A Pleasure Farm

I asked him where he worked before this and he said a pleasure farm.

I excused myself to the company toilet and felt the whole city mocking me through the glass exterior wall. Did he really say a pleasure farm? The automatic foam ejaculated into my marker-board hands. A beautiful woman was applying lipstick in the south wing of the ladies' room. I pictured her working on a pleasure farm, too, with hooves and a bell around her neck, my student strolling by in his overalls to milk her.

The white board printed all my notes in color at the push of a button. The elevator was sleek, metallic, and utterly radiant. I was bowed deeply to upon my departure from the marble lobby. This place was not fucking around. People didn't get jobs here with things like "pleasure farmer" on their resumes.

I almost don't want to write it, or know it, or face the disappointment so typically forced upon us by reality, but the truth is--as we all might have guessed--that my student didn't work on a pleasure farm at all. The truth is far more innocuous, but much closer in line with my student's hair cut and golf habit; he was a real estate appraiser, and worked at an appraisal firm.

Maybe someday when my work is done and he can finally speak English, I'll share the joke with this student. "You know, the first time I met you, I thought you were trying to tell me you'd worked on a pleasure farm! HAH--I don't know what I thought went on at a pleasure farm, but I sure wasn't about to ask--I barely knew you!"

My student will have sensational control over his Rs and his Ls by then. His pronunciation will be more native-like than mine. Together we will have reaped all the pleasures offered by a wholesome education in a foreign language. We will have been pleasure farmers.