After the last party guest left daddy called me into his bedroom. It was the second time today, on my 22nd birthday, he'd told me he had something special he wanted to show me. When I entered the bedroom, even though we were alone in the house now, he told me to close the door and lock it. "You never know when somebody will forget something and show up unexpectedly, especially in these times..."
Dad seemed inexplicably nervous. Like everyone else at the birthday party, me included, he'd been drinking all afternoon. Domestic champagne mostly, though he toasted the occasion with a couple bottles of Veuve. I'd also gone out in the backyard, away from the screened-in pool and lanai, to get high with a few of my old college buds. I was still high. I felt great! Unlike dad, who stood halfway across the bedroom by the side of the bed, I wasn't nervous at all. Curious, but not nervous. What was it he wanted to show me? Why all the secrecy? Was it some kind of uber-valuable family heirloom he'd decided to pass down to me now that, as he'd proclaimed during the recent toast, I'd entered "the second quarter of my life"? Now that, as he went on to say somewhat stiffly, and annoyingly, I'd "entered the real world of adulthood"? As if college finals weren't real enough?
Dad wore long pants and a cabana shirt; his feet were bare however. I still wore my bikini, an extravagant birthday present to myself; though hours ago I'd pulled on a wonderfully sheer, sky-blue tinted sun-dress that hung to my knees. One of my male friends, a nice guy but not someone I'd ever dated in college, came up to me at one point and said that my white bikini beneath the diaphanous blue reminded him of those times when a full moon is still visible in a cloudless daylight sky. I was touched; flattered. I thanked him and kissed him on the cheek. "Well you just made Denny's day," one of my girlfriends told me moments afterwards.
"He's sweet," I replied.
"Sweet but not cute," she said. "Besides," giving me a cynical sideways look, "it's the sweet ones you gotta watch out for."
Call me naรฏve but I wasn't sure what my friend was getting at. I shrugged. Now I stood facing dad in his spacious master bedroom. Mom may've been a bitch and run off with a younger guy, but she hadn't contested the divorce. All she'd asked for was a little of the equity in the propertyโa beloved house on a large plot of land with sentimental value dad otherwise got to keep. After graduating from college I'd moved in with him. Just on a short-term basis, you understand, while I figured out what to do next with my life. I'd returned home in early June. Now it was July 20th, over six weeks later, and I was no closer to knowing what my next step was going to be than when I arrived. I'd been spending most of my days swimming; sunbathing; reading; relaxing. I went out with friendsโsome of my girlfriendsโon weekends but I wasn't even dating anybody at the moment. Some of these same "friends" kept telling I was wasting myself.
"As pretty as you are?"
"You're in the prime of your life, Ariel."
"Who are you saving yourself for?"
"You're only 21 once, girl."
Now I was 22. So what?
"What's the big mystery?" I now asked my dad. He swallowed.
"Mystery?"
I gestured at the locked bedroom door. "What is it you wanted to show me?"
Dad hesitated. Looked down, up. "Promise you won't freak out?"
I giggled, involuntarily. "Why should I freak out?"
My diffident dad was still beating around the bush. Almost literally, as it turned out. Finally his hands disappeared under the long tail of his cabana shirt. His pants fell. Then he untied his Speedo, with its thick slanting bulge at the front. He wiggled out of this as well. Dad lifted his shirt-tail as if it were a stage curtain, a drama about to unfold. A melodrama at any rate.
I stood. Stared.
Dad's penis was hard; erect. It pointed straight up at the ceiling. I passed another involuntary giggle. Or something. What the...?
Dad's face crumbled. Not that I was presently looking much at his face. He said, haltingly: "Darling...I've been watching you ever since you returned home...swimming, sunbathing...in your bikinis...You're such a beautiful young woman. Your body...It...You've been driving me crazy without knowing it...I can't help myself...I see you, I watch you...I get aroused. I...I've talked to my therapist about it and heโ"
"He told you to expose yourself to me?"