The Mooring Mast

The paint chip found me on a Thursday afternoon, if you can believe that kind of luck. I was on my knees inside the mooring mast at Kuldīga, scraping at a flaking patch near the curved metal wall, when a whole slab of old stage flat came loose and nearly landed in my bucket. I say stage flat because I know what it is. Underneath the gray primer they'd slapped on sometime in the nineties, there was a layer of faded scenic paint, this washed-out blue with a hint of gold leaf in it, the kind of cheap theatrical stuff a set painter would have rolled onto flats for some amateur production decades ago. The mast had been used for everything over the years. Storage, a dance hall for one strange summer, and apparently once a theater backdrop workshop, because the stuff was still coming off the walls in chips like shed skin.

I'm Jane, by the way. I'm twenty-nine, I do mosaic restoration, and I had been contracted to clean and stabilize the interior of this ridiculous beautiful metal tower before the town's Rustic Lumberjack Festival turned it into a beard contest venue. Which sounds like a joke. It is not a joke. There is a beard contest. There are trophies. The mayor has opinions about judging criteria that he shares at length.

Anyway. The chip. I turned it over in my fingers and felt that little thrill I get when old work surfaces under new work, when somebody's effort from seventy years ago peeks out and says hi. Most people would have swept it into the dust pile. I put it in my front pocket. I collect these little orphans. My studio shelf at home has maybe forty of them lined up on a windowsill, each one a tiny rectangle of somebody else's abandoned project. Hugo calls it my museum of other people's half-finished ideas. He means it fondly. He's thirty, he's patient, and he married me three years ago after we'd been circling each other since grad school, where we met when we were both twenty-three and equally bad at cooking.

Here is the thing I had never told him, in three years of marriage and six years of knowing him. I like latex. Not in a casual, oh-isn't-that-a-fun-texture way. In a real way. In a way that made me order things in secret and keep a locked pouch at the back of my closet and blush like an idiot whenever rubber gloves appeared in a pharmacy. I'd been carrying this around since my mid twenties, before Hugo, one long embarrassingly specific interest that I assumed would either come out eventually or rot quietly inside me like a splinter.

The paint chip went in my pocket, and for some reason that little act of keeping something small and hidden made me think about the other thing I keep small and hidden, and I stood there in the cold circular chamber feeling like a hypocrite. I restore old things for a living. My whole job is saying, this layer matters, don't paint over it, let it be seen. And I had painted over myself so thoroughly that my own husband couldn't find the original surface.

That was Thursday. Hugo came by Friday morning to help with festival setup, because he's on the committee this year, which is how I found out the beard contest was happening inside my mast in the first place. He came in through the ground door with two coffees and a clipboard, wearing his committee lanyard like it was a medal, and I was sitting on the trapdoor in the floor eating a gas station pastry because the kiosk by the river is the only food option before ten in the morning.

"Good morning, master mosaicist," he said, handing me a coffee. "Podiums arrive at noon. The judging podiums. I told you this."

"You told me this," I said. "I'm mentally prepared for podiums."

He started unpacking cable ties and bunting from a crate, humming to himself, and I watched him and thought, today, today is the day you stop being sensible, because I had decided it overnight in a very decisive way that I then almost talked myself out of twice before breakfast. My tool bag was sitting by the wall. In the tool bag, underneath the grout floats and behind the spare gloves I actually use for work, there was a second pair of gloves. Black latex, long-cuffed, bought online months ago and carried around in that bag for two weeks like some kind of talisman, too cowardly to use and too stubborn to take home.

I pulled them out. I held them up. My hand was not entirely steady and I did not care for that, but I held them up anyway.

"Hugo."

He looked over from the bunting. Then at the gloves. The pause went on long enough that I heard the river through the door, which is a thing you notice when your whole nervous system is standing at attention.

"Those aren't the work ones," he said slowly.

"No!"

"Okay." He set down the bunting very carefully, like it was breakable, which it was not. "Okay. So. Tell me what this is, because I don't want to guess wrong."

So I told him. Standing in a decommissioned zeppelin mooring mast with pastry crumbs on my jeans, I told my husband of three years that I had a thing for latex, had had it for years, had hidden it because I was scared he'd find it weird, and that finding a paint chip the day before had somehow unlocked this whole confession, which made no sense and which he accepted anyway because that's the kind of man he is.

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, "Weird, yes. Bad, no. I need you to know those are different words." And then, "Can I see? The gloves. On you, I mean. Not now necessarily, but, generally, as a concept."

"Not now?" I said, and something in my voice made him look at me properly.

"Now works," he said.

So that was how my husband kissed me for the first time that day, up against a curved metal wall in a building that smells faintly of rust and old rope, with festival bunting half-unpacked three feet away. And I want to note, because it matters to me, that he asked first. Not in a formal way. He just said, "Come here?" with his eyebrows up, waiting, and I said yes, and then it was his mouth and my mouth and my hands still holding those stupid black gloves pressed between us as a peace offering from myself to myself.

It heated up fast. His hand slid under my jacket, I got a fist in his collar, I made a noise into his neck that I will not be describing further, and I was actually reaching for the hem of his shirt when somebody knocked on the mast door. Three polite thumps. Hugo and I broke apart like two guilty adults, which we were.

"That'll be the podium people," he said, voice wrecked, and I laughed so hard I had to sit on the trapdoor again.

It was Ilze, a festival volunteer, a retired schoolteacher with a clipboard of her own and no sense of irony about anything. "The truck cannot get close," she announced through the door. "The driver says the lane is too narrow. You must carry the podiums from the square."

"We must carry the podiums from the square," Hugo relayed to me, with the face of a man doing arithmetic about how far the square was.

"Two podiums?" I asked.

"Two podiums and a banner stand."

So we carried podiums. Both of us, down the lane from the town square, Hugo and Ilze taking one and me taking the other, because apparently I am not allowed to have a single romantic moment without municipal furniture interrupting it. The podiums were wooden, heavy, shaped like chopped stumps for theme reasons, and mine had a painted beard on the front that some volunteer had done with obviously great sincerity. Halfway back my arms were burning and Ilze, walking beside me, told me a long story about the 2019 contest in which a man's beard had contained a live bee, and by the time we got the things inside the mast I had sweated through my shirt and completely lost the mood, or so I thought.

We set the podiums by the wall. Ilze checked her clipboard, thanked us, and left, and the door closed behind her, and Hugo and I stood there in the sudden quiet of the round chamber, looking at each other across eight feet of festival equipment.

"So," he said. "The gloves."

"So the gloves," I said.

He looked at the clock on his phone, then at the door. "The committee meeting is at six. It is now eleven forty. I am just telling you the facts so you can make an informed decision."

I had the black gloves back out of the tool bag before he finished the sentence. And that, more or less, is where the real story starts, though I didn't know yet how much of a night we were going to have in that tower, or how many interruptions one beard contest could generate.

The gloves went on first, because they were what I had, and because I am a coward in increments. I peeled them up my forearms and the feeling hit me the way it always did, that second skin tightness, the squeak of rubber against skin, the way my hands suddenly looked like they belonged to a much more interesting woman. Hugo watched from the trapdoor, sitting on it like it was a bench, which it technically was, and did not say anything for a second.

"Okay," he said finally. "Okay, wow!"

"That is the whole review?"

"I'm building up to a longer review. Give me a minute."

Here is the thing I had never admitted to anyone, including myself, for about five years: I didn't just like wearing latex, I liked the process of it. The slow roll of it up a limb. The powder, the tug, the little fight the material puts up before it gives in and hugs you. I had bought the dress two years ago, online, at 1 AM, from a shop in another country, and it had lived in the locked pouch at the back of my closet ever since, and I had worn it exactly once, alone, in our bathroom, with the fan on so Hugo wouldn't hear the particular rustle it makes. That detail embarrasses me more than anything else in this story. The fan. I turned on a bathroom fan like I was covering up a crime.

But today I had brought the dress. I had zipped it into the bottom of my tool bag under a drop cloth and a jar of adhesive, because apparently my subconscious planned this whole confession before I did.

"I also have a dress," I said.

Hugo's eyebrows went up. "Of course you do. Naturally. A whole dress."

"Do you want to see it or not?"

He got off the trapdoor. I want it noted that he also got up to lock the door, which he did, turning the little thumb latch that some previous custodian had installed sometime in the last century, and then he stood there with his hands in his pockets as a man waiting for a museum to open. I dug the pouch out of the tool bag. The zipper on the pouch is stiff and always has been, and my fingers, now in rubber gloves, were worse at it than usual, and Hugo started toward me