Touch

by Courtney Maum

  “Roman,” Leila said coolly, giving each of his cheeks a perfunctory kiss. Leila had never come out and said what she didn’t like about him, but Sloane was pretty sure Leila thought that Roman had coerced Sloane into childlessness. A natural-born progenitor, Leila didn’t trust people who didn’t want offspring.

  “Oh, guys!” Sloane said to the children. “I’ve brought you stuff from France!”

  “Ooooh,” went Leila, her eyebrows raised mockingly. “All the way from Paris! Let’s get all this stuff off, and then we can do gifts.”

  Sloane stood there helplessly while the children were husked from their overclothes and boots. Nina looked up at her, confused.

  “Is Paris the planet?” she asked, rather gravely. “The one where you’re from?”

  Sloane cocked her head. Benevolently, she ignored her sister’s flushing cheeks.

  “Mom says you’re from another planet with different rules from us.”

  “Nina!” Leila snapped.

  “Eeeeeee, eeeeee,” whined Sloane, doing a bad impression of an alien.

  • • •

  The good thing about Leila having two children and a third on the way was that not a single thing of import could be discussed throughout the meal. If Nina wasn’t dropping something then Everett was throwing something up. Leila spent the duration of the dinner blotting at one food stain or another, including a spray of pomegranate blood on her own blouse. (Pomegranate! The weeper in Sloane’s stain-removal focus group would have had a nervous breakdown.) None of them could get a sentence in edgewise, much less tell an entire anecdote, which meant that the end of dinner had been arrived at without either Roman or Sloane having been asked about their work, which was just as well because Sloane did not need him outlining the semantics of a Zentai suit while passing the potatoes.

  After dinner, up-for-everything Roman did the dishes alongside Harvey. Something was going on upstairs: footsteps, Margaret’s laughter, maybe the makings of a bath. And then Leila descended the staircase jacketed and wool-hatted with two sleepy kids.

  “You’re not staying over?” Sloane asked.

  Leila narrowed her eyes at her. “Stay over?!” she exclaimed. “Why?”

  Leila and Harvey lived only twenty minutes away in Westport, so yes, why would they do that? Simply because Sloane had told her mother in the e-mail that seeded the whole dinner business in the first place that she and Roman would sleep over, and out of some inflated sense of occasion, Sloane had assumed that Leila and the kids would, too. Sloane was going to be up so early with jet lag, she’d entertained quixotic visions of her getting breakfast for everyone. There was that diner she used to go to with her father—the buttered corn muffins they’d split . . .

  “It’s a school night,” Leila chided. And then, when she registered, somewhat incredulously, her sister’s disappointment: “They don’t sleep great in this house.”

  “No,” Sloane said. “Of course. We probably shouldn’t be staying over, either.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk about anything you’re up to,” Leila said, repositioning the now fully sleeping Everett on her hip. “Harvey!” she shouted. “Some help here! I’ve got two and a half kids in my arms!”

  Sloane reached out belatedly—why hadn’t she thought to help her pregnant sister? But then there was Harvey, a gargantuan diaper bag hanging from his shoulder joint.

  “I guess we’ll have another chance,” Leila said, shrugging. “I mean, you’re here?”

  “Oh yeah,” Sloane said. “I’m here.”

  “For a whole six months.” Leila nodded.

  Sloane nodded back.

  “So we’ll see you, like, what, once more?”

  She tried to shrug off the insinuations of this comment.

  “Maybe twice,” she said.

  Leila laughed, and in that honest sound there was a glimmer of the bond they used to share. All these openings for closeness—all these humans with their disappointments and their desperate hearts, but it’s so much easier, so convenient, to blame emotional distance on a lack of time.

  “Okay,” Leila said, rearranging her weight on the stairs. “So we’ll see you soon.”

  “Sure, soon,” Sloane said, making room for them to slide past her on the staircase, knowing that “soon” was a word for a moment that probably wouldn’t come.

  “Good-bye, Harvey,” she said, as he moved sturdily past her, a groggy Nina in his arms. “It was nice to see you again.”

  “Yeah,” he said, speaking low as to not wake the children. “It was.”

  • • •

  That night, even though Margaret had given Sloane and Roman her art studio above the garage so they’d have privacy, Sloane couldn’t sleep. Her inability to engage Leila in any kind of real conversation had made her too afraid to try the same thing with her mother, and so even though Margaret had been hovering in the kitchen, rearranging toothpicks and doing other things that clearly didn’t need attending to, Sloane had asked her if she was going to bed soon, and her mother had asked her if she was going to bed soon, and too unfamiliar with working through each other’s inhibitions, going to bed is what they’d done.

  When she went up to the studio—fresh linens, old paint cans—Roman was in bed mating with his tablet, the light from its screen an electronic embrace. Seeing him there, otherwise engaged, made Sloane want to run back across to the main house, where her mother was surely up still, spill out her unhappinesses like something ill-digested, exchange reassurances over something hot and honeyed, be tucked childlike into the guest bed down the hall.

  But Sloane was an adult. An adult who had chosen not to need her mother. To rely on herself for emotional sustenance instead.

  “You going to be on that a long time?” Sloane asked. Prone to insomnia, she practiced good sleep hygiene: no screens or cell phones three hours before bedtime.

  “Maybe,” Roman replied, tilting the screen toward her. “Say, have you ever given thought to the next cat?” Her eyes settled on the image of a kitten on its tiptoes in an unfamiliar patch of snow.

  “Like what will replace them?” she queried. “In terms of videos?”

  “Yeah,” said Roman, pulling the screen back. “Because there are these virtual red pandas coming on the market. That could be huge.”

  Sloane sat on the mattress, reached for her book. She always packed a penlight because hotels seemed to be doing away with bedside lighting options, catering to a clientele who only read electronically, but that night, she tugged the pull string of the little lamp beside her and a cozy wash of luminosity bathed her side of the bed.

  Sloane was reading The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, a book that challenged preconceived ideas about sexuality through tight epiphanies. Sloane was having a hard time with it—some of its anecdotes touched a little close to home. In fact, she’d actually welled up a couple of days earlier when the author described an altercation between two animated Popsicles: “You’re more interested in fantasy than reality,” Popsicle One accused. “I’m interested in the reality of my fantasy,” the other said.

  “Honey,” Roman said, kneeing her under the covers. “Pandas?”

  The thing was—Sloane thought, refusing to turn toward him—the thing was that with trends, change wasn’t inherent in every little thing. People would always love the feel of weathered denim; the warmth of a baby’s cheek against a waiting chest. Videos of other people’s kittens doing funny things.

  “It’s just going to make people sad,” Sloane said, “imitation pandas.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Roman, briskly. “Especially when the real ones are all gone.”

  • • •

  The next morning, through a combination of lingering jet lag and a rough night’s sleep, Sloane woke up feeling anxious. It had been a mistake to sleep over at her mother’s. Certainly, in terms of convenience, it d
idn’t make sense. Plus, the eagerness Sloane felt to get to her second day of work had set back any desire she’d had the previous night to make inroads with her mom.

  She’d woken up earlier than Roman—it was just turning six o’clock. Carefully, Sloane rose and put on last night’s clothing, donned the change of jewelry that she had packed in her overnight bag, and started down the staircase into the cold outdoors.

  As she walked across the yard in the yawn of early morning, Sloane was better able to see the places where the old house was falling into disrepair. Part of a water-logged fence collapsing, the herb garden spiked with bolted plants, the back deck slippery with leaves and mildew green as avocados.

  In the house, the quiet—real quiet, her mother still asleep—Sloane was confronted with a vision of the rooms that housed her childhood: the smell of old flowers and burnt paper and sunlight mixed with dust. With his death, Peter had lost his marriage-long campaign for cleanliness and order, and an organizational system based entirely on sentimentalism and nostalgia had won out.

  Sloane opened up the fridge and was confronted with a menagerie of gruesome leftovers in mismatched pots and jars. She didn’t have the fortitude to start looking through them, the liquefying evidence of her mother’s rémoulades and quiches, her tangible efforts to keep late-life loneliness at bay.

  Why had she imagined she’d go out and get breakfast for everyone? An empty stomach would have to suffice—she had to get to work. But just when she’d started to wonder whether she could get away with leaving her mom a note, she heard a plank creak on the stairs.

  “Honey, is that you?” Margaret called. “Don’t touch anything, I was going to make pancakes!”

  Sloane didn’t respond. She listened to her mother’s footfalls, trying not to hear how slow and careful they were. And then her mother was in the doorway, wrapped in a fleece robe, dabs of unabsorbed moisturizer stuck in the creases of her neck.

  “Don’t you want pancakes?” she asked, pushing her hair back to tame it into some kind of shape. “Is Roman up?”

  Sloane winced. See, this is the thing that drove her nuts about her mother. She thought she could heal everything by smothering people with good intentions. Pancakes? Pancakes!? Sloane was almost forty, she hardly wrote, she never called, and Margaret pretended that a hearty breakfast would make everything all right.

  “Oooh,” said Sloane. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Does Roman not like pancakes?”

  God, this was another crutch, displacing the blame of everything disappointing onto a man she hardly knew. The inquiries about their food preferences, the insinuation that Roman was picky—neither of them gave a shit about Roman’s eating patterns; what Margaret wanted to know was why Sloane had become so difficult to love.

  “He’s showering,” Sloane answered. “Doing e-mails. So I don’t know. Maybe just toast?”

  “Oh,” Margaret said, sinking. “You sure?”

  Sloane looked at her mother’s mismatched eyes and her wild hair and the bathrobe with the tea stains, and she wanted to fall down on the floor with her and lean against the cupboards and let everything out; tell her mother that her partner preferred rubbing up against strangers than touching her in bed; tell her that there was a darkness in her decision to work for Mammoth that she was trying to ignore. Tell her that the overheated seawater was coming for the wetlands, coming for the aquifers, coming for them all.

  But instead she just stood there at the fork between the way she wanted her relationship with her mother to be like and the way it actually was.

  “I don’t know,” Sloane said. “You already did so much cooking last night. Toast would probably be easier.”

  Her mother’s shoulders sloped. A branch fell down outside. Even the kitchen appliances with their fingerprinted surfaces seemed to turn against the daughter who had chosen the wrong words.

  8

  On the way back in from Stamford, Anastasia dropped Roman off at the apartment before shuttling Sloane to work.

  She and Roman hadn’t talked the whole way back. Roman wasn’t the type to feel they had to “download” after a visit with her family. On his side, they only saw Yves and Victoire Bellard twice a year for white wine and cold chicken, brisk luncheons that were as perfunctory as they were expected. Seeing that he viewed his own relatives as little more than expensive pieces of furniture that needed to be dusted and polished from time to time, it wasn’t surprising that he didn’t feel the need to check in with her about her feelings since they’d left her mom’s. He’d been with her ten years now—he assumed she didn’t have any.

  Normally, Sloane would have been relieved—grateful, even—for Roman’s silence, but on their drive into Manhattan, she just felt let down. Roman used to have good instincts, used to be able to at least identify when she wanted—uncharacteristically—to talk, but ever since he started becoming something of an Internet sensation, he’d tuned out everything except for the reverberations of himself. Currently, he was answering requests for follow-up interviews that had come in the wake of his polemic Nouvel Obs profile, and was checking in on the success of the latest urban Zentai selfies he’d posted to Instagram. Roman running along the East River in his gold Zentai suit, a flashy supernova. Roman on the L train in between a commuter dressed like a rigid schoolmarm and a teenager with gray hair.

  His one concession to something resembling empathy was a question. They’d arrived at the apartment building, and he had one leg out of the car, his eyes momentarily off his device.

  “So, I thought that went well, yes?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” Sloane said. She didn’t. She was at such loose ends with her family, she’d lost the ability to gauge their interactions.

  “Hmm,” he said, distracted, leaning against the car door. “I think I’ll have eight hundred thousand followers soon,” he said, unable to contain his grin.

  “Really?!” Sloane balked. “Are you serious?”

  “The Americans, they really like the Zentai way of thinking.” He slid his phone into his pocket. “I think it’s freeing for them. With their puritanical history—it’s liberating, yes?”

  Sloane was still staring at the number eight hundred thousand in her head. That was a lot of people. In such a short amount of time. It was the person in her, not the forecaster, who didn’t want Roman to be onto something. But he was.

  “Well, that’s great. That’s great.” Her shock turned toward resentment. “That’ll be really great for your book. Whatever the fuck it’s about.”

  “Oh, chérie. I’ll have something for you soon. I’m having the big plans!” Roman’s hand shot up vertically, imitating a rocket ship. “It will be great for us!”

  “Wonderful,” she said, unsure of what “great for them” would look like. An open relationship? Zoophilia? With a robotic panda? “A little background would be good. Maybe you’re writing a tell-all, for all I know.”

  He got out of the car. They didn’t kiss each other. Sloane’s heart twisted at her comment. Such a book would be unsaleable. People don’t like to read stories that don’t have love in them.

  • • •

  Whether Anastasia sensed Sloane’s disquietude through thermal seat sensors or—incredibly—instinct, she left her charge in silence on their way to work. Sloane was grateful for Anastasia’s uncanny sensitivity; she had to cleanse her mind. Personal entanglements had always clouded her, which was one of the reasons she kept her social life antiseptic clean. She avoided people with “issues,” needy people, sad ones, anyone who really, truly needed a friend. Back in Paris, Sloane and Roman’s group of friends were jubilant accessories: always there for fun. And when the going got tough? The tough stayed off the dinner party circuit until they felt bright and strong again.

  It was worrisome to have this much muck inside her. Guilt, or disappointment maybe, about the way it had felt to see her family, Ro
man’s recent secrecy, these things were becoming difficult to ignore, and worse yet, they were clogging up the plumbing she used to do her work. Normally, this early into a stay in New York City, Sloane’s mind would have been electrified with ideas and intuitions, synapses firing with possibilities and codes, but instead she felt numb and dumb and worried.

  Usually, this only happened when she was working on something short term and superficial that she didn’t really care about. Fashion forecasting sometimes made her feel like this—the trends came so hard and fast. Tastemakers wouldn’t be caught dead tromping about in wedge sneakers, but several years ago, they were the only things to be seen in. Certainly, Sloane had compiled forecasts involving actual items: denim overalls, ankle-baring men’s pants, the return of designer socks—but what she preferred to invest her time and energy in was the longer-term sea changes in human desire. But she wasn’t getting an overarching read on what people wanted so far. The humans were so tired. The environment was shit, people’s ability to empathize with others was going to hell in a fair-trade handbasket, politics around the world had become a poisoned farce. It felt like the only thing that people wanted was to stay alive and order takeout and play quietly with their phones.

  Sloane looked out the window at the restaurants and cafés floating by. She had a pretty intense craving for a slice of pizza. For cheese and grease and carbs to soak up some of the sad. She could almost hear her mom second-guessing her desire: pizza? In the morning? Her dad would have thought nothing of it. It’s just cheese on bread . . .

  Although recently she’d started feeling like a circus animal in a treat-filled cage, when she’d been younger, she’d felt lucky to be special. The premonitions, the presentiments, the “Spidey skills” as her dad called them, they were all a thrilling gift. Of course, lots of children think they have magic powers, but Sloane had such queer pastimes: working with all her might to change the shade of traffic lights, spending entire hours at the Greenwich shoreline, wet sand in her small fists, certain that she alone possessed the power to feed the growing waves.