A breeze in my favor

If I had been a non-smoker, I never would have witnessed the mildly erotic display. Sitting outside a restaurant in Avondale, I lit up a cigarette. The gentle breeze blew the smoke in my wife’s face, naturally I volunteered to switch seats and the offer was duly accepted.

Changing places gave me an uninterrupted view of the girl dining with her mother at the next table. She was in her early twenties, cute, with dark brown hair in a short style that framed her face. In keeping with a warm summer evening, she wore a knee-length, pale yellow dress that had a pale blue geometrical pattern, slender straps; and the low cut revealed the upper contours of her small but ample breasts.

The girl and her mother dined and chatted. My wife and I dined, chatted and watched the world go by. Suddenly, the girl’s cell phone rang. She answered and made to leave the table, not wishing her mother to overhear the conversation.

And that is when it occurred. Still seated, the girl moved her right leg about 18 inches to the right in order to gain leverage to rise from the seat; in doing so, she gave me a PG-rated Sharon Stone moment. It was impossible to avoid. The narrowing gap between her inner thighs was right in my line of vision and drew my gaze in toward the triangular target of male desire, hidden by the dark blue marbled pattern of her panties or thong.

Like Dan Maskell commentating for the BBC on the Wimbledon tennis championships of yesteryear, my response was, “Ooooo, I say.” My wife threw me a puzzled glance. With the girl now several yards away deep in her conversation, I explained what I had just seen, adding that it was most unladylike.

You see I was brought up in an age when young women were careful not to reveal that most intimate part of their anatomy to public gaze. When the mini-skirt came on to the fashion scene, girls were careful how they sat down and got up from a sitting position; legs were always kept firmly pressed together. When bending down to retrieve something from the floor, they would bend at the knees and stoop gracefully to pick up whatever it was that had fallen. Even when wearing jeans, girls did not bend down from the waist. It took liberation during the 1970s before jeans-clad young women adopted the more mannish posture that is now commonplace.

When the girl came back to her table, I became more and more intrigued by the incident. Surely she must have been aware of what she had revealed in front of my gaze? It wasn’t like she was some gawky 14-year-old, with braces on her teeth, and completely unaware that what lies between her legs is highly sought after, a prize that men will lie, cheat, steal, even kill for. And it wasn’t as if I was wearing dark glasses and carrying a white cane.

After finishing my cuban panini, served with coleslaw, I settled back with a cup of coffee and whiled away the time with conversation and a cigarette or two. The girls’ cell phone rang again and she reprised the earlier glimpse of her femininity, as she once again moved away from her table.

Now, once might have been an inadvertent lapse in decorum on her part, twice set me thinking. I began to suspect that it might be some kind of game and she knew exactly what she was doing. It was one big tease, as if to say to me, “You can look, but you can’t touch.”

Again, I told my wife and put forward my theory that the girl was deliberately flaunting herself at me. My wife, like most wives, was quick to deflate my male ego. She instantly dismissed the theory and proffered a more pragmatic explanation; the girl’s dress, given the warmth and humidity of the evening, might have stuck to the chair and that had caused it to ride up. I countered that it had nothing to do with the dress but the manner in which the girl moved. Rather than opening her legs to get up from the seat, she should have swiveled to one side with her legs pressed together and then stood up.

The girl’s mother must have overhead me and passed this information to her daughter because, when they decided to leave a few minutes later, the girl followed the exact procedure I had described. I was thus denied a third and final view. She had reverted to her basic instinct.