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            “There’s really no hope for any of us, is there,” asked Edwin with a shoulder heave. “We’re just living in a mall.” He looked up at Sloane with a bemused self-pity. “My kids, they’re good people. And these kids—” he gestured to the floor above them. “They seem like good people, too. But it doesn’t matter any more.” He shook his head despondently. “What’s frottage?”

            “Will you two do me a favor?” Sloane asked, ignoring the question by getting to her feet. “Would you two agree to get really drunk with me tonight?”

            “At your service,” said David, sweeping his hand across his belly.
            “I’ll get a head start,” said Edwin, lifting up an imaginary glass.

            “The world might be ending, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun, right?”

            “In-sou-ci-ant,” said Edwin, drawing the word out. “Like all the kids.”

            Sloane coaxed her hair into a disheveled bun. “And frottage, Edwin,” she said, twisting the stray pieces into place, “is the sexualized rubbing of two people’s body sections. My husband just publicly endorsed such aforementioned rubbing against the inner thigh.”

            “Tough week,” said David, with a grin.

            “Learn something every day,” whistled Edwin.

            “And while we’re at it,” Sloane continued, “the aspirational lawn care thing? It isn’t actually bullshit. People are going to be painting instead of watering their lawns. Because of water shortages. So, you know, Poppy,” she shrugged. “She might be on our side.”

            “I find you pretty benevolent for a person with a meme,” countered David.

            She parted her lips to retaliate something clever, but then she saw apparent seriousness in his eyes. These two people, or at least this one person, appeared to think that Sloane was in possession of a decent soul. And she thought the same thing about them. The world was a despicable, hopeless place until it wasn’t. There were still some reasons to rejoice. The smell of charcoals heating in a barbecue. Birthday candle light swaying with the force of an exhale. It was impossible, to be run through with this deep will to survive. To not just survive, but to enjoy one’s time on the planet. To forgive, forget, to fall in and out of love. So much beauty bookmarked by such fathomless stupidity. It could make you go insane weighing whether or not to give up.

            Sloane took her leave of the two gentlemen to go and ready her slideshow on the interpersonal applications of convenient things.

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Fell called when they reached the Henry Hudson with conciliatory news: current book sales had them well on track to make the bestseller list during the first week of her book’s publication. Fell’s tone was more upbeat than usual, the real reason for her call unspoken (Sloane’s books always hit the bestseller list of The New York Times), Fell was feeling guilty over her suggestion that Sloane get a divorce.

            It was crazy, Sloane knew it, to become so domestic at her age. But between the dogmatic ignorance of the rising right wing and the acidifying seas, it was like her mother with her miniature canvases: Sloane wanted something small and beautiful that she could control. So be it if it happened to be her marriage. Sloane didn’t make nice with Fell. She listened to what she had to say, thanked her for saying it, and then she hung up. Because her car was mad at her for some unknown reason, it calmed Sloane to be angry at somebody else.

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He had also spent the better part of that French autumn delivering his Sorbonne lectures in fetish Zentai suits, integral second-skin ware that covered up everything on his body, even his eyes and mouth. He claimed that the seamless body suits buttressed many of his controversial theories on touch. She claimed that his controversial theories were ruining their marriage, not to mention that they were in blatant opposition to her biological clock. But even in her own life, it was irrepressible, her foreknowledge of the ups and downs of trends. As it was with hemlines, profit margins, airplanes, so it was with human relationships. What went up, came down.

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            If this had been the past, if they had both been younger, Sloane would have taken his confession as an invitation to delve deeper into his life. There was a current between them, but it wavered, hesitant, like a flickering porch light. Sloane felt an attraction to him, but his kids, his wife, her blabbering husband, the overwhelming statuses of their adult lives made that attraction an uncomfortable weight to bear, like something ill-digested in her stomach. And yet, to not move closer to the heat felt inhuman and perverse. She didn’t know how to be a confidant to such a person without opening up her heart, and yet it was pointless and foolhardy, she might find a wealth of worlds within him, but there was nothing she could hold.

           

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“Sooo…” he said, finally turning towards her, his belongings arranged. “Sorry, I’m actually…I get a little weird on planes. I’m more of a train guy, but no one takes those any more.”

            “In Europe they do. I take trains all the time.”

            “I’d like to live in Europe,” he said, his comment coming out uncharacteristically vague. “You’re in Amsterdam?”

            “Paris, actually. My sister’s in Amsterdam though, so I go a lot. I teach at one of the art schools there, so. And you’re…in the Berkshires?”

            “Yep,” he said, unscrewing his water bottle top. “You know it?”

            “Sort of. I used to…this might sound crazy, but I have an energy therapist there.”

            David held on to the water in his mouth, bug-eyed, before swallowing it down. “Really.”

            “Yeah, it’s not as weird as it sounds. It’s because I’m constantly carrying this energy around, or like, tapping into other people’s and—”

            “No, no,” he said, looking at her. “I used to do Reiki. You know. So I know.”

            “Hmm,” she said, impressed. “Really?”

            “Oh yeah,” he nodded. “I used to be this, like… I don’t know. Really spiritual guy.”

            “Spiritual,” she repeated.

            “Yeah,” he said, fiddling with his water bottle cap. “It’s really something, isn’t it. The energy around us. I guess you’d understand. I don’t know if I could do it—Reiki—now. It’s like, people are so fractured. They’re just—everyone is in seventeen different places. Sorry,” he said, taking a startling deep breath.

            “For?” She looked past him up the aisle. There didn’t seem to be any stragglers there, no one coming for their empty seat.

            “For this,” he said, moving his hand in a circle around his head. “I’m just not completely here.”

            “You miss your family?” Sloane asked, trying to make her voice pique in the right place.

            “Well sure, but that’s not it. It’s just,” he exhaled again, looked at her. “I’m going through—fuck it. You know. A mid life crisis.”

            He followed his comment with a laugh, which invited Sloane to laugh also, but his admission made her sad. To be thrust so quickly into someone’s orbit, to feel the weight around them, to know you didn’t have enough time to discern the origin of their hows and whys.

            “It’s not a big deal,” he said, brushing something off his pants. “It really isn’t. It’s just that this is not a great time for me to be on tour. Sorry, whew! And the plane’s not even in the air yet! There’s a couple seats available, you might want to move!”

From yet another project!

And he also seemed to be making a real mess of a pass. In her experience, the last decade of it at least, busy, high-earning people did not have time to “talk.” They had time to email, and they had time to text, but they didn’t have time to walk you into a hallway and start exchanging thoughts.

            Sloane didn’t know what he wanted from her. Maybe she was still high. But it felt good, the not knowing. To have a man—a tall man, a man like something out of an outdoor clothing catalog—in a hallway all alone, even if it was just to talk. She hadn’t talked or laughed in so long. It was astonishing, she saw it. Despite the inquisition that she had undergone, and in a public relations sense, had failed, she had had a good time that night. She’d downright had fun.

            And yet. And yet, the darkness. The responsibilities. The wives. The tomorrow of every minute of it, the mistakes within the now. Sloane had started the tour alongside hired colleagues. Every sinew in her body warned her that nothing good would come of allowing her heart to welcome them as friends.

Who the heck really knows anymore? Cut from yet another project

It meant something, thirty-eight. It meant that she was that much closer to entering a situation of permanent regret. When she met Romain, no: neither one of them wanted children. And now Sloane had that itch, that restlessness of instinct. Now Sloane did.