Touch

by Courtney Maum

  “So, I’m happy to say we’re having some breakthroughs at work,” Dax announced, holding up his glass. “Sloane! Tell ’em about the bots!”

  Roman clinked his glass against Daxter’s and they both drank without toasting her.

  “Robots,” Sloane corrected. “Bots are on software. Or . . . anyway.”

  “Tell ’em about the bots!” Dax repeated, grabbing a piece of bread.

  “Yes, um, well,” Sloane fumbled, trying to step around her own words, “it stemmed out of my conviction that people need more . . . actual physical contact, in their lives right now. I was calling it—am calling it—the professionalization of affection. The idea that people will start paying strangers to . . . nurture them. So an empathy robot would be an extension—”

  “No, but tell them about the temporary kids!” Dax cried, tucking in his elbow so the waitress could set down the first round of food.

  She felt empty, empty, empty. Completely null and void. She didn’t give a flying hoot about robotic empathy toddlers. But the idea had been hers.

  “Right, well, you could eventually envision robotic empathy toddlers, is what we’d said. That you could turn on and off . . . so you could be a parent only when you feel like it. But anyway, it’s not really fleshed out, I was more excited about the—”

  “Can you imagine, honey?” Dax said, passing the artisanal carrots to his wife. “Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “Well, I’ve certainly felt that,” said Raphael. “I’ll wake up, see the two of them, and think, Oh God, you’re both still here! I can imagine a lot of people welcoming a time-out.”

  “Time-Out!” Dax said, bringing his hand down on the table. “That’s great! You think we could call it that? Time-Out Tots?”

  Sloane turned her hands up. “Sure.”

  Dax narrowed his eyes at her, but for only a moment. In a flash, his expression returned to its open, friendly self. She needed to be excited about whatever the fuck he was excited about—this was a big dinner, her boss, his wife. But she’d never been good at feigning enthusiasm for something she found sad.

  “You hadn’t mentioned this idea yet,” said Roman, attempting, unsuccessfully, to place his hand on hers. “What a good idea! Of course, your child would be mostly turned to off.”

  She glared at him, but he didn’t notice.

  “It’s a very exciting time for us, isn’t it?” he continued, wiping his lips with the checkered linen napkin that was absurdly undersized. “I think it is perhaps the most important time to be thinking about new physical rules. The best time to be a neo-sensualist!” Sloane grit her teeth. She knew within an inch of her life that Roman was about to self-promote.

  “I don’t know if she’s told you about the article I have coming out?”

  “She hasn’t!” Dax said happily, inviting him to go on.

  “Well,” Roman cleared his throat, holding his fork above the appetizers. “I have a theory that we’re entering a period that is post-sex. People want beyond that, yes? They want more—it is too simple, the I-put-this-into-you, you-enter-me, the pounding?”

  Sloane tried to make her entire face disappear into her wineglass while he reenacted fornication, once again.

  “So many people are finding their virtual sex lives so much richer than their real ones,” he continued, his hands now blessedly occupied with the ministrations of his fork. “People have sex all the time without ever leaving the house. They text—is it not also a way of making love? Physical distance is very, very sexy. Trying to bridge that distance without actually coming together in a physical sense—this is the new way to—you’ll excuse me—fuck!”

  “And you have an article coming out about this?” Dax said, almost salivating. “When?”

  “In The New York Times,” Roman said, his eyes demure. “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!?” Sloane choked, the same time that Dax repeated, “The New York Times?!”

  “Yes, chérie,” Roman said sweetly, “I haven’t had a chance to tell you that they accepted my piece.”

  Sloane firmed her grip around her wineglass. “Well!” she said, trying to recover. “That is so, so great.”

  “Day before Thanksgiving, huh?” Dax said, toasting him. “Ballsy.”

  “Apparently, Thanksgiving is one of the most popular days for online reading,” Roman said.

  “Turkeys do take a long time to cook,” Raphael accorded.

  Sloane scrambled to find a steady footing. The New York Times? Tomorrow?! She should have said yes to her family’s noninvitation to Disney World—it would have been the perfect place for her when the article hit. All those kids running around, the almost purifying stress of it, no time to check in on developing tragedies online.

  “It is thrilling,” Roman said, unwilling to step out of the spotlight. “They told me they expect quite a response. Maybe even viral? Because in it, I will announce our hiatus from penetrative sex.”

  Sloane had to make a guttural effort not to spit up her Pinot. “Your hiatus,” she managed. “Yours.”

  “Oh my God,” Dax said gleefully, almost knocking the bottle over with his forward lean. “We’re gonna need something stronger than vino! Wait, so, Sloane, you’re predicting some kind of hugging renaissance and Roman—”

  “Oui,” Roman said, tearing a hunk of bread off. “The end of penetrative sex.”

  Raphael flashed Sloane a tentative smile. Stop smiling! Sloane wanted to yell. Don’t smile your way into convincing me that you have the perfect life! Your husband is a steamroller! And you hardly talk!

  “This is fucking amazing,” crunched the steamroller. “Sloane, you never said!”

  “Well, it’s not really something that I want to brag about, is it?” Sloane asked, spearing something approximating a beet. “The New York fucking Times. How grand.”

  She set to chewing furiously, chewing long after she’d swallowed. Raphael pushed some food around on her plate and Dax thumbed the stem of his wineglass.

  “It really is exciting,” Roman said in conclusion to something no one had said. “I’m looking forward to expanding the boundaries of what we think of as sex.”

  Everyone remained silent. Sloane could feel Dax’s eyes on her even as she avoided his.

  “If we could maybe move on to a new topic,” she asked in monotone.

  “Well, I certainly think it’s great that we’re living in a world with so many different choices,” Raphael said, serving up some Brussels sprouts. “Men can be women, women can be men, people can do just about anything online, have babies, or not have children.” She smiled peacefully. “It definitely is an exciting time to be doing what you do.”

  “That’s certainly what I think,” Dax said, in a tone that sounded like a test.

  “Me too,” said Roman, smiling.

  “Me three,” said Sloane, absolutely desperate for a pause. She was being tugged down by a current toward a place she didn’t want to go, or didn’t want to return to, like something dark and cold and terrifying that comes at you from a dream years after you’ve had it.

  “Will you excuse me?” Sloane asked, standing. “I just have to run to the . . .” She nodded toward the bathroom.

  Sloane had planned to go to the bathroom, but she didn’t need to go to the bathroom, so at the last minute, she headed for the street, hoping against hope that none of the others had seen her slip out. It would have been useful if she was still a smoker; she could lean against the outside of the restaurant and fume. As it was, she simply looked like she was waiting rather emotionally for a taxi cab.

  Without a scarf or jacket, she pulled her blouse around her throat, her eyes welling. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair to do that, Daxter sitting there with his gorgeous, docile wife, new life sleeping inside her, a babysitter—or a full-time nanny, probably—with the other kids at home, a life that was full and busy and compl
ete and probably even happy, and him with a squadron of people at Mammoth working to promote the very opposite of what he had. He had what he had, so how fun for him to imagine the opposite. Pander to the opposite, the freedom and vitality of a life lived without kids.

  What a shitty place to put her in—her spearheading something he secretly mocked. She wasn’t a trend forecaster at Mammoth, she was a hired hand.

  Sloane watched the taxis rushing through the November slush to get their charges to their trains and flights on time. Thanksgiving was a rotten time to start a love affair, that was for fucking sure.

  It would be really nice if Sloane wasn’t the resident asshole in her family—at least she’d have someone to break down on and call. She imagined herself in their rented Florida condo, someplace called Pelican’s Landing or Sweetgrass, a magnum of bad wine opened on a granite island, her sister’s kids yelping down the hallway from the dirty bath, holiday commercials batting desperately at them from an oversized flat screen. There would be Cheerios decomposing in between the pillows of a mass-produced Raymour & Flanigan sectional, but in this vision, Sloane was happy. In this vision, she received a text from Jin and her sister noticed it. Sloane was teased, gave in, she kissed and told a little. She kissed and told a lot. Her sister squealed and served her more 15 percent alcohol by volume Yellow Tail and begged to be told more.

  In this daydream, Sloane had an easy relationship with her family, and even as she bemoaned the next day’s trip to the Magic Kingdom, she also felt warm and safe in the knowledge that the kids were going to love it and that their joy, their utter revelry, was going to infect her with the new old way of seeing life again. You could learn a lot from children. She did believe that.

  Sloane tightened her thin blouse around her again. She couldn’t leave the dinner, there was no excuse to. She couldn’t very well play sick again. She steeled her reserve and headed back inside.

  When she arrived at the table, she noticed that extra dishes had been ordered. Roman and Dax were laughing about something when she got there. Dax stopped laughing, Roman did not.

  “Something that I said, Sloane?” Dax asked, his lips pursed. “You didn’t go to the john.”

  “Oh, honey, drop it,” Raphael chided.

  “No, you know? It’s fine,” Sloane said, coolly, pulling out her chair. “We’re all adults here. Roman and I are just working through some . . . differences around his article and thus I would have thought he might have had the tact to not allude to it is all, but he doesn’t have the capacity for graciousness. So here we are!” She sat, loudly. Grabbed a sweet potato nugget. “What were we talking about?”

  The waitress appeared with a second bottle of wine. Everyone looked up at her, silent.

  “Eh, sorry,” the waitress said, seeing their stony faces. “Did you change your mind?”

  “No, no, of course not,” said Dax, waving her on. “Let it flow! You two have things to work out.” He nodded toward Sloane when his glass was filled to his satisfaction. “It happens.”

  “Usually not like this,” she mumbled, as she stuck her nose into her own glass.

  “Well!” said Roman, rising above the fray. “Another toast! Dax is going to have me in!” he said, clinking Dax’s glass, then hers. “To talk to the students!”

  “Employees,” Dax corrected.

  Sloane tilted her head at Dax. “Is that right?” she asked.

  “We actually work together all the time in Paris, so I didn’t think—” Roman stammered, sounding nervous for the first time.

  “And when’s this happening?” Sloane insisted. “When are you having him in?”

  “Monday after break.”

  Sloane placed her silverware alongside her plate. Her eyes hadn’t left Daxter’s. “His article will have made the rounds by then,” she said. “Fantastic timing.”

  Dax also put his fork down. “Clear something up for me,” he said. “Why is this a problem?”

  “I don’t agree with the premise of his article,” she said, her eyes flashing. “I don’t agree with it at all.”

  “You know what you once told me?” Dax said, refolding his napkin disinterestedly across his lap. “At one of the trend conferences. You once said that trends hide between opposites.”

  “Roman’s not a trend forecaster.”

  “Sloane—” attempted Roman, who was cut off by Dax.

  “I see,” Dax said, looking as if he had just been refused a favor he’d called in. “I see.”

  “Do I really need to fucking point this out to you?” Sloane asked, her game face dissolved. “My own husband—almost husband, whatever—is coming out with a manifesto about the end of fucking sex. And you’re going to sit here and be all, ‘I don’t understand the problem with this, Sloane’?”

  “On va se calmer un petit peu, là,” said Roman, breaking into French. “I am sure that Dax, like the readers of the article, they are interested in the general applications, not the personal. That’s what’s important! We will become the devices, become sources of our own pleasure and stimulation. Beautiful, efficient, self-sufficient machines.”

  “We have this capacity already,” Sloane insisted, cutting off his non sequitur, “because we come with fucking brains. Not that anyone’s using them, because we’re t-t-tapping all the time.” She imitated a rodent clawing at a screen.

  Dax drew in a breath and Sloane knew she’d gone too far. It was in that instant, then, that she saw what would come in not just the days after, when Roman’s article broke and caused a pandemonium, but in the weeks following, when Daxter had already decided he’d chosen the wrong woman for the job. She knew, intrinsically, that there was no getting back into Dax’s good graces, she could come up with all the empathy robots she wanted until the cyber cows came home.

  “I’m sorry,” Sloane said, which instantly made things worse.

  “Ri-ght,” said Daxter, having reached a conclusion of some kind. “Soooo . . . what I’m getting here is that I’ve hired someone who wants electronics to go away.”

  Sloane tried to compose herself. She knew in the reddest recesses of her stomach that she had failed. “I never said that. I would never say that. Our relationship to our electronics is changing—that, I will defend.” She stopped herself from divulging the other ideas that she’d been having.

  “Listen,” she continued, “a lot of Roman’s ideas actually have merit. And applications in the marketplace which I do want to discuss. But tonight is not the night,” she said, her eyes softening at the couple across the table. “It’s been a really long week.”

  “Has it ever,” said Raphael, with a gentle nod.

  “Thanksgiving makes them cray-cray,” said Daxter, encompassing the two women in the roll of his eyes.

  Sloane bit her lip again to keep from screaming. How quick he was to dismiss her once she displayed the slightest vulnerability. In the space of one dinner she’d become overemotional and needy because she’d had the gall to suggest that human beings were too reliant on their phones. If he didn’t want to see it, he didn’t have to see it. Maybe they were living in a world where monolithic companies called the shots. Maybe her position wasn’t even relevant anymore. Maybe Mammoth was in charge of telling people what they wanted. And if that was true, then what was the point of tracking human desires anymore?

  “I really think it would be best if I left you all to talk,” Sloane said, tugging her coat off her chair.

  “I’ll walk you out,” said Roman, pushing his chair back. That did it. She’d explode.

  “You do not walk me out,” she said, rising to her feet. “This is not your show, Roman. You’re not calling the shots.”

  “Well, I don’t see why the surprise that some people are not open to your ideas,” Roman added, shrugging. “No one wants to go back to medieval times.”

  The calmness of his expression deranged her.

 
; “Medieval times?” she shouted, aware of nearby bodies twisting in their chairs. “That’s not—I’m saying that people are starving for affection, for physical demonstrations of love, Roman. I’m not calling up the Dark Ages.”

  “You know,” Roman said with an edge she didn’t like, his eyes darker than usual, his pupils huge. “This is what you want. And you are always right,” he said. “It’s been impressive. But maybe now you’re wrong.”

  Sloane wanted to gasp and cry and shriek all at once. Roman had hit exactly on the thing that had her panicked, the gnawing worry that her professional intuition was being polluted by her own desires.

  “What you’d be surprised to discover,” Roman continued, taking full advantage of her speechlessness, “is that the more you try to find connection in the physical, the more disillusioned you will become. Whereas, in the virtual realm, all of your desires can not just come true, but be surpassed.”

  “Oh, fuck you!” Sloane yelled, finally causing the heads of the other diners to fully snap in their direction. “It doesn’t make me old-fashioned to want affection! It doesn’t make me old-fashioned to want to have kids!”

  The minute it was out, Sloane wished with every muscle in her that she could pull that comment back. She could tell from the curve of Roman’s lips that she had just given him paper to her rock. There was a cool, blue energy emanating from Dax that was tightening around her heart.

  “Ah, so this explains things!” Roman cried, looking from Raphael to Sloane as if she were a child who had given Sloane a naughty idea. “The ticktocking? It will pass.” He gently touched her coat sleeve. “And then you’ll see much clearer.”

  “Oh, I fucking see just fine,” Sloane said, yanking her sleeve back.

  “Sloane?” said Dax.

  “I’m fine! This isn’t what he’s saying,” she said, her throat tight. “I’m totally fine!”

  In a cluster of chair squeaks and Excuse mes, Sloane was out on the street again, for good. This time, though, Roman followed her. He hadn’t brought his coat.