Big huge cut from a 2015 work in progress

            Here is some more information about Romain, the French man that Sloane wed. Sloane met him on year number four in Paris—a celebrated semiotician and Modern Culture and Media professor at the Sorbonne, he’d been asked to join a focus group that the trend forecasting company she worked for then for had formed for a client that was making a male line of body soap. Romain was known, among other things (his monochromatic dressing style! His full head of silver hair!), for specializing in all things having to do with human touch, and Sightline (her then company) wanted his expertise as to how the new soap should feel.

            Sloane was still susceptible to the seductions of smart men. Even after what she’d been going through with Romain, who had intellectualized all of the sex out of their life, she still got pretty excited by men who could pontificate about texture, taste, and touch. As he picked up all the materials they’d put out on the “inspiration table”—a vial of saffron, a bar of pumice, short-grain, wild rice—she fell first for his long, elegant fingers before he started to talk.

            Romain was like the veil swirling softly around the bellydancer of rhetoric. Word play, double entendres, innuendo, irony, to spend an hour in his company was to be reminded of the grace and elegance of true wit. At the first focus group, he’d had his rhetorical barrels firing—he bid them goodbye at the end of the session with a perfectly delivered anatanaclasis: “I don’t know what I’ll wash with, gentlemen, but I wash my hands of this.”

            When she met him, he was in an open marriage with a German (duchess) fifteen years his senior who lived in a separate house just outside of Paris in a bastion of sexual hysteria called Neuilly. He was in a relationship with two women to Karina’s five, and every trend forecasting gut in her body told Sloane not to get involved, but she was over the moon dreamy for this man’s mind. Love, she was going to tell her daughter in roughly seven years, should originate from your sex parts. Love from your libido first, then from your heart, but do not heed the mad directives of your mind.

            When she heard about the open marriage and the other girls, Sloane assumed, of course, that Romain was having sex with them, and concerning Romain, this was the first of many times when she’d been wrong.

            Basically, Romain was just taking these two women out to cozy dinners and priming them with gorgeous conversation before rubbing his penis into the soft place behind their kneecaps after dinner, under hotel sheets. Here is the biggest wrong that eclipses all the others in Sloane and Romain’s past: Romain had told Sloane upfront about his distaste for vaginal penetration, and she’d married him just the same.

            It is reprehensible how much a smart woman will excuse in order to stay with, and stand by, a smart man. In the amber scented confines of their elitist friends and foes, Romain had a reputation for being an extremely sensual, attentive, and unexpected lover. And this proved true, actually. He paid a lot of attention to places that women rarely had serviced anymore—the soft fold of the armpit, the taught webs of skin between the toes—but Romain Ender-Scott wouldn’t go anywhere near a vagina.

            They’d had sex in the beginning. It amazed her now, but they’d had sex (real sex, penetrative!) enough to make her think that he could change, which really means that she thought that she could change him. She’d asked Romain about it (this was the good thing about her husband, he had a problem putting his penis into her vagina, but he was very keen on the open flow of dialogue in and out of people’s ears), she’d asked him why he’d fooled her in the beginning with all that penetrative sex, and he said, (verbatim!) that she had a very handsome vagina, comforting and temperate, and that being inside her felt like curling up with a hot water bottle in his childhood home. But that later, (ah, the cruel effects of time!) having sex with her felt like an aggression, like he was trying to force something upon her, like it was a war of wills, whereas stroking and rubbing and ejaculating on her splendidly long back felt respectful and true.

            She got pregnant. Romain was happy. Once the baby came, Romain—still happy!—announced that he’d rather not ever have sex with her again. 

            It sounds better in French, but it was bullshit all the same, because regardless of how tenderly he said it and the words he used to say it, what it all came down to was that Romain did not want to enter her, or any other woman (he assured her) with his penis ever again. He understood her disappointment, but he’d had a change of heart.

            For a while, she made do by grinding against the tip of his hard penis, then, when that proved too “penetrative” for him, she outfitted her forefinger with a silicone, vibrating nub that she would hold against her clitoris while he rubbed his demented penis into her lesser-used folds, but one morning, as she was packing for an important three day conference in Vienna called “Futura Trends”, she caught a glimpse of herself standing over her open suitcase in her black knee-highs and a bra, her bush full and soft looking, her breasts more or less round, and their then one year-old’s toys scattered under and on top of and next to their bed, and she realized that this was not the way that she wanted to be loved.

            When a marriage has ceased feeling like a marriage for a long time, you’re not in terrific rush to end it. When she came back from Futura Trends, she told Romain that she wasn’t interested in any of his pushing and his rubbing and that, (in summary, Latin), she wanted all attempts at sexual physicality between them to end.           But that didn’t mean that she didn’t still want Romain as a husband. She knows, we know, that’s the part that’s tough to understand, but Romain was not only intelligent, he was attentive, and generous, and kind, and a lot of fun to be with outside of the marital bed. Whenever she was lost in a particularly tough project, or feeling like the work she did was little more than heady fluff, he would take her out—sometimes only for a walk to sit somewhere other than her desk chair, to pick at a sandwich, to watch the way all of the other people in Paris were handling the insane gift of life.

            He was also a good father—actually, he was great. You never know with intellectuals, but Roman was somehow—incongruously—made to be a dad.

He had more patience than she did for reading, and re-reading, and re-re-reading the same books, and he loved to thrill Jane with funny get-ups: adopting warbling voices for Jane’s puppets and Jane’s masks.

            That’s how the Zentai suit thing had started, or at least that’s what Sloane had hoped. The first time he walked into the living room in it (Jane was at daycare, and Romain was home for lunch), she’d laughed just like a little girl. But the body suit was integral: with no holes for your eyes or mouth, with no holes, anywhere, actually. When it was put on properly, when it was made of quality material, it looked like the wearer’s body had been dipped in liquid pewter.  

            “What’s that for?” She’d been working on her computer, and had gone back to working on her computer to ignore the fear that was riding inside her. What’s that for. He said he was giving a lecture the next day on the changing rules of touch. His students, they were born into a different generation of gestures than them: they scrolled, they tapped, they clicked on, but they didn’t use prolonged touch. The Zentai fetish represented both a refusal and an invitation towards personal touch. It presented the wearer’s body as an anonymous thing that could be contemplated in its entirety, but the skin could not be touched. “Isn’t it something!” she remembered him exclaiming, “The skin can’t be touched!”

            To summarize: after his lecture, which was a great success, Romain (Ender-Scott) was invited to give the same lecture somewhere else until he started receiving emails and phone calls from Zentai enthusiasts inviting him to Zentai meetings in Paris, in Zurich, in Amsterdam, in Berlin, all across Europe, everywhere in France.

            Romain started buying the Zentai suits in every hue of color. He wore them to his Zentai meetings, to his touch-centric lectures, he started wearing them around the house. Jane thought they were hysterical—she called him Spiderman. But Sloane knew what was going on at those Zentai meetings, and it didn’t make her laugh. Oh no, she didn’t think it was hysterical to know that he’d found an entire community with which he could exchange non-penetrative caresses. In Paris, they led an intellectual and open-minded and bohemian life, and these three descriptors fit for every one of their colleagues and almost all their friends, and although Sloane could envisage a future where they stayed together platonically and she went to the produce aisle and took herself a lover, she could not imagine a future in which Romain was running around the cobblestoned streets of Paris in a neon catsuit advertising the kind of sexual life he wanted, and finding himself devotees to love and rub him back.

            Sloane’s bath is finished now. She puts on a bra over her soft nipples, she pulls on a blouse. She uses the hotel hair dryer to dry her hair. She feels her daughter playing on the floor behind her, grabbing at her pant legs, peeking her head between her mother’s knees and finding it hysterical to be stuck there. Sloane misses her daughter’s grasping grubbiness so badly at that moment that her eyes prick with tears. She raises her hand to her face to stop the tears from coming and the sink’s faucet senses her movement and the sink turns on.