The Crane Operator's Corset

I'm forty-two years old and I make wine for a living, which sounds more romantic than it is. Mostly it means smelling things and spitting them out and arguing with tanks. But this story isn't about the wine. This story is about a pressure cooker, a crane operator, and the fact that I have spent twenty years wondering what it would feel like to wear a corset, and never told a single living soul.

The corset thing started when I was twenty-two, at a friend's birthday party in a rented hall with a bad cover band. There was a man there, mid-thirties maybe, wearing a green dress. Not a costume, not a gag. A proper dress, fitted, and he stood in it like it was the most natural thing in the world while everyone else got drunk around him. I remember thinking he was the most interesting person in the room, and I remember the specific heat of realizing I liked him. Nothing happened. I never even learned his name. But the thought of that green dress has lived rent-free in my head for two decades, and somewhere along the line the thought shifted from "I like a man in a dress" to "I think I might want to be the one wearing it." I've dated around since my fortieth birthday, nothing serious, a string of decent men who never quite made me want to say the quiet part out loud. So it stayed quiet. You know how it is. Some things you carry around like a bottle you keep meaning to open.

***

The pressure cooker entered my life in March, at a house inspection in a coastal suburb that smells like salt and diesel. My friend Marian, a real estate agent with twenty years of sass behind her, was selling the place, and she dragged me along because she wanted an opinion on the kitchen, and because I'd half decided to put in an offer myself. Marian sells houses the way sharks swim, constantly and without reflection, and she'd already told me the seller was some port worker moving inland for a quieter life.

The kitchen was decent. The pressure cooker sitting on the bench was better than decent. Enamel, old, a brass valve gone soft gold with age, the kind of object that looks like it survived a war and enjoyed it. I picked it up and a voice behind me said, "That's mine."

He was maybe thirty-eight, built as one who lifts heavy things for money, forearms that suggested the crane cabin was the lightest part of his day. "It's in the house I'm buying," I said, because I hadn't yet, but I was going to.

"You're not buying it," he said. "I am. It's my sister's old cooker. I'm keeping it."

He was not the seller. He was another buyer at the inspection, which Marian had somehow failed to mention, glaring at the man she described as competition. Denny, his name was, and we proceeded to have the single stupidest argument of my adult life over an appliance neither of us technically owned yet. I cited provenance. He cited family. I offered to buy it out of the sale. He offered to physically carry it out of the state. Marian watched us from the doorway with an expression I now recognize as a woman calculating commission.

He got the house. I found out from Marian over coffee the next week, along with the information that he'd put the pressure cooker in the "included in sale" clause, which I chose to interpret as an act of war.

***

The karaoke bar happened a month later, the late-night one near the port where a woman named Tess from my wine club performs badly on Thursdays. I was there for Tess, and for the fried food, and I was halfway through a basket of chips when a familiar voice started butchering a song I refuse to name. Denny. Crane operator, pressure cooker thief, singing like the microphone had personally wronged him.

I waited until he came off the little stage, glowing and sweating, and slid onto the stool next to him. "You owe me an appliance," I said.

"And you owe me an explanation for why a winemaker needs my sister's cooker, so we're even." He ordered two more of whatever I was drinking. We argued about the cooker for another hour, and about wine, because he thought wine was pretentious and I told him that was because he'd only had bad wine, which is pretentious in itself. He was easy to talk to in a way that caught me off guard. Rough hands, careful words.

What I noticed, and what I probably should have pretended not to notice, was that he kept adjusting his shirt. Pulling the hem down. Tugging the collar flat. And I noticed that I was staring at his mouth while he talked, and that he noticed me noticing, and that neither of us called it out for a long while.

"Sorry about the singing," he said finally, staring into his glass.

"It was terrible. I enjoyed it."

He laughed, then went quiet in a way that had weight to it. "Can I say something? You'll probably think it's weird."

"I sell alcohol for a living. My weird bar is very high."

He turned his glass around on the coaster a few times. "I looked you up after the inspection. Not in a creepy way. Marian mentioned the winery and I got curious." A pause. "You ever do anything you've wanted to do for twenty years and then not do it, because it seemed too late?"

I thought about a green dress in a rented hall. "Once or twice," I said.

He nodded like that was the answer he needed, and then, because it was past midnight and the bar was thinning out, he said the thing. "I wear women's clothes at home. Lingerie, mostly. Have since I was eighteen, and a girlfriend found out by accident when I was twenty-five and didn't laugh. She was the only one who ever knew." He looked at me then, properly, no glasses to hide behind. "You stared at me for twenty minutes and I thought, well. Maybe she's the kind of person who wouldn't laugh either."

I want to tell you I said something smooth. I said nothing. I drank. Then I said, "Show me."

"Not tonight." He paid for the drinks before I could argue, which annoyed me. "The cooker's at my place. So's everything else. Come for dinner Tuesday, if you want. You can lose the argument for real this time."

***

Tuesday. His house was small and tidy in the way of a man who works two jobs and cleans between them, and there on the bench sat the pressure cooker, gleaming, smug.