Farnsworth's Revenge

4. A Woman’s Right to Choose

Chapter Four

A Woman’s Right to Choose

We were going at it hot and heavy, drooling over each other in our lust, our discarded clothes still warm on the floor. She was enthusiastic, I was randy, and our interests were about to converge.

That’s when I went soft, in a manner of speaking.

Having been married to Felicia, even though it had lasted less than a couple of years and technically still wasn’t over, had changed my outlook. I’d never been what you’d call a rake, but there was a time when I thought like one. Scoring was the only goal, even though the opportunity didn’t present itself all that often. I was a legend in my own mind. I was a conqueror, a despoiler of sandy nations and dark, sultry females. To be a shameless, heartless, stud road-warrior, that was the ideal.

But with Felicia, I found myself thinking more often about what she wanted. I learned to anticipate, and then to please, and the selfish rewards brought on by this seeming selflessness were truly amazing.

This afternoon, thousands of miles across the sea from my estranged wife, I decided, as if I’d always done business that way, to offer this random lady an unmistakable choice.

I flipped onto my back, my frozen pole pointing to magnetic north. She did the expected thing, throwing a leg over me, crouching with a knee on either side of my heaving chest.

As she looked down at me with what could have been condescending amusement or stifled glee, she panted to catch her breath. I placed my hands on the supple, flushed mounds of her lower back, resting my palms just where her hips flared from her waist. My fingers throbbed, but I didn’t push and I didn’t pull.

That’s when I decided the next move would have to be hers.

She could lower herself onto the throbbing knob of my desire. Or not.

And after half a heartbeat, she decided not.

So as my pole thawed and my balls turned blue, a cold shiver wriggled down my spine. Was I being gallant or moral or faithful or fair, or had I simply lost my nerve?

In not taking her, had I betrayed both of us?

“Perhaps we’d better not,” she said simply.

Was she taking her cue from me, or did she have her own reasons for not going through with it?

Boyfriend? Husband? Girlfriend? Time of the month? Herpes? Brain surgery in the morning?

“Sure” was all I said as I rolled out and crawled around, groping in the half-light for the mate to a gray argyle sock.

In the early twenty-first century in post-industrial Western nations, you’d think it’s the woman’s choice. She decides when and where she will give it up.

Oh, r**e happens, but it’s not in my experience base. You read about it in the papers, if you still get a paper and you can still read. You hear about frat parties and Ecstasy and fratire books. I suspect the reality of those stories involves a lot more puking and a lot less s*x than advertised, even though not since Brautigan have so many wallowed in so much vomit and pretended it’s cool. But old-fashioned James Bond seduction is pretty much a thing of the past, if it was ever more than a pipe dream of Hugh Hefner and the preppies. If you think you seduced her, you are in denial and your ego is bigger than your d**k, no matter what your shoe size. If she thinks she was seduced, she’s indulging in a romantic fantasy. Drunk or sober, she should decide and signal, even if it’s just a provocative look or opening a door. What comes later is more or less negotiated in advance, is all I’m saying.

She picks the time and the place. She has the one egg ready, and I would not be at all surprised if one day science proves she actually picks the lucky spermatozoon.

“Just where do you think you’re going?” she’d ask the wriggling intruder.

“C’mon, do you mind? I’m in kind of a hurry here,” the single-celled, sole-purposed little i***t would reply.

“Not so fast. You don’t look so fresh. Did you sleep over last night? Miss the last douche out? That tail looks deformed to me.”

And that would be enough to turn him around, in shame.

The winner had an IQ of 168 in his past life and managed a call center in Mumbai. He literally did not know how to take no for an answer. Persistence and tenacity were his virtues, overconfidence his downfall. In that past life, he died prematurely when he got so drunk at his brother’s bachelor’s party that he took a dare on a bet, shoved his hand in a straw basket, and startled an irritable cobra.

Now, in his new life starting out as a one-in-a-gazillion sperm, he’s scored because he can think of nothing else but thrusting forward.

His was not my way, not this time. I had hesitated, thinking I was being generous by letting her choose. Of course this babe had chosen already. She chose in the café where we’d hooked up, again as we necked and petted in the Metro, and again as she led me to her cozy studio apartment above an antique store in the Marais.

And her English was almost better than mine, although my French was passable. I made the first move, but she picked me up.

So maybe letting her choose yet again on the point of penetration was beside the point, or literally not on it.

Roused with passion, maybe she didn’t want to choose. Perhaps she wanted to be taken, to deny that it was her own intention to bring me thus far, to be able to tell herself the next day she hadn’t been able to help herself even as she resolved never to see me again.

Kissing on the Metro. Metro s****l. Sounds like some smelly perv on the subway beating his meat.

Her name was Celeste, not that it matters anymore.

I’d met her on the Champs Elysées, in the high-rent district, where I hardly ever go. They were showing a Vin Diesel crash-and-burn action flick, and most of the big 3D theaters are on that street. So I bucked the tourists and the hawkers of fake Hermes scarves to take in a mindless movie that stirred my aggressive urges.

Afterwards, I stopped in an overpriced brasserie thinking it was as good a place to collect my thoughts about Farnsworth’s dilemma and figure out what, if anything, I could or would do to help him.

Celeste sat at a table by herself reading Time magazine.

“Could I borrow that when you’re finished?” was all I said, in English, assuming a Parisian would be too ashamed to read a Yank journal in public.

She didn’t bother to finish, just smiled and handed it to me without a word. So I still didn’t know whether to thank her in French or in English or in Schweitzer-Deutsch.

“Merci,” I mumbled, sitting down at another table.

I didn’t have to pretend to read because I really wanted to see whether there was anything on the Keppelhoffer story. It took me a few minutes of page-thumbing to realize there wasn’t, at least not this week.

I looked up to see some people on the sidewalk raising their umbrellas as others scurried into doorways and raindrops began to streak the window glass.

She’s drinking Pernod. Maybe she’s French, after all.

“Il va pleurer,” I said and gave her my best smile.

She stifled a giggle, then couldn’t help herself and laughed loud enough to turn heads.

“You’re either a poor student of French or a very bad poet,” she said in a local accent as she caught her breath.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Pleuvoir,” she coached. “Il va pleuvoir.”

“What’d I say?”

“You said, ‘It’s going to cry.’”

And sometime later, the poet in me realized I’d spoken the truth after all.