Each pump is going through this woman, and into you.
It’s been a long while of swinging, if you could call it that, because it is not actually swinging. Swinging is a word that belongs to another time, to people who are not Sloane. She is refined and so are her world, her bedsheets, her brain.
It is more like sexuality without boundaries, but not in a hedonistic, hipster sense. If you were to liken their sexual life to the setting of a dinner table, the table itself would be long and thick, decorated with antlers and other bones and flowers. To drink, there would be wine and port, and the guests would eat their dessert and salad at once. There would be velvet chairs and simple wooden bar stools, but guests could also sit on the table, naked, or in baroque dress.
It all began on her twenty-seventh birthday. The first week of July, over a decade ago. The restaurant had been open for two years. White cornices, sunshine. She was pleased with what she had built. She felt that everything she had done up until now had a reason.
It was hot and Newport was humming with the force of the holiday weekend. The Fourth of July is the first lucrative weekend of the season. The summer people buy up the flowers from the farmers’ market. They carry dripping stems back to their air-conditioned beach cars, their green station wagons, and their vermilion antique convertibles. The rust on the undercarriage is a statement. Long-haired girls in their early twenties wear bikini tops and soft pants. Every year there is one kind of sandal that is favored over another.
In the morning Sloane went to the restaurant to fill out some paper work. She ran her hand along the stainless steel in the kitchen, admiring the refrigerator full of cold summer vegetables. All the machines, the industrial blenders. She owned these things. She could feed hundreds of people a night.
A noise startled her at the other end of the room. She looked up and saw Karin, a server who also worked on the restaurant’s books. Sloane knew little about Karin, only that she had recently graduated from college. And, like many young women who weren’t sure what they wanted to do or where they wanted to live, Karin had come to work in Newport, where her friends’ parents had vacationed. She had come as a preteen several times and learned what to covet. She had very dark hair and dark lips. They were vampiric, almost. As though full of congealed blood.
Sloane, who was known for being both thin and sexy, immediately, there in the kitchen, began to list the ways in which she was better than Karin, and the ways in which Karin was better than her. Sloane was thinner. Karin was younger. Sloane owned the restaurant, and Karin merely worked in it. But that could also be reversed. It could be better that Karin was an employee, a pretty young thing obeying orders. Is that not a man’s dream? thought Sloane. But no, Sloane was confident, alpha, abundant yet reserved, partied but went home early enough to be missed. Karin was a child, she was probably insipid to talk to, good only at concerts and in the bedroom for the first fifteen minutes before you grew weary of the switching of positions. Because this was a girl, Sloane could tell, who moved about often, who displayed her whole deck, grinning. Enough would be enough, sooner than a man might imagine. Sloane, on the other hand, long-haired, yogic, fearsome, had ever more layers. Eventually any man in the world would go to her, and stay there.
Hi, Karin said. It was an unusual hello, warm and spiky.
Hi, said Sloane. She has a way of saying hello that is at once inquisitive, judgmental, and a little bit sensual.
Isn’t today your birthday?
Sloane nodded. She could feel a smile forming. Is it so simple? she thought. For someone to say it’s your birthday, and your guard falls. Like you are seven years old, wearing your new dotted swiss dress.
What Sloane didn’t know was that a few days prior, Karin proposed something to Richard. She said, What if I join you and your wife in the bedroom? Of course that was not the actual question. Unless the moment has been recorded, you can never know what the actual question is. It’s impossible to answer. You couldn’t be honest about exactly how something like that is worded. Utter honesty, Sloane