(Apologies for no new podcast. Should have a new one up tomorrow-ish about Books, Bananas, and Marlon Brando. In the meantime, enjoy this reprint from the Gentleman Savant days of old.)

I was drinking a cup of hot tea (oolong, in case you cared), reading a magazine and enjoying a French cigarette on a bench outside of a local gourmet coffee shop near my house, when a pregnant woman sat down next to me and coughed.

Now, far be it from me, in most circumstances, to presume a woman is “with child”. Being the caring and compassionate gentleman you know I am, I would not make such an assumption unless she (a) has told me directly, without ambiguity, that she is pregnant (preferably yelled it at me from a distance of no more than 3 feet away) or (b) is lying upon a doctor’s table in a room in a hospital called the “Baby Delivery Room” with her legs up in stirrups and a doctor or five present and talking about things like dilation and crowning and epidurals. I have personally gone to quite extreme lengths to avoid saying anything pregnancy related to an obviously pregnant woman that the following conversation happened to me once.

“So… Carol… it’s been forever since I’ve seen you. How’s Jim? What have you been up to lately?” I said.

“Well, I’ve been trying some yoga classes lately and just really taking care of myself. Jim and I have been redecorating the guest bedroom, preparing for our big arrival. We’re just so excited.”

“Oh, yes? Someone coming to stay with you?” I asked, innocently.

“You realize I’m not just fat, that I’m actually 7 months pregnant with twins, right?” Carol said.

“Oh my goodness, now that you mention it, it’s so obvious! Congratulations!” I said, as if I hadn’t noticed that she was smuggling a beach ball beneath her dress.

Carol shook her head, pityingly. “You are such an idiot,” she said without having to say it.

Better to be thought dense, I think, than to assume a woman is with child when she is not. I’ve seen it happen, my friend, and it’s not pretty. It’s a train-wreck that you can’t stop, like trying to carry too many things at the same time and accidentally dropping a bottle of expensive liquor. You think to yourself that maybe there’s something you can do, but no, there isn’t. That bottle’s heading for the pavement, and you’re about to be beat down by an angry woman. And she’s got the weight advantage, too, most likely. (If not, then why’d you say it?)

I’ve often thought that if you were unsure of a woman’s pregnancy status, you might offer a nice, vague, benign compliment, such as, “My word, Karen, your skin is looking absolutely radiant, glowing even!” but my wife has shot this idea down as being transparent and even insulting (?). Of course, my lovely wife is the sort of person who would rather assume that a seldom-seen friend has become fat rather than pregnant, just for kicks, saying something along the lines of, “Geez, Karen, you’ve really let yourself go lately, huh?” She, I think, says things like this for the shock value, and she’s cute enough to get away with it, too. She’s shameless, under the right circumstances.

(I am, apparently, also quite shameless in the right circumstances. Just last night I asked a nice older female friend, without thinking, “Exactly what kind of animal had to die to make that blouse you’re wearing?” I mean, it was a lime-green leopard-print, but I should have just kept my mouth shut. Luckily she had a sense of humor about it and told me that, although she wasn’t sure of the species, she was pretty sure, because of the color, that it must have been very ill and they’d put it out of it’s misery. I’m really such an ass sometimes.)

I guess you could say something like, “So, how far along are you, Amanda?” Then, if the answer is not an immediate response of “20 weeks” or something like that, you can immediately follow it up with, “I mean at your job as a biochemist! You’ve been doing that for what, 12 years now? Wow, you’re quite committed to that… er… field.”

But this sort of comment is clumsy and requires the kind of cute shamelessness that only my wife possesses (and she’s already chosen her conversational tactic). In the end the only option for a gentleman is to be blind to these sorts of enormous glaring details, to be thought of as dense rather than risk a faux pas of disastrous proportion.

Like a good gentleman, when the woman sat down next to me on the bench where I was so obviously enjoying my cigarette (I was humming, for heaven’s sake), I put it out. I put it out feeling annoyed. I thought to myself, who the hell is this woman who would put herself in harm’s way, endangering, however momentarily, the health of her unborn child and causing me to have to put out my Gauloise? These damn things are expensive and becoming ridiculously hard to find. The nerve of her! There’s plenty of benches around, so why choose this one? It’s irresponsible! Seriously, woman, what’s next? Bungee jumping during the third trimester? Huffing paint the week before you deliver the little guy?

“I think,” A friend said to me later. “that she did you a favor. And I don’t mean that in the way you think I mean.”

“Sure. Let me guess. You’re going to say to me that by sitting next to me she caused me to put out my cigarette, which is a step in the right direction, because I shouldn’t be smoking anyway? Because cigarettes are nasty and addictive and cause cancer and disease? And they’re anti-Semitic and are responsible for world hunger and whenever I smoke the terrorists win, eh? Or is that what you thought I would think you’d mean?” I said sarcastically, confusing even myself with the last sentence.

“No. Not at all. The favor she did for you was that she gave you the perfect opportunity to exhibit exceptional behavior.” He said. “By sitting next to you, she unwittingly gave you an opportunity to set yourself apart from the rest of the unthinking jerks out there, the opportunity to put out your cigarette and be a knight in shining armor, even if only you were aware of the sacrifice you made.”

“I guess I’d never thought of it that way.” I said, like the teenager who’s been caught drinking or having unprotected sex in an after-school special. I was so busy being annoyed with her stupidly sitting down next to me in her current state that I hadn’t realized that it didn’t even occur to me to NOT put out my cigarette. Were I not the aspiring gentleman I am, I might have continued smoking out of spite. But I didn’t. I put her unborn child’s welfare before my own petty vice, even if she wasn’t willing to, and I was quite proud, now, that I had done it. Well, f**k. I guess she did do me a favor of sorts.

“Oh, and, besides that, smoking is disgusting.” My friend said then, “You’ve really got to quit that shit.”

Damn!

Tags: dense, fat chicks, french cigarettes, gauloise, gentlemanly behavior, oolong, pregnant women

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Humor, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.