dark, caterpillar-browed, square-jawed look that is at once subversive and likable. At the time Wes was sleeping with two other employees, Jenny and Danielle, and neither knew about the other. He’d also been sleeping with one of the restaurant’s regular customers. Like many charming men, he had a way of leaving a room that made others feel there was no reason to stay now that he was gone.
Sloane had known Wes for many years. She had never thought of him sexually but on this New Year’s Eve she was struck by what happened around midnight.
Sloane was working the room, feeling like a fish in an aquarium—existing for the crowd, preening for it, but also traveling along, alone. She felt beautiful and skinny. She had not vomited in years. Now she had healthier ways to stay trim. They were still admittedly obsessive. She went to the gym a lot and ate little. She found quick ways to exercise throughout the day, micro thigh presses she could do while she was on the phone or cleaning up after dinner. Richard came to find her.
You have to see this, he said.
She followed him into the kitchen.
It was five minutes to midnight. Jenny and Danielle were traveling up and down the aisles of the kitchen, looking for Wes. The customer he was seeing had also come into the kitchen. They were peeking behind fridges. Three women wanted to kiss the same man at the stroke of midnight.
Where is he? Sloane whispered to Richard.
Richard pointed toward the walk-in freezer. Sloane cracked the door open and there was Wes, leaning against the wall next to the ruby sides of meat that hung from the ceiling.
He put his finger to his lips. Sloane dropped her jaw in mock disbelief. He winked. There was a little smile on his face. It was sly and also tender. She smiled back, closed the door, and returned to the floor. At midnight, she kissed her husband. Everyone in the big dining room was sounding noisemakers, shouting Happy New Year! and clinking flutes of champagne.
In the years to come, Richard and Sloane would experiment with inviting third parties into the bedroom. The third person was usually a man. It turned Richard on to watch his wife with another man in his presence, or sometimes it could be just her and the other man while Richard was working. Sloane would send verbal and video updates via text message to keep him informed and involved.
Richard would select the man. He would mention someone, sometimes in bed or over coffee, after the kids had gone to school. Sloane never remembered the content of these conversations. She rarely said no. Sometimes a particular man whom Richard had chosen would be surprising to her but for the most part, the men made sense. She never thought of Wes as being an option. She had known him for so many years. He was handsome and thick-haired. She liked her men bald and powerful, like her husband.
In any case the other man usually didn’t move her in any direction. The exciting part was simply the presence of a third person. They were always nice-looking enough, kind enough, smart enough. Nothing she couldn’t stomach. But she wouldn’t have picked them out herself.
Less often, the third person would be a woman, the way it had gone on her twenty-seventh birthday. Sloane preferred it when the third party was a woman. When it was two men and herself, she felt that she was onstage. Attention was solely on her; she was the star of every scene. Some men didn’t like it when their balls or penis brushed against her husband’s balls or penis, and she would be the one to guard against such accidents. Sometimes it felt as if she were the only player on a badminton court, trying to keep the shuttlecock in the air on both sides of the net.
It was Richard who drove all of these events. It was his predilection she was serving, though she enjoyed it as well. She would rarely do something exclusively for herself when it came to sex, though one time, she got close.
She was in Sag Harbor with some girlfriends. They were drinking vodka at a bar on the water and Sloane could see the boats lit up in the harbor, little showpieces. All night she’d eaten very little and her belly was flat. Even after she’d gotten better, had moved past the eating disorders into some type of normality, she was still