Chapter 37
Before Sloane had left with Alex, Caroline had paused her beside the door.
“I lied a little,” The Country Wife said in a quiet, hasty voice, eyes darting to Alex’s back, obviously hoping Alex wouldn’t overhear them.
“It’s true that you shouldn’t choose someone close to you.
You’ll get caught that way for sure. But also, you shouldn’t choose someone just because they’re bad.
” Caroline’s face looked young then, girlish.
“I have my own moral code, sure, but it isn’t all about vengeance—it can’t be.
You can’t come to the meal from a place of hatred if you want it to give you something back.
It has to be communion.” She pressed her hand quickly, gently into Sloane’s. “You have to love the food.”
Love the food.
Love was something that had gotten very complicated since Isla was born. Sloane was constantly asking herself to love things, to love herself, to love her body, to love her mind—things she had hated in varying degrees and to little consequence before.
Love the world to which your daughter will one day belong.
Love humanity and all its ills.
Love your husband and all his sins.
Love your fellow man, your fellow woman.
Love your work. Love the food. Love is all you need.
“You okay?” asked Arya, jolting Sloane out of her thought spiral. She jumped, her heart beating double-time as he dropped his backpack beside his usual desk chair in her office. She hadn’t even heard him come in.
“What?”
“You had a look.” He gestured vaguely to his own face, in reference to hers.
His was remarkable, truly. Sloane knew things about Arya now, about the way he looked when he came, the way his sweat smelled and tasted, the laundry detergent he used that was almost too good, stealthily suggesting the presence of a woman’s training or an actual, living woman.
(Possibly his mother? The thought depressed her, a heavy weight to the center of her chest.) All the intimate things that under other circumstances Sloane would have begun to take inventory of, distributing them into piles.
Keep. Save. Throw away. Sloane recalled suddenly that before Max, she hadn’t been an easily amorous person.
(One occasionally had to do this: view oneself in retrospect, as a person that one once knew, who was no longer familiar or even capable of existence.) She had not loved easily or hard.
Max had changed that, rewritten the part of Sloane that could see things like the future.
The fucking bastard. He had made her see a future; he had made her chase one down. And now look where she was, exhausted.
“I’m fine.” She blinked. Blink. Blink. “You’re late today.”
“Missed me?” Arya grinned at her, though thankfully did not wait for her to answer, too adept was he at flirtation, never leaning too far in. “I ran into my cousin outside.”
His cousin, Nina Kaur. Nina Kaur with those legs and those tits.
Nina Kaur with her zest for life and her dry sense of humor.
Nina Kaur with her youth. Nina Kaur, whom Sloane did not hate, could not hate, for knowing her as fully as Sloane knew her own heart.
For knowing the beat of it, the craving.
Because what did Sloane want? What any woman wanted!
To scream, to tear open human flesh. To suffer a love that was carnivorous and devouring, resting on the thinnest edge of peril, a blade to kiss the throat.
To be handled gently, sweetly. To cry, to drown, to eat.
To be fucked, goddamnit, really fucked, lacerated by pleasure.
To know what it was to feel worthy, to be cradled and cherished.
To know you could crush a man’s head between your thighs.
“What’s she like? Your cousin,” said Sloane, suddenly feeling like she was entering a trance. A fugue state. Like the ground beneath her was starting to shift.
(What is a Good Woman? One that is worthy.)
(Not of academic validation. Not of power.)
(One that is worthy of honest, unfailing love.)
Love.
Love the food.
“Oh, well, don’t let her hear you call her that,” said Arya, with an air of fondness.
“She’s … I don’t know, sensitive, really.
She’d kill me for saying it, but she is.
She wants everyone to be different—she wants everything to be different, and she has some really strong opinions about what falls within the constraints of right and wrong.
She comes off tough as nails, totally confrontational.
Bull-in-a-china-shop kind of recklessness.
The kind of energy that makes you think wow, I need a nap just looking at you.
” He smiled, or grimaced. It was a look that was admiring, but shadowed with doubt.
“But?” Sloane prompted.
“But,” Arya agreed. “Underneath it all, you kind of know she’s one of the people the world is going to hurt.”
“What?”
Sloane felt a sudden hammer of alarm. It wasn’t what she expected—though, what had she expected?
What had she wanted to hear? She didn’t understand this reaction she was having, this abrupt sense of …
pain. Yes, pain. Over the future belonging to some other idealistic girl, inevitable injury that was so completely irrelevant to hers. And yet not fully cleaved.
“I mean … maybe that’s not true. I hope it’s not true.
” Arya ruffled a hand through his hair with a shrug.
“But do you know what I mean? There are some people who are just … innocent. Who only want good things for others. It’s this, I don’t know, this earnestness, this energy that you just know people are going to misuse.
” He fell into his desk chair, staring idly into nothing.
“I don’t know, she seemed off. I think something happened to her recently. She seems a little depressed.”
“Yeah?” Sloane was holding her breath.
“She just doesn’t seem … light, I guess, anymore. There’s a heaviness to her now.” Arya stared into space again, then shook himself. “I’m probably overreacting, or, I don’t know. It’s not like I really know her, I just—”
“It’s her age,” Sloane said quietly. “I was idealistic at that age, too.”
“But you’re not burned out, though,” Arya said. “Are you?”
“Burned out?” Sloane had to consider it for a moment. “I mean, no, I don’t think so. But I’m also not sure I was ever trying that hard to change the world.”
“Why go into sociology if not to change the world?” Arya was doing it again, expressing an avid interest in her thoughts.
Poor thing, Sloane thought. Don’t waste this goodness on me, not when there are so many young ones left untainted, still intact.
Not some purity bullshit, but a light—exactly as Arya had said, a lightness.
“I was trying to understand the world, I think,” Sloane explained. “I guess in some sense to explain it, first to myself and then to others. And then try to get other people to see it the way I saw it.”
“In order to…?” prompted Arya expectantly.
“Change it, I guess. Sure, if you want to call it that.” But Sloane didn’t remember a lightness. “I just don’t think I was ever that person. The kind of person with that kind of fragility, I guess, or that the world would try to hurt.” As soon as she said it, she knew it rang false.
“Of course you were,” said Arya, with certainty he couldn’t possibly possess, but still Sloane wanted to believe it. “How could you not have been?”
“I just don’t think I inspired this kind of protectiveness,” she said, gesturing to Arya, who shook his head, rising to his feet.
“I would have wanted to protect you then,” he said. “I still do now.”
His eyes were dangerously soft, a reminder of Sloane’s moral hazards.
A Good Woman didn’t devour. A Good Woman left things intact.
No, not intact. A Good Woman was a nurturer.
A Good Woman didn’t leave things as she found them, she made them better.
She simmered the sauces until the flavors melded.
She made the home gleam again with airiness and health.
She was deserving of love not because she was beautiful—she was beautiful because she shone with worth.
It came from inside. Love that love had begotten.
You had to treat the self with tenderness. You had to love the food.
“How can I help you?” Sloane abruptly asked Arya, who frowned. “What’s something that will actually help you, Arya? Recommendations, of course. Anything else? Would you like any of my publishing contacts?”
Arya frowned at her, puzzled. “What?”
“Sex with me will get you nowhere, Arya,” Sloane said matter-of-factly. “You’re the garden. I’m not here to uproot what you’re growing. Let me tend.”
“That cult is really getting to you, huh?” Arya’s eyes were laughing, confused, hurt.
“I really enjoy fucking you, Arya,” Sloane said seriously. “If I didn’t have a daughter, I’d be fucking you right now.”
Arya blinked, his expression only barely faltering. “I’m not totally understanding what Isla has to do with it—”
“It’s her girlhood, Arya,” said Sloane. “I can’t rob it from her, okay? I can’t let her see the ways I fail her. I can’t fail her, don’t you understand?”
“Sloane.” Arya’s confusion blended into concern. “Are you okay?”
She was talking too fast again, too passionately.
“Your cousin, it’s not that she doesn’t know,” Sloane tried to explain.
“It’s not like she doesn’t understand that the world is going to hurt her.
She knows the game is rigged. She knows she’s playing to lose.
She already crossed that bridge, you know?
There’s no going back now. That’s the heaviness you saw in her.
” Sloane’s certainty came from a place of experience.
It came from history. It came from knowledge that was developed over time, from catcalls at twelve to a life built on the razor-edge of predation and exploitation.
Confusion about whether the desire of others was good or bad.
A reward or a punishment. Wanting without understanding.
Catching glimpses, the way you could brace yourself instinctively, the way you knew from the shared history of your kind to reach for protection, but—god, how dark things could get!
Sloane ached for her—a version of herself that was dead now, long gone. A version of her that didn’t exist.
No, Sloane realized abruptly, she did exist. She couldn’t stop existing, doomed but unformed.
She existed in all the bodies of all the girls who didn’t yet see that they could no longer trust the intentions of their teachers.
She was real in the heart of the girl who was only just beginning to understand that she wanted justice she could never achieve.
She existed on the precipice, in the beauty that was desirable because it was unaltered by the knowledge to want better, to ask for more.
She lived inside the value of youth, which wasn’t value, not really, because it was mythological, empty—just a vessel waiting to be filled.
She was the vacancy of potential, which was a shape constrained by nothing, which was the very same thing as being shapeless.
She existed—smarter, prettier, boundless, and younger—still ultimately destined to find her way here, to this place of endless failure—in the form of Nina Kaur.
Sloane rose to her feet then, kissing Arya’s forehead. “I have to go,” she said.
“Sloane,” Arya called after her. “Are you okay? You look a little bit—”
She didn’t hear him. Time, time was slipping away from her.
With every moment that passed, Isla became a person that was further and further from the safety of Sloane’s body.
Closer to being injured, closer to being hurt.
To being molded like clay into something that this disappointing world had made her.
This world that wanted her to suffer, all because a woman in a story ate an apple in a garden—because a woman somewhere got hungry.
Because a girl could still starve and nobody would care, but a woman had to eat.