AFTER THE ORGY, THE INQUEST

So, it was me, Bella, Frieda, Alice, Tom, and Jay in the bedroom where they kept the coats at my cousin’s twenty-first birthday party. That’s a lot of potential horny masterminds to plow through, but forget Frieda. She was away with the fairies when it started—that floaty, dewy-eyed vessel of the world sweet spot; a confluence of whatever was on offer, by which I mean weed and brandy—this was Idaho, not Gomorrah. Just to say, Frieda was incidental to any can’t-start-a-fire-without-a-spark revisionism. She was the clickety-clack of the track, not the engine. She was ‘there’ but not the ‘let’s go there.’

Jay wasn’t part of our crowd. He was maybe Alice’s friend, but she wasn’t all that friendly. Jay always wore a hat, like a woolly bobble hat, even inside, even with the five of us sprawled naked on zips and toggles, stroking and probing for dear life. I’d see Jay regularly at the pool a decade later, at our respective kids’ swimming lessons. He was bald as a prison tennis ball, so maybe he was already receding out of high school—maybe he was self-conscious, even with his mutual acquaintance hog flopping around.

Back to Alice, the unfriendly. After husband number two, she confirmed what we all knew, that she wasn’t bi in the slightest, but gay gay gay, in a burn it all down, year-long rainbow bunting, campaigning for ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’ on the eighth-grade curriculum kind of way. Even some of the very ungay things she did on those coats lacked gusto, but she was anti ALL sex if anything back then, which is why we clicked—the circular, mono-mania anime discourse—if GT Goku could take Super Goku. She was my friend, and I was her only friend.

Tom was the sleaziest, easy—he’d rank asses, and share NSFW memes, roundly humoured and cock-blocked—death by a thousand eye rolls. Simple to pin it on him, you’d think, but he was an anti-boner. Any proposal from Tom would’ve been repellent—a fart in a lift. I remember, in the blur of it all, him being slapped away from the business end of Bella, finishing himself off in the corner, chided by Alice for the mess, which he had to clean up with his Nickelback T-shirt.

After Frieda’s funeral last year (a quickie cancer—she surfed her short life away across South America, was blissfully happy, never tied down), I’d insisted on driving Tom to the airport and staying for drinks in the business lounge. Reminiscing—even vanilla, non-orgy reminiscing—gave him a raspberry glow. He mainly wanted to talk about his Subway franchise and bitcoin losses.

Listen, it wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been. I was terrified of girls who weren’t Alice. Ter-rif-ied. The wildest thing I instigated was D&D at my mom’s kitchen table. I was safe, so my role on the coats in my cousin’s bedroom was, what, a barometer? A lightning rod (although it wasn’t that compliant, with this being my first time, even non-plural)? I took the edge off the taboo, I’m pretty sure. If I were there, it would be as safe as my Fortnite server. My rec room with the Pikachu beanbags. But I was plenty fortified that night. A generous two slugs of vodka before I even showed up, the way I’d roll up to social gatherings, or exams, then work presentations, Christmas days, weekdays.

So, it could’ve been Bella, you’d have to concede. But Bella was ballast. Woodchip. The most inoffensive. I broached it over dinner on our seventh wedding anniversary, Bella with her chardonnay, me with my twelve-step sanctioned fruit juice in a fancy glass. She screwed her pretty nose up, teetering between mischief and disgust, the way she did when I didn’t scarf-dance around flesh-pressing in PG-13 metaphors. The way she always had forever—not prudish, but not the buckles that got swashed all over parkas and puffers.

“It must’ve been Jay. We didn’t know him, and we don’t know him now to ask, thank God. No more orgy talk, babe, c’mon! If you’re hot for glory days, we can skip dessert, and I’ll let you crème my brulee.”

Bella was a dork. My delicious dork. I walked her home the night of the orgy. Kissed her on her porch, as the others had on the coats in the bedroom at my cousin’s house, but surgically. With consequence. It couldn’t have been Bella. It was that bald pervert Jay, talking us all into it. He wasn’t part of our crowd.