"You really should come hot-tubbing sometime," Wendy had said repeatedly.
She was right. How was I ever supposed to fit in with the Deus Ex crowd if I couldn’t even sit in a hot tub with my husband’s business partner’s wife?
The hot tub room in the Marshalls’ condo had a rep. Some mighty weird things had transpired in there, I had heard, although the baby was making it a little difficult to sin these days. Open-minded babysitters who didn’t want to play too were in short supply. In the days when the place had been just Jonathan’s, I had heard, the whole tub had crashed through the floor, sending a couple of partyers to the hospital in states of consciousness they didn’t want to be examined in. It took all of Jonathan’s not-inconsiderable savings account to repair the damage, since Overloading a Hot Tub with Tripping Revelers did not qualify as an "Act of God" under his insurance plan. Or maybe he just didn’t want to raise any suspicions by filing a claim.
Jonathan was surprisingly non-confrontational---and conventional---about certain things. Like Sascha, he wanted everyone to like him. But while Sascha curried favor in order to get things from people or for his own greater glory, Jonathan genuinely believed that everyone should get along. Apparently, one of the people he wanted to get along with was his insurance agent.
The new and improved hot tub room looked pretty regular to me. It was enclosed by tinted glass on three sides. Below us was the shared backyard, and I could even see a strip of Broadway in the corner. The big plants added some jungle allure and a little cover, although I wasn’t sure how much action non-voyeurs could actually observe through the glass anyway. Perhaps that was part of the game.
"Take off your clothes," said Wendy, pleasantly, like a nurse.
I stood there. I observed my own prudery as if from a distance. I knew why I was really here---to gauge my tolerance of woman-to-woman intimacy, that is to say, potential lesbian action. And I had a pretty good idea that Wendy could provide all the action I could tolerate. But I couldn’t tell her this, because one of three things would happen: #1, she’d say, "Well, why didn’t you tell me in the first place! Let’s skip this hot tub crap and head straight for the bed!"; #2, she’d be horrified by the idea because she didn’t find me attractive, or she only slept with people she knew well, or she couldn’t possibly tread on Sascha’s turf; or #3, any kind of seduction was the furthest thing from her mind, and she’d be turned off by my presumption.
Wendy pulled off her big fisherman’s sweater. She had straight thick hair under her arms. She reached around to unhook her bra. Her body was strong and bony. She tied back her long horsy hair. Her breasts were small and pointy. I looked away---discreetly, I thought.
"Sara, you are so uptight!" She laughed. "You wait until you have a baby. You have strangers, like sticking cold instruments in you and you’re spread out there screaming and grunting and gushing in front of God only knows who."
"I understand that. I just don’t like---you know, you understand---to get undressed in front of people. It’s not uptightness or anything, really."
Wendy smirked. "‘Not uptightness?’ OK... How could you have ever been on a swim team?"
"I was polite. I never looked."
"You’re protesting too much, like they say. Here. Let me unhook your bra for you."
I pulled off my sweater. My bra was a Victoria’s Secret wireless 34B, a little tight around the chest from all those hours of swimming.
"You go, girl," said Wendy in that same pleasant, noncommittal voice. "Look at those muscles. What does your husband think about them?"
"He doesn’t think about them at all. Well, maybe they annoy him because they mean I swim all the time instead of working or something. OK---sometimes he wants to know what weight training I do and whether he can do any of it at his desk."
"That’s my boy." Wendy laughed a little. "So, are you going to chicken out or what?"
Imagining that I was still on the swim team and we were all about to put on our tanks and go fight the good fight, I let everything drop and leapt into the hot tub.
"I don’t want to talk about Deus Ex and I don’t want to talk about computers," I said, settling underneath the hot foam.
Wendy was still watching me, dressed from the jeans down with her hands on her waist. "I don’t either. I mean, I did have sort of a life before I met Sascha. When I was at Tufts, I was going to be a veterinarian. Sascha wanted me to go on after I finished school, but they---Sascha and Jonathan and the others---really needed me to help out with the company. They said they couldn’t afford to hire someone to do the accounting. And there I was, someone who had actually taken classes in something as mundane as bookkeeping. Besides, I don’t think they trusted anyone else. So here I am, filling out prescriptions for the company instead of for puppies."
Wendy unzipped her jeans and stepped coltishly into the water. I forced myself to look.
"So why do all you guys get off on sleeping with each other?" I asked. "Don’t you think it’s a little weird?" This was as good a time to ask as any.
Wendy shrugged. "It’s the culture, I guess. You see it really early on at MIT. There’s all these geeks who spend their lives in labs, experimenting, writing programs, and whatnot. When they get back to their dorm rooms, they want to experiment some more. And since practically everyone they know was a raving geek in high school, they’re all discovering sex for the first time. And they want to have more sex. Different sex. Better sex. Sex on drugs. Sex in weird places. Sex with more than one person. And once you get the hit that comes with that kind of sex, you don’t want to go back."
"Do you think that way?"
"I guess. I didn’t go to MIT, but I sure have enough of it in me. Some people are just more into sex than others. Lucky for you, I guess, you married someone who isn’t a big sex person either. I mean, Sascha loves to dance around with his ass showing---he talks about sex a lot, in a conceptual way. But unless he’s doing something that’s really ‘forbidden’ or ‘unusual’ or new, or something that people will gossip about later, it’s just like pissing or sleeping to him---he’s got to do it, but it takes away from valuable work time."
I didn’t think Wendy was quite right, but she wasn’t wrong, either, and she probably would know better than me anyway. I had been warned by a few people that Sascha was still going through his blinded, early-relationship phase with me; subsequently, I heard, there would be disillusionment, then one of the famous depressions.
"Let’s talk about sexual orientation," I said. "What’s the story with all this bisexuality? I can’t believe it’s like this all over, and I’ve just been moldering in a little puddle of backwardness."
"I guess it’s a question of ‘Like attracts like,’" suggested Wendy. "It’s really the rage among high school and college kids now, but we’ve been doing it for years. And bi/poly/nerd/technopagans---which a lot of kids are aspiring to be these days because it’s gotten trendy for some reason---were a lot harder to find ten or 15 years ago. So it’s a small community. People get notorious. Some people start out straight, go to San Francisco or Seattle for a year to work, and come back converted. You know who your people are and what you can get away with. And it’s very important in this group to get away with as much as you can.
"But there are different degrees of sexual orientation. Ariadne, for instance, is an out-and-out dyke. If a man touched her, she’d scream rape---although, if you knew her history, you could see why. Crystal prefers women to men, but she’ll have sex with a man in a minute if he can offer her money, or security, or physical safety. Except for the Crystal fixation, Elia’s straight---I think. She’s just so touchy-feely with everyone it’s hard to tell. Frick is probably straight, but she’s not getting any anyway, so she might be hard up enough to go home with a woman---if they could discuss the complete works of Anne McCaffrey afterwards."
"What about you?"
"Well, if someone asked me on a questionnaire, I’d say I was straight. I love men. I married one. I guess you could say that I’m a cat person, but when someone gives me a puppy, I don’t return it to the pound either."
"What about the guys? What about Drexler, for instance?"
"Ah, yes, Drex is a wild one. A body’s a body to him. They’re all fun, especially if you’re tripping. I’ve done Drexler, and Drexler’s chick, Shanna. Drex’s a good time, he is. If you make sure he doesn’t bite too much."
"Ian?"
"Asexual, and by choice. Higher calling. A true priest. Then again, I’m sort of responsible for his no-sex rule. It’d be best if you didn’t ask."
"I won’t."
"Ian’s problem is a real common hacker one: he doesn’t see grey. Things are clean, or else they’re buggy. You can be promiscuous, or you can be celibate. He’s hard to deal with that way."
"What about Catfood?"
"Straight, I guess. But he doesn’t date. And he dresses pretty fruity. It might be cultural---although I can’t imagine his snacking habits are a result of where he was born."
"Will?"
"Straight as they come. C’mon, he’s in marketing---and he likes it!"
"Jonathan?"
"About like me. He and I make a good team. But we approach it---seducing people and stuff---so differently.
"The thing about Jonathan," she said wistfully, "is that he’s fundamentally so good. I seduce people because I want to boff them. He really wants to promote harmony between people. My mom says he has a ‘highly developed morality.’ Who thought I’d marry someone with morals?"
I didn’t say anything about Sascha. I was continually frustrated by his evasive comments on the subject, but I also didn’t want to hear the truth---whatever it was---from such an authoritative source as Wendy.
"I guess you already know about Sascha. That’s why you’re not asking."
"He won’t tell me anything about it." Why did people always assume I knew more than I did about Sascha’s past? I wasn’t around then, and often he didn’t feel like discussing it anyway because it was "over now."
"Well, the truth is that nobody really knows the truth. Some people think Sascha swings both ways because he’s so femmy and kissy---he’ll hug and kiss anybody if the mood strikes him. Also, because his sister’s a big scary dyke, even though they don’t talk any more. Other people, especially folks who’ve known him way back, think he’s completely het and just being a chameleon to fit in with the group. Me, I think he’s like Crystal. He’d always choose a woman over a man, but if the person who has the trade secrets or the corporate casting couch were a man---well, he’d just drop his pants and do it. Also, if he found someone to idolize, and that person wanted to toy with him, Sascha’d be happy to be toyed with regardless of gender. You must have heard some stories about him."
"I know that the first year he was in the group the guy who invented that big Internet thing---I forget what it is but everybody uses it---tried to seduce him. I know that they did go into the bedroom together and close the door."
"There were only two people in that bedroom---and neither of them will talk. But I do have a friend who has a friend who lived in that group house at the time and was at that party, and based on that person’s info, I think it was an aborted mission. But I don’t know whose engines failed. Probably Sascha’s." She laughed.
For people who claim to be so nonjudgemental about sex, I thought, they sure talked a lot about other people’s sex lives.
Wendy turned her interest to my mostly submerged body. "You know, it’s really nice looking at you. Your body is so different from the other women I’ve slept with."
I stopped thinking about Sascha’s potential bisexuality and returned to thinking about mine. Other?, I thought, imagining with paranoia that Wendy wanted to add me to her list.
Wendy’s hand, with an elaborately carved wedding ring, reached out and, still very friendly, caressed my bicep. "You’re so little. So tight. All these neat muscles." She brought her fingers down to my solar plexus, which reflexively retreated, quivering. "Look at this. Sascha doesn’t even know what he has here. And your pubic hair! It’s so bright, so thick...I really envy you."
Envying someone’s pubic hair? This was a new one to me. I watched as Wendy’s hand slowly moved down to the aforementioned area. She stroked, then grabbed my hair a little. Her face was bent down towards her hand, not with any kind of specifically sexual expression, but one of amusement and curiosity. Please, please, please, don’t let me get turned on now, I thought.
Her two middle fingers slipped in deeper, struck flesh, and began to probe delicately. I froze.
Then, before I could think Sara, you stupid homophobic coward, I had leapt out of the hot tub and snatched something to cover myself.
"Listen, I gotta go, thanks for inviting me over," I babbled. "That just wasn’t---well, it just wasn’t what I had in mind. I’m new at this whole scene. I’m still pretty straight. I’m sorry." I pulled my sweater on backwards. "I’m sorry if you’re upset. I didn’t know what to expect."
Wendy stuck her elbows out of the tub, still cool, noncommittal. "Hey. No big deal. Sorry to freak ya out." How like a man, I thought.
"Come back again soon!" she yelled after me as I scurried out the jungle greenery toward the door, still mumbling half-finished apologies. "We’ll bake some bread! You can eat it with your clothes on!"
As I stomped home with my head bowed against the wet snow, I wondered how fast the sad story of Alternative-Lifestyle-Free Sara would get around.
*
I was sending out some utility bills on Tele-Check a few days later when I got a Talk request from Sascha. Why didn’t he just come out of his office and talk to me? I wondered, annoyed.
Guess what? he typed at me. Wendy just found out she’s pregnant again.
Is this a good thing? I typed back.
It’s not a *bad* thing. This time they know---or at least they pretty much know---that the kid is theirs. Or at least they know that it’s not--- he paused for such a long time I thought there was something wrong with the connection---well, you know. Gotta go. He logged off.
"Congratulations," I said awkwardly to Wendy the next time I saw her. "Of course, if that’s what you want."
"I wasn’t expecting it, but I have time and we can afford it. Anyway, this time we know that Jon’s the father, or at least we know that it isn’t---" She looked at me questioningly, probably wondering if it were appropriate for her to continue.
"Yeah," I said. "Sascha said exactly the same thing."
She laughed, relieved. "Listen, you, if I had known that the time I spent with you in the hot tub was going to be my last hot-tubbing for months, I would have been more---well---aggressive. I hope it was OK for me to say that."
"I wish I had been a more willing subject."
Amazingly, this was the last I heard about the hot-tub episode from anyone except my own head. Wendy had more judgment than I thought, or maybe she just had a lot on her mind now. Oddly, both of these possibilities made me jealous and disappointed.
A spurned, obsessive bi-wannabe. Just what I needed for an identity right then.
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