"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.
