“The moistness, you mean?”
Now I’m just being mean. I blame all the fake pregnancy hormones.
“Stop saying moist!” He looks like he ate a bad peanut. “Why is it so wet?”
“The vulva?”
“The vagina.”
“You’re looking at the labia, the vulva, and the clitoris. The vagina is the tunnel where the baby comes out.” I feel like a tour director on the Vagina Express. Greg does not pay me enough to provide sex education to co-workers. I should put out a tip can.
“Where, exactly, is the clitoris?” Josh questions.
“That’s what every man asks.”
“How in the hell am I supposed to know? I’ve never seen one of these,” he bites back. “By choice.” He wrinkles his nose. “And now I know why.”
I snort. “As if penises are aesthetically pleasing.”
He looks offended. “What’s wrong with penises? Penises are awesome.”
“They have two looks. Deflated fire hose or Washington Monument wearing a firefighter’s hat. While they’re certainly useful and sensual and exciting under the right circumstances, they’re not exactly works of art.”
Josh ponders that for a minute, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He tilts his head back and forth as if weighing out my words, then finally whispers in my ear. “I’ll give you that.”
“Shhhh,” someone rasps from the back of the room.
We go silent.
Silence is pretty much the only rational response to what we watch for the next ten minutes as the video describes the process of the development of a baby from conception to birth.
“You can grow your own organs?” Josh whispers in my ear, his hot breath frantic and punctuated by weird little hitches. Is he on the verge of hyperventilating?
“Women can. Not men. Hah! Isn’t that cool? The placenta gets built from my body. Breast milk, too.”
“You realize you’re not really pregnant, right? You didn’t build a placenta from spare body parts and cells inside you. And it’s an organ that just goes to waste after the baby’s born.”
“Unless you eat it,” I say, distracted by the sight of a baby’s foot pressing up against the thinly stretched wall of the mother’s huge belly on screen.
“Eat what?”
“The placenta.”
“People eat it?” he shrieks. “Isn’t that a form of cannibalism?” His eyes search the perimeter of the room for available exits. “I had no idea how violent childbirth is!”
“Shhhh,” Sunny says, her eyes glazed. “We’ll talk about how to desiccate and eat the placenta later, after I teach perineal massage.”
“What’s a perineal?” Josh asks, suspicious.
“It’s part of the woman’s neck,” I lie.
“Whew,” he says, his shoulders relaxing. But he’s still shaking, and now his arms are covered with a thin sheen of cold sweat.
He is the very definition of all the reasons the word moist is so disgusting.
“Would it kill these women to try a little with their appearance?” he whispers as we watch more of the video presentation.
“What?”
“I mean, look at them. No makeup. No toenail polish on those feet.” He makes a sour face. “Hairy legs. Bushes that look like they spread chia seeds on their—” he waves his hands vaguely around the crotch area “—you know.”
“Mons.”
He shivers. “That word is worse than moist!”
“You expect women who are experiencing the most painful and athletic event of their life to put on makeup?”
He half shrugs. “Just saying. A pedicure or some eye shadow would at least show they tried. The poor baby’s going to be born and mama will be in all the pictures looking like a Jersey Devil with an overdue mani pedi.”
The slide changes to an image of a woman’s legs spread wide, with a baby’s head crowning.
“Oh, my lordy lord it’s got hair teeth!” Josh screams. His eyes roll up the back of his head and bam—he’s in a dead faint, falling on the floor and rolling on his side on the industrial carpet.
“He acts like he’s never seen a vagina before in his life,” one of the dad’s murmurs. His words carry throughout the room, and all eyes are on me. “How could she be pregnant and he’s never—”
“We’re strict Mormons,” I lie, grasping at straws.
All the expressions soften into understanding, as if that explains everything.
“He’s bleeding!” someone gasps. I look at Josh’s head and yes—he is.
The next few minutes are a blur of activity as the class teacher administers First Aid, someone is pulled in from the emergency room, and a nurse assures me that lots of husbands faint during class from nervousness, though “never quite this early in the lesson.”
As Josh comes to, he looks around the room, wild and unfocused.
“Labia is a lovely name if it’s a girl,” he whispers, then faints again.
I like him better unconscious.
The wall of suits appear, because it’s not enough to have my gay, unconscious co-worker who is my fake husband bleeding all over the floor of a conference room where a baby’s head emerges from a woman’s vagina and—ouch!—we see the evidence for why stitches have to happen after birth.
Let’s throw in a few grey-haired CEOs and their bean counters. And one delightfully delicious CEO who has most definitely seen a vag before.
Mine.