… you excuse yourself to use the rest room before the curtain rises at the theater on the Great Boulevards where a good friend has invited you for your 60th birthday.
“It’s your prostate,” she says.
You tell her that you resent her recognition that you have un prostate.
“Une prostate,” she corrects. “Your prostate is feminine.”
It’s moments like this when you’re forced to confront the fact that your French will always play second fiddle to your English. You generally don’t mind being corrected for an erroneous conjugation of tenses, other than perhaps a slight embarrassment at the thought that you should have known better. But mistaking the gender of a noun as personal as your prostate is more than linguistic, it touches on your very sense of self. It reminds you of your tenuous grasp on the nature of things. Of course, reproductive anatomy wasn’t on your vocabulary lists in French class in high school, and you managed to live in France for this long without questioning the gender of your prostate. But that’s no consolation for now being informed, however matter-of-factly and by a close friend, that of late you’ve been awakened in the middle of the night by a feminine prostate.
Still, honesty from an old friend is to be accepted with grace. And more comes when, upon your return to the seat, she tells you about her uterus.
She’d been sent for an MRI, she explains, and has just gotten the results. “The doctor says that there’s nothing to worry about, just a few harmless polyps that no one will notice. What’s more disconcerting is that my husband and I aren’t having sex anymore. Not disconcerting for me, but for him, meaning for us, therefore for me, because now we have to talk whenever there’s a problem, but he’s never been good at that, which wasn’t a problem before because we would have sex instead, but now what do we do?, we sulk and imagine we don’t love each other anymore.”
Just then, thankfully, the lights of the theater start to dim and her monologue fizzles out. As the curtain rises you lean over and congratulate her on having une uterus saine (a healthy uterus).
“Un uterus sain,” she corrects, for it turns out that not only is your prostate feminine but her uterus is masculine—and not just hers but all uteri!
The play is a comédie de boulevard, meaning that it’s full of conventional sexism, mistaken identities and witty word play. Aside from some contemporary twists and political commentary, it follows the genre well as the husband, his young would-be mistress, the wife, her young lover the plumber, and several minor characters enter and exit in insatiable, farce-inducing desire and quid pro quo. Though predictable, it’s quite funny and well acted. However, while watching the circus of desire you find yourself stuck with the triply disturbing thought that your testosterone level been decreasing, that your old friend now shares stories about grandchildren and polyps instead of lovers and parties, and that your prostate as it exists in your adopted country is feminine. Admittedly, your testosterone level peaked at 20, your friend adores her grandchildren, and you’ve always lived with une prostate, but being faced with all three at once is disheartening.
You have trouble concentrating on the play, though not much concentration is required as the husband hides his mistress beneath the bed while the wife’s lover hides behind the curtain.
It’s one of those precious, ornate late-19th-century theaters whose red velour seating was installed when the average Parisian man was 5’6”. There’s basically only one way to sit in such a theater: with straight back, knees clamped together and forearms fighting for armrest dominance with the neighbor. Between the confining position and your new understanding of la prostate, you felt a certain pressure down below. While on stage the husband opens the curtain to reveal a shirtless handyman who now tries to explain that his shirt got wet from plumbing work, you need to pee again.
It isn’t urgent; it isn’t even truly a need; it can wait until intermission, but you’ll be thinking about it until then. You sneak a look at your phone to see what time it is. Well, sneak is the intent, but checking the time on your phone lights up the entire row. The actors on stage might well notice the light coming from your lap. The woman sitting to the opposite side of you from your friend certainly does. “Tsk,” she pronounces with a distinctly Parisian accent. This is soon followed by the sound of the vibration of your friend’s phone in her pocket as it presses against the armrest. She can’t resist having a look at the message that it signals, further lighting up the row and eliciting from the neighbor on her other side a Parisian “pff.”
As the curtain falls for intermission, your friend turns to you. “It’s a message from my husband,” she says, with the same eye-roll as the wife on stage.
“What does he want?”
“Reassurance.”
“Well, go reassure him,” I say. “I’ll take a little walk.”
“OK,” she says. “I’ll do what I have to do. You do what you have to do.”
And so, like the aging good friends that we are, we do, before the curtain goes up for more plumbing jokes.
© 2020, Gary Lee Kraut
Hi Gary. My first confrontation with the illogical genders was when my first child was born and I was breastfeeding her — le lait. My husband usually tried to convince me that the genders came down from latin but for this I could argue that in Spanish and Italian it was feminin — la leche. No logic, at all. I’ve been battling these gender idiosyncrasies for 50 years.
Very funny, Gary. Have tweeted it. 🙂
Ah, yes, aging . . . you’re in good company!! 😉 Enjoyed this piece!