Nine Kinds of Naked (3 page)

Everyone has their one dumb thing, their one karmic blunder, their one high heel on a jackass, and this was Bridget's. If she had stopped to think for a minute, she might have guessed that the alcohol-free reception had a purpose other than sanctimonious temperance. But that was not her way, and so Bridget did not discover for weeks that the bride and groom had met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. And though they had avoided alcohol for two years together, they certainly knew what it smelled like on someone's breath. Slam-dancing guests slurring “Sorry!” in their faces left little room for doubt.

Bridget was unaware of all of this. She was rather pleased with herself, in fact, and decided to chase the impulse, to spur the moment, and that is what brought her to Dave. He was leaning against the wall draining his second tequila sunrise when Bridget bounced up to him.

“Is your name Dave?” Bridget ventured, though she was quite certain of his name.

“Yes it is,” Dave replied, straightening and effortfully avoiding measuring her hips with his eyes.

“Dave Wildhack, right?” Bridget gushed like a groupie. She knew his last name was not Wildhack, though she would have liked it to be.

“Wilson,” he corrected her. “Dave Wilson. I'm sorry, you must have me confused with someone else.”

“Oh, I'm not confused,” Bridget grinned. “I just like the name Wildhack. I made it up.” She clinked her glass against his and took a sip.

“Oh you made it up,” Dave smiled, though he was nonplussed. “Wildhack.” He raised his glass to her toast and nervously took a large swallow.

“Do you like it?”

“Like what?”

“Wildhack.”

“As a name?”

Bridget bit her lip and nodded. “It's a fetching name, don't you think?”

“I suppose.”

“Tell you what.” Bridget nudged him with her glass and affected a Southern-belle accent. “If a dashing Dave Wildhack were to ask me to dance, why I don't think I could possibly decline.”

Dave nodded, utterly mystified. “You're telling me you want my last name to be Wildhack?” Bridget shrugged, and Dave fumbled as he struggled to grasp the situation. “Would you, uh, like to dance?”

“Is your last name, uh, Wildhack?”

Dave hesitated. “Yes?”

“I'd love to,” Bridget chirped as she led him out onto the dance floor. Dave followed, unpleasantly confused.

During the set break thirty minutes later, it occurred to Dave to ask his nominator the minor detail of her own name.
He was not reassured when, with a flash of her eyes and a lick of her lips, she declared, “My name is Bridget
Snapdragon
!” just before catching the bridal bouquet.

 

6
D
AVE DID NOT
realize for weeks that this new woman in his life was not recognized by the state as Bridget Snapdragon, but Bridget Brown. He only discovered this at all because he idly happened to glance at the mail on her coffee table one evening while she was still getting ready to go out. He may have accepted that the gas company had her name wrong, as she tried to persuade him when he demanded an explanation, but it was absurd that the senders of all six pieces of mail were uniformly confused as to the proper designation of their addressee.

“What is it with you and names?” Dave was exasperated. Such wanton disorder vexed him greatly.

“Oh, you're one to talk,” Bridget retorted. “You led me to believe your name was Dave Wildhack in order to get me to dance with you.”

Dave blinked and shook his head as a dozen different expressions fought for the territory of his face. “What?”

Bridget crossed her arms and pouted. That was her strategy of last resort when reason overwhelmed fancy, and here, fancy was as overwhelmed as a windmill in a tornado.

“Okay, listen, from now on we just call each other by our
real
names, okay?” Dave, satisfied that the matter was settled, nodded in agreement with himself.

Bridget shrugged, though she did not, as a matter of principle, believe in any such concept as a
real
name any more than
she believed in any such concept as the state. Besides, she was only acquiescing to become Bridget Brown as her undercover alias, thereby launching an evening of espionage and intrigue for secret superagent Bridget Snapdragon, whose top-secret mission impossible was to discover the sexual fantasies of Dave Wilson, a.k.a. Dave Wildhack, renegade spy extraordinaire.

Secret superagent Bridget Snapdragon accomplished her mission, and before the night was through, Dave Wilson asked her to marry him.

 

7
I
N
B
RIDGET'S VIEW
, answering such an audacious invitation is like tearing off a piece of plastic wrap. It's all or nothing, and a moment's hesitation will get you tangled up in misery. Bridget said yes, of course, and immediately, too. Some three years later, as her naked-except-for-his-socks husband lay snoring on top of her, she was consequently able to reassure herself that she truly loved him.

He was getting sweaty, however, and beginning to drool as well. A slight nudge was all it took to awaken him, at which point he scrambled to his feet, glanced down at his shriveled penis, and muttered, “Holy . . . ,” leaving his blessing ultimately unfinished. Bridget sighed sleepily, and Dave collapsed into cravenly mortification. “Sorry,” was all he could glurch as he gathered his clothing and fled from the room.

 

8
T
HE HUMAN FACE
is the most playful countenance among all creatures, capable of stretching its muscles into more than seven thousand distinct expressions. Among this catalog of looks and lineaments, however, there exists one particular visage
that has featured only once in all of human history, and that was way back in the ninth century when a runaway serf glimpsed a debauchery of dryads before an enormous oak upon which he was gazing snapped back to its accustomed rigidity. The circumstances of this incident are beyond the scope of the present paragraph, but suffice it to say that it inspired him to pursue his freedom to the end of his days.

This expression of unmitigated awe—which really had less to do with his musculature and more to do with a surge of sensual divinity within—made its second appearance on the face of Dave Wilson when Bridget announced she was pregnant. Like the serf of yore, it filled his lungs with ambrosian atmosphere and left his face shining like the sun in September. His smile was easy and complete, his eyes rapt and infinite. He stood two inches taller, his nostrils flared, and a shock of his hair turned suddenly silver. A blink of his windswept eyelashes drained a single tear from his left eye, and he bowed with perfect composure.

“Wow,” was his reply.

 

9
I
F
B
RIDGET BEWILDERED
Dave before she became pregnant, she terrorized him once Creation began to pulse through her. Any dams her socialization had hammered into place to constrict the currents of life were now overwhelmed, swallowed, and forgotten. She no longer pretended to be Bridget Snapdragon. She
became
Bridget Snapdragon. She even went so far as to have her name legally changed. Of course, Dave knew nothing of this, nor did he know that Bridget had also
taken the liberty of forging the necessary documents and having
his
name legally changed to Dave Wildhack. She had to think of the child, after all.

And so the oblivious Dave Wildhack arrived home from work one day late in his wife's second trimester to find her dancing naked around the house, shaking rattles at him by way of greeting. He stumbled back outside, came in the back door, and locked himself in the bathroom, where he sat tearing at a piece of toilet paper until he heard the ruckus stop. When he ventured outside after several minutes, he found Bridget—now wearing a bedsheet toga—busily coloring on their formerly Spartan kitchen wall with an old box of sixty-four crayons.

“Hey lover,” Bridget singsonged. “Do you wanna color?”

Dave looked at her, but could manage no aggravation in the face of her impeccable enthusiasm. He plucked the brown crayon from her fingertips, and a chuckle slipped past the censors of his conditioning. “What are we coloring?”

“I don't know,” Bridget replied, and indeed she did not. When she looked to see what she'd been drawing, she was pleased to find a gnarled and mighty oak tree gracing the wall. However, this was not what Dave saw. What Dave saw was an orgy of dryads writhing and cavorting about.

“Jeezus!” He instinctively stepped back, looked again, and saw nothing but the oak tree. Bridget bit her lip, delighted that he was impressed, for he was beaming as if he had just witnessed the burning bush. Without seeking further compliment, she picked up a green crayon and humbly returned to
her coloring. Dave joined her momentarily, befuddled but unable to resist drawing in the curve of a rump where he thought one might belong.

 

10
T
HERE WERE ONCE
those who believed that the word “sex” could be discerned within the hairs of Abraham Lincoln's beard on five-dollar bills. There are still those who, hunched around a pack of Camel cigarettes in the dim lighting of a bar, claim to trace the outline of a naked man, arms akimbo and penis a'plumb. The oblivious Dave Wildhack was neither of these folks. Dave, in fact, was unable to detect the merry dryads ever again, though he spent long hours gazing at the wall and likely even elaborated their cuddle puddle as he drew.

In any event, by the time he and Bridget were ready to declare the kitchen wall complete, the gnarled oak found itself at the foreground of a wondrous glen. Acting on rare impulse, Dave added the finishing touch by coloring in a silhouetted figure leaning against another tree and facing the great oak. Bridget winced at this last addition, feeling it spoiled the whole scene to stick in a silhouette that looked like one of those cheap plywood shadow cutouts seen along country roads. But she grinned when Dave looked to her for approval, though she privately resolved to color their walls only in his absence henceforth.

 

 

 

 

The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze

 

Twelve Centuries Earlier

 

I
T IS BETTER
to be stoned than to throw stones.

Clovis tried to cheer himself with this notion as he was led into the village square, but he may as well have been trying to rest his head on a live beehive for all the comfort it provided. I suppose I'd rather be stoned, he thought, but he sensed immediately that there were other options. Being stoned seems morally superior to throwing stones, but there has to be a better angle to this than a stiff swallow of self-righteous rectitude. I'd really much rather do neither, he darethought. Might as well ask me if I want my hands or my feet chopped off.

It didn't matter, anyway. No one was asking Clovis if he wanted to throw stones. Still, given that his own kith, serfs the same as he, were arranging to stone him, there was perhaps some minor consolation to be found in his predicament. After all, he could easily have wound up on the fling side of one of these rocks if some other uppity peasant had abandoned his obligations. Lord Mauvoisin had neither patience nor mercy in such matters, and Clovis had only managed to avoid casting stones at his fellow cottagers thus far by diligently working the fields during the occasional lapidation.

Fine day it is, anyway, Clovis mused aimlessly. Must be June by now. He squinted at the vassals riding up, taking a presence at the perimeter to ensure his execution. Their attendance was an implicit threat to the other peasants. Serfs of every class would be heavily taxed if they failed to carry out this obligation, but there was probably no risk of that. Friar Frankalmoin and his lieutenants were already sermonizing about how this was God's will, about how the social order is divinely ordained, all that sacred sycophancy.

Clovis rocked on his heels and his thoughts turned to his wife. She had been dead for some two months, died right after childbirth, and the babe survived neither. He shook his head at the memory; it was all he could do. Laughing with relief at the completion of her labor, cooing over their newborn daughter while a morning storm raged outside, the birthing cottage had suddenly disintegrated and his wife and daughter were torn from his embrace by a horrifying whirlwind. Absolutely shattered, Clovis found no sympathy from his fellow
cottagers, who believed Friar Frankalmoin's quaky declaration that such an atrocity could only be the work of the devil retrieving a witch's soul. His claim was immediately credible, footnoted as it was by the additional fact that every meager stitch of tattered clothing in the village had also mysteriously vanished.

Worsemore, a few evenings later, two vassals had arrived at Clovis's cottage to collect Lord Mauvoisin's heriot—the death tax assessed on the surviving family to compensate for the value of the lost labor. The two scantily clad vassals who showed up at Clovis's hut that evening wanted to take his only mule. Clovis—wearing only a strung-together tunic—became furious and refused. They backed down, but promised to return with reinforcements. Clovis shook his fire poker at them and said they'd better get a lot of reinforcements, because there was no way they were taking his goddamn mule. That's what he said. He used God's name in vain and defied God's will, insofar as God had anything to do with divinely ordaining the social order. The vassals could see that he was serious.