he will ask her to talk about fucking someone else while he is coming, which is not her thing, but shit, she thinks, who cares?
She cannot tell Jenny that Richard can be an asshole, but the kind of asshole he can be is never the unforgivable kind. It is never the kind who lies about where he has been. She cannot tell Jenny that when he is fantasizing, it is not about a friend of hers or even a porn star, it is always, always about Sloane. Perhaps it is about Sloane with the porn star, but she is always in there. She cannot tell Jenny that she never has to worry about her husband in precisely the way that Jenny was shown she had to worry about hers.
Mostly, Sloane could not tell Jenny her own pain, because it was smaller than Jenny’s pain, and Jenny was not responsible for Sloane’s pain in the way that Sloane was responsible for Jenny’s. She could not tell Jenny that she stands and looks out the window of her kitchen in the morning and the tasks of the day unfurl themselves before her like a roll of celluloid and she thinks, Okay, tick spray and change of clothes and skating lesson and refill the toilet paper and need milk, onions, lemons and order more printer paper and get oil changed in car one and order food for the dog and wax bikini and make pasta with butter nut squash and ricotta and wait do we have a fucking dog and get sixty-watt bulbs for the bar and restock Grey Goose and get clothes out of dryer and pluck single black hair from chin and clean car two before extended family comes and bring garbage bins inside and get new plunger and fuck my husband and walk the dog if we have one.
She could not tell Jenny that she couldn’t trust her husband in a certain way. She could ask him to do half the tasks on her list. He’s a chef and so his day doesn’t begin until later and granted he has his own list but his list is not as long as Sloane’s and it does not exist, as Sloane’s does, in the form of heartburn. It isn’t written in orange fire.
Say she gives him forty percent—no, thirty percent, he can handle that. And of that thirty percent he will fuck up precisely half. He might buy the wrong dog food. He might forget to tick-spray the kids. He will get the cow milk but not the almond milk. So say he does the list and he fucks up half of it, but he’s proud of himself regardless, and if Sloane says, Look thanks for buying the dog food, but it’s the wrong food, and anyway we have no dog, he will be upset, and something will freeze inside his urethra, it will turn into a little icicle, his urine and his semen in there, and he will feel bad about himself. So she can’t say that. She can’t say anything. She could say, Thank you, but even that is wrong, because Thank you means that Sloane assumes he wouldn’t have done it otherwise, and even though he will never do something on his own, he thinks he would. Of course eventually he would do something. Like, if she were dead. And anyway Sloane doesn’t want to be a nag. There are women who excel at nagging but Sloane hates the sound of her own voice as it forms a question. So what’s the fantasy? It’s nothing, really, if you have to ask. Sure, yes, the fantasy is he did the stuff she didn’t even know she needed, like cleaning his amber drops off the rim of the toilet, getting the kids’ clothes ready for the following morning, putting the scissors back where the scissors go, he did a bunch of things before the thought of them even entered Sloane’s head. Invisible service, the kind she likes the waiters to practice in her restaurant. He cleared the room in her brain so that she might be able to get sexually excited in that now wide-open field up there where the to-dos aren’t scrolling and the boxes next to each task are checked—but that overwhelming list didn’t even get written up because he did it before she thought about it. He even walked the dog. Ha, she thinks. Come on. That’s crazy. After all, we don’t even have a fucking dog.