Sort of like how your wife’s smell affects me.
“What does it engender in the opposite sex?” Luke asked.
“Fear,” Greta said.
Luke nodded.
“Have you thought about having him snipped?” Greta asked. “It’s not too late. Pi?on was neutered at age six.”
Luke shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Big Swiss seemed far away, likely lost in a fantasy of having Greta snipped, or doing it herself.
“I prefer to leave him intact,” Luke said. “I don’t think neutering is really necessary for males.”
Blow jobs aren’t necessary, either, Greta thought, but I bet you couldn’t live without ’em, am I right?
“I imagine he wanders off a lot, though,” Greta said. “On the prowl for poon.”
“I’m not anthropomorphizing,” Luke offered strangely. “I guess I’m just reluctant to do something irreversible when there’s little evidence that it does anything good.”
“Well, friends are good,” Greta said, and raised her glass. “To new friends.”
“To new friends,” Luke repeated, raising his.
“Cheers,” Big Swiss said cheerlessly.
They passed around the salad, along with an assortment of dried meats and various breads, including nut and fruit. In the pot, five mountain cheeses, three glasses of wine, two shots of kirsch, some garlic. Greta and Luke dunked lightly, almost playfully, but Big Swiss dragged hers along the bottom, drowning the life out of it before plopping it onto her plate, where it rested briefly before traveling to her beautiful mouth. Rather than devour it in one bite, Big Swiss nibbled off the fork—flirtatiously, it seemed to Greta. Sure enough, Big Swiss and Luke exchanged one or two private smiles.
Where’s my private smile? Greta wondered. “You’re supposed to flirt with the other woman,” she imagined lecturing Big Swiss tomorrow, “not your boring husband.” But then she remembered that she wasn’t in fact the other woman. The other woman would be sleeping with Luke. Greta was the gay lover.
The gay lover was painfully full five minutes later. So was Luke, it appeared, who kept pushing food around on his plate. Like the child of an alcoholic. Greta counted his drinks—five beers, fifty minutes—and thought of various ways to rescue him. But why, when he was clearly very wealthy? She never pitied the rich. And he could easily defend himself. In fact, he looked like he could jiu-jitsu Greta’s face off if he wanted. Was he flexing his forearms?
He was twitching, she decided. He was tactile defensive! Some texture or other must’ve been bothering him. He was certainly holding his fork funny. He had trouble brushing his hair, Greta remembered Big Swiss saying, but his hair looked fine, a little unctuous, maybe, and she wondered if the culprit was coconut oil, and whether he spent as much time as Greta slathering it all over himself, slathering it all over his wife, getting it all over the sheets, tracking it to the bathroom, spitting it out in the sink, washing it off in the shower but never quite getting it out of his hair, and whether he could even glance at a coconut without thinking of pussy. But that was Greta’s life. Perhaps Luke’s life was coconut-free, or, who knows, maybe he was anti-coconut, because of all the monkey labor, those poor pigtailed macaques in Southeast Asia, forced to harvest coconuts on farms for the last four hundred years.
“？Habla más de un idioma?” Luke said in a low voice.
“Por supuesto no,” Big Swiss said.
“Que te pasa, cari?o,” Luke said. “Estás actuando rara.”
“Ninguna cosa,” Big Swiss said, and shook her head. “Te diré después.”
Was she having an auditory hallucination, or were they really speaking Spanish?
“Hola,” Greta chimed in. “Feliz Navidad.”
Luke looked embarrassed. “Gosh, I’m sorry. We don’t mean to be rude. We’re just practicing.”
“For what?” Greta said.
“Fun,” Big Swiss said quickly.
“Ecuador,” Luke said.
“Oh?” Greta coughed.
“Did you tell her, Flav?” Luke said.
Big Swiss shook her head without looking at Greta.
“We’re going to this fancy eco-resort for our anniversary,” Luke said. “We’ll be there two weeks—maybe longer. We’ll see. But we haven’t been to South America in five years, so we’re a little rusty.”
“Me neither,” said Greta, who’d never been south of Tijuana.
“You know any Spanish?” he asked.
Greta cleared her throat. “I only know one phrase.”
Don’t say it, lady. Not here, not tonight. Just—control yourself. But it was too late—they both looked at her expectantly.
“Sacame la leche,” Greta said.
Luke blinked. “？‘Take my milk’？”
“Cum,” Greta said. “？‘Take my cum.’？”
Luke blushed deeply. Big Swiss shrugged and looked out the window.
“Well,” Luke said slowly. “If all goes according to plan, Flavia will, uh, sacame la leche in Ecuador.”
“Pardon?” Greta said.
Big Swiss gave Luke a punishing look, which bounced right off him.
“We’re trying to get pregnant,” Luke said shyly.
Greta immediately stuffed bread into her mouth.
“With twins, Flavia hopes,” Luke said. “Twins run in my family.”
“Oh wow,” Greta said, chewing slowly. “Wow, wow. Cool, very cool.”
Now Big Swiss gave Greta the same look she’d given Luke, which affected Greta like kryptonite.
“Twins run in my family, too,” Greta said weakly. “My mother was a twin. My grandmother had five kids under the age of five, and then totally lost her mind.”
Luke smiled politely.
“Was she institutionalized?” he asked after a moment.
“No,” Greta said. “She had three more kids and several miscarriages.”
“Oops,” Luke said.
Greta smiled and wondered what the fuck she was doing here. They were clearly very married. And very broody. Dinner had been Luke’s idea, ostensibly, but why had Big Swiss agreed to this? She watched Luke tear into a fresh baguette. He broke it apart with his handsome hands and passed the heel to Greta, which seemed appropriate.
“Use a knife,” Big Swiss snapped. “She doesn’t want your fingers all over her food.”
Luke sighed. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” Greta said, and looked at Big Swiss. “You know, I think you might be slightly allergic to alcohol? That’s why you get so… agitated.”
“Ooof,” Luke said. “Careful, Rebekah.”
Greta carefully scratched her scalp. It had started like any other itch, but it occurred to her now that this was the itch, the unbearable crawling sensation at the back of her head, the curse of her adolescence. Phantom lice. Scratching released serotonin, she’d learned long ago, which in turn made the itch worse. Otherwise, she recalled nothing from the few weeks she’d experimented with habit reversal therapy （HRT）。 Her first impulse was to stab herself with a fondue fork. Instead, she scratched behind her ear like a dog.