Re-Union

I am standing on the perimeter of a large group of a people I used to know with the wife of a friend who is watching her husband, the father of her two children, lean in close to the hottest woman in the room, his arm around her shoulders. The wife’s arms are crossed, the right toe taps the floor, the corners of her mouth descend as if being dragged by gravity and one eyebrow is lifted in what could only be construed as a threat. Though more blatant than the other males at the reunion, my friend is by no means uncharacteristic in his actions. Decades on they seem hell bent to capitalize on the second chance to subdue prey they could not conquer in their youth. If only I knew then what I know now, they think. 

These thick-middled sweaty men, now husbands and fathers, little league coaches, white collar keyboard jockeys are transported back by the magic of the mirror ball and Lionel Ritchey music to their physical primes if only in their minds, and this time they will not fail. The cheerleader, though herself now a wife and mother, herself thickened and bearing the visible traces of the life since graduation, flits through the evening between hot flashes. But the attention takes her back to that earlier time too. To an epoch when she wielded the power vested in her by mere virtue of her youth. And again, if only for an hour or two, she has the magic back as the boys once again clamor and jostle for her attention.    

My friend’s wife won’t understand. She won’t care. It is not the kill the boys miss; it is the hunt. Very few conventional marriages afford the opportunity for the inner predator to assert itself, so every ten years the males of the tribe grow back their heavy brows and beat their chests again in a wretched spectacle of misplaced virility.

I am not of the hunting clan though, so I witness this rite from the periphery. I am descended from the shamanic clan, the observers, the story-tellers, the solitary madmen who howl at the moon alone in their caves out beyond the boundaries of the village. I am much more comfortable spending my time with the wives and children while the men go off to test their mettle against one another. So it is I am able to see, in the tapping of a foot or the roll of eyes, the exasperation in a wife’s expression.

Such empathy no doubt comforts The Managing Partner who knows she will likely find me far from the center of gravity, usually at the apogee of any given dance floor. She would probably prefer some sort of compromise, but she seems content. Let her dance with somebody else’s husband. Then when she’s tired of being groped by the degenerate, she knows where I am.