Condom on the Roof

...continued

My coat's pockets hold not only a condom, but tiny slips of paper with e-mail addresses of women I've met in Internet chat rooms. I've got my work gloves on, too-this is my time, I said, without saying anything, coming up from the basement with Christmas lights bandoliered across my chest. My wife, holding files from her work—the baby waiting unchanged—had nothing on me. This was my time, steeled in the vocabulary of men.

I found my original condom while emptying my desk at eighteen. It was still slippery sliding inside. As a kid I kept it stupidly in my wallet, and there it stayed unused, forming a ring on the leather as though I'd kept there a miniature can of Copenhagen. As an adult, alone in a house I was leaving, I tore the package, filled the condom with water and held it, tight as a drum. Before I pulled away in the U-haul, I threw it up on my dad's roof, and there it broke in a splashing blast.

Continued...