Chapter 33 #2
“I don’t know, Max! Who are you fucking?
” shrieked Sloane, and Max had said something about not being able to reason with her and then he left to go to work, which was a thing he did every day, for hours and hours, with Sloane now forced to acknowledge that she didn’t know how he filled that time—whether it was haunted by thoughts of his daughter, as hers was, and whether he would ever live up to the person his daughter deserved, or if he was just getting blown by some pretty teenager who didn’t yet have crow’s feet or a fucking sense of solidarity to her kind.
No, no. Sloane forced herself to calm down, to think rationally. This wasn’t the pretty teenager’s fault. Sloane thought then about Nina Kaur, about her beautiful face and her lovely breasts and her dry, drunken remark that had so undressed Max—so prodigiously unnerved him.
It had to have been Nina Kaur. Sloane hadn’t seen Max that shrunken up before, like someone had shined a harsh, unflattering light on his face.
Interrogation lighting. He’d looked old to Sloane then, newly a little paunchy, a curve she hadn’t noticed before spilling over the top of his jeans.
Not like Arya, who’d looked ridiculous at the time, and yet also like he’d been carved from stone.
So yes, Sloane had gone to her office the following Monday intending to write and then she’d fucked the twentysomething who worked for her, so there was that for her dignity.
Because yes, Sloane could feel that cannibalism was fundamentally wrong, but so was adultery, and was there any real way to compare?
(Yes, but Sloane was close now, so close her thoughts were blurring, her hand wrapped painfully tight in Arya’s hair.) Okay, so her husband had cheated on her—was cheating on her?
—and now she would probably lose her office and she would have to stay home with Isla, because the amount she brought in as a part-time lecturer was essentially equal to the cost of non-University childcare, and that math simply didn’t make sense.
And yes, it was true, Sloane wanted desperately to stay home with Isla, but didn’t it matter that she had a book?
One that might actually sell, unlike whatever self-indulgent monstrosity Max would write about the unbearable [blank]-ness of being!
She could leave him, she recalled. That was technically an option.
She could go it alone like Alex, who might be a cannibal but who was also a really good mom.
Couldn’t a person be two things without one counteracting the other? Maybe a man could.
Sloane came so hard that she choked, a little saliva spilling helplessly from her lips. She wiped it away quickly, feeling something about herself that was mainly disgust. She hated that she could still feel that way so easily—that nothing ever changed, not really.
“You okay?” Arya looked up at her, his lips slick, mouth red. “Sloane.”
Some young girl was out there right now accomplishing things, becoming an interesting person with innovative thoughts, exercising regularly and taking care of her skin, spending money on clothes that made her waist look small and her legs seem long so that she could be noticed by a guy like Arya, who would make her feel like she wasn’t alone anymore, like she mattered, like there was so much love in her heart that she could share it with somebody else, and she’d love him so much, so profoundly, that she’d long so intrinsically for a person she hadn’t yet met and then she’d feel that person’s heart beating inside her, and then theoretical-Arya would become someone different, a person who didn’t particularly want to change—or maybe some other version of the exact same fate, the one where you’re a woman and it’s your job to make everything easier for everyone around you, even though nobody will ever think of you.
You’re a woman, and it’s your job to fade into the background.
It’s your job to make sure your children love their father and never know what a fucking idiot he is, or how little he is capable of accomplishing without you.
You’re a woman, and it’s your job to have it all but never complain about how heavy it is to carry.
You’re a woman, so you must strive to achieve, even if those achievements will drive the envy that means you will always be disparaged and never be embraced.
You’re a woman, and you were put here to suffer and feel pain, or so people will say, and so they will act, and so you will never be properly treated and your borne-in aches will never be taken for the fatal blows that they are.
You are a woman, and so the transgressions against you will always be justified in some way by what you wore or what you said or who you are, and everything bad that happens to you will always somehow be deserved.
Unless you die a martyr, for your children, which is the only sure way to be a Good Woman.
Because then, when you are dust and unexamined, important only for the act of ending, you will finally have the honor of being a saint.
“No,” said Sloane, “I’m not all right,” but she knew there was only one person who could fix it.
It wasn’t Arya, who was a good man, or maybe he wasn’t a good man, who even knew anymore, but good things didn’t grow from poisoned earth.
If this could have ever been real, Sloane had fucked that up the moment she took him at the expense of her own goodness.
And she still wanted it, the goodness. That was the fuckery!
She still wanted to be a Good Woman, a thing that didn’t exist, some utter fucking mythology—except that even in this world, the one that she already understood was on fire, there was still the glowing light of Isla.
The only untainted piece of Sloane’s heart.
So later, she dialed the number, and the other line answered: “Hello?”
“Hey,” said Sloane, taking a deep, sustaining breath. “Sorry to bother you. Are you free right now?”
“I’ve got a few minutes,” said Caroline Collins. “What can I do for you, Dr. Hartley?”