The Orgasm

HERE HE IS. ANOTHER WEDDING.

It’s a nice day for one too. The grass is green. A cool breeze blows. The sun is shining on the church’s stained-glass windows. The cross stands eighty feet tall and casts a shadow over the adjacent highway.

Everyone is together on the lawn. Some of the bridesmaids wear pink, others violet. Children play in the grass.

The wedding party is larger than expected. They stand in groups. They talk and smile. Hugs are given. Tears are shed.

Bernard is standing on the church steps. He schedules weddings for the church. He does other things too, but mostly he schedules weddings.

Sylvie is standing next to him. She is his wife. She has long legs and a long torso. In fact, she stands a almost a foot taller than him.

She is beautiful and fierce, and Bernard has no idea what she ever saw in him. She doesn’t know either. She says, “I have no idea what I ever saw in you.” Usually, she says this when he makes a mistake, but sometimes, she says it for no reason at all. He’ll be watching TV, and she’ll be walking to the kitchen, and she’ll stop and say, “I have no idea what I ever saw in you.”

A few minutes pass before a child in a tuxedo cries, “Mamma! Mamma! A long, black car!”

Mamma looks up and says, “Here she comes everyone!”

People stop talking. Children are hushed. Music plays. Everyone stands at attention as the limousine pulls up to the curb.

The limo is black and shiny. The windows are tinted. The wedding party stares at a reflection of itself until the child in the tuxedo cries out again. “Mamma! Mamma!”

Mamma is embarrassed. She hushes him, but he isn’t having it. He says, “No, Mamma! Look! Another car!”

She doesn’t listen; she only wants him to shut up. She drags him away from the group. She pulls him to the church steps. She clutches his little shirt and lifts him in the air. She says, “Don’t you ever embarrass me like that!”

Then, the second limo pulls up behind the first.

Bernard’s brow furrows. His lips flatten.

He thinks it over, but it isn’t until the second bride steps out of the limousine that it makes sense. Oh Jesus, he thinks, how in the world did we overbook?

By now, the two brides are gawking at each other. A few fistfuls of rice must have been thrown because one of the brides is swatting at her veil, and the grains can be heard percussing the concrete. The other bride is holding a bouquet of roses and sunflowers. She uses it to shield her eyes from the sun and scans the faces of the crowd until a woman in a gown rushes to her side.

Bernard weighs which of the brides to approach first, but then, it hits him. The real problem. All this about the brides—it’s just a distraction. A red herring. The real problem is simple: he didn’t enjoy his orgasm. Not one bit. It was forced, unnatural, utterly underwhelming. It had sputtered out of him that morning like a cloud of exhaust from an old car, and it’s been nagging at him all day.

He turns to Sylvie, and she is smirking at his incompetence.

God! He could kiss her—the hateful woman!

The brides are bickering on the lawn. Voices are raised. Insults are exchanged. The word “ugly” is used. A few members of the crowd step forward. The brides lunge at each other, but they can’t reach past the arms of their family and friends. The other members of the crowd turn and look at each other.

Eyes narrow. Sides form.

Sylvie is wearing a perfume called coco mademoiselle. The major notes are bergamot, orange, and grapefruit. Bernard smells it. She must be close, he thinks. And indeed, she is.

She places a finger on top of his head and draws a line down the side of his face. She runs it across his chest and grabs his crotch and says, “You really fucked up this time.”

Bernard swells in her hand.

On the lawn, a fight is breaking out.

As the brides lunge at each other, a man looks across the arms and shouts, “Can’t you keep that bitch under control?”

Then, he takes a hard one on the chin.

This prompts a few more people join in, and now they are wrestling in the grass.

At this point, a man approaches Bernard and says, “What’s the meaning of this?”

Bernard has seen him before. He’s one of the grooms. He’s wearing a tuxedo and a baseball cap. Apparently, it’s a thing. “I’ll be wearing a baseball cap,” the groom said when he scheduled the wedding. Bernard asked him why, and he said, “It’s a thing.”

He looks less friendly now.

He waits for an answer, but Bernard doesn’t know what to say, so Sylvie pushes him aside and says, “I might as well ask you the same thing! We run a respectable church! Why in God’s name is everyone fighting?”

The groom isn’t scared. He is shorter than Sylvie, but he gets in her face. He says, “They’re fighting because y’all are trying to pull some shit, and we’re not going to fall for it!”

Sylvie shoves a finger in his face and says, “Stop those people fighting. Then we’ll talk.”

The groom thinks about it for a second, then turns to break up the fight. He walks toward the crowd of people with his arms in the air and says, “Stop! Everyone, stop!”

Sylvie looks at Bernard. She says, “Look at that. Another fuckin’ mess. I have no idea what I ever saw in you.”

Then, the ground begins to tremble and shake.

The fighting stops. Everyone looks around. Their eyes are wide. Is it a storm? An earthquake? The wind picks up. The cross sways. Suddenly, everyone is shaken by a vibration so large that it knocks them to the ground.

The air rumbles. Pulses quicken.

Bernard falls to the ground, but he looks up just in time to see the culprit: it’s his orgasm, and it’s screaming down the highway at the speed of sound. It’s accompanied by a force so large that cars crash, the cross collapses, and the wedding party leaps into the air with a newfound joy bursting from their pores.

Bernard grabs Sylvie. He dips her so low she can hear the worms fart. He kisses her and thrusts his head back. There are roses on his lips, sunflowers in his eyes. He screams, Sylvie screams, and they keep on screaming together until the orgasm moves through them and beyond them.

It circles the earth before ascending into the heavens.

Disembodied, it traverses time and space, looking for new worlds to inhabit, new nerves to shock. It’s a spasm free of the body, a lonely pleasure floating in the void, a vibration beginning in the vacuum and concluding in the spine.