By Toby Tucker Hecht
I am sitting in a car with a man who is not my husband. It is lunchtime in mid-April. Ross, the man I am with, pulls out a thickly layered sandwich—turkey, lettuce, tomato, and avocado—carefully wrapped like a gift in aluminum foil. Little plastic bags of carrot sticks and cookies and a juice box with a straw peek out from his brown paper sack. I have no doubt his wife put this meal together for him. Ross has three children and his wife treats him like a fourth. This I have gathered from previous conversations in this car in the same parking spot over the past month. Ross is eating with relish, like a man taking as much pleasure in the act of chewing as in the satisfaction of a full stomach. I smell the vinegary mustard oozing out the sides of the bread and I have an urge to get out and sit for a while—at least until he has finished—in my own car parked five spaces away in a lot that is otherwise empty. But I don’t.
I don’t eat during these meetings. I am jittery and afraid if I do I might have a pressing need to go to the bathroom, or that my breath might be off when we kiss. That is how far we have gotten: kissing and a little caressing, as though we were recapitulating high-school dating. I have been the bolder one, letting my hands discover him, an invitation for Ross to do the same. That is why I am here: because I want to be desired, to be kissed and touched by an attractive man. So I wait until I am back at my office to eat my lunch. Ross assumes that I am dieting. He says it’s a turn-on that I’m making this effort to be sexy, and asks if it’s really for him or for my husband Seth. I tell him what he wants to hear. Ross knows who Seth is; once in a while Seth picks me up at choir practice where Ross and I have been singing once a week for the past two years. I suspect that before he made his opening move, Ross studied the two of us together—the older man, a bit starchy and distracted, and the younger woman, trying too hard to please—and decided I could be won over.
—Toby Tucker Hecht, Spring 2010
