Fair Winds

Jackie Francois had seen her husband off on three deployments, and this time she'd promised herself she wouldn't cry on the pier.

The wind off the harbor had other ideas. It shoved her yellow sundress flat against her thighs and whipped her chestnut hair across her mouth. She kept one hand on her hair and the other in the air, waving at a white speck on the rail of the USS Bellamy. The speck was Franco. She was fairly sure the speck was Franco. Three hundred sailors in dress whites looked a lot alike from the pier.

"Four months," she said, though he couldn't possibly hear her. "Just four months, baby."

The speck waved both arms, and she waved back. They'd been doing this routine for eight years, since his first deployment as a brand-new ensign, and they'd gotten good at it. He'd have his binoculars out. He'd watch her until the pier was a line on the horizon, and she'd keep her arm up until it went numb, because that was the deal.

The ship's horn went off, one long note that shook the concrete under her sandals. Jackie flinched and kept smiling anyway.

Around her, the crowd thinned. A few wives turned away early and dabbed at their mascara. A retired chief in a VFW cap rolled up a sign that said FAIR WINDS BELLAMY and tucked it under his arm. Jackie stayed until the Bellamy rounded the breakwater and turned into a gray wedge, then a gray smudge, then nothing at all.

Her hand dropped. Her smile went with it.

"Goddammit," she said to nobody, and walked to her Civic.

***

Captain Emmanuel Whoo watched the Bellamy go from the end of the pier, where the official party stood in a neat row of khaki and gold.

He was the squadron commodore, and seeing his ships off was part of the job. So was knowing which of his officers had left a wife alone for four months in a little brick house on Crescent Bay Drive.

He'd met this one at the wardroom reception in February. Lieutenant Francois, thirty-one, Academy, the best navigator in the squadron, had introduced her with the pride of a man showing off a new truck. She'd shaken Whoo's hand, laughed at his joke about the admiral's golf swing a beat too long, and then spent the rest of the evening glancing at him over the rim of her wineglass while her husband explained tides to a dentist.

Today she stood at the rail with her arm in the air. The wind pressed the yellow dress against a fine pair of tits and a narrow waist. She hadn't worn a jacket, despite the March chill, and her nipples had noticed.

A good-looking woman. A Navy wife. Alone.

Whoo was fifty-one. His own wife had stayed in Virginia when he took the squadron, and they spoke on Sundays about her tomatoes. He did not consider himself a predator. He considered himself observant.

"Commodore?" his chief staff officer said. "Car's ready, sir."

"Thank you," Whoo said, and took one more look at the woman in yellow before he went.

***

Jackie's problem started on day eleven.

It wasn't a dramatic problem. Nobody would have put it in the spouse club newsletter. Jackie was twenty-nine years old, eight years married, and in perfect health, and she could no longer cum.

The first week, she was too busy to notice. She cleaned the house top to bottom, alphabetized the spice rack, worked extra shifts at the clinic, and baked six dozen cookies for the spouse club. She slept on her own side of the king bed with one arm stretched across his side, which was pathetic, and she knew it was pathetic, and she did it anyway.

On day eleven, she lay on the navy duvet in her underwear and played Franco's voicemail greeting on speaker.

"Hey, it's Franco. Leave a message and I'll get back to you when we hit port."

She hit redial. His voice filled the bedroom again, slow and warm, with the Louisiana drawl that came out when he was tired. She slid her hand into her panties. She'd been wet on and off since lunch, which was its own problem, because she worked at a family practice and there was nothing remotely sexy about a family practice.

"Hey, it's Franco—"

Her middle finger found her clit and circled. She pictured his hand instead of hers, his thick fingers and the careful way he touched her, as if her cunt were on loan from a museum. Her hips lifted. Her other hand squeezed her own tit through her bra. The pressure built and built and built, and then it simply stopped.

Her cunt clenched around nothing. Her thighs shook. The orgasm she'd been chasing wasn't there, the way a stair isn't there in the dark.

"Fuck," she said. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

She tried again the next night and the night after that. She tried in the shower with one hand on the tile. She tried with Franco's electric razor buzzing on her clit until her knees gave out. She tried with the handle of her hairbrush, which she would never admit to anyone, including God. She got close every time and never got there.

What was wrong with her? Was it stress, or hormones? Was her cunt on strike in solidarity with the deployment? Women got through deployments all the time. Women got through deployments and also had orgasms. She had read about it.

The Ombudsman had an opinion. The Ombudsman was the voice in Jackie's head that sounded exactly like the spouse club's official deployment pamphlet, and it said that a Navy wife's job was to hold the line, keep the home fires burning, and not worry about her clit. The Ombudsman had never had a clit.

By week three, Jackie was a mess. She had dark circles under her eyes and a body on a hair trigger. A deep voice on the radio made her wet. A man in uniform at the commissary made her wet. The noon horn from the harbor made her wet, which was ridiculous, because the noon horn had sounded every day for the three years they'd lived on Crescent Bay Drive and had never once been sexy.

She was not handling it gracefully.

"Where do I pee?" a patient asked her on Wednesday, holding the little cup.

"Down the hall," Jackie said. "Second door."

"Which hall?"

"The only hall, Mr. Pruitt. There is one hall."

"Well, you don't have to bite my head off," Mr. Pruitt said. She apologized, and then she went into the staff bathroom and sat on the closed lid with her hand down her scrubs for fifteen minutes and got absolutely nowhere.

She came home from a double shift on a Thursday, kicked off her shoes, and didn't even bother with the voicemail. She just lay back on the bed and went at her clit hard and fast.

"Come on," she hissed. "Come on, come on, come on."

Her thighs trembled. Her back came off the mattress. It built, and it collapsed again, and she was left with her hand still moving and her hips still lifting and absolutely nothing to show for it.

"Fuck!" She punched the mattress three times. "Fuck, fuck, FUCK!"

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was the spouse club group chat, reminding everyone about Deployment Survival Night on Tuesday. Wine, cheese, and a special guest!! Renee had written, with four wine-glass emojis.

A minute later, Renee called.

"You're coming Tuesday," Renee said. "Don't even."

"I don't know, Renee. I'm so tired."

"That's why you're coming. You sound like death. When's the last time you slept?"

Jackie looked at the ceiling. "Define slept."

"Okay, wow. Is it the bed thing? The big empty bed?" Renee lowered her voice. "Because I have a Rabbit in my closet I've never opened. Hector bought it as a joke for our anniversary. You want it?"

"Renee."

"It's still in the box! I'm not giving you a used dick, I'm not an animal."

"I'm fine," Jackie said. "I'll come Tuesday. I'll bring the dip."

"Bring the dip," Renee agreed, and hung up.

Jackie rolled over and put Franco's pillow over her face.

***

Deployment Survival Night was held in the back room of the chapel annex, which smelled like coffee and carpet glue. There were two folding tables of cheese cubes, eleven bottles of wine, and nineteen women who looked as tired as Jackie felt.

The special guest was Captain Whoo.

"The commodore," Renee Castillo whispered, sliding into the folding chair beside her with two plastic cups of pinot grigio. Renee was thirty-four, president of the spouse club, and married to a chief who had done four deployments and fixed everything with zip ties. "He does hypnosis. Like, actual certified hypnosis. The Navy paid for some course back in the nineties, for sailors who couldn't sleep."

"You're kidding."

"Last year he made Carla Petty quack." Renee drank half her wine. "She says she doesn't remember. She remembers. She just doesn't want to have quacked."

Captain Whoo stood at the front of the room in service khakis, salt-and-pepper hair cut short, shoulders square. He was tall and unhurried and talked like a man reading coordinates off a chart. Hypnosis wasn't magic, he explained. It was focus and relaxation. It couldn't make anybody do anything she didn't, on some level, already want to do.

"Which is why," he said, "I never take a volunteer who doesn't want to be up here."

Several women laughed. Jackie didn't. She was thinking about the word sleep.

"I need one person," Whoo said. "Someone who's tired."

Nineteen women looked into their wine. Jackie looked at the commodore, and he looked back. She remembered the reception, the golf joke, the way she'd laughed too long and then felt stupid about it all night.

She raised her hand.

"Oh my God," Renee said. "Jackie!"

"I haven't slept in three weeks," Jackie said, which got a bigger laugh than the golf joke.

Whoo seated her in a chair at the front and sat facing her. Up close, he smelled like sandalwood. He took a brass pendant out of his breast pocket, about the size of a quarter, on a short chain.

"You're in charge," he said quietly, just to her. "If you want to stop at any point, you say 'Belay that,' and we stop. Understood?"

"Belay that," Jackie repeated. "Very nautical."

"I'm in the Navy, Mrs. Francois. Watch the pendant."

It swung left and right. He told her to breathe in, hold it, breathe out. He named her toes, her ankles, her calves, and each one went heavy as he said it. His voice was low and level and made it seem silly to do anything except listen. Somewhere very far away, Renee said, "Holy shit, she's out."

She wasn't out. That was the strange part. She could hear everything, and she simply didn't want to move.

"Your right hand is very light," Whoo said. "It's floating."

Her right hand floated up off her lap, and the room went, "Ooooh." It occurred to Jackie, distantly, that she had never been so relaxed in her life and would like to stay here, please, for the next four months.

He had her hand float back down. He had her forget the number four, and she counted her fingers in front of nineteen women and got eleven, and couldn't stop giggling about it. Then he counted her up from one to five, and she was back in a folding chair in a room that smelled like carpet glue, with everybody clapping and her cheeks on fire.

"How do you feel?" Whoo asked.

"Like I took a nap," Jackie said. "A really, really good nap."

"You go under very easily." He said it plainly, the way he might read her the tide tables. "Most people fight it."

"Is that… bad?"

"It's rare." He tucked the pendant away and handed her a business card with a number on the back in neat block print. "If the sleep doesn't come back, call me. The squadron takes care of its families."

Renee drove her home, because Jackie had had two pinots and a trance. "Girl," Renee said at the stop sign, "he looked at your tits like they were a nav chart."

"He did not."

"He did. Carla Petty didn't get a business card. Carla Petty got a quack."

Jackie dropped the card into the ceramic bowl by the front door with her keys. She went to bed and slept nine hours straight for the first time since the Bellamy left.

When she woke up, the sheets under her were wet.