Sputterpub's Blog

Seriously, I dislike my best friend’s husband. Yes, another four months have passed, and we’ve been through the shower, the rehearsal dinner, and the actual ceremony. A week ago Jane became Mrs. Jerry, and I still don’t get it. I think I get him, but I can’t figure out the why of them.

But what do I know? Lately I’m a straight woman with a crush on a woman.

Mel is Jerry’s older sister. I had no idea. I didn’t meet her till the shower, and I was put off by her then. She’s a big girl with a big personality. The woman just oozes self-confidence. At first she seemed to be a blowhard like her brother, but on further acquaintance one discovers a humility and sweetness in her that is astounding. Looking back on it, I think her personality was just too large for the private room we rented for the shower.

Melanie is gay. I now know from Jerry that she used to go with men, but she was always attracted to guys who were smaller and shyer than she is. When she realized her true orientation, she sublimed from maladjusted straight woman to drag king. There’s no middle ground for Mel.

She’s a big person, tall and substantial. As I learned at the wedding, she’s a fine man.

She and Jerry have always been close. He asked her to be his best person for the wedding, and Mel did herself proud with tux and attitude.

But that was our third exposure to one another. As I said, the first was the shower, and there I thought she was too loud and as full of affectation as her brother.

She came to the rehearsal dinner in a sleeveless black cocktail dress. That showed off an impressive amount of ink. I’m not normally into tattoos or piercings but she wore her sleeves, her chest, her back with style. She made a circuit of the room, charming everyone she talked to, including me.

Mel has a way of looking at you like you’re the only person around. Her face is open and attentive, her eyes are bright, her posture is confident, relaxed, reassuring. I enjoyed talking with her. Afterwards I kept replaying our conversation. I’ve never done that before, about a female.

I wondered if I’d just met a person as willful and powerful as myself.

The tux covered her ink on the wedding day. But nothing hid her charisma. The peak experience was after dinner, after toasting, when she walked to the stage and took the mic. She murmured to the band and then launched into her own cover of “You Can Leave Your Hat On.”

I’ll admit it: I felt seduced. I knew it was a woman singing, and she was singing straight to me, and I felt a melting receptiveness that I hadn’t experienced … ever.

The feeling hasn’t left me. It’s led me to new thoughts and strange impressions. I’m still straight. I still despise Jerry. But I’m really looking forward to the dinner Mel and I arranged. Tomorrow night.

Put another way, I loathe my best friend’s fiancé. It’s been three and a half months since I started this rant; Jane and Jerry are now engaged. They announced their plans to me over a fancy dinner last weekend. I suppressed my dismay. I hid the hate. I even acted humble and honored to be asked to stand up with Janie.

We went to the best of our favorite restaurants. Jane and I are known there and we were offered one of the hard-to-get booths, but we had to decline because of Jerry’s belly. He can’t fit into a booth. And I’m okay with accommodating anyone with special needs, even if the needs are their own fault, but I didn’t like how we faked it. Jane acted like there was nothing wrong with asking for a table, like the preference was natural and not required. It’s one thing if she wants to look beyond his obesity and another step toward murkiness when she pretends he isn’t overlarge or acts like she wants him this way.

Anyway, we took a table. We ordered appetizers and champagne. I’ll say this for Jerry: he isn’t afraid to try weird foods. He requested the pig’s feet and he dove into the blood sausage. Jane picked at the plates. I stuck to the hummus platter. We listened to Jerry’s latest ideas for a computer game. He isn’t a programmer but he thinks he can invent games that others will code. As usual his idea was unsubtle. Jerry likes slapstick and pratfalls and superheroes and two-dimensional villains. He has blustering energy but no finesse.

I thought I was speaking fondly to him when I commented that no one would accuse him of wit. I sure didn’t mean to be offensive, and I smiled sincerely when I said it. But Jane leaped in. “Are you saying that Jerry isn’t witty?”

I was flummoxed. Chagrined even. I stammered a little. “Well, yes I guess I am,” I admitted. “But we all know there’s more to life than wit.”

“What: do you think wit has to be subtle or something?” Jane sneered that one at me. This from a woman who appreciates Oscar Wilde!

Me: “Yes, I’m saying that too. I can’t imagine unsubtle wit…”

We got past the moment. We moved on to entrees with wine and dessert with green tea. But I kept looking at Jerry and Jane. I detected no sex spark. I saw companionship but I think they’re each too young to settle for that. And then Jerry started telling me, in all seriousness as far as I could perceive, about a secret city under Tokyo, manned by captured Chinese slaves. I nearly lost it.

Jane said nothing. She used her phone to capture pictures of what was left of our creme brulee and flourless chocolate cake.

I had a moment with her before we left. We visited the bathroom together (very together – it’s a single room). I couldn’t resist asking “So what’s with the secret underground city?”

“Hey,” she said. “Don’t ask me. I choose my battles.”

I can’t stand my best friend’s boyfriend. Please don’t look at me that way: I’ve heard all the Psych One ideas. Believe me when I tell you I am not jealous. No way do I want that slob. And I’m not lusting for my bff either. It would be convenient if I were gay – that would satisfy my Lesbian friends’ aspirations for me and certainly my dance card would never be empty – but orientation is not a choice. I may be a gay woman trapped in a straight body, but if so, I haven’t come up with an escape idea.

No, I don’t like Jerry and I never have. And it isn’t even the sort of interesting dislike that might spark into something else sometime. It’s way too boring for that.

Jerry and Jane met a year ago. He’s the second cousin of a friend of her brother’s, and the introduction occurred at their parents’ house. Everyone gathers there at holiday time and Jane’s brother brought some guy from his place, and that guy brought his visiting cousin. Jane’s brother lives in a big shared house near campus and it seems like there are always extra guys around.

I would have been there for the initial meeting except that my parents took a place in Hawaii and hauled all of us over there. Picture me: full-grown and climbing a short hill to 30, traveling with my parents and sibs. I couldn’t turn the trip down. It was an unusual plan for my parents to hatch, and they treated it as some sort of emotional pilgrimage.

By the time I returned, Jane and Jerry were a couple. I never had an opportunity to make the sort of disparaging comments that might have turned her interest away from him. She came over for dinner and announced that she’d met her future husband (!). She introduced us the following day and a week later he moved into her place.

Jerry is not good looking. He is overweight but his fat is not covering lovely (or even big) bones. As it is, he is so doughy that his face fat compresses his features and his fingers look swollen. He has big arms but they start at pillowy shoulders and they end in wrists as creased as a baby’s, so if they’re strong they are hiding that quality. He tucks a big black T-shirt into tight cuffed jeans and he looks like a lollipop. Even if he lost a hundred pounds he’d still have small close-set eyes, a bulbous nose and a boring mouth.

But I’m not small-minded. I can get past the physical specifics. My contempt for Jerry has structure and depth.

The guy’s an undereducated moron. He decided when he was about 14 that no one could teach him anything, and then he dedicated his future to proving that’s true. I have never met such a combination of ignorance and arrogance.

He believes in conspiracy theories. He tends to blurt out stupidities and then try to cover them, if he’s challenged, by acting like he didn’t mean his words – he was just provoking his interlocutor, or “testing the Internet,” depending upon his venue at the time. He mumbles predictions daily, usually about such momentous subjects as fashion trends or burgeoning revolts against “the man,” and he is almost always completely incorrect. But Jerry only remembers the statements he’s made that turned out to be true (“why, I predicted that studs would come back a year before they showed up on the runways!”), and even a broken clock is right twice a day.

When Callie was in her mid-40s, she was still a Victoria’s Secret customer. She’d started when she was 33 and in love with the man who would be her second husband; he took her to the store and bought her the lingerie he wanted her to wear. Callie thought that shopping trip was sexier than most of their intimate time, which wasn’t bad either. If good sex had been the only requirement, she’d still be with him.

But it wasn’t and she isn’t. By the time they broke up she wasn’t buying teddies any more. But she liked the bras and panties; she kept her Victoria’s Secret credit card. This was in the middle of the 1990s and the store then featured a fabric they called Second Skin Satin. It was glossy and slick but it had a little stretch. It was opaque but almost seamless in its construction. Callie will never understand why it was discontinued. She had to toss pieces as they stretched out or wore through over time, but even now, almost 64 years old, Callie owns two racer-back bras and one pair of high-leg panties made of the stuff.

The bras are handy when she wants to expose her shoulders. She doesn’t do that often, because she hasn’t found a way to show shoulder without brandishing her flapping upper arms, so the bras are in pretty good shape. But the panties are shot. They are still a nice red color, but the cotton crotch in each pair is starting to fray, and the underpants have stretched to old-lady dimensions.

Those red panties have been her Monday choice for the last few months. She put on 20 stress pounds this year, she’s always at her peak weight on Monday morning, and the old VS panties are the comfortable underwear in her drawer. Until now.

Her college boyfriend just paid a visit. Their breakup was amicable and they’ve stayed in touch over the decades. It had been a year since they’d last seen one another. Kevin drove from his Fresno house to Callie’s Oakland condo on Saturday, for a nice dinner out, a platonic sleepover, and Sunday morning conversation.

Kevin and Callie don’t have a sexual relationship. They did in college; in fact, they were each other’s first. But that was Berkeley around 1970 so of course they weren’t each other’s only. They stayed together, mostly, through college, but then Kevin went kind of nuts. After diagnosis and some treatment he settled into depression and bipolor disorder, which are not nuts, but his treatment toned him down in all ways, some of which were personality-altering. He became dismayingly humble and gentle. To Callie it was almost like altering a cat.

Kevin hasn’t married. Callie has twice. They haven’t resumed having sex, not even long after she became single again. But they’ve stayed fond of each another. One or the other of them occasionally considers “what if?” but they’re never in sync enough to proceed.

He showed up around 2:30. They hugged, he brought his bag inside, and then they took a walk. It wasn’t until after a good dinner out, when they were seated on her small couch watching a movie, that Callie’s nose first detected an unfamiliar odor.

She lives in one room. She’s naturally neat and not a collector. She knows her home with all her senses. Discreetly she checked out her own armpits – no. Then she assumed she was smelling some critter gift; the yard in which her cottage sits is home to all sorts of urban varmints. It wasn’t death, but might it be some shit? No – too musty.

When she walked Kevin to his car at noon yesterday, they bear-hugged. She felt his little pot belly against her stomach (in the old days Kevin was lanky and Callie was plump, but over the decades she has gotten into exercise and he has gotten into sitting). Tightly they embraced and chastely they kissed, but not before Callie concluded that Kevin was the source of the smell.

She thought about that during the afternoon and evening, as Kevin’s spoor dissipated. She had given him a towel when he arrived, and she offered her compact facility that morning, but he said he didn’t necessarily shower daily: just when he sweated.

Clearly Kevin should shower. Callie doesn’t know if the smell is on account of the anti-depressants he takes or age or both, but it is probably not a necessary smell. She knows she would mention it to him if they saw one another more often, but as it is, as they are, she is unmotivated to give somatic advice.

The mustiness was gone by this morning. Callie woke to her usual Monday environment, feeling fat. After exercise and her own shower, she opened her underwear drawer and pulled out the red panties.

And noticed them. They were humongous. They were old. They were no more okay than Kevin’s smell.

Callie made her habitual Monday morning diet promise, knowing as she vowed that it wouldn’t stick. But she did something new, too. She walked to the foot-operated garbage can in her single room, and she dropped those old panties inside.