Free Creatures of Habit by Jill McCorkle Page A

said. “Jesus Christ.”
    â€œCan you give it a rest?” Ethan’s wife finally says. She is on her third cosmopolitan and feeling strong if only momentarily.
    â€œSo men like breasts,” Dennis says and looks around to get moral support. “Is that news? What’s the big deal?”
    I say that if there were a disease the cure of which required men to have their penises removed they would be a bit more sensitive to body parts. I say this knowing that Dennis’s mother had a double mastectomy when he was still in high school; there she was, a divorced mother, not so common at the time, working a forty-hour week, with a disease no one ever mentioned. There were no supportgroups, no magazine articles in which other women told their stories.
    Ethan, who is lounging back on my sofa with his shiny little loafers propped on one silk-upholstered arm and who has had one too many, tells us, apropos of nothing, that he takes Viagra. There is absolute silence. Ethan’s wife, Joyce, who had gone to the bathroom (she said, though I know that really she slipped by the liquor cabinet to freshen her drink), now returns to silence.
    â€œWhat’s up?” she asks.
    â€œEthan apparently,” I say, and after the roar of laughter dies down, I continue. “He was just telling us about how he takes Viagra.”
    â€œEthan!” There is horror all over her face. I am horrified just to imagine the man tuned up like an Eveready. Horrified that poor Joyce has to live with him. And now horrified at myself for making a joke at her expense as well as his.
    â€œDo you see blue?” one man asks. “I’ve heard it can affect your vision.”
    â€œTemporary,” Ethan answers smugly. Mr. All Knowing. Mr. Thinks He’s Big. Nothing can slow him down.
    â€œAnd it works?”
    â€œOh,
yeah,
it works.” Ethan is enjoying his five minutes inthe sun as he and Joyce knock back the liquor for very different reasons.
    â€œSo this was for a medical reason?” I ask.
    â€œYou mean impotence?” Dennis yells.
    â€œNo,” Ethan spits. He wants to call me something really really bad, but he thinks better with Bill there beside me. He can’t call Dennis anything because Dennis is a rung or two higher than he is on the man’s man ladder. “I was just curious.”
    â€œOh,” I say. “Curious.”
    Bill catches my eye and I can’t tell if it’s to apologize or to say
Give me a break, I only entertain these guys once a year, let us act like boys. Let us have some fun.
I’ve heard it all before. And there were the years when the women thought the way we could compete was to act just like them, to go to clubs and drink too much and watch men strip. Scream out things like
Wooo wooo woo, shake it baby yeah,
whistle wolf calls, salivate like Pavlovian dogs. You know, you never really do get into that and you sure get tired of trying to. Personally I’d rather be watching old movies—Bette Davis, Charles Boyer. I’d rather be in my nightgown with a mug of hot chocolate and my children snuggled under a down comforter watching reruns of
Andy Griffith
or
Leave It to Beaver.
I can’t imagine Andy Taylor or Ward Cleaver going to Cafe Risqué. Thelong and short of it (no pun intended) is that very often at the end of a day, I am tired. My breasts are tired. My legs, back, brain. I would like nothing better than to stretch out and close my eyes, disappear, if only briefly.
    T HE MEN, IN spite of everything that has been said, return to the Cafe Risqué topic. Apparently there was one sexy waitress who was considerably overweight. (Ethan: “See? We aren’t prejudiced against fat ones. The one that really liked me was the
fat
one.”) Another skinny Asian one, Dennis informs us, needs a good orthodontist. (Plus her G-string was nasty looking; her thighs had purple stretch marks.) The one pouring coffee had a tattoo of a snake