plagued with a dark fear of food. The way it could build up inside you. She had never been overweight. It wasn’t as though she had lost a hundred pounds and was still hungover from the difficulty, the years of elastic-waist pants and dripping tunics. She’d gotten a little bigger during her pregnancies and struggled as many women did to lose the added pounds. But for the most part Sloane’s rings had always slipped on loosely. Still, the fear was overarching.
The first night in Sag Harbor was a blur. Everyone was drinking a lot. Getting another drink at the bar, Sloane bumped into a couple she knew. They had always been flirtatious, the man and the woman both, and this evening was no different. She couldn’t remember which one of them was more excited to see her. Sloane flirted back. Then they all returned to their own rooms.
In the morning Sloane called Richard and told him about the evening. She pictured him in the kitchen, moving up and down the aisle, separating a hard lobster tail from its meat. She loved the smells in their restaurant’s kitchen.
He told her she should go to the couple’s room. It was early and the sun was exceedingly bright. She was sort of feeling up to it, but not entirely. She felt thin and pretty. Sometimes that was enough for sex. She texted the couple. They wrote back, Come on down. They sent their room number.
The friends Sloane had come with were either smoking cigarettes outside or riding bikes through town. Sloane was still in her pajamas and now she put on her running shoes. She was still a little hungover from the evening and out in the air-conditioned hallway, wearing pajamas and sneakers, she felt silly. It was not a convincing ensemble. She walked quickly and took the stairs to avoid running into her friends. As she reached the couple’s door she looked up and down the hallway before knocking.
Beyond sending mini updates when Richard wasn’t present, she would sometimes video much of the interlude on her phone. Then she and Richard would watch it later.
In these moments, when she was sleeping with other people, she often felt clear. The negative aspects of her life melted into the periphery. Women like her sister-in-law, who made her feel bad about herself; problems at the restaurant; issues with money. These annoying things fell off.
Earlier that summer, Sloane had read the Fifty Shades trilogy, and something had clicked. She told friends it was as if she’d been going through life with poor vision and then put on a pair of glasses. It was silly, she knew, to describe it this way. As though she were a college freshman who’d come across Nietzsche one holiday weekend and suddenly could see the world clearly. Besides, it wasn’t Nietzsche but a trilogy of soft-core pornography.
In the books a young woman signs a contract with a sexual dominant, who also happens to be a wealthy, powerful, handsome entrepreneur. She becomes his submissive, allowing him to whip her and handcuff her and insert goddess balls into her vagina. After reading the books, women across the country went to leather stores and bought riding crops to leave on their beds. The books had made these other women feel daring and wild. But they made Sloane feel sane. They normalized her lifestyle. Romanticized it, even. Before reading them, she’d often felt unsure about her place in the world. Who was she? What had she become? What had she not become? People seemed to come into and go out of her life but to cleave very firmly to their own, to know who they were, even if they were different according to the seasons. Living in Newport, Sloane was surrounded by women with a separate set of summer clothes in their summer homes, by celebrities and former presidents who touched down and ate her husband’s food and partied in the bar and flirted with people who weren’t their spouses but then went home to their routines, their heteronormative, monogamous relationships. But the books and the sensation that followed their publication had transformed Sloane’s life into the enchanted one. I have a cool existence, she thought, and this is the role I play and that is all right.
Much as when she’d taken control over the way she ate, she was now in control of her story. If previously she’d been simply accommodating her husband’s desire without being true to her own, now Sloane had a