I sat in my small office studying a chess puzzle on my phone, waiting for Rob Gullickson, who was several minutes late. When he came in, he had a bounce to his walk, a smile, a far off look in his glimmering eyes, all as though he was dramatically enthused about something well beyond what we were about to discuss. He was fat, tan, looked well-rested from his three weeks in our office in Uruguay.

“You can shut the door if you want,” I said.
He glanced at the small El Greco print I had up on the wall, seeming to find it unsettling for some reason. “It’s fine,” he said. “Whatever you want.”
I looked back down at my phone. “Up to you.”
“Let’s do this,” he said, sitting down across from me.
I didn’t look up from the puzzle until I’d solved it. When I did, I put down the phone and glared at him. “Harly says your training program was, I quote, profoundly ineffectual.”
Gullickson shrugged. “He just doesn’t like my style.”
“Well, he’s the client, so if he doesn’t like your style, I don’t either.”
His grin grew. “Well, doesn’t that suck balls.”
I stifled a sigh. “Okay.”
“I’m quitting, by the way.” He sat up straight, took on a parody of a serious air, his voice snippy. “My official notice is that my last day is today. Effective immediately.”
“You just ruined a two-hundred-million-dollar contract. Do you know how many people are going to be out of a job because of your actions?”
His grin turned into an effete smile. “I got a better offer.”
“That’s all well and good in today’s fast-paced environment, as they say, but even a floor-level employee is expected to give two weeks’ notice.”
For some reason, this was the remark that seemed to chastise him. He glanced down, his bravado vanished. He said, “I’m sorry, it just all happened so fast,” as though he were a woman attempting to explain away a sexual indiscretion, having been overcome by powerful emotions that would leave the situation beyond her control.
“Any chance I can convince you to stay on for a while and try to salvage this?”
“No, sorry. Like I said, it just all happened so…”
“Get out of here, then. I trust you know where the door is.”
“I can at least stay the rest of the…”
“Out.”

I went so far as to point toward the door. His silly grin came back to his face, though he wouldn’t look at me, and he got up and walked out, on to his greener and brighter pastures.

I took a deep breath. For a moment I was jealous of him. I was going to lose out on a big bonus because of this dishonorable idiot’s failures, but I was still jealous of him. Because, as of now, he didn’t work here anymore.

I could quit too, I thought. Just walk out. Go do to my boss what Gullickson had done to me. I didn’t want that on my conscience, though. My abrupt quitting would ruin contracts and other people’s jobs just as much as Gullickson’s had. And besides, I reminded myself, it would be better to save up a couple more years of my ridiculous salary before quitting. Then I’d really be able to do whatever I wanted. Play chess, start a jazz band, whatever.
I had to do something to decompress, though. Instead of quitting, or punching a hole in the wall, I went to go see the masseuse.

Her services were a company-provided benefit. Every Thursday from 9:30 – 3, Emelia Gauthier set up shop on site and gave thirty- minutes massages to any employee who signed up. She was a quiet woman of medium height, always wore her dark hair in a thick braid. She had an accent, but no one could tell if she was Latina or French. I’d never used her before, but I knew she occasionally had openings for walk-ins in the slot right before lunch, given this was a popular time for mandatory meetings, so I headed over. I found the chair empty, but no Emelia. Instead, an unfamiliar woman sat reading a paperback. She stood when I came in. She was maybe thirty, tall, almost my height, had mousy brown hair with blonde highlights and a slim, athletic build. She had that look on her face that a woman gets when absorbed in a good story, but she was attempting to get professional.

“Hello,” she said. “Walk-in?”
“Yes, please.”
“Have a seat.”
“I’m David,” I said, offering a handshake.
“Kate Neeson,” she said, giving me a firm shake. “I’m subbing for Emelia.”
“She’s sick?”
“Covid,” said Kate, wrinkling her nose. “They really should bring back masks.”
“Oh no. Is it serious?”
“I don’t think so. I asked our manager if she was vaccinated and she didn’t know, which is kind of irresponsible frankly.” She blinked, stiffened, realizing she may have breached a boundary. “Anyway, regardless, I hope she recovers soon.”
“Me too,” I said, sitting down. “You from in town?”
“I’m not. I flew in from Denver at the beginning of the week and I’m covering her schedule.” The tone of her voice got lighter. “I’m a bit new at this, by the way. I was a yoga instructor for years but decided it was time for a change after my divorce. I hope I don’t disappoint, I know that Emelia is highly regarded.”
“I won’t be able to compare,” I said, absorbing her remarks. “I’ve never even gotten a massage before. Well, a professional one, I mean.”
She laughed lightly. “Oh, I’m honored to be your first. Anything I should know about? Shoulder or back pain? Injuries?”
“Nah. I’m just stressed.”
“Well, I’ll do my usual, then.”
Her usual was nice. She worked my shoulders, then had me stand while she repositioned the chair into a table, and then worked on my back. I found myself thinking I might take advantage of this benefit more often.
“So, you from Denver originally?” I asked as she was finishing up my lower back.
“No, I grew up in Valparaiso.”
“Indiana?”
She laughed, “Yeah, not Chile.”
I chuckled. “I figured.”
“You’re from here?”
“I am.”
“What’s a good place for lunch nearby?”
“I was just about to go out. You want to join me?” It seemed a natural enough question to ask a woman who’d just had her hands all over me. I stood, looked at her while she thought about my question. I was feeling frisky.
She needed about six seconds before answering. “You know, I was going to eat and read, but, sure. I’m feeling like a little conversation.”
“Let’s go,” I said, touching her upper arm lightly, taking care to gauge her reaction, which was neutral. She walked along side me as we went toward the front door. I asked, “What are you feeling like?”
“You need to stay well-hydrated, you know,” she said, as though suddenly remembering something.
“What?”
“After a massage.” She smiled in a quirky sort of way. “I mean, not that you shouldn’t stay well-hydrated in general.”
“Of course, of course.”

The office was downtown. We went out and stood on the front steps. She said, “I think I’m in the mood for Mexican, or, maybe Indian. Or, you don’t have Ethiopian, do you? What’s your favorite?”
“My usual is the burger joint on the corner there, they’ve got a great one with bacon and a fried egg.”
She wrinkled her nose at my suggestion. She seemed to like wrinkling her nose. “That’s such, I don’t know, white people food.”
I chuckled and looked at both of us. “Well, we’re white, aren’t we?”
She seemed confused. Vaguely disapproving, yet in uncertain waters.

I continued, “Hey, you’re the guest. There’s both Mexican and Indian options. I could go for a curry.” I’d thought about suggesting tacos and cocking an eyebrow, but I felt that might be a bit much right now. I needed her to recover from whatever strange mental state she’d just experienced when I mentioned our shared ancestral heritage before I resumed flirting.
“Curry is good, okay,” she said.

“The place I’m thinking is about four blocks this way, just on the other side of the public library, if you don’t mind walking a bit.”
She responded with a curt nod, and we walked.

Along the way, I pointed out a historic movie theater, a historic hotel, and she took in the sights, nodding, appreciating. When we took a turn and came to the wide lawn surrounding the public library and the city hall, her expression turned somber. In recent years this lawn had become something of a homeless encampment. The city had thus far resisted allowing them to put up actual tents, but people lay prostrate on blankets, zoned out on drugs, while others wandered about in their highs, talking loudly and gesturing aggressively toward each other, as though putting on some kind of theater. Others who were still in a frame of mind equipped to deal with reality played chess at picnic tables. Some were hustling, playing against tourists and businessmen on their lunches for cash, and others just played to kill time. It occurred to me that of all the activities done to kill time in the history of civilization, chess was a highly murderous thing.

“It gets cold here at night,” she said, quietly, surveying the lawn. “I was shivering last night on my way back to the hotel. I hope they have a good shelter.”
“There are several shelters,” I said. “There’s the regular city one that’s been around forever, but it’s always full. There’s the Salvation Army, there’s the new thing they call the Harm Reduction Center.”
“Those are the best, really,” she said, her voice taking on a reverent tone. “They’re publicly funded, and help the people in the most need.”
“Do they?”
“They don’t kick them out for using drugs, they make sure their needles are safe through exchange programs.”
“How do you help people who want to destroy themselves with drugs by encouraging them to do more drugs?”
She huffed. “They don’t encourage them. They protect them from disease, from overdose.” The reverence in her voice increased, as though she were talking about a deeply spiritual or even magical activity. “They even help them administer their drugs, if that’s what’s needed.”
“I’d rather donate to a shelter that helps people who want to get clean get clean.”
She nodded, released from her trance. “Those are good too, of course.”

I wondered if I stopped and won a quick game against a hustler if it would impress her. I leaned against the idea, particularly since there was no prize on offer other than cash, the most gauche of prizes. Their chess was for the most part awful in a technical sense – playing fast and dirty, embracing certain tricks and without regard for either precision or accuracy, relying on the clock to win. One is tempted to mock this sort of play until remembering that the great Mikhail Tal defeated reigning world champion Garry Kasparov with an unsound knight sacrifice in a blitz game.
We reached the restaurant and saw it was unexpectedly closed for the day, an apologetic sign written in marker and taped to the door.

“Dang, sorry,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, almost a gasp, already taking the next step.
“What?”
Her head had turned toward a food truck that was serving a line of customers, only a block away. “Street tacos,” she said, like an ardent Roman Catholic who had just been surprised by seeing the Pope himself walking out of a convenience store.
“Let’s do it.”
We got in line. I stood close to her, letting my arm touch hers near our shoulders, and she did not move away. I smiled, feeling warm, leaned and talked to her ear. We were back on track. I said, “This truck is new, but people say it’s good.”

She turned and looked right in my eyes. “Let’s hope so. It would be so sad if lunch were disappointing.”

The line moved fast. We got our tacos, wrapped in aluminum foil, and went back toward the vast lawn. There were some park benches near the city hall that the lawn’s denizens tended to shy away from, and we sat down at one and ate.

“The guy who took our order reminds me of my oldest daughter’s boyfriend,” she said. “Though this guy was a lot older, of course.”
“How many kids you have?”

“Two. Two daughters. That was one of the reasons why I left my husband, actually. He was too strict with them. He never let them enjoy life. They always had to be in structured activities, every minute of the day. He said they couldn’t date until they were eighteen. He said all this was good for them, kept them from getting in trouble, but really it was just about control. He just had to have so much control, so I drew a line.” She glanced down. “Of course, he wasn’t great with me, either, but for some reason I was willing to put up with that for the longest time.”
“How old are they?” I asked.
“Eleven and thirteen.”
I chuckled. “Here I figured you were barely thirty. Or, I mean…”
She smiled. “No, I’m thirty-six. I look young, it’s true.”
She was only three years younger than me. I said, “All that yoga.”
“It is! I still do it. But being a yoga instructor didn’t give me the kind of income I need to be on my own. So, I got a loan and went to massage school.”
“Well, you did a fine job. I still feel limber and warm.”
“Good. How about you, David? Do you have any kids?”
“I don’t. The men in my family tend to settle down later in life.”
“That’s your plan too?”
“That’s my plan.”
“And what sort of woman are you thinking you might settle down with?”

Maybe I shouldn’t keep flirting with her, I thought. I was having fun, not looking for a wife. “I’ll be honest, I’m certain I haven’t found her yet.”
She shrugged, smiled, not at all put-off. In fact, I thought I detected a hint of excitement in her eyes. Perhaps she was simply looking to add a little spice to a work trip, a desire I’d experienced frequently while traveling. I remembered the Persian lobbyist in Washington DC, long-legged, muscular from CrossFit. The redheaded Heather in Seattle with her green eyes and mischievous wit.
Kate said, “Take your time. I’m taking mine before I settle down again, if I do at all.”

“Hey, maybe I’ll be a bachelor forever.”
“Nothing wrong with that. Maybe I’ll be single forever.”
We walked back toward the office, brushing shoulders and hands on occasion, enjoyable gestures serving as signals of what might, what would, come later. I should have realized all along she just wanted a fling, I told myself. A traveling woman abruptly mentioning her recent divorce before giving me a massage. Near the door, I asked her how long she’d be in town.
She turned to face me, close enough for me to feel her breath on my face. “Flight leaves tomorrow morning.” Her eyes dared me to be direct.
“What hotel are you staying at?”
She told me.
“My last meeting ends at five. See you at six?”
Kate nodded. We exchanged numbers and she abruptly turned, walking into the building to finish her shift.

I texted her from the lobby and she replied, ‘room 312. I have an IUD.’ I went up, knocked, heard the door unlatch after a moment, and then it opened inward. Inside, she greeted me in a plush bathrobe, which she shed the moment the door shut behind me. Her slim figure was taut, breasts small and pert, and she looked down at my reaction, making a movement with her mouth that was sort of half smile and half snarl. She seemed ready to pounce, body electric with tension, but it was I who did the pouncing, pinning her to the wall. Her eyes half shut and she smiled as I moved my hands and mouth over her body. It had been a couple months since I’d been with a woman, and I was ravenous.

She liked it when I sucked her nipples but made a dismissive motion when I offered to go down on her. At some point we got my clothes off, and she was just the right height to take against the wall without any degree of awkwardness. She climaxed suddenly, surprising me, and I followed suit.

We took a shower together, ate a light dinner with some chardonnay at the hotel restaurant, and then went back up to her room to continue our adventures.

The alarm went off at four fifteen. I woke up hard and she gave me a sleepy smile as I pressed myself to her thigh, entered her easily. Afterwards I made us coffee in the knock-off Keurig. “Flight’s on time,” she said, looking at her phone.

“They usually are in the early mornings like this if the weather’s okay.”
“Yeah.” She smiled. “Oh, look at this. My children miss me. They sent me this last night.” She showed me, on the screen, a photo of a girl and boy flanking an adorable gray terrier, one of those dogs that looks simultaneously like a cute toddler and a wizened old man with a giant mustache, with all the best traits of both.
“Nice,” I said, smiling. Then I blinked. “I thought you said you had two daughters.”
“Oh,” she said, with a knowing nod. “Yes, you’re talking about Elise. She was assigned male at birth. Incorrectly, of course.” Her expression and tone became reverent again, curiously identical to manner she’d taken on when speaking of vaccination, or the publicly funded harm reduction center, or street tacos.
“She’s transitioning.”
I felt blindsided, nauseated. I spoke without thinking. “That means hormones, then? Surgery?”

Kate sighed heavily. “We had to fight so hard in our state to get puberty blockers. Not just against my ex-husband, her father – we won that battle – but against the state. So much hate and corruption to go through. If we lived in a more enlightened society, she’d be receiving better gender affirming care.”
I was curious if her son still had the genitals God gave him, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. We had broached a subject that brought horror to my soul.
I refer not of course to the supposed sanctity of girls’ sports. While I wondered if that odd character felt any shame while accepting first place swim trophies as he towered over the real girls in second and third place, I never lost any sleep over the incident. I refer not to harmless transvestites using opposite sex toilets with suitable subterfuge, or even sexually eccentric adults who want to attempt chemical and surgical transformation of their own bodies using their own hard-earned dollars. I refer to my own childhood.
When I was a young boy, I was interested in art and music. I made friends easily with girls, never thought them icky. I even liked doing whirling dances with my mother’s colorful scarves, like I was involved in miniature kabuki. But I wasn’t gay, just sensitive. After all, when I hit puberty, I got awkward hardons for the girl next to me in Spanish class as often as any of us boys that age.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Okay? I’m appalled.”
She blinked.

“I was a feminine little boy,” I said. “I pretended to be a girl at times, as much as I might pretend to be a pirate, an astronaut, a dinosaur. When I did, my father, may he rest in peace, gently encouraged me to do otherwise. God made you a boy, he’d say, so you should do right by him and act like one, and my mother approved. Tell me, if you’d been my mother, would you instead have had me castrated?”
Her eyes widened. I couldn’t help myself. I stood, raising my voice. “Tell me. Do you plan to have your son’s balls cut off? Do you think he really, truly wants this? Do you think this is a decision he possesses the wherewithal to make?”

She stood quickly, set her cup down with a trembling hand so that only half of it rested on the counter and it immediately tipped, spilling and splashing. She scurried about grabbing her things, looking up at me periodically and freezing like a terrified doe, clearly mistaking my passionate address as an intention toward physical violence.
I sighed, walked back to a corner of the room, and sat down in a chair. She had her stuff and was moving toward the door.
“What’s his name, Kate?” I asked, calming my voice. “What did you call him after you gave birth to him?”
She turned, opened her mouth, but seemed unable to speak. When it was clear to me that she was simply going to walk out, I said, “If you haven’t done it yet, don’t do it. Don’t make your future adult son hate you with every fiber of his being.”

She left, trembling, the hotel room door slamming hard by its own weight, and I had only to sit and wonder if my words had any effect on her. I doubted it. I was simply one more toxic male, both threatening her and bullying her poor, victimized, transgender child from afar.

Weeks went by. I found myself visiting Emelia Gauthier one Friday afternoon. She was stronger, more deft than Kate Neeson. Afterwards, instead of frisky, I felt reduced to rubber.
She laughed when I stood, wobbling. “Careful,” she said, in her warbly accent that was either Latin or French. “Hope I didn’t overdo it.”
“You were fine. Great.”
She smiled. “Remember to stay hydrated.”

There was another man at the door, waiting, so I left.
In my office, after a call, curiosity once again brought me to Kate Neeson’s Instagram. She posted daily, attempting to draw attention to her massage business, which seemed to be doing fine.
I kept thinking of my outburst in the hotel room. Obviously I’d gotten worked up, reacted too harshly. I wondered if I had been cooler in my questioning, more subtle, if I could have gotten her to reconsider what she was doing to her son.

I told myself no, that there was nothing. Given that she’d been willing to divorce her husband and father of her children over it, there was likely very little that I, a stranger, could have said or done.

I kept visiting Emelia every Friday, and eventually I started dating the woman who would become my wife, a violinist named Annabelle Tse. I got promoted, stayed with the company. It wasn’t terribly enjoyable work, but I had my own office, which is crucial to maintaining sanity in Corporate America. Behind a closed door I had my chess puzzles, my El Greco print, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Life went on, and it was good. Eventually, Kate Neeson was nothing but a distant echo in my memory.

But I still wondered from time to time, mostly in the moments that followed fleeting memories of my night with Kate, what her son’s name was, what would become of him. If he was still helplessly suffering under her horrifically misfiring maternal instincts.

And I praised the Lord above that I hadn’t been born thirty years later than I had, or I might be suffering the same fate.