230 PM Sasha #2
As she tried to bring Theo back into himself, she found her mind split in two.
On one hand, she did her best to see the world through her husband’s eyes.
New York was a terrible place, filled with terribly ambitious people.
The first question someone asked you when you met them at a dinner party was “What do you do?” and she imagined that suddenly to not have an answer was disorienting, like having your phone’s battery die in the middle of the day.
It couldn’t have helped that some of the dumbest people they knew were now the most successful—it certainly hadn’t helped her.
She had grown up as the richest of her friends, but now she found herself constantly feeling somewhere in the middle of the pecking order, despite the fact that she was working very hard.
Whenever she scrolled through Instagram, Sasha thought of Theo and felt a vicarious rage.
How the fuck did someone like Nina Guzman have a house in Sagaponack?
On the other hand, she was getting a little annoyed that he couldn’t get it together.
By all accounts they lived very easy lives.
They had decent health insurance through the gallery, and they had gotten a sub-three-percent rate on their mortgage.
And the fact that Theo was choosing not to focus on all that but was wallowing in self-doubt struck Sasha as indulgent.
She wanted to take hold of his shoulders and scream at him, which yesterday was exactly what she had done.
They were standing on the street in Tribeca—Theo had gotten the car from the parking garage, and for the next ten minutes they loaded its trunk with a bassinet, and a Pack ’n Play, and enough diapers to clothe Lithuania.
Once they were finished, and once Ethan was strapped into his car seat, Sasha had taken the keys from Theo, and directed him to take shotgun.
“Listen to me,” she’d said, setting her jaw. “We are going to go out there, and we’re going to have some fun. Do you hear me? We are going to have some fucking fun.”
The wineglass was full, edging dangerously close to overflowing.
Sasha took a sip from its rim, thought about getting some for herself, then decided she needed something stronger to drink.
On the opposite side of the kitchen near the door that led to the dining room, there were bottles of liquor lined up inside a cupboard, and now she looked at their labels, one hand set on her hip.
There was a bottle of gin, and another of Campari.
She decided to make herself a Negroni and then realized there was no vermouth.
“Adam?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Do we have any sweet vermouth?”
“I think I saw some in the study.”
“The study?”
“The den? Whatever you call what’s on the other side of the observatory.”
“Thanks,” she said, “and also, just a reminder—”
“No cilantro. I remember.”
The den had a wet, musky smell. Old leather mixed with rotting books and mildew.
On one wall was a painting of waves crashing against a lighthouse.
On the other, an ancient television sat in the center of a media console, the shelves above it lined with maritime paraphernalia.
A rusted brass compass and a protractor.
Twin life-sized seagulls carved from blocks of wood.
To the TV’s left, a lamp’s shadow stretched out along a patch of sun on the floor.
Sasha crossed to the lamp to turn it on, but when she toggled the switch nothing happened.
Rattling the ice in her glass, she spotted a few bottles on a bar cart, next to a mounted spyglass.
She was darkening her Negroni with some Martini & Rossi when she heard the floorboards creak.
“Oh, hey.”
It was Mitch Reynolds. He was stripped down to a pair of blue swim trunks, and as he closed the door behind him she watched as they tightened around the crotch.
“Finally,” he said, grabbing her by the ass. With a single, abrupt jerk, he pulled Sasha toward him and began kissing her. His tongue tasted like beer and potato chips. Drops from her Negroni splattered on the floor.
“Stop,” she said. The shutters on the window were halfway open. Through them, she could see slices of Nina Guzman, flouncing around in her gold caftan.
“I can’t,” Mitch said.
“Well, you’re going to have to. Because my husband and child are outside.”
He kissed her again. Sasha put her hand against his chest and pushed him away.
“I keep thinking about that purple dress you were wearing at the Crosby.”
Sasha straightened out the top of her bathing suit.
“It was a red dress.”
“I’m pretty sure it was purple.”
“I don’t own anything purple. Purple makes me look like Barney.”
The truth was she couldn’t remember what she had been wearing when Mitch came up to talk to her at the Crosby Hotel.
This was back in May. Earlier in the evening she had gone to an opening at a smaller gallery, one of those after-work events that, before she had a kid, she was stupid enough to dread.
On the way home, she’d decided to stop by the Crosby for one last drink.
She’d told Theo she would be back by ten, and it was only eight thirty.
For once, she had spare time. Pulling her phone from her purse, she took a picture of herself and texted it to Mia, along with the caption Moms gone wild.
Immediately she regretted it. She read it back to herself on the screen, where it was unretrievable, and felt like the biggest loser to have ever lived.
Then Mia responded with a thumbs-up emoji, which only made her feel worse.
Leaning her elbows on the bar, she’d asked a woman in a black shirt to make her a martini, and turned around to look at the rest of the crowd.
Mitch Reynolds sat alone at a two-top. He smiled back at her for a few seconds, then stood up.
“Well, hello,” he said.
“Mitch.” Sasha did nothing to hide her annoyance. “Thank God.”
She lifted the toothpick from her martini glass and removed an olive with her teeth.
There was a seat next to her on which she had placed her coat, and now she found herself moving it so he could sit down.
She finished her martini and ordered another one, and he got one for himself as well.
Since they had last seen each other he had moved to Los Angeles, and then come back again—he had started his own fund with a few guys he used to work with at Goldman, he said, and a week ago had closed on a condo in DUMBO.
Mitch was a very difficult person to like, but as he spoke, the details pleasantly washed over Sasha.
She realized that she didn’t really care what he was saying—she was just happy to be talking to a functioning adult.
“I probably paid too much for it, but the views are incredible.” Mitch angled himself toward her. “You can see three bridges.”
Sasha twirled her olives. “Three bridges,” she said, and didn’t recoil when his hand brushed her knee. “That’s really something.”
Was he attractive? Sure—why not. He was nowhere near as beautiful as Theo, but he had a strong jaw and sturdy neck, the sort of cartoonishly good-looking features that she bet read well in a conference room.
What was more important was how she felt as she talked to him.
For the past twelve months, she had given herself over to either producing a child, birthing a child, or feeding a child.
Theo hardly noticed when she was around anymore, and seemed to have been drained of any sexual appetite.
But now here was Mitch, staring at her with his big blue eyes, like Sasha was still someone who deserved to be stared at.
Here was a man with whom there was still something left to imagine.
“And you live in this spectacular apartment all alone?” she asked him.
Mitch grinned. “Just me and my three bridges.”
Sasha looked at her watch: it was nine o’clock. She ate the last of her olives.
She said, “Sounds lonely.”
The sex was not good—he fucked like they were being filmed by a multiperson camera crew.
She wasn’t supposed to be having it, though, so despite how objectively bad it was, it was also the best sex of her life.
When they were finished, Sasha experienced a wave of guilt, followed by an all-consuming relief.
Mitch’s apartment was a place she wasn’t supposed to be—it was like she was twenty-two again, slipping into the Explorers Club or beneath a velvet rope, and whenever she was there she felt like a real person, as if she had found her way back to herself.
Lately she had been having this strange experience of waking up in the middle of the night not knowing who she was—that was the only way to describe it.
The feeling wasn’t figurative, but literal: when she looked around her bedroom in Tribeca, she didn’t recognize her life.
How had she become so old, so young? It was as if she had taken over the body of another character—one who was a wife and a mother—and was now expected to play its part.
But recently the lines of dialogue had diminished, and what she had been left with was a set of camera angles and stage directions and a script that she couldn’t remember ever having been given.
Which probably explained why she kept going back to DUMBO, where she let Mitch lie on top of her and grunt performatively.
For that matter, it probably explained why she was letting him kiss her again now, as the ice melted in her Negroni and Ethan cried outside.
She wasn’t proud of it. She loved Theo, and she knew what she was doing was wrong, but to stop now felt like another kind of defeat.
She saw on her horizon a long line of diminishing opportunities.
If at one point there had been a thousand paths available to her, each choice she made had slashed that figure in half, and then in half, and then in half again.
And every day those choices were becoming more pressing, more critical, more necessary—every day she felt like there was a gun pressed up against her temple, demanding that she limit her already limited future.
Reaching between her legs, Mitch pushed aside the bottom of Sasha’s swimsuit and slipped a finger inside of her. Biting her lip, she pressed her forehead against his shoulder. Then she heard Marco’s voice upstairs and she shoved him away.
“Were you surprised that I ended up coming?” Mitch asked.
“That’s one word for it.”
“When Richie texted me that you were all going to be out here, I was like, eh, we’ll see, I don’t want to spend Labor Day in some shitty rental. But then he mentioned that you were going to be here, and I thought, well, that changes things.”
“It didn’t have to, you know.”
With another theatrical laugh, Mitch took a step toward Sasha. He kissed her again, nearly choking her with his tongue. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Not here,” she said. “I’m serious.”
“That’s going to be very difficult. What if I sit next to you at dinner? My hands might just—”
“Then don’t sit next to me, Mitch. It’s a very big table.”