Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories

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.”

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.