When you gonna put the paint on my belly?

Katie looked at me and pulled out her tools. I looked back and remembered I hadn’t worn my wedding ring. I felt guilty as the blond, taut woman put her hand on my arm and told me what she was about to do.

This stood to be one of the most intimate moments I’d had in weeks. When my wife crossed the line into the third trimester, she bought a giant shepherd’s hook of a pillow and adopted it as the thing around which she wanted to wrap her legs. Me, I spent a lot of time looking for excuses to watch Food TV. Beef loin is the new porn, after all They get better with age at sexmature, okay maybe not but you get my point.

But, Katie. Katie found me interesting, funny, and easy to grab. My wife didn’t care. She’d given up on keeping me in check weeks ago. Plus, my wife knew how humiliated I would be before it was all said and done. Wives, in case you have been watching Food TV and missed the announcement, love that kind of thing.

Katie pulled out the calipers and attached her instrument near my right tricep. She nodded and almost smiled.

“Damn right,” I thought and nodded with her. I was standing in front of the young woman while she sat in a chair.

Times are few and far between when a woman other than my wife touches me. The last time it happened, my wife sent me to a spa for a hot stone massage after I had spent a long time on the road. Next thing I knew, there was a fairly attractive Latina woman rubbing all over me. I spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about embarrassing myself in the same way you might expect a guy to embarrass himself when a hot Latina is rubbing all over him. I’ll be honest. My body responds to me like it has since I was 16 years old, so the entire idea of a woman touching me (especially now that we have entered the third trimester) is cause for discretion.

The other day, a friend of mine was explaining one of the steps in a vasectomy. “They have this warm gel they rub all over your–” he said before I cut him off.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “They’re going to rub warm gel…”

He indicated it wasn’t nearly as intimate as it sounded, what with the fact they would soon be cutting a hole in my scrotum. I wasn’t convinced. Scalpel or no, warm gel in an intimate area is warm gel in an intimate area. My insurance doesn’t cover lawsuits for how that may turn out. I’m glad that is many months away. I might have time to find new insurance.

But, here was Katie and her case full of calipers. She was giving me something called the Jackson-Pollock exam and I couldn’t wait for the moment she started to splatter paint all over me. She could call it art if she wanted to, but to me, it was going to be the first time a woman had splattered me with Technicolor since college (and that time, it had only been spaghetti sauce in a cross-campus dorm at Mizzou).

Katie said, “I need to see your hip bone.”

Ah-hah. The erotic dance it would be. And there it was in front of her eyes–a part of my body that seconds before had been unexposed. Now, my hip bone was there under the lights and Katie was all over it. Again with the calipers. Again with a satisfied look.

“The first time I had to do this,” she said conspiratorially, “I almost threw up.”

The fact she wasn’t puking on me meant I was something special. I just knew it.

When I’d looked at her plan for me and saw Jackson-Pollock, I was ready for something avant garde and experimental. Nobody, not my mom, not my wife, not my friends, and certainly not Food effing TV told me the eccentric painter was into Body Mass Index tests. Let me tell you, there is nothing at all sexy about Adult Body Fat % = (1.61 x BMI) + (0.13 x Age) – (12.1 x gender) – 13.9.

Nothing at all.

My relationship with Katie took an odd turn at that moment.

“This is more embarrassing for me than it is you,” she said.

Damn, I wish she hadn’t said that. She pulled up the front of my shirt and shoved one end of the instrument into my navel. The other end went…well, hell, I don’t know where it went. After it crossed the border of Anheuser and Busch, I lost sight of it.

Katie looked at the numbers like there must be something wrong with her eyes. The arm had been fine. That hip bone had been downright sexy. This area around Samuel and Adams, however, that’s what Science calls an anomaly.

Katie punched the numbers into a computerized graph. The bar on the graph looked like a city with an out-of-place skyscraper, or, perhaps more appropriately, a middle finger extended from a hand.

“Do those pants come up?” Katie asked. “Because they certainly are not coming down.”

And that was it. Anything special I’d felt up to this point vanished. Katie put her calipers above my knee and took the measurement. It was fine, but nothing would erase what happened when she had stared August Busch in the face. She died a little inside that day.

And so did I. There are very few times a pregnant wife will say, “Go out and get yourself felt up by another woman!” This was one of those times. Now, I can’t help but wonder if I should ever again worry about what might happen when another woman touches me. The next time I have to worry about my body responding like a teenager, I’m sure I’m going see that confused look on Katie’s face and think, “This is going to embarrass me more than it is you.”

This, folks, must be why the people at Pfizer are rich.