Quiet Afternoon

Jason is at work. At the drug company. Not expecting anything. Doesn’t think he’ll ever expect anything again. Not anything good. He has become a martyr.

When the Wagmans left him with their praise and their hopes, the dutiful husband and good citizen marched upstairs and convinced his wife she was too important to the world to go back to obscurity. She had to give them a chance to use her for – he almost choked on it – the greater good.

At first she put up a fight, with her eyes and her newly arrived, hoarse whisper. She was getting better; she could make sounds. She was tired, she said. Every moment had been awful.

No it hadn’t, he assured her. She’d shone like a star. She gave everybody what they wanted and some what they deserved.

“I think I lied a lot,” she said. “Well, not exactly lied.”

“That’s it,” he told her. “Not exactly lying is not lying. You did perfectly. You have the knack. That’s why you have to stay in. You have a talent for it.”

“I do?”

“Sadly, yes.”

The pact is formed. She knows he doesn’t want her to do it, he knows she wants to anyway, and so she will. He’s getting nothing for it. If something comes along that he wants, he’s entitled.

He’s seen Danielle once since he checked out the Dads for Tads site. When she asked if he’d been there, not only could he say yes, but he’d done enough research on the matter to impress her.

Today, she does not even look at him. She’s forgotten her mincing hip-roll. She’s into the Midwest Stride. On the rolling plains. Going to the cow barn for a pitch fork. The barn’s a half mile away – just a jaunt.

He can feel the breeze. She’s at the door. She barges in.

The door slams open, banging against the inside wall. Clyde jumps in his seat. She’s got a newspaper under her arm. Her blonde curls fall all over it. She whips the paper out and flaps it down on the desk. She stabs her finger at a picture on page one.

“What’s this?” she demands.

He looks. So do we. Damned if it isn’t a picture of Brenda. And Clyde. At a Planned Parenthood “Our Bodies” rally. Beer and chips in the park. Microphones. Brenda and Clyde sitting side by side on a bench. The CEO of Drugs Incorporated (not its real name) and the Democratic candidate for congress, the liberal teacher. Wait a minute. Is she a liberal, or just a plain old Democrat? We weren’t sure before, but now we, and everybody else, knows. She’s a lefty.

She’s out there in full view with the baby-killers. Cheering them on. Promising to pay mothers for stem-cell tissue, encouraging women to choose murder. The article states that Waters has thrown his support behind the candidate. It describes Clyde as the CEO of the company that makes and sells the morning-after pill. It makes Clyde’s being there look sleazy. He hadn’t intended to focus on that issue, just benefit quietly. He was there for women’s rights. That’s what that politico Wagman had told him. It was a women’s rights meeting. It had turned out to be more than he’d bargained for.

“Killer!” Danielle yelled. “Murderer! I work for a hit-man!”

She pounds her fist on the paper. It’s a loud sound. Then she rushes from the room, right into Jason’s arms. Instinctively, he’s anticipated this, and is ready to rescue his hysterical damsel in distress.

She flings her arms around his neck. The melodious voice has become a gasping, throaty sob. The great big breasts are pressed into his chest. He has to stretch his arms to put them around her. But he manages. They’re standing there like that when Clyde walks out the door.

Jason and Clyde stare at each other. Victims. They both know it. Jason separates from Danielle only enough to turn her around. Arms around each other’s waists, she leaning on and slightly over him – she’s a little bit taller – they leave the room. At the moment, Jason believes this to be a reasonable posture to assume when comforting a woman. That’s what’s meant by “thinking with the little head.”

Jason believes he’s walking her to the ladies’ room. Instead, they get into the elevator – it’s empty – and without looking at each other or talking, leave the building, go to the parking lot, and get into Danielle’s car.

She has stopped crying. She has stopped everything. She seems to be only partly there. Jason does not want to argue with what’s happening. Does not want to break the spell.

She takes the highway to her garden apartment and they go up the stairs in the same formation. She unlocks the door. When they’re standing inside, she turns, pushes him up against the door with that bodacious bosom, and grinds his lips so hard he thinks he might faint.

Something in him goes limp. No, not that. It’s his psyche. His spirit. He gives in. The prairie-girl has hog-tied a calf and is dragging it to the altar. The figurative altar. The bed.

There she proceeds to undress him. Fast. It’s a good thing he’s not trying, because he couldn’t keep up with her. She flips him around and over till he’s lying naked on the bed. This, folks, in a suit and heels.

She looks at him lying there and smiles. Then very slowly, like a shy French maid, she slithers out of her jacket and … and nothing. There is nothing else. He is face to chest with the breasts. He opens his hands wide, as wide as he can, reaches out and tries to take one in each hand. They’re a little too big. She wiggles out of her skirt – nothing under there either. Farm girls are a wicked lot. Animals don’t wear underwear, why should they?

She is, as we have hinted, stupendous. A wasp waist, curvy hips, high definition in arms and legs. Sculpted shoulders. Think “Heavy Metal heroine.”

He takes his captor in a loving embrace, and commences to enjoy his prize to the fullest.

He’s exhausted when it’s over. A spent tube of toothpaste flattened on a sink.

You haven’t heard any of their conversation. That’s because there wasn’t any. They haven’t spoken a single syllable to each other all afternoon.