From a 2015 book project, I hope!

After a while, since she was the only one with a child, (except for Tonya Harding, who was still skating around), Hunter asked her what it was like to be a mom. Hunter had rolled a joint by this point, which she was gamely sharing, but it had been mixed with a menthol cigarette, which made Sloane coast and cough.

            “I was surprised, actually, when I found out,” Hunter said, sucking in the smoke and the cold air. “I’d sort of pegged you for the childless route.”

            “Me too,” snickered Stephan, who had his head on Hunter’s lap. He watched Hunter puff smoke rings and flapped his hand in the direction from whence the smoke had come.

            “Me too, actually,” Sloane giggled. She was drinking champagne out of somebody else’s glass. There was a wine bucket full of bubbly at the bleacher’s edge. This was something else she never did in Paris: giggled, smoked, got high.

            “But the thing that no one tells you is that you tap into this higher frequency. Seriously, being a parent, it’s like you have access to this underworld that is right there under the surface of everybody’s lives. And you pass these haggard people while you’re down there, and you just understand them. And then you come up to earth again where everyone else is, I don’t know, going about their lives in this way that seems so fantastically careless to me now.”

            “Like what,” said Sumpti. “In terms of sex?”

            “God no, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that there’s not a single day anymore where I don’t think of death. I mean, there’s not even a day part for God’s sake. When I merge onto the highway, when I get into a plane, when I look outside my window and I see rain clouds, when my daughter is cuter than usual or easy to deal with, I hold her against me and I think about huge violence.” No one said anything. Tonya Harding was standing one legged on the ice rink, shaking something out of her skate. “I just hold her and think that this could all be taken away.”

            “That’s some fucked up shit,” said Hunter. “You need to appreciate what you have.”

            “But I appreciate it more because I can lose it at any minute. That’s the thing that’s become so pressing, that’s made me,” she looked up at the trees and faltered. “There’s not much more to add to it. I’m a mom obsessed with death.”

            “Well!” said Stephan, pushing himself upwards with one elbow. “That’s certainly depressing! Hunter! Does your mom still have the dance floor?”

            “Of course,” she shrugged, pointing. “The northeast tent.”

            “Shall we?” Stephan asked the motley crew.

            Sloane had never known her brother to be so socially solicitous, but she was glad that she’d divulged one of the reasons she was loathe to continue with her tour, her career, her life. She reached out for the menthol marijuana mixture and pulled at it, hard.

            “Last tango in Greenwich,” she said.