paradise

If you part the red sea and save your people from genocide, you retire. You live out the rest of your days knowing you did good work. You let the people you saved bring you manna and you make off color jokes about Egyptian tyrants. When your people grow complacent with the good times and decide to melt their jewelry into animal sculptures they can worship, you celebrate their creativity and then nicely recommend they all see therapists. What you don’t do is you do not climb Mt. Sinai to get a set of 10 divine rules that are literally set in stone. If you do that, you’re condemning all future people who use a Judaeo-Christian operating system to worry that their moments of pleasure are moments of over-indulgence, that their dark thoughts are as bad as dark acts. Thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not. Thou did not. I did not. I did not commit adultery. I couldn’t even if I wanted to because I’m not married. I also did not covet my neighbor’s wife. But I did, Jesus H Christ did I ever, covet some random woman’s husband.

He’s reclining in a chaise’s lounge chair, his wife I think was in a chaise’s lounge chair doing something, and his kid daughter is back and forth between a chaise lounge chair and the pool. I’m sitting at the foot of a chaise lounge chair that is three chairs to his right, and I’m playing cards with three of my closest friends. We’re all surrounded by a setting sun, poolside cocktail waitresses, towering blue mountains, aspens, and dappled green light. Paradise. What more could you ask for.

You could ask for him to be handsome, which he is, and you could ask for him to walk by you on his way to the hottub, which he does. You could also ask for him to look at you and your friends with muted disapproval that, when he looks at you a second longer, changes to muted curiosity. You could have asked for that, but you didn’t, but that’s what happens, so you replay and analyze the fresh memory and make a stupid mistake in the card game.

Now, I’m competitive, so in this scene let’s say you’re competitive and that we refocus on the card game, leaving the husband to enjoy his time alone in the hot tub that is at our of back. We sip a full glass of white wine. The sun sets further, the air cools to the ideal warm temperature, we’re dealt a strong hand. We’re focused on winning the card game until we’re pulled away by an assertive voice that tells its daughter, “5 more minutes in the pool, then we’re getting ready for dinner.”

We know it’s the husband’s voice and that he’s again reclining with hands clasped behind his head because even though we’ve been focused on the cards, you’ve also been tracking his movements with all your peripheral senses. You are not a lech and you do not ogle, not for years and not anymore anyway, but you do want to steal a glance while the cards are being dealt, so we do. Staring back at you is the most honest conversation you’ve ever had: “we shouldn’t be doing this but we’re doing it. I’m in this for the ego boost and you're in this for the excitement. Your boyfriend would be crestfallen if he caught us making eyes at each other and my wife would be annoyed; she wouldn’t be threatened because she knows me and knows I won’t leave her while our daughter is still young. My brat daughter is oblivious but adds nice texture to this moment, more for you than for me. I’m tired. You’re lonely. We’ll never speak, we’ll never see each other again. And when you, not I, revisit again and again what’s not yet but is about to be a memory, you’ll feel guilty because thousand of years ago God or god or no one had to reshape morality into sanctimony.”

God damn.