Hal Wright
There is a video of my wife having sex on the internet. “You cannot look at someone the same way after you see them having sex,” one parent complains at the school board meeting, and everyone tries not to turn, to look at my wife, to see her different. And while I think this is a true statement, it’s not a good argument. You cannot, for example, look at someone the same way after you see their eighth grade yearbook picture, but that doesn’t prevent eighth graders from going on to become elementary school teachers. I remember seeing my wife’s eighth grade yearbook. I remember seeing my wife the morning after we first had sex. I remember wondering how so many dimensions could find their way into one person. Anyway, what second graders are looking up sex tapes online?
Somebody looked up her sex tape online. The link was shared. Everyone claimed not to watch it, but some of them must have been lying. I didn’t watch it, of course. Until I did.
The school board meeting is about my wife’s video. The meeting is not about my wife’s video, but concerned parents have made it about my wife’s video, which is to say they have made it about themselves. They line the room, red faced, gripping tri-folded letters of complaint. During the section of the meeting given to the public, the parents read from their letters and request that each letter of complaint be placed in her permanent file. I do not know if such a file exists, but the stack of letters in front of the school board grows.
The sex tape involves pegging. My wife pegs the man, which I was strangely proud to see. One woman brings a strap-on dildo to the school board meeting. “This,” she says, “is what our children are being taught in school.” I wonder where she got the dildo, if it came from her own closet, or if she did research, trying to decide which color would look most lurid to the school board, red, or green or purple. The dildo is purple. It looks almost slick in the LED lights. No one is teaching second graders about pegging, least of all my wife.
I feel an obligation to my wife, to say something that will combat the parents, to stem the tide of their self-righteousness. Most of them do not have children in my wife’s class, though most of them have seen my wife having sex, or have at least imagined my wife having sex.
When I get to the podium and look back on my wife, she is in tears. We both had the kinds of parents that said “I’ll give you something to cry about” if they caught us crying. It became a sort of joke between us. If I catch my wife upset, I promise to give her something to cry about—my wife enjoys being spanked, and I enjoy spanking her.
I cry on the way home from work if the right song comes on shuffle. I spend all day looking for flaws in the armor of my company’s security software. The goal is not to find what I am looking for. My wife can tell when I’ve cried on the way home from work because my mustache tastes salty. A salty mustache means it’s my turn to be spanked.
The video made me see my wife in a new way; there is now an entire world of sexual possibilities I had never considered. We’ve never gone beyond spanking and tentative nipple pinches. “My wife is a good person,” I say to the school board, the concerned parents.
My wife left the Mormon church over punctuation. That is not quite right, but this is how she tells it. “I learned there were four thousand changes made from the first edition of the Book of Mormon to the current version.” I have heard her say this at parties, a cocktail or two in. “I was told by several church leaders that the changes were largely punctuation, but my god, four thousand? Needless to say I did my own research and it wasn’t just punctuation.”
But the change in punctuation that pushed her out of the church was none of those four thousand. When my wife applied to serve a church mission, she was turned down because she had an asterisk on her church membership. The asterisk indicated a history of homosexual activity, though at that time she’d only gone to second base once and felt appropriately chastened. The asterisk upset my wife, obviously. “Does God’s love for me have an asterisk?” she asked.
“God will always love you,” her bishop informed her, “but you might not be one of his favorites.”
This experience propelled her out of the church and into the beds of other women and men. In college she was a great favorite, she joined a polyamorous community, a network of fingers and mouths and warm, soft crevices. Of course, the real world imposed itself on their free-love association eventually and the weed-infused late-night cuddle-puddles—which was what they called them—began to be replaced with 9-5 office work.
The parents’ faces swim before mine as I stand at the podium, grasping for the words that will dismantle their fury. I wish I had a letter one thousand pages long, something to balance the scales against their typed and folded complaints. There are so many holes in their arguments that all the dildos in the world would not plug them up—if I found this many weaknesses in the software at work, I would tell them to burn it down and start over.
“She is good,” I repeat, but this statement seems to have an asterisk, even to my ears.
***
I drop my wife off at home and go out to buy the wine she likes.
She has a charcuterie board ready when I return. There are soft cheeses and cherry tomatoes. There are three kinds of crackers. One corner of the board is stacked with berries. She is just staring at it, like she doesn’t know where to begin.
“I got this for you.” I place the wine bottle on the table, and next to it, a strap-on with a fleshy dildo I’d bought at the love shop down the street.
My wife puts her face in her hands like maybe if she hides from them, all of her troubles will go away. When she looks up, I and the strap-on are still here. “I’m going to lose my job,” she says. “Do you understand this?”
“You’re not going to lose your job,” I lie.
I sit down beside her. Maybe if I appreciate the effort of her charcuterie board, maybe if I exude my love for her she will be willing to try it. I pop an olive and hand a second to my wife, but we have nowhere to spit the pits.
There is a world in which nobody is afraid of the things the flesh longs for. There is a world where sex is a form of love and not a form of shame. When promised blessings don’t seem to pan out, my wife tells me, Mormons claim them for the next life. She calls this a cop out, but I can imagine the next life, a heaven populated with warm, soft people, Kama Sutra-ing in the clouds, barking orgasmic hallelujahs, shrimping and fisting and pegging forever and ever amen.
Sometimes you need a companion who can help you preview paradise, and other times you need someone to sit in the shit with you. I extend my cupped hands to my wife, and she spits into them the slick pit of the olive, globs of green fruit still clinging to it. My own seed dribbles from my mouth and cuddles against hers in my palm. We look at the mess of them in silence.
“If we plant these,” I ask, “Would they grow?”
My wife folds my fingers closed around the pits, presses her lips to my double-fist.
“No chance in hell,” she says.
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Hal Wright (he/him) is a queer writer whose work has been published in Ninth Letter, HAD, X-R-A-Y, Wig Wag, and elsewhere. His unpublished novel, Red Flags, was recently named a semi-finalist of the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize.