Sexual Tourette's and Pinworms

After the waiter brought Lacey her bowl of pumpkin soup, she took a few spoonfuls. Then, after declaring she was full, she shoved the bowl towards me and said it was all mine. Since I didn’t have a spoon of my own, I grabbed hers and had just started to lick it clean, when she said, “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you. Not unless you want to get my lergies.”

Up to this point, my conversations with Lacey, a mum at my daughter’s preschool, had been limited to banalities about our respective kids, but I was damned if I was going to be polite after she’d made such an ominous statement. No, I was determined to find out what disease she was so keen not to pass on. Not because I was likely to catch it (I am never sick), but simply because I am nosy as hell.

“Oh, why’s that?” I ventured, still licking away. “Do you have herpes?”

“Well no, it’s nothing that bad, but I mustn’t let myself forget to go to my doctor’s appointment this afternoon.”

I went rigid with excitement. It was obvious that Lacey had some beans to spill and that it was just a case of making a small cut in the bag of beans before they’d all come tumbling out. I made the first little cut with,“Why, are you pregnant?”

“Ha, ha, no, that would be a bit of impossibility. I hardly have sex. Oh! My poor husband!”

“Really?”

“Yes, I simply don’t find him attractive.” Her big brown eyes grew wide. “But don’t get me wrong, I love him to death.”

“But there’s no sexual spark?” I said, shoveling in the delicious orange soup.

“No. But it’s okay, because I was such a slut before I got married that I really don’t need to be having any sex now.”

“Right. You don’t care that you’re never going to have good sex ever again?”

“No, because in any case, I’m frigid.”

“Frigid how? You find it difficult to come?”

“Ha ha! No, I mean I never come with a man. Never, ever.”

“You mean not even with oral?” I squawked loudly. The people at the next table turned around and gave me the evil eye.

“No, never. I never had an orgasm from a man touching me. Even when I do it myself, I sometimes can’t manage it and get carpal tunnel syndrome.” I choked on my soup. “I think maybe it has something to do with all the horse riding I did as a kid, I think I might have damaged some nerves or something.”

“Oh. By the way, why shouldn’t I lick your spoon?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve got pinworms. That’s what I’m seeing the doctor about.”

If you think I lost my appetite after finding out that I’d licked her worm infested spoon, then you don’t know me very well. I finished the soup and, despite myself, couldn’t help feeling rather smug that I had a good sex life and that Lacey did not, even though she didn’t seem to care.

That first lunch date happened a few weeks ago, and I’ve seen her a few times since. Then out of the blue, she tells me yesterday, that she’s just found out from a movie producer friend of hers that they’re going to put up $3 million to make an indie movie of a script that Lacey wrote.

At first I felt a bit jealous because, well, you’re meant to feel jealous about that sort of thing, aren’t you? You know, so she’s frigid, her sex life sucks and she’s got pinworms, but some script she rustled up in her spare time is now going to be made into a movie. Maybe if it were someone less vulnerable, I’d be thinking: BITCH. But I’m not, because she also has a bunch of other problems too, such as the fact that she’s losing her memory and sometimes can’t recognize people’s faces, although the medics can’t find anything wrong with her. And also, that she seems to suffer from an illness that I can only describe as Sexual Tourettes, in that, the other night when I was at a club with her, she met this very cute twenty-five year old, and within minutes had told him, “If I were ten years younger, I would so have fucked you. You have such a nice tight arse.” This, after she’d had only one drink! Then she was surprised to find him all over her like a cheap suit for the next hour, until the penny finally dropped that although Lacey had said something that sometimes transmutes into a green light after the lady has imbued a few more beverages, in this case the lady was simply a Sexual Tourette’s sufferer, and not someone he would be penetrating anytime soon.

So after Lacey tells me about her movie deal, my old brain starts whirring. Like, now I have her as a contact, as a friend of a friend who makes movies, shouldn’t I start scribbling out a script? Well, I don’t know yet. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. Maybe, right now, I’m just happy with my lot. Just glad my arse is free of pinworms and that I don’t have Sexual Tourette’s.