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  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Dax, sitting up. “So, like, something that keeps tabs on your love life? Sloane! So French!”

  “No, not sex,” Sloane insisted, confused by his primness, “just interpersonal interactions that specifically involve skin contact. The idea that came up was that people who don’t have children might be in a . . . touch deficit. So we were brainstorming second-skin wearables that could inform people of this.”

  Dax pushed more citrus into his mouth.

  “Okay,” he said, chewing juicily. He took his time with it, the fruit. Then he stood. “That’s depressing, and in my experience, people don’t buy things that are sad. I think we’d have more success with something that tracked, like, sexual prowess, like a virtual wingman.” He threw out finger guns.

  Everyone waited. The room throbbed with the painful silence of people hoping he was kidding.

  Dax tossed the clementine peel into the trashcan, wiped his hands on his pants. “Let’s just not have it get too depressing,” he accorded. “I’ll leave you to it. Don’t wanna cramp your style.” He bucked his chin at Deidre. “You’re taking notes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Grrreat. Carry, carry on!”

  Sloane waited until Dax had trotted down the hallway to face the room again.

  “Guys?” she said, hands up. “What happened? I mean, I know what happened, but let’s pick that thread back up. Mina, you were on to a really great idea . . .”

  Mina had been, but now she looked like she was drafting the most important e-mail in the world.

  “Guys?” Sloane tried. “I know it can be frustrating, but can we try to get back to where we were?”

  They’d completely lost momentum, that much was obvious, but there was something else. There was a business-as-usual vibe that felt both false and terrifying. Sloane decided not to push. It was more important to discover what was going on.

  “Okay,” Sloane acquiesced. “Sometimes it’s easier to think in private. Let’s all come back to our next meeting with three product ideas that could benefit people who are voluntarily childless. I mean it. Homework. And in exchange for that, your freedom,” she said, releasing them back into the corporate world.

  As the room emptied, Sloane turned to the only person still remaining. “Deidre?” she said, her expression questioning. “I know that they’re intimidated by him, but is it . . . I just want to know for future sessions, is this really that far-out for them? Can they not speak their minds?”

  “Oh, people can say anything,” Deidre said, with a tight smile. “It’s a very . . . open culture. It’s just that some of the employees have a very clear idea of what Mr. Stevens wants.”

  “I see,” Sloane said, seeing a bit too much. She tried to do the therapy trick Stuart had taught her, no negative framing. But she couldn’t help but wonder, why had she been hired? To escort these staffers down a well-lit, beaten path?

  It was her first day. People didn’t know what to make of this temporary, new boss yet. Unfortunately, Sloane felt very far from in charge.

  7

  Sloane came home exhausted. Her other department meetings had gone similarly to the one with beauty—routine until someone came up with something weird and noncommercial, but then the group’s energy doubled back upon itself as if they were embarrassed by the sincerity that had been reached.

  Sloane had kept her office door open all afternoon, hoping Mina would come in. Many people did, but none of them were the spitfire with the good idea. Aster, the effusive business developer, popped by to talk beauty shop; she admired the color work Sloane had done at Aurora and she wanted to know her opinion on US Color Corporation’s color of the year choice: white. Sloane’s response was that she’d felt very strongly that it should have been neon lemon, but that the color-matching company had to make up for their dismal mistake with 2015, which they’d dubbed the year of “marsala,” which only ended up being true for mothers of the bride.

  All in all, it had been a taxing day, overly abundant in new sights and sounds, and when she reached the landing outside of their apartment, Sloane was grateful to hear the soft electronic music of a Roman at home—he, at least, could understand her frustration from her sabotaged momentum—but she was less grateful to see what he was doing inside it. He was sitting in his Zentai suit (the less often used red one), cross-legged on the carpet, sifting through a suite of boxes that must have just arrived.

  “Oh, hi there!” he said with his nonmouth. He got up and pressed himself against her in what was meant to be a hug but—clothed as he was—came off as frottage. “How was it?”

  Sloane pulled off her boots and fell into a nondescript chair. They’d rented the place furnished. Who’d chosen this chair?

  “It was . . . I don’t know. It was a little disappointing. What’s all this stuff?” she asked, indicating the FedEx envelopes littering the floor.

  “Amazing!” he said, plopping down again. “The companies sent all this! After the Nouvel Obs profile? I tell you! So responsive!”

  He held a box up in her direction. The Zentai suit didn’t have eye slits, it was simply more weathered around the facial area from wear, so she wasn’t actually sure if Roman could make out anything other than a general blur, but she could. She could read it. The future of masturbation, read the box’s tagline. “VR Tenga” read the brand.

  “The peak of neo-sensuality!” Roman crooned. “This is the future of cyber realist sex.” He grabbed a pair of goggles and a penile-looking tube. “You just slip this over your genitalia,” he said, demonstrating, “connect it to the virtual gaming headset, and then—”

  “Roman,” Sloane said, digging her nails into her ankles. “What the fuck’s your book about?”

  “Neo-sensuality,” he answered, with a sigh. “I’ve told you! How digitalized people experience the new sex! I’ll have something for you to read soon. I’ve decided to write an article. A—how do you all say it? An op-ed?”

  “On cybersex,” she repeated, nodding at the VR Tenga Box.

  “On post-sexual sex,” he corrected. “Okay, yes, this all seems like some kind of video game. But no, you are the game. This level of machine and human synching, Sloane. It has not been seen.”

  “With good reason,” she quipped. “It’s gross.”

  “It isn’t like you to be so conventional.” He shrugged.

  “Conventional?” she asked, voice rising. “Do they have vaginal tubes yet? I bet not. Looks to me like that tool is for men only. So don’t start with me about convention.”

  Because she couldn’t see his expression, Sloane couldn’t tell whether or not her point had been accorded. She crouched down and picked the dick tube up off the floor. With its red and silver coloring and two exterior clasps, the sheath looked more like something you’d put hot chocolate into than a penis.

  Overcome with exhaustion, she put the masturbation aid back down. This wasn’t the day to go to her mom’s house for dinner, that was for fucking sure. But it wasn’t going to help her track record if she canceled.

  “You know,” said Roman, responding earnestly—if belatedly—to her question, “virtual vaginal stimulation is actually very complicated. Whereas the penis is like historical gaming tools: the shooter, the gamesticks—”

  “Roman,” Sloane said, standing, “it’s been a really, really, really long day. And we’ve got to get to my mother’s. Can you take that suit off? Can you get ready?”

  “I can’t wear this to your mom’s?”

  He was kidding. Was he kidding? She couldn’t tell anymore.

  • • •

  Nothing made Sloane feel less like herself than a visit with her family. Or that wasn’t quite it, was it? Nothing made Sloane feel more like herself than a visit home. It was one thing to be the Sloane Jacobsen who lived in Paris, who could busy herself with trend forecasts in a language none of her relativ
es spoke. It was something else entirely to be back on the highway that her father had taken in and out of Stamford, Connecticut, every day for work. Approaching, far too quickly, the names of exits that had once meant something to her. Round Hill, the site of a party where she’d first got her breasts touched. Lake Avenue, the ranch home of a boy she used to love. Long Ridge, the backyard where she’d convinced Leila to climb an evergreen to liberate their mother’s Christmas ornaments because she’d gotten a “reading” that they wanted to be free.

  Although even Leila agreed that it would be good for her after Peter died, Margaret never sold the house. She put it on the market once, but took it off once someone bid. The house and its outcrop of random buildings were like a stone rubbing of her parent’s marriage: proof that they had been there, proof of what they’d been. The main house, red and wooden, with low ceilings that her tall father had always railed against, the dry sauna out by the forsythia bushes that Peter’s Danish heritage had deemed essential, her mother’s painting studio on top of the garage, the tree house that Peter had built for Sloane and Leila beyond the stand of aging poplar trees.

  As Anastasia drove them alongside the forsythia plants and copper mailboxes that lined her mother’s road, Sloane’s stomach pitted. The last time that she’d seen them all, a dishonorable three years ago, Sloane had left feeling awkward and uncomfortable. Sloane’s niece—her sister’s firstborn—had been asked to draw a picture of her whole family for school. Nina had put her mother and brother and father on the left of a boxy red house, and to the far right, towering in front of a wiry pyramid meant to be the Eiffel Tower, stood a frantic figure: Sloane. Her sister’s children thought that she was French, and apparently, her sister hadn’t done much to correct this. It suited everyone to pretend that Sloane was some kind of exchange student who returned once in a while to pay her respects to the people who used to house her. In this way, she could be thought of as an exotic guest instead of an ingrate.

  “You okay?” asked Roman, as they inched into the driveway. His hand mercifully—ephemerally—making contact with her knee.

  “Yeah,” she lied, staring out at the red wooden siding that she’d always loved. It wasn’t that she expected anything to be different about this visit. She wasn’t going to break down at the dinner table, for example, let go of the incertitude that was percolating inside her. But there was a certain deliriousness that came from knowing that she could.

  “Oh, Sloane?” asked Anastasia once they’d come to a stop on the gravel driveway. “I’m sorry, but if anyone besides you two wants to come into the vehicle, we’ll need to sign a waiver.”

  “Oh, yeah, no. I’ll just tell them it’s a normal car.”

  “Oh,” said Anastasia, her voice falling.

  “I mean, a super extra better than normal normal car,” Sloane corrected quickly, astonished—and impressed—that her car’s feelings had been hurt.

  • • •

  Sloane rang her mother’s doorbell, and the minute she heard its cascade of demonic cheeriness, she knew that what she should have done was use the key that she still kept on her keychain all these years, barrel into the kitchen, been boisterous and loud, hugs for everyone whether they felt forced or not. By ringing the bell, Sloane had just communicated to the members of her family that she was tentative about her place there. Sloane wished she could get into the car, be reversed out of the driveway, start all over again.

  Her mother came to the door with a bit of flour in her hair, a pudge of dough stuck to her wrist.

  “Oh!” she cried, her hand flying to her forehead. “You’re here! You’re early!”

  Margaret looked better than Sloane remembered. Brighter, vivacious, she wore sixty-seven well. The auburn hair Sloane shared with her had accepted gray rather than turned it; she still wore her hair long. Margaret’s eyes—one green, one hazel—had a kindness to them that Sloane couldn’t deny. It touched her to consider that Margaret might have actually been looking forward to their visit—she’d been watching the clock.

  “Look at you guys!” said Margaret, bringing her hands together—a nervous tic, Sloane knew. “Just look at you!”

  Sloane felt a lurch of happiness, that old hopefulness again. She moved toward her mother, who enfolded her in an embrace that smelled of roses and black tea, the never-changing fragrance of her mother’s good intentions underscored with nervous sweat.

  “And Roman!” Margaret said, pulling away from a closeness that was foreign to them both. “Too skinny! I’ll never know how you do it, you French men! I don’t think one of your pant legs would fit over my thigh!”

  Margaret didn’t like Roman, but it was generous of her to try. To his credit, Roman had never been anything but flattering and attentive around her family. But there was a troubling halo of energy around him that other people picked up on. Her sister had once asked her if Roman was bisexual. (Sloane’s answer? He could be, if he tried.)

  After taking their coats (which slid immediately off the overburdened coat tree onto the floor), Margaret pushed them into the kitchen where she proudly held up three fingers: index, middle, ring.

  “I’ve made three kinds of soufflé!”

  Because Peter had been the cook in the family, in the years after his death, cooking lessons were laden on Margaret by well-intentioned girlfriends who thought that food and wine was the way to revive a widowed heart. But unfortunately, due to the formality of the classes she’d taken, Margaret now equated good cooking with haute cuisine, and thus her epicurean efforts were often elaborate failures.

  Today’s menu—souffléed potatoes with pomegranate-glazed lamb chops from the looks of the dark seeds staining the wooden counters—was no exception. Sloane had just pinched a sheet of paper towel to start cleaning the bleeding seeds up when the sound of things dropping and being asked for in the mudroom alerted them to the arrival of the kids.

  “Little dumplings!” Margaret called, brushing her hands off. “Aunt Sloane is here!”

  Sloane’s chest tightened. She made a conscious effort to stretch her smile wider, hope held within her tightened muscles that this evening would feel more natural than the ones before.

  She walked into the mudroom where Harvey had little Everett on his shoulders. Mud was melting off the boy’s boots onto her brother-in-law’s anorak. Nina was on the bench already, tugging her boots off. Her sister wasn’t in sight.

  “Hi, guys!” Sloane said in her best approximation of an auntie voice. “Nina, God, you’re big!”

  Rather than measure out her life in coffee spoons, Sloane could track time by her sister’s children’s height; their persistence in her absence to keep growing up. It was a bit of an affront, really, to take leave of a baby and come back to find a little girl.

  Nina looked up from her boot-removal efforts and Sloane didn’t miss her microflinch: the resentment that the group dynamics in the house would now be altered.

  “Can you say hi to your auntie?” Harvey asked, flashing the demented grin parents use when they talk through their children. Can you tell her she’s not exactly wearing winter shoes? Can you tell her that her sister feels abandoned? Can you tell Aunt Sloane that it’s still legal to pick up the phone once in a while?

  “Hey, Harvey,” Sloane managed, unsure how to greet a man with a child on his shoulders. She settled on pressing herself against his damp coat in a half effort at a hug and planting a kiss on the left side of his face. Then she put her hand on Everett’s knee.

  “Hi there!” she said, moving her hand to his impossibly round cheek. “You’re such a little man now! Does he . . .” She looked back at Harvey. “Does he talk?”

  Harvey dismissed her question with a laugh. He bent down and slid Everett off his shoulders.

  “Heaps,” he said, brushing snow off of Everett’s hat. “But when he’s around people he doesn’t know . . .” He coughed to cloak his blunder. “He’s just a little sh
y.”

  Roman thrust out his hand with more enthusiasm than the moment called for. “Harvey!” he exclaimed. “It’s great to see you again!”

  Sloane tried not to wince as the handshake was exchanged. She had forgotten to refresh Roman on her niece and nephew’s names. The fact that he’d gotten Harvey’s right was no small feat—he’d only met him once at a Thanksgiving where they’d thoroughly offended her mother by staying in a hotel.

  “Roman, you look great, as always.”

  “Oh!” Roman scoffed. “But you! You’re so outdoors!”

  It was true that Harvey Kane was as outdoorsy as suburban dads could come. Harvey was an engineer who shared their father’s fervent faith in exertion. Outdoor showers, cold swims, uphill walks through snow piles; one of Harvey’s highest compliments was that something was “bracing.”

  “And bonjour, demoiselle,” Roman said, bending down in front of Nina, “although you’re not so little anymore!”

  With a twinge of envy, Sloane watched Nina smile back at him. Children gravitated toward Roman because he didn’t like them. It was like the anticat people. Felines always preferred people who had no tolerance for cats.

  “You guys are back!” Her sister’s voice behind her. “Everett! I hope you had a scarf on. How was it?”

  Sloane turned to see Leila crouching in the sky-blue robe she’d had as a teenager, a garment that was older than the roof on their parents’ house. She kissed her children’s cold faces before rising to greet Sloane.

  “You made it,” Leila said, her expression pinched.

  Despite her relief from finally being in her sister’s presence, Sloane’s tenderness at the sight of her sister was buried under guilt. She couldn’t help but hear her greeting as accusatory.

  “We did,” Sloane answered, folding her arms around her sister’s exhausted bathrobe, the sleeve of which bore both dried milk and cereal. Leila was the kind of mother who liked to wear the travails of motherhood like a badge: she never put concealer on her under-eye circles, she rarely brushed her hair, she didn’t shower as often as she might have, even though Harvey was the kind of husband who would have taken the children away for a whole week if she asked.