Touch
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And she had found a new understanding with her mother, as well. Margaret wasn’t someone to whom she could just apologize: she needed to spend the rest of their time together turning her life into proof that she understood how she had hurt her, and that she regretted it. But that didn’t stop her from knocking on her mother’s bedroom door one night while visiting to try. It had been a long Saturday, full of the kind of outdoor chores that would make Margaret feel loved. Weed-whacking, scrubbing moss from the patio pavers, reinforcing the fence. She’d been getting into the guest bed with Jin when she felt it in her stomach: action was essential, but words were needed, too.
There is something incredible about the phrase “I’m sorry.” When it’s used carelessly, the expression is impotent, and can even offend. But when you really, really mean it—even if your mother is nightgowned and bed-ready with a scrum of toothpaste still in her mouth, when the words rise up inside of you on the strength of every way in which you’ve changed, it can be enough.
Surprisingly—if gratifying—she’d even had overtures from Mammoth. In the months leading up to the summit, as Roman’s meteor soared, and soared, and phenomenally crashed, and people all over the world started tabling their cell phones, posting and think-piecing and taking to the streets to “get back into real touch,” Daxter came to Sloane with a golden olive branch. She could consult for Mammoth in the iteration and the scope that she desired, she didn’t even have to come into the office, they just wanted her advice. Cell phone sales were down for the first time in company history. Should they make more apps? How could they rejigger their consumer offerings so that people felt they were “participating” in a movement, instead of being asked to “purchase” a version of something they already had?
Sloane entertained Daxter’s advances just enough to get her car back. Not her car car, of course, but a smart assistant version of it made possible by anonymous fans of hers in IT and HR. When word had gotten out of how attached Sloane had been to her M-Car (it was the least she could do after sabotaging their consumer electronics sales that quarter, to give them some good press), a package arrived, unsigned, with instructions on how to transpose the car’s assistant system into her personal phone and landline. Even if Sloane missed being chauffeured around the city (with a hot beverage and conversation, no less), it felt great to have her efficient, considerate and biometrics-focused friend back.
And in the months after her defection from Mammoth’s corporate seat, Sloane was inundated with restless staffers who wanted her to take them with her. For the moment, she had only hired away Mina to direct graphic design, but her workload was getting to a point that Sloane knew she was going to have to hire an assistant. She’d wanted Deidre, wanted her from the start, but Deidre had eloped with consumer-engagement Seth, and was running an adult arts camp out of the Bahamas with her new husband and stepchildren.
So that led Sloane to Anastasia, who turned out to be a tie back to the very trend that Sloane had rebelled against. She was an admission that there was a lot of good about technology. She was a modern compromise.
Roman was given a two-million-dollar advance for his first book and it didn’t sell. By the time Can’t Touch This published in the fall, school shootings had increased and people were inoculating themselves against the inanity of politicians who preferred fighting for holiday wreaths on coffee cups than gun control by going out and organizing with their neighbors so that they could be better than the people they’d put in charge. The increase in neighborhoodliness meant new connections, which also meant an increase in recreational sex.
With his unsold hardcovers sent back to be pulped and his post-sex theories conspicuously unfashionable, Roman came crawling back to Sloane as she’d known he would. After his fallout at Mammoth (his project presentations for ReProduction had been a one-track-minded, degenerated mess), he’d nonetheless been offered a guest lectureship at New York City’s The New School, after only three weeks at which the inevitable had happened, and a student’s parents had complained about Roman’s teaching getup. (Since his rocket rise to fame and consecutive fall from it, he’d been conducting all his professional and personal business in his Zentai suit, in hopes of rocketing back.) Public opinion and the college’s fear of litigation forced him to resign, his work visa wasn’t renewed, and in the spring he came to Sloane tearfully, his unflappable countenance decidedly flapped. He didn’t want to return to France. He couldn’t. Not after the life he’d had a taste of, the man he had the potential to be with Sloane at his side. He could admit it now, he had to: he needed her help. Would she consider a lecture circuit with him? Sloane gave him the information of the couple renting her apartment in Paris so he could arrange to have his things moved out. Godspeed, she said, good luck, and by the by, if he couldn’t afford to fly direct back to Paris, he should stop at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. They had great finger food.
• • •
It was June when the loss of balance started—a certain physical offness that felt like vertigo. When Sloane walked around it seemed that the very pavement shifted underneath her calves. The effect was unnerving and destabilizing, as if she were tilting through a city block with one heel on and one heel off.
Sloane feared Lyme disease—they’d spent almost every weekend that spring at Jin’s mother’s place in the Berkshires, where the dreaded things hitchhiked in on firewood and dog fur and barn coats. She had Jin check her hair, her body over many times. It was an excuse, really, for his touch, really. Almost every time.
She next decided that it must be mononucleosis. After that, anemia: the intelligence-compromising dimness of a body low on oxygen. Diabetes was proffered by a particularly clueless nurse’s aide: Sloane declined the test. Chronic fatigue syndrome? But she felt dreamy, not fatigued.
It wasn’t until they were having lunch on a rare weekend in the city when they both opened their eyes. Sloane had ordered a raspberry soda, not at all typical, as she disliked things that fizzed. Jin ordered a beer. And then he looked at his beer, and he looked at her drink, and she watched him take her in. And it was in that moment, Jin knocking his glass over to reach for her, the syrupy liquid spreading across the table like a protective film, that she saw every second of the glorious rites to come. They would ask for the check from the young waitress, leave the restaurant shaky. The pharmacy with its bright solutions, the public restroom with its droning, touchless flush. The way she would lean against the cold metal of the bathroom stall, the white tester in hand. The minutes like rolls of thunder barreling through her head while she waited to see life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sally Kim and Rebecca Gradinger: through the twists and the turns and the seemingly endless iterations of this sprawling project, you believed in the version that we are holding now. Your respective edits put some hair on my chest but this story is better for them, and I am a better writer with both of you at my side. Thank you for not giving up on me.
Veronica, Gráinne, Melissa and everyone at Fletcher & Company: thank you for it all. Ivan, Danielle, Alexis, Ashley M. and Ashley H., Elena, Emily, Christine, Carrie, Joel, Anna, and the rest of my super team at Putnam, thank you, thank you, for your support, your tangible enthusiasm, and for bringing me on board. Thank you, also, to my original Touchstone team and especially to Susan Moldow.
This book could not have been written without reliable childcare. Thank you to my big and boisterous family, and especially to the tireless women in my life who took planes and trains and highways to give me time to write: my giant-hearted mother Linda, my all-seeing mother-in-law Annie, and our neo-southern belles, “Moo Moo” and Ashley. And to the team at NELC: every day I’m grateful to you, don’t ever disappear!
My friends: for the tequila, the hugs, and the eardrums, thank you. Thanks especially to Jeff, Emily, Alana, and Sebastian, who were especially supportive of this project from day one.
Rodrigo Corral: you nailed it. Colin Lane: thank you fo
r showing me in a good light yet again. Thank you to the early endorsers of this novel and the friends who helped me get in touch with the writers I look up to.
Thank you to the horses. (You know who you are.)
Thank you to the baby who saw me through the final rewrite. You came on time. You left too soon.
Thank you, Gabriela. Everything else is just atoms and particles when I’m with you.
Diego. I don’t know how you manage, every morning, to wake up and say, I’m going to do what I can to support her, but you’ve done it every waking hour of this year. Your kindness is an example to me. Bring on your next film.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Courtney Maum is the author of the novel I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You and the chapbook “Notes from Mexico.” Her short fiction, book reviews, and essays on the writing life have been widely published in outlets such as The New York Times, Tin House, Electric Literature, and Buzzfeed, and she has co-written films that have debuted at Sundance and won awards at Cannes. At various points in her life, she has been a trend forecaster, a fashion publicist, and a party promoter for Corona Extra. She currently works as a product namer for M·A·C Cosmetics from her home in Litchfield County, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
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