A Woman

I’m not sure that I am reacting as most people might, following the death of their long-time spouse. Specifically, I refer to my thoughts about the opposite sex. In my case, women. I will further clarify by saying that my reaction is the lack of thoughts about women or sex. I have, incrementally, over the last three months, become less and less interested in women, sexually. I sometimes think you might set Angelina Jolie between me and my television, have her dancing seductively in a see-through negligee, and I would ask her to kindly step aside so I could flip to the Discovery Channel or the Food Network. Something is missing…and that something, though I never really try to define this in certain terms, is the woman I loved. For all these years I have invested all that I am, all that I have, in my wife. Now that she is gone, so is most of my desire.

This is an unexpected development. I expected that the absolute absence of my wife, the hole that she left when she vanished might drive me to, at a minimum, unfulfilled desire.

Not so.

The other day, for instance, I met a younger woman defined by a pair of large, surgically enhanced breasts. Big, fake boobs, if you prefer. Her breasts stood at forced attention below her chin, handily exposed in her low-cut top like two glossy bullets in the open magazine of a rifle. Not an unattractive woman by any means, she purposefully swung her breasts at me, tossed them to the side, pressed them out in front of every motion she conducted. A production, to be sure. While many men would have been hoping for a “wardrobe malfunction,” similar to the one that befell Janet Jackson at Super Bowl 38, I backed away, concerned that one of us might get hurt if she became overly animated. Mostly, I kept fixed on her eyes, which were deep brown, nearly the exact color of Coca-Cola, and far more interesting than the rest of her.

--Mitchell Hegman