The Paris Project

Another dark blue scandal

Normally, I’m very cautious about sleeping companions, but I've been working really hard, and it’s been really hot, and it was the end of a long day, and I guess I just let my guard down. I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t really even remember everything that happened, but I’ll try to reconstruct the event. It can't be undone, and already there are irreversible consequences. Perhaps by telling my story, however, I can help someone else make better choices than I did.

The other night, James was watching log-rolling or thumb-wrestling or some other useless sport on TV, so I went to bed. Now, I'm a happily married woman. Well, pretty happy, most of the time, though I do have my complaints...but that's a digression. The point is that I don’t like being alone in bed, not even just during the final televised minutes of the hot-dog-eating competition. So I brought along The Love of Impermanent Things, The Enneagram, and the pen. I was having great fun misusing the enneagram to categorize friends and family members instead of exploring my own spirituality. I was concerned that a friend has been misdiagnosed as a One when he really is a Nine, curious about whether another friend is a social or a sexual sub-type Eight, and bored-but-still-reading about the tedious Sixness of my father. Mostly, however, I wanted to consider the Fourness of my mother-in-law. I underlined extensively. I promised myself I'll bring the book along on vacation, read it to James during North Dakota, and leave it lying around the family reunion in hopes of starting conversation.

James came to bed, and I put away the books and the pen, and fell asleep. And that's the truth, except for the part about putting away the pen. In the morning, there were pools of wet ink on the sheets, and as for my body, well, if the ink smears were second-degree burns, I'd be in the hospital with "large percentage of body surface covered" written in my chart. I suppose I should keep it in perspective – dark blue ink on my white person is better than some other whiteness on, say, a dark blue dress.

I went to the health club the following morning and took my Walk of Shame from the locker to the shower. Other women were pointing, staring, and jeering. It was like I was marked from what I had done the night before, and everyone could see it. I tell myself that what I do in bed only affects me, but in my heart, I know that’s a lie. I’m just lucky James didn’t turn blue, though now we both have to sleep on a partially-blue mattress pad. The affected maroon-and-burgundy sheets were practically new – we’ve been using them regularly since our wedding in 1998. And even dear Wesley has been blue for a day. He came into bed for a nursing, and the ink pools lapped his chubby thigh.

I feel like a fool. I’ve known for years what this pen is like, and still I brought it into my home – even into the marriage bed. I’ve been using this brand of pen for about seven years, since I started working at Bethel and bought some at the campus store. Several times they have exploded while traveling, leaving, on various occasions, my pocket, my luggage, and my backpack pooled with ink. They leak easily, staining my fingers with ink at work. I make excuses for the pen, because I like it. The way it signs my name really expresses who I am. It’s cool for a professor to have ink-stained fingers. It was my own fault for traveling with it.

Despite all that’s happened, I’m not willing to give up the pen. I like who I am when we're together. I’ll set good boundaries for us: it can't come into bed, and we'll keep a Bible’s width between us when I’m wearing white.