize them more successfully than I was a betrayal too profound to countenance.
"She wasn't mute," I said finally. "She just chose not to talk." It sounded strange even to me, despite the fact that I'd been there.
Sharon was an old friend. She had nursed me through the stages of grief after the wife had left -- denial, confused indignation, anger, rage, homicidal fury. She'd been a shoulder to cry on, always ready with the "there-theres", the "it'll-be-alrights" and the "pull-yourself-together-for-fuck-sakes."
"Not so much as an introduction?" she asked, squinting at me, looking for the joke.
I shook my head.
Sharon was my best female friend. I'd heard of the concept of friends with benefits but hadn't broached the subject with Sharon. I didn't want to risk it. I sometimes fantasized about enjoying benefits with Sharon, and suspected that she knew I did. Her suspicions didn't stop her from flirting with me from time to time, for which I was grateful. It gave me the impression that I wasn't completely harmless in her eyes.
"No thank you? No follow-up?"
I shrugged my shoulders. It would sound goofy if I told her that words had been unnecessary.
Several weeks ago, Sharon had convinced me to go to my company's Winter Wonderland Party. It was the company's attempt to have a Christmas party without offending the minority non-Christians. It also enabled them to take advantage of the lower cost of holding a party in February, which I suspected was the real reason. In doing so, the party itself lost any meaning -- the yuletide spirit that I might have mustered for my colleagues in December didn't extend to making small talk with them over expired eggnog while suffering seasonal affective disorder in the cold, nasty days of the shortest month of the year.
Sharon though, would have none of it. "You've got to circulate. Let people know you're back in the game."
"Spinster aunts beware," I said.
Sharon punched my shoulder. I fought not to let on how much it stung. I'm tough that way.
"But they're serving halal chicken," I said, pulling a face.
"You don't even know what halal chicken is," countered Sharon.
She was right. I didn't have a clue. "Do you?"
"I think they whisper sweet nothings at it while the slit its throat to bleed it."
"Ugh. I prefer my chickens atheist."
"There are no atheist chickens in the abattoir. Anyway, you need to let it be known that you're back in the hunt. I'm not saying that you should be putting the moves on your coworkers, but they might have friends or friends of friends who have a thing for slightly overweight, balding, father-of-two white guys..."
"You paint a rosy picture."
"...who are nonetheless cute, funny, available, and not gay."
"Makes you wonder why no one's beating a path to my door." I snapped my fingers. "Perhaps you can be my date."
"A winter wonderland party? Give your head a shake."
So I donned the suit that I used for weddings, funerals, job interviews and winter wonderland parties. The kids didn't need me anymore and were okay alone. My son, a 14 year old internet warlord of some dubious repute, grunted distractedly as I left. My daughter, two years his senior, had plans to meet her black-lipsticked coven.
Having successfully raised them to this level of maturity, I was free.
At the reception hall, I collected my two drink tickets. One for me and one for the date I didn't have but lied about. The company, fearful of litigation, wanted to make sure no one had too much fun. I chatted with a few people I knew, wished my staff a happy winter wonderland until their discomfort suggested to me that I should leave, and was given another drink ticket from a tea-totaller who must have sympathized with my social discomfort.
At length, people started drifting into the dining room. They seated us at round tables with a dozen place settings. The selection of your fellow diners was a bit of a crap shoot. Employees typically finagled things so that they weren't sitting with management. I couldn't blame them. I was a manager and my table was full of folks I dealt with every day and was perfectly happy to avoid during non-working hours.
The conversation drifted from the Toronto Maple Leafs, who would miss the playoffs again, to golf, which the Leafs and some of the guys at the table would be enjoying in a couple of months.
I feigned interest in the golf stories being exchanged.
"Do you golf?" asked my neighbor.
"No, I whack-fuck."
My neighbor looked at me, so I felt compelled to explain. "I whack the ball, and then I use an obscene term to express my displeasure as it sails into the tall grass to be found weeks later and then sold with my other balls on the side of the road."
"Ah."
Having effectively shut the door on conversational bonhomie, I straightened my cutlery. The hall filled with the rumble of conversation and I cursed Sharon for having convinced me to attend.
The lithe form of a woman eased into an empty seat opposite me. She was little taller than five feet, wore a form-fitting, strapless black dress that revealed a trim figure to great advantage. Dark hair cascaded around her shoulders, framing an exotic face that spoke of a more equatorial heritage that my own pasty-white northern hue. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes held mine for what I thought to be a moment too long. Full red lips parted slightly in a smile. I'd never seen her before.
I sighed to myself in the same way I do when I see expensive European sports cars and boats and big houses and all the other things I covet but would never have.
I caught her eye again and nodded at her in the way of men struck mute by unattainable beauty. My brain scrambled for something disarmingly endearing to say, a clever turn of phrase that would set me above other potential suitors. Nothing came to me. I didn't doubt that I would wake up in the middle of the night with a killer line on my tongue.
She nodded back. Her smile widened.
I felt like a giddy adolescent. A smile for me! From a beautiful woman no less!
Perhaps it wasn't genuine, I thought to myself. Perhaps it was an aloof smile that I hadn't correctly interpreted -- a smile that a benevolent goddess might bestow upon a cowering shepherd.
The woman's neighbor exchanged a few words with her, though I could make out none of it from across the table. An unreasoning pang of jealousy flared in me.
The man nodded and tried to get the attention of the table. "Everyone. I'd like you to meet..."
Just as the introduction was about to be made, the tapping of cutlery against wine glasses at other tables announced the CEO's obligatory address to the assembled troops.
The CEO stood and grinned at the assembled throng, amazed and perhaps a little chagrined at how many people were willing to celebrate winter wonderland. The year went well, he said. The company faced challenges and overcame them. Thank you all for your hard work. But you're not here to listen to me -- ha, ha -- let's eat.
An efficient army of wait staff soon served soup. I used the distraction to sneak a peek at the woman opposite me, and noted with alarm that she was unselfconsciously studying me, but without the pretense of stealth that I'd somehow failed to exercise. She popped a cherry tomato into her mouth and closed her eyes as she chewed. I'd seen a lot of people consume a lot of produce, but never had the sight caused my heart to skip a beat as it did then. I quickly looked away and cursed myself for doing so. Typical of me to abort what might have been a meaningful gaze of the kind shared by actors, usually from across a crowded room, in a Hollywood movie.
When I looked up again, resolving to be bold and signal my interest with an intense and suggestive gaze, she was engaged in conversation with the man who'd failed to introduce her. It was suddenly important for me to know her name. Curse the man for not yelling it over the CEO's inane blather.
The main course arrived. My halal chicken looked like every other chicken I'd eaten. Given that it had squawked into the sunset of its life on the wings of ritual, simply stuffing it into my mouth seemed woefully inadequate. This was, after all, a blessed chicken -- perhaps the first such fowl I'd eaten. "Sorry to eat you, little buddy," I said to it. It was the best I could do.
