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.  

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.   

Cut from a book project for 2015, I hope!

Yes, Hunter kept in touch with all the girls they used to be friends with, and yes, she’d even had sex with one of them but she wasn’t saying who, (Just kidding, it was Sonia), and yes, they were all still lithe and energetic and rich as fuck.

            “They’re probably in there somewhere,” said Hunter, nodding towards the pulsating mass of bodies crammed inside the glowing house. “If not, then they’re in Vail.”

From a (hopefully!) new book project for 2015

On the way home to Greenwich, passing what was left of the Greenwich homes. Well, there weren’t any of them left, really. When I was a little kid, there were beautiful trees hiding beautiful houses. White clapboard, black shutters, stone chimneys, imperfect grass. People had dogs they really cared about, but they treated them like dogs. Nowadays, when you ask someone if they have children, the non-children havers get self righteous and answer that they have a dog. To avoid hurting their feelings (because in the twenty first century, we don’t hurt each other’s feelings), you will say, “Well then, you understand.” But it’s total bullshit. If you don’t have a child, you can’t understand, and even though they wake you up at night to bark and poo and piss, a dog is not a child. My point is that I’m working things out, here. Sometimes I’m going to be “I,” and sometimes I’m going to be “Sloane.” It’s going to be confusing, but we’re going to have to deal with it. Come back in the car with me. Let’s look at my old home.

            Everything is new here where I used to live. Childless couples cross the threshold of foreclosed upon McMansions that were built on spec two years earlier and when they see the stainless steel appliances in the kitchen and the kitchen island that is marble when what is cool now is cement, they say to their broker, well, obviously, it’s a total tear down. When I was still in high school, and the private community my parents lived in wasn’t yet a ghost town of foreclosed, too-big homes, a young couple rented the house next to ours while they constructed a house right down the street. They tore down the house that used to be there, a sprawling, three-story Tudor, and when they finished paying someone to build their dream house, they realized that they’d always wanted his and her sinks in the master bathroom, and then they got nervous that they’d forgotten about some of their other hidden wishes, so they started again from scratch. They tore the whole thing down. You will think I’m being sarcastic a lot throughout this book, or that I’m exaggerating. I do, sometimes, but I’m not exaggerating this. Their names were Kenneth Briggs and Jennifer Reilly, of Rochester and Atlanta, respectively, and they tore down their just-built, seven million dollar home because they’d forgotten to ask their builders for his and her sinks.

           

From a (hopefully?) new book project for 2015

Using, using, using, Sloane drummed inside her head, before coming back to her promise to leave him be for a little while. This is the thing though: you have children, and they grow up unable to handle the world’s possibilities, the flaxen blur of reeds rising from a salt marsh, the incalculable perfections of a child’s hand. So they do things to their bodies. They denigrate their minds. They slide into the shakehole, perpetuate the hurt.

Cut from a 2015 book project—I hope!

.... but after high school, at Juliard, he went in for composition and for a while, he was an emerging musical composer in the world of modern dance, but then his lifelong penchant for addictive substances took over and he became a drug addict before netting out at drunk.

            There are certain people who do not want to heal. People who need access to the specific briny beauty that the world affords you when you’re high; the transcendental high notes, the paludal lows. There are lots of performing artists with substance abuse problems, but the really successful ones have teams of people who check the automatic payment box on their cellphone bills for them, who schedule their hotel wake-up calls, who buy them airplane tickets and drive them to the planes.

            Or they play in a band and survive on a system of checks and balances with the other members of the group. With some exceptions, the severly drug addled are not playing Rachmoninov for a sold-out house in Lincoln Center. Stephan could have been a great composer, or he could have made a tolerable amount of money showing up (or sleeping through) gigs in hotel bars, but for him, it was the prestige of the concert pianist, or it was nothing else.

Cut from a 2015 book project—I hope!

She had a call on her voicemail from Maven Fox. It had started. The girls knew that she was back in town. Just like her sister, Lola, Sloane had her own set of girls. She called them the monograms and she’d gone to high school with them. Just like Lola’s set, these women were born as little girls in Connecticut, then they went south and west to come of age during college, then northeast to Manhattan for their first jobs in banking and event management and PR, and then they moved back to the bedroom town of Connecticut once they’d found a hedge fund manager to share a bed with. And then they had the kids. It was astonishing, all of the off-spring produced by former friends of hers. All of the darn kids. Sloane wanted no children until she became pregnant, and once she had one, she wanted two. When she was told by her husband that he never again wanted to have sex with her, she wanted all of the children. She wanted, effectively, to drown in kids. And now she’d come home to a set of women she used to be friends with who had everything they’d ever wanted: rich men who got it up for them, rainforest showers, radiant flooring, and 3.1 kids.

            Maven had run into Stephanie Williams who had run into her mom who had said that Sloane was back in town. Could it possibly be true? They absolutely totally just had to get together. How long was she around? Did she have plans for Thanksgiving? Well, obvs, of course she did! But they positively had to get together. Restaura did white wine flights now. They had to make a plan.

            Listen. Sloane doesn’t hate her female friends from high school. She envied the fact that they were already in their golden years, was the thing. Recently, at a party, she’d met someone who told her about a friend of theirs who’s life goal was to own a house with a two-car garage. At thirty-four, he’d done it. He wasn’t interested in kids or career advancement, just the house and the garage and now he had it and the rest of his life was just bonus footage, as far as he was concerned. Sloane envied her old friends for much the same reason—their DNA seemed to be configured without the restless gene that hers had. Sloane didn’t have an overarching goal for her life except that she wanted to feel less frenetic and concerned about her chances for survival, which was difficult to do in a world where restaurant managers were shot in the stomach for running out of bread bowls and (victims of sinking vessels) used dead porpoises as life preserver vests.