He caught her at the cafe and they sat for drinks For a moment they watched the clouds, a bundle of helium balloons colored with the colors of the Mexican flag, and pigeons checking the ground for food.
Finally, he said, “He called me a cod. A cod.”
“A reference to fish?” she said.
“I don’t know what it was a reference to, but I’m going to look it up,” he said. He raised his finger for wait service but there was no wait service at the moment.
“It must mean something bad. He must think I’m such a dork.”
She shrugged. She took up her phone. “I’ll check,” she said. After a few moment, after some tapping, she smiled and said, “Sort of. Scrotum. It’s another word for scrotum so not exactly dork.”
He nodded and raised his eye brows. He saw a wait person and raised a finger and a woman approached. He said, “Could I have iced tea” and the woman said sure she’d have it right over. “Paula?” she said because she knew Paula.
“Coffee, please” and the woman left.
“Well, then, why didn’t he just say that?”
“He figured you probably knew what it meant,” Paula said.
“But he didn’t say it like that. He said something like ‘Cods do this. They forget to sign off on their projects.’ Fucking ass. He’s a fucking cod. A big purple scrotum. Mr. Purple Scrotum. Sir fucking Winter Shriveled Scrotum.” He imagine the boss as a big scrotum in the boss’s chair and when the boss chuckled the scrotum shook or shuddered, the hairs going rigid then relaxing in the skin when he stopped laughing.
Paula smiled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It sure as hell matters. Now he thinks I’m a cod. What am I going to do?”
“I don’t know. Sign off next time. Don’t forget.”
“It’s ready made, you know, for putdowns,” he said, “what we call our sex and what we can get away with in the office. Ready made to just toss around. Men are called pussies. We’re called dorks and cods and assholes. An asshole isn’t really a hole. I don’t think holes are most of the time closed. We’re never called fingers or elbows.”
Paula was at her phone again. She said, “To be fair you’d have to call me a cleft of Venus or a mons pubis or a labia majora for the same general effect or relationship. Cleft of Love.”
“I could call you a clit,” he said. “Let’s say you forget to sign off and I’m the boss and I say, ‘Clits do this kind of shit.'”
“It doesn’t work,” she said.
“We should give our things proper names. I would call mine Henry or Marshall. I’ll come into the bed room and say, ‘Hey, Henry wants to see Bridget or Judy. Henry wants a dance or a ride to the levee. Marshall wants to take Mary for a drive. Marshall wants to see what Mary’s keeping secret.”
Paula said, “I wouldn’t know what name to give. I think cleft of Venus is a horrible thing to call it.”
He wasn’t going to agree or disagree. Instead, he watched the pigeons. He wondered what you called theirs. He imagined pigeons dragging their organs between their knees.
“Ask it what they call a pigeon’s cod. Ask it if pigeons have a cleft of Venus.”
She picked up her phone. She spoke a search string out loud as she pressed the pad. “What do you call a pigeon’s sex organs.”
And then they waited.
