the pornographic mystery

Before I went into the hospital, I kicked up my heels one last time on a rare grown-up night out in downtown SF, with the Sober Husband and a rather hard-drinking couple we know from when our fourth graders were in preschool together. The Sober Husband rarely drinks these days, with weeks going by before he'll dare to sip a single, abstemious beer (he ignores the charms of alcohol and other substances these days, despite the fact that he put it away like a champion back in our courting days, claiming that he must always be at his sharpest intellectually each and every day and that even a single drink of an evening can cause him to be duller the next morning), but when we get together with these friends, he'll throw 'em back like a Drunken Housewife's mate indeed.

After the Sober Husband and I had had a pre-game drink at a lovely hotel bar and met our friends and enjoyed a huge, delicious, boozy Mexican dinner and postprandial drinks at the fabulous Colibri, we moved back to the hotel bar for a bottle of wine. Here my friend told me that her fourth grader had come to her with a big worry recently: he'd started typing in something on his laptop, and the browser autocompleted the search he'd started, suggesting to him that he wanted to search for "fat men with big dicks." Our friends' distraught son said to his mother, "Dad must have been using my computer! Is Dad gay?"

My friend and I roared and roared with laughter, being the sorts of mothers who find this kind of thing hilarious and having had many drinks by that point. The husbands were not amused. I shared that I'd had quite a discovery of my own that very day. I was using the Sober Husband's laptop for the first time in ages, he having been away on business nearly all week, and his laptop filled in the search window for me with the interesting suggestion, "Arab porn Arabic porn muslim porn arabic sex arab sex muslim sex." "Hmm," I thought. "The old husband must have been doing some interesting computer searches off in his hotel room this week." My friend, her 140 IQ shining through the haze of alcohol, instantly had a helpful suggestion: "We've got to get you a hijab!" We roared again. Once again our husbands were not amused.

"I must have searched that for work," said the Sober Husband. "Yes, I have to look that kind of thing up all the time for my job." We laughed again, and he soldiered on, saying haughtily, "I had to sign something once, saying I acknowledged I would have to view porn in the course of my employment."

Meanwhile the other unamused husband was trying to work out the implications of the "fat men with big dicks." "Why did he think I had searched that? And what made him think I was gay? Who did that search? Who has been using that computer?"

Later as we said goodbye, our friends said again that I should call after surgery if I needed anything. I said that if I were bored, perhaps the husband, using his discerning eye and expert opinion, could drop off a DVD with the "best fat men with big dicks" for my convalescing entertainment.