I HAVE A CASUAL FRIEND - let's call her June - who makes comic music videos and shows them on YouTube. Around her is a group of female and (mostly gay) male friends - we go out sometimes, to comedy shows, for drinks, and sometimes there are house parties that end up being scenes in which we contribute something to her latest project, stand in as background for a shot or deliver a line or two.
Last year June made a low-budget feature film - wrote it, directed it, starred in it - and we all contributed in various ways to its production. Then she disappeared for a while into the editing room, producing a rough-cut for us all to see and critique. It was at this screening party where someone told me about an extraordinarily erotic experience she'd had.
We were a dozen women and a few men, crowded into a darkened basement watching the film unfold on a bigscreen TV. The film was fun and light and silly, more of a musical than I'd expected (though the songs were truly wretched), and low production standards. Luckily we'd all had enough to drink and were laughing generally when we were supposed to.
The couch was crowded and there weren't enough chairs, so I found myself sitting on the floor off to the side, next to one of June's other friends who, like me, tended to stay on the periphery of these things, a cute, petite woman in her early forties named Ellen. As I watched the film, I couldn't help notice that she was agitated and glancing frequently my way, a response I thought was elicited by vague embarrassment over what we were watching. I leaned in and whispered, "What do you think?"
She whispered back, "Calais, is it true you write erotica?"
I sat up and cast my eyes around in the dark, then replied, "How did you know? I didn't think people knew that."
She leaned in close and said directly into my ear in a voice that made me pay attention, "I have to tell you what happened to me. Maybe you could write it as a story."
Writers rarely want to hear these words from non-writers. But there was something compelling in her tone and body language that made me sit up and listen. She searched my expression with something like desperation before I said, "All right. Maybe we could meet for a coffee - " but she was already saying, "In here, in here" as she shuffled towards the back of the room. I followed, keeping my eyes on June and the other guests, but they were absorbed by the movie and didn't notice. Ellen slipped through a curtain, and I followed into darkness. I felt around - we were sitting on cushions in a low, warm room.
"What is this? Where are we?" I asked.
"A play space for June's youngest. Do you know Edgar? He's autistic. It's his quiet room." The curtain was thick and shut out most of the light from the TV, and the sounds were dampened and distant. "When the other kids are playing he can hide in here."
"Is there a light?" I asked, wanting to see where we found ourselves.
"No light," Ellie whispered. "I couldn't tell this if I was looking at you." And she began to talk.
She told me first about her marriage.
Ellen is confident and warm. Her husband Tim is a few years older, and quiet and kind in his own way, perhaps a little reserved. He runs a small company which specializes in transporting art for museums - sculpture, crafts, and famous paintings by artists like Monet and Van Gogh. The couple started dating when Ellie was in high school, before the whirlwind of university and medical school and interning and working in an emergency room and finally setting up her own practice with two other female doctors, a busy, run-off-your-feet family clinic, where patients have to declare their every appointment - from a plugged ear to a suspicious lump - as an emergency, if they hope to get in the door within the month.
She'd been thoroughly faithful to Tim throughout their marriage, and he to her.
They'd suffered a crisis recently, when she told Tim she was afraid she was going to leave him. Not because she wanted to, but because she felt she had no choice: she'd only ever slept with one man: Tim. In discussion they both recognized the irony of this situation, how in a previous age people got married to have sex, and these days they were getting divorced to have sex - with other people.
"It doesn't have to be," Tim had said. "There are options." And then they discussed, in their rational, measured way, about polyamory, about making their own rules for marriage. "We need to find you something, El," Tim told her. "Someone special."
Ellie spent the next few months preoccupied by fantasies inspired by this talk, but those slowly faded, replaced by the same despair that had inspired the discussion in the first place. She feared that Tim hadn't meant what he'd said.
And then he asked her for a favour.
Tim never asked for medical favours, so she was surprised when he came to Ellie with a request to run a battery of tests on a man she didn't know, a pilot from Belgium who had flown extensively for Tim's company, mostly in Eurasia and Africa. Due to some technicality, he needed his medical certification updated so he could fly while he was spending a few months in Canada. Though she could not take him on as a patient, she could do this single examination.
When Ellie sped through the crowded waiting room that day she immediately noted a tall stranger, curiously exotic among the old ladies and moms with coughing infants. While she saw patient after patient, she could not get him out of her mind, and when she opened the door to examination room three and saw him sitting there quietly in his suit, she was momentarily flustered. He was softspoken and shy about his accent, which was French, but many other things too. When she asked about it, he said his voice was like his body - a little from every part of the world. He had ancestors in Israel, Egypt, India, Denmark, Siberia, and Ivory Coast. She liked him immediately, and could not fathom why.
She conducted the physical exam thoroughly and professionally, sent him for blood tests, and that was that. Though she had to admit she was still thinking about him a week after the appointment, especially the moment she reached into his unbuttoned shirt and slid her hand over the swell if his pectoral to probe the beat of his heart. There'd been something there, and she'd had to listen for a long time to catch it, moving the stethoscope's probe to home in on it, her knuckles against his warm skin. Listening. Waiting for what she thought she'd heard: an extra beat. He cleared his throat.
"You are hearing my PVC," he said shyly.
"Premature ventricular contraction?"
"I'm told it is harmless. Completely."
"I'm sure it is," Ellie replied. She closed her eyes and listened. And there it was, an extra thump among the steady cadence of his heart.
"It is part of who I am. I think it makes me stronger," he said.