Tim Sandlin - Social Blunders

I was afraid this would happen. “The nipples are cantaloupe colored.”

“They cost Skip six grand apiece. How about my stomach. Do you like my stomach?”

“Don’t go any lower.”

Katrina unwrapped her head towel and handed it to me. She shook out her hair while I blotted my wet face and wondered what she used to hold the false eyelashes in place. Leaning to one side, she regarded me as an object of curiosity.

“Skip learned a lot about you last night, and there’s more coming in today.”

“The hairs in my nose are scorched.”

“Mostly money matters which bore me to death, but some of the information was interesting.”

Sweat dripped off my earlobes. That had never happened before.

“You’re thirty-three but you have a daughter who is nineteen,” Katrina said.

“Leave my daughter out of this.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Your wife of eleven months left you recently. Before her you had a checkered personal life of short-term relationships—including one former marriage—going back about twelve years. Before that you couldn’t get a woman with a stick.”

“Who did this detective talk to?”

“How many women have you slept with?”

I couldn’t see a breast enhancement line, but maybe it was hidden in the fold.

“That depends on your definition of ‘slept with.’”

“Had sex with.”

“I’m not clear on that definition either.”

Katrina made a sound of impatience. “How many women have you stuck your pistol in?”

“Not that many. I generally keep my pistol out of sex.”

She frowned. “A hundred.”

“I don’t think so, I’m not that kind of boy.”

“If you got laid every other month for a dozen years, you’d have had seventy women.”

“Gentlemen don’t keep score, Mrs. Prescott. And I object to the word had when it comes to this subject.”

“You prefer diddled ?”

“I prefer we talk about what you asked me to come here and talk about—my mother’s rape.”

Katrina continued to study me. Sweat trickled down my rib cage and the inside of my thighs. I wanted to take off my shirt but felt she might misinterpret my actions.

“How does my body compare to the average woman?”

Her legs beneath the towel were quite tight, for an older, short woman, and her stomach muscles were good. The shoulders rode higher on the neck than I generally liked. “You have a very compact body, but there’s no such thing as an average woman.”

“I want you to make love to me now.”

Okay, perverts, I admit it. The thought had crossed my mind. “The temperature’s a hundred and fifty degrees in here, Mrs. Prescott. We can’t make love.”

She threw aside her body towel. “Skip is afraid of you. I can’t begin to say how excited that makes me.”

“Would you like me if Skip didn’t hate me?”

“Of course not, you dress like domestic help.”

“Then it’s not me you want, but a way to hurt Skip.”

Katrina stood up. “What’s wrong with that, darlin’, do you want me or not?” Drops of sweat clung to the ends of her pubic hair. From deep in the forest, a clitoris called my name.

S a m.

“Yes, I want you. I want every woman, but I only want them for the right reasons, and hurting my father is not an appropriate reason to have sex.”

She touched my cheek with pampered fingernails, then ran her hand down my neck to my chest. “Any reason for doing it is the right reason.”

“I disagree with that attitude, Mrs. Prescott.”

Fingers fluttered across my stomach. “You’re trying to tell me you loved all seventy women you screwed.”

“I never said seventy, but however many it was, yes, I wanted to be closer to each one as an individual. I wanted to bring them joy.”

Her eyes snapped. “Bring me joy, Goddammit.”

I yelped. “You don’t want joy, you want revenge.”

“Revenge would bring me great joy.”

“It’s not the same thing. Let go of my crotch, Mrs. Prescott.”

She kneaded. “What’s my name?”

“Katrina.”

“I want to see it.” With her free hand she started digging at my jeans’ button and zipper.

“No. I don’t want to have sex with you.”

Suddenly, the fire left her. Katrina released me and slumped back onto the bench. She sniffled. “Why do you hate me so?”

“I don’t hate you, Katrina.”

“You’ve slept with seventy floozies in Carolina and you won’t sleep with me.”

“Some of them weren’t floozies.”

“Am I that ugly?”

I stepped toward her. “You aren’t ugly at all, you’re compact and pert, but the truth is I look at you as something of a mother figure. After all, you are married to my possible father.”

She was probably faking, but what with all the sweat, I couldn’t tell real tears from manipulation. “Skip will be so happy when he finds out you rejected me.”

“He doesn’t have to find out.”

“Skippy finds out everything. I’ll never matter to him because no one will ever again want me.”

She was a lot more appealing pretending to be vulnerable than she had been pretending to be invulnerable. The poor woman was one artificial layer over another all the way down to the core, where I imagined a little lost fetus the shape of that rubber thing in the center of a golf ball.

“Tell you what, Katrina. I really don’t want traditional sex with you, but maybe there’s another way to bring you joy.”

Her face lit. “How, honey?”

“Lean back against the wall.”

Katrina fingered the bumps on my head while I went to work. First impressions had been right; she talked through the entire orgasm.

After Katrina’s final yelp I drove down to the interstate and checked into the Ramada Inn to take a shower. Signed myself in as F. S. Fitzgerald. When you carry cash you can do that kind of stuff. I stretched my shirt, jeans, and boxers on the air-conditioning/heating vents and turned the fan to high. My clothes might smell, but at least they’d be dry and that was the best I could do. Shannon and Gus would notice if I bought a shirt and came home wearing something I didn’t go out in. The instinct to notice changes gives women a tremendous advantage over men.

After the shower I lay on the bed and watched Phil Donahue interview a Type A personality in a suit. Even with the sound off, I didn’t like the man. I rolled onto my back, covered my face with a pillow, and considered Katrina. Like most fireballs, she was insecure, and what she wanted wasn’t that hard to give—in fact, it was fun to give—but the relationship was deeply flawed: She didn’t like me and I didn’t particularly like her. So why should I go crawling around between her thighs when only yesterday I’d met someone good who could make a difference?

I’m sorry to say, Katrina wasn’t the first married woman who’d asked me to save her. My one God-given talent, besides Young Adult sports novels, is that I can meet any woman and tell precisely what she needs—lover, listener, friend, father, mentor, a lifelong commitment, a servant, meaningless orgasms, a confidante, or nothing whatsoever—but my God-given weakness is I feel a compulsion to fill needs wherever I find them, regardless of consequences.

Filling each need you come upon causes conflict. You can’t commit for life to every woman who needs a lifelong commitment in order to be whole. There’s too many of them; besides, when I tried with Wanda, it didn’t work. And you sure as hell shouldn’t give meaningless orgasms to one woman while hoping to be all of the above with another.

So—bottom line—Katrina had to go. No more sauna sex. She could cry about her low self-image till doomsday, I wasn’t going to build her up at the risk of losing something I wanted. For a change.