Wedgie Protocol

The thing about my wife is that she doesn't warn you. Not in any way that counts. She'll mention something three weeks out, casual as weather, and you'll nod along because it sounds hypothetical. Then the day arrives and you realize the hypothetical has a body and a schedule and it's standing in your bedroom doorway while you're still in your underwear.

"Five minutes," Diane said from the hall. "And you're wearing the set I laid out. The whole set."

I was standing in front of the dresser in my boxers, looking at what she'd left folded on the bench at the foot of the bed. On top: a black thong, silky, barely there. Under it: a pair of pink panties with a little embroidered flower on the front and a ruffle around the leg holes. The kind of thing you'd find in a novelty shop or a bachelorette party gift bag, except these weren't a joke. Diane had bought them. Diane had washed them. Diane had folded them and placed them exactly there, in that order, and she was waiting in the hallway with her arms crossed, and I knew from the tone of her voice that the question of whether I'd wear them had already been settled.

"You're serious," I said.

"I'm always serious." A pause. "You have four minutes."

I put on the thong first. It was a weird sensation, the thin strip of fabric settling between my cheeks, the pouch in front doing almost nothing to contain anything. Then the pink panties over them, and the ruffle sat right at the crease of my thighs, and the flower sat dead center on my crotch like a target. I caught myself in the mirror and looked away.

The dinner party was at the Hendersons'. Richard Henderson was a partner at Diane's firm, and his wife Margaret did the kind of catering where the food arrived on long white platters and nobody asked what it cost. Diane had been talking about this dinner for two weeks. She'd bought a new dress, deep red, sleeveless, the kind that made her look like she was in charge of something even when she wasn't. She'd had her hair done. She'd been unusually pleasant to me all week, which in retrospect should have been the first sign.

I came down the stairs in my slacks and a button-down, and she looked me over the way you'd inspect a piece of furniture for scratches.

"Turn around," she said.

I turned. She reached out and snapped the waistband of the pink panties through my slacks, quick and precise, and I felt the elastic bite into my skin.

"Good," she said. "Let's go."

The Hendersons lived in a house that had been in Margaret's family for three generations and had been renovated twice in the last ten years, which meant it had the kind of kitchen where the cabinets closed without a sound and a dining room with a table long enough to seat fourteen. There were twelve of us that night. I knew maybe half the faces. The rest were Richard's colleagues and their spouses, people who shook my hand and immediately forgot my name, which was fine because I forgot theirs too.

What I remember about the first hour: the wine was good, the appetizers were tiny, and Diane kept me close. Her hand on my forearm. Her body angled toward me when she talked to other people, like I was a piece of information she wanted them to notice. Twice she leaned in and said something quiet against my ear that had nothing to do with the conversation, just a reminder. "Sit up straight." "Don't fidget." The second time, she let her fingers trail down my arm and then pinched the fabric of my sleeve between two nails, hard enough that I felt it through the shirt, and smiled at Margaret across the room like nothing had happened.

Dinner was seated. I was placed at the far end of the table, near the kitchen door, which meant I spent most of the meal watching Diane from a distance. She was at the other end next to Richard, laughing at something he said, her head tilted back, her throat exposed. She was good at this. She was good at everything she decided to be good at, and she'd decided a long time ago that being my wife would be one of those things, and that meant she ran it the same way she ran her cases. With preparation. With strategy. With the expectation that the other side would eventually do what she wanted.

I didn't know what she had planned. I want to be clear about that. I knew about the panties. I knew about the thong underneath. I knew that she'd been weirdly calm all week and that she'd asked me twice if I'd been drinking enough water, which was not a question she'd ever asked me before. But I didn't know about the robot.

Nobody at that table knew about the robot.

She'd been building it in the garage for three months. I'd seen the boxes arrive, the servo motors and the aluminum framing and the spools of wire, and I'd asked her what it was and she'd said "a project," and I'd let it go because that's what you do when your wife has a project and you've learned not to push. She'd been in there at night, after I went to bed. I'd hear the drill, the occasional clatter of something dropped, the low hum of her talking to herself. Once I woke up at two in the morning and she wasn't in bed, and I went downstairs and the garage light was on and I stood at the door and watched her through the window, bent over a workbench, her hair tied back, her hands moving over something metal and human-shaped. I went back to bed. I didn't ask.

That was my mistake. Not the not-asking. The not-asking was normal. The mistake was assuming that whatever she was building in the garage was for somebody else.

Dessert came and went. Coffee. The conversation at the table drifted into the kind of territory that happens after the second bottle of wine, work stories and old grievances and the slow loosening of people who've known each other long enough to stop performing. I was half-listening. I was thinking about the panties, about the way they'd ridden up when I sat down, about the fact that I'd have to stand up eventually and walk to the car and that Diane would be watching me the whole time. I was thinking about how much I wanted a cigarette, which I'd quit four years ago, and how the wanting never really goes away, it just gets quieter.

Then Diane stood up and clinked her glass.

"Everyone," she said. "I have a surprise."

The table went quiet. Richard looked up from his coffee with the expression of a man who's been married long enough to know that surprises from other people's wives are usually not his problem. Margaret smiled the way hostesses smile when they've been looped in. I felt something cold settle in my stomach.

"I've been working on a little project," Diane said. "And I thought this would be the perfect audience for its debut."

She walked to the kitchen door and opened it, and the robot walked in.

It was human-sized. That was the first thing. I'd been expecting something small, something that rolled, something you could mistake for a vacuum cleaner. This thing walked on two legs, articulated at the knees and hips, with a torso that was roughly the shape of a person and a head that was roughly the shape of a person's head, smooth and featureless except for a pair of camera lenses where the eyes would be and a speaker grille where the mouth would be. Its arms were longer than a person's arms. Its hands had too many fingers. It moved with a slight hesitation, like a puppet on strings that were just a little too long, and when it stopped at the end of the table it turned its head and looked directly at me.

"Hello, Mark," it said.

Its voice was pleasant. Mid-range, slightly synthetic, the kind of voice you'd hear from a GPS or an automated phone system. But it said my name like it had been waiting to say it.

"Hello," I said. My voice came out thin.

"I've been looking forward to meeting you," the robot said. "Diane has told me so much."

Around the table, people laughed. Not unkindly. The way you laugh when someone's spouse does something eccentric at a dinner party and you assume it's a bit. Richard leaned back in his chair and said something to Margaret about how this was why he loved coming to their house. I didn't laugh. I was looking at Diane, and Diane was looking at me, and she had the expression she gets when a case is going well. Not smug. Not cruel. Just certain.

"Mark," she said. "Come here."

I didn't move. I couldn't. My legs had decided on their own that standing up was a bad idea, and I sat there with my hands flat on the tablecloth and my heart going faster than it should have been, and the robot took a step toward me.

"Mark," it said. "Diane asked you to come here."

The room had gone quiet again. The laughter had faded into the kind of silence where people start to realize that the bit might not be a bit. I looked at the faces around the table, and they were all watching me, and none of them were watching Diane, and I understood that whatever was about to happen, I was going to be the only one who knew it was real.

I stood up.

My chair scraped against the hardwood floor. The panties had ridden up when I sat, and standing made them settle again, and I felt the ruffle shift against my skin, and I wondered if anyone could see it through my slacks. The robot watched me with its camera lenses. It didn't blink. It didn't need to.

"Good," Diane said. "Now go stand in the corner."

The corner. The one by the sideboard, where the wall met the window, where the light from the chandelier didn't quite reach. I knew that corner. I'd stood in it before, in our house, in our bedroom, on nights when Diane decided I needed to think about something. But this was not our house. This was the Hendersons', and there were twelve people at the table, and every single one of them was looking at me.

"Go on," Diane said. "We'll wait."

And I went.