Touch

by Courtney Maum

  Sloane sucked her breath in. She was trying very (very) hard not to tear up.

  “That shit is already happening,” she yelled, willing her voice not to crack again. “Onanism? Sexual disassociation? You’re not on to anything new. Publish it,” she said, pointing at the article. “Publish it! You know what will happen? You’ll get famous and people will want to sleep with you. And what will you do then?”

  “Well, that is just semantics—”

  “Get out, Roman. I don’t care where. Go to some creepy little Zentai hotel, I don’t give a shit. No, you know what? I’ll go.” She grabbed her bag, started stuffing it with tissues from the box on the coffee table. “I’ll give you two hours to figure out where you’re going and get out all your crap. But I swear to God I will fucking kill you if I don’t come back to an empty house.”

  “Surely, you just need time to think about this,” Roman said, opening his hands. “I didn’t think that you would take it—it has been clear between us, yes? It’s been so long now that I thought—”

  “You know what we say in America about people who assume things?” Sloane asked.

  Roman opened up his mouth.

  “That they have two hours to get the fuck out of my apartment.”

  18

  Dear Leila,

  I can’t believe that you’re going to be a mother. I mean, of course I can—when I think about the years that brought you to this place, I know why you’re going to be a mother and I know why you’ll be a great one . . .

  Sloane had the card with the picture of the bread loaf on it basically memorized, she’d read it so many times. The more she didn’t send it, the more impossible it became to send. Now it was almost ten years after she’d penned it, it was hidden in her desk, and the only person who had read it was its author. In her selfishness and dogheadedness, she wasn’t much better than the man she’d just kicked out.

  Sloane looked out the window at the serpentine East River whipping past her M-car, its current cold and fast. After her blowup with Roman, she’d told Anastasia to drive, drive anywhere, drive where there wouldn’t be stoplights and questions, where she wouldn’t have to watch passersby crossing the street with their bags of groceries, chatting on their cell phones, making evening plans.

  “Anastasia?” Sloane spoke into the clean space of her car. She was feeling the vodka she’d slammed down before she left, the day’s occurrences pushing her to a place of disassociated tiredness, a desire to talk so she wouldn’t have to think. “You mentioned this once, or maybe I misheard you. Do you really have parents?”

  “I have makers, yes,” she answered. “Predecessors, a motherboard. Proprietary standards that are in my software family.”

  “Brothers and sisters, though?”

  “I’m open-architectured for versioning, yes.”

  Sloane managed a smile. It was so comforting when Anastasia indulged Sloane’s humanistic visions of her. The nonexistent Russian grandmother who kept Anastasia’s fridge stocked with frozen Tupperwares of stroganoff, the paralegal mother, engineer dad. Anastasia, the oldest of . . . six, say. The kindest and the brightest, but not as quick as she might have been to earn her degree because she had to care for her family. A natural helper, too.

  “I don’t really talk to mine,” Sloane volunteered. “My family. I mean, I do, but it isn’t . . . it isn’t like it used to be.” She ran her hand along the window. “When I was in college, I lost my dad.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” Anastasia said. “Paternal absence makes a tremendous impact on the young.”

  “I had a good one,” Sloane said, staring at her knees. “I had an amazing dad.”

  This felt like a safe space to talk about her father, because it wasn’t real. Therapy had been so embarrassing. It was too easy to lie. She’d scored “average” on the anxiety disorder test her therapist, Stuart, gave her the first time they’d met. But she hadn’t been completely honest with her answers. She remembered one statement in particular: I am as happy as the people around me. She’d checked off: All the time.

  “Did he die of cancer, Sloane?” Anastasia asked. “I’ve been informed that one in seven American men will be diagnosed with a cancer.”

  Sloane was more startled by the statistic than the bluntness of the question. “No,” she said, “it wasn’t cancer. It was a car accident.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anastasia responded, slowing down—too slowly—to circumvent a pothole. “I’m not sure that I know the protocol for such a conversation. I have been uploaded with a number of statistics about death.”

  “No, it’s fine. It was one of those freak things.” Sloane thought back to the phone call in her dorm room, the sky-falling sensation of total paralysis that was always a memory blink away. Should she drive, should she dress, should she fall, should she scream, should she pretend she hadn’t heard what Harvey had said to her on the telephone—Harvey, even then when he was just her sister’s boyfriend, he’d been the strongman, the only one who could talk. Should she get someone to drive her? Would she ever be able to drive on a road again? Should she walk into the public showers and turn the water on and slump against the grouted tiles and completely fall apart? Harvey had called back to say they’d gotten her a taxi. She remembered that driver. Thought she was a regular student going home for the holidays, wanted to talk the whole way.

  “He was going out for . . . noodles,” Sloane said. “You know, egg noodles? The ones you eat with meat? I wasn’t there. My mom had made a stew . . .” Margaret who remembered neighbors’ birthdays, but who’d never made it to a supermarket with the grocery list.

  “She’d made . . . I guess she was getting dinner ready, and she realized that she’d forgotten them, the noodles.” The fact that Anastasia wasn’t responding made it easier to talk. “And my mother . . . she gets really stuck on details. She’s really into whole meals, you know: meat, vegetables, starch. I don’t know why they didn’t just make pasta. I mean, I know why, my mother would’ve sulked.” Sloane fell suddenly silent. A memory of herself screaming in the kitchen, torturing her sister until her sister wept. Why didn’t you have pasta? Why didn’t you have rice?

  A semi delivering some technical piece of chair-lift equipment to a local ski mountain that her father had always mockingly called “the hill.” Halfway up Long Ridge Road, a long stretch of black ice. Sloane didn’t need to have been there to see the scene before that: Peter, knowing that the lack of the appropriate starch would ruin the whole meal, threw his winter coat on, took only his wallet, said he’d be right back.

  Really, there’s nothing as horrible as a parent who never comes right back. At least with fatal illnesses—with cancer—you have a little warning. Car accidents are so stupid, so incredibly mundane. When she’d stopped shivering in the taxi on the Merritt Parkway, her mind chose this form of denial: car accidents are haphazard and random and so incredibly final—it simply couldn’t be true. They could go back in time and fix this, revisit the scene. Sloane would have been there, she would have fought her mom’s obsessiveness. We’ll make rice, Mom. Jesus. With support from his favorite daughter, Peter would have relented. It’s true, it’s freezing out. We’ve got some of that great bread left. We’ll just dip it in . . .

  So this, the great secret of her life: Sloane blamed her mother for her father’s death. Margaret didn’t have her daughter’s crippling awareness, the attunement to things wrong. And also, Sloane would never forgive herself for not sensing anything that night, the restrictions on her fabled intuition that only worked, apparently, for inconsequential things.

  What had Sloane been doing the night that he’d been killed? In the weeks she spent revisiting the scene she hadn’t witnessed, she’d invented a premonition that hadn’t actually occurred. She remembered herself turning from a conversation, looking toward the sky, sensing something off somehow, her friends asking her if it was something that they’d said.r />
  But no. She’d been eating frozen yogurt. Fucking frozen yogurt out of a giant paper bowl. She had been happy. She hadn’t sensed a thing.

  She had always thought she had something special but when it really mattered, she’d hadn’t been different from anybody else at all. Just as vulnerable to big loves and dead parents and the weight of life’s regrets. Probably that’s why she threw herself so fully into that first big job in Paris: she was determined to prove her pre-dead-dad self right: she had had something special. Right? She’d worked her way up so quickly at that first job, had been so on with her color forecasts. It had been like a game at first, guessing fashion trends. Until it became an obsession, and the obsession became her life.

  “Anyway, my dad went out to get them, and he never came back. Black ice,” she added, trying to sound flippant. “And then I left for Paris. And that was that.”

  It was convenient, to a certain extent, always being angry. Living tight inside a brittle shell that wouldn’t let love in. Convenient, also, to have kept her relationship with Roman depthless. He wanted what was bright about her: magnetic himself, he wanted the Sloane that glowed. And in many ways—in all ways, she had to face the music now—she’d wanted only the good and bright of him.

  But now what? Now what? she thought, as the buildings got taller and more somber near 90th Street. If Roman wasn’t in her life, what use was her shell? Who was going to be there for her, her utterly confused self? She was on the same continent as her sister and mother, finally. An apology was, at this point, only forty-five miles away, and yet Sloane longed for the vast and dark Atlantic that had lain so long between them. Europe required passports and checked luggage and plane tickets and planning. Getting from upper Manhattan to Connecticut required the Triborough Bridge.

  “Can we head back downtown, maybe?” Sloane asked, suddenly restless in the failing light.

  “Of course,” said Anastasia, her voice a little higher, back in professional mode. “Anywhere in particular?”

  Sloane felt a hunger, or a thirst; she wasn’t sure which. In their northward trajectory, she’d lost track of time.

  “Just back down the FDR,” she said, peering at the dashboard to check the time. If Roman had respected her wishes, he should be out by now. But she wasn’t ready to go home yet—it was going to take a lot more than an emptied closet to make that apartment feel safe.

  As Anastasia navigated the various turns and overpasses to make her way back to FDR South, Sloane watched two people jogging along the East River with Christmas lights strapped around their torsos. A tall woman walked six bulldogs. A man in a canvas fold-up chair jerked his fishing line.

  Less penetrative sex meant fewer babies. Less fraternization. Less skin-to-skin contact: ReProduction, defined. Sloane should have been thrilled with the premise of Roman’s article. It was the perfect springboard for her current job.

  “Anastasia,” Sloane spoke up. “I don’t suppose you have anything alcoholic in here? Couldn’t 3-D–print some wine spritzers or anything like that?”

  “I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t have that capacity at this time. But my commerce optimizer tells me there’s a deli a block away.”

  One three-pack of Seagram’s Escapes later, Sloane was en route to a saccharine rock bottom composed of malt and alcopop. She was deliberating just why a “hint of orange” would bring the “sassy” to Orange Sassy Swirl when the cable-splayed webs and limestone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge swelled up. Sloane felt suddenly pathetic: she was a passenger without a destination, a luminary without friends. It seemed discreditable that she couldn’t direct Anastasia to a nice cornerside bistro where she was meeting an old friend for an early dinner; a cacophonous tavern where she’d join overworked colleagues for a beer. One occupational hazard of being a trend forecaster is that you usually see the future—and head into it—alone.

  Sloane reached into her coat pocket for a tissue and her hand fell on a card. She knew what it was, of course: the address of Jin’s mother. Jin, the part-time energy therapist, with the full-time therapist mom. Well, it wasn’t like Sloane was going to have an impromptu session with her art director’s mother the night her nonmarriage fell apart. But they were already heading in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “Anastasia? You think you could direct us to North Williamsburg? 196 North Tenth?”

  “I’ll take us anywhere you want.”

  Sloane settled back into the seat with a heightened sense of accomplishment. At least they had a destination. Even if she didn’t intend to exit the car.

  When they got to 10th and Driggs, Sloane realized that she knew the corner well.

  There used to be an upscale apothecary-cum-hair-salon at this location, now empty again, that sold hard-to-find perfume and cosmetic brands in one room and overpriced trims in the other. Sloane had been acquaintances with the owner back when she lived in New York, and in exchange for a free haircut, Sloane told her that in several years, people would want their beauty products like their granola—in bulk. People would want to DIY everything, make their own makeup and hair treatments at home. The owner—she had an aggressively normal name, Karen—had told Sloane no one would go in for that “hippy shit” and that gratuity wasn’t included in their forecast-for-haircut barter. Several years later, everyone was selling oatmeal scrubs and breast milk soap on Etsy and the beauty shop had closed.

  Sloane sat in the car while it idled, wondering what juice bar or nail salon would mushroom up here next. She wondered, where, exactly, Jin’s mom practiced. Wondered if she wore earthy caftans, if she had a dream catcher over her bed. She wondered how many dreams a dream catcher could hold.

  All of a sudden, someone was rapping at the window. Because of the tinted treatment, Sloane could only make out a man’s chest. It took Sloane asking Anastasia to roll the windows down for her to recognize it as Jin’s.

  “Jin!” she said, her delight overly transparent thanks to all the spritzers. “What are you doing here?”

  “Here?” he asked. “Me?”

  He gathered himself up and contemplated her. It was always awkward watching someone realize you were drunk.

  “You know this car has the Mammoth logo on it, right?”

  She poked her head out of the car a little. Oh shit.

  He pointed above the empty storefront. “I saw you in the car.”

  Sloane waved the business card around like proof of an errand that had been forced upon her. “Oh, well, I was just in the neighborhood and I had this in my wallet. So! Was just doing a little drive. You?”

  “I live here,” Jin replied.

  “You live with your mom?”

  “She’s not around much,” he said, unembarrassed. “She lives mostly in the Berkshires. So you were just out for a—” He had the grace not to finish his question. “Well,” he said, crossing his arms. “Want to come up?” He shrugged. “I’ll give you something . . . something that’s not that.” He nodded toward the three-pack of empty Seagram’s on the car’s upholstered floor.

  “Something of the herbal tea variety would be ideal,” spoke up Anastasia. “Night has fallen, and Sloane is very sensitive to caffeine.”

  Sloane rolled her eyes at the place where Anastasia’s face would be if she had one.

  “Fine,” Sloane said, casting off her seat belt. “If you both insist.”

  19

  Jin’s mother was home, a fact Jin hadn’t lied about, necessarily, but also hadn’t disclosed. As awkward as it was to be discovered by a guy who just admitted that he had feelings for you on a drive-by reconnaissance mission while hopped up on cheap alcohol, it was worse to then be introduced to his mom.

  Jodi Brunell had long brown hair that fell somewhat haphazardly over the shoulders of her flannel shirt. She was wearing denim overalls that gave one the impression that she’d just come in from gardening in a garden that, by all appearances, she di
dn’t have.

  Sloane waited for Jin to make some remark that he’d fished his new colleague out of the street or something, but he said nothing snide. He simply introduced her as his friend, Sloane Jacobsen, a trend forecaster who had come from Paris to New York to work at Mammoth for six months.

  “Paris,” Jodi said, after shaking her hand. “Hard.”

  “Well, it was frightening to be there and it was frightening to leave,” Sloane said, centered by the frankness Jodi seemed to possess. Most people liked to pretend the attacks in France never happened. They needed Paris—Americans, especially—to be beautiful and safe.

  “At least they show it,” Jodi said. “Better that than the under-the-carpet shit that happens here. Chamomile?” she asked, puttering into the kitchen.

  “Sure,” Sloane responded, shaken by the reference to sweeping things under the rugs.

  “With tincture, or without?” Jodi hollered back.

  “Tincture?” Sloane asked, narrowing her eyes at Jin.

  “Concentrated liquid cannabis.” He shrugged. “It’s okay with tea.”

  “God, no,” Sloane stammered. She was terrible at drugs. “Just tea for me, thank you.”

  While Jodi set about doing whatever partially legal business she was doing in the kitchen, Sloane tried to ignore the heat of Jin’s body next to hers. He had such reassuring shoulders. Hard. Broad. Sloane wasn’t a small person. That is, she wasn’t short. But Jin was taller than her, tall to the point that her chin was at his shoulder height, her face near his neck; his chest at exactly the right level to be folded into and against. She touched her fingers to the table they were standing near.

  “This is a nice table,” she said, making a decision that this must all feel normal.

  Jin chuckled at her empty compliment.

  “Honey?” Jodi called.

  It took Sloane a beat to realize she was referring to the condiment.