“Also, did I ever tell you that you basically lost me my biggest donor at the benefit that night? They e-mailed the next morning to say they were switching allegiances to our main rival. All that time you and I were dancing to those cheesy songs from the eighties, I could have been chatting them up.”
“Yeah, but admit it, you had more fun than you’ve had in a year shaking your booty to ‘Footloose,’” said Clay.
How did he know? “Maybe I did,” Karen said coyly, “and maybe I didn’t.”
“Besides, you have me on board now, and—you never know—I might pony up a few more rubles at Christmastime.”
“I can’t wait,” she said, reaching for a peanut herself. Under ordinary circumstances, the blatant mixing of business and pleasure that Clay was engaging in would have discomfited Karen. But somehow—maybe because the circumstances weren’t ordinary, or maybe because the pleasure was so immediate—it didn’t. Or maybe it was that his fortune was so large that it rendered money, even if he’d lost a little bit of it today, almost beside the point.
Just then, Clay took Karen’s hand in his own, leaned forward slightly, gazed at her intently, and said, “Me neither—how about we get out of here?”
“And go where?” said Karen, taken aback. Hadn’t they just arrived?
“I have a room booked at the Mandarin Oriental and a car waiting out front. Sorry if that’s presumptuous.” He smiled sheepishly.
“Excuse me?” cried Karen, laughing again and pulling her hand away, because it was all so sudden and suddenly so real. And what kind of fool reaches middle age and still thinks her fantasies will come true? “We haven’t even had dinner,” she told him.
“We can eat later—or order room service,” said Clay. “Come on. Say yes. What do you have to lose?”
“My marriage, for one thing!” answered Karen.
“Mark will never find out.”
“It’s Matt.”
“Matt. Whatever. Don’t you ever just want to escape your life for a few hours—or is your life pure, unfettered joy?”
“At the moment, it’s pure hell.”
“Funny—so is mine. But we can pretend we’re happy. We can get in bed and watch sitcoms. You don’t even have to kiss me.”
“I just have to sleep with you.”
“Who said anything about sleeping?”
“I did,” said Karen.
“Well, that’s your problem, then,” said Clay, shrugging, but not unkindly.
“And the fact that you’re married too isn’t an issue?”
Clay sighed as he reached for his drink. “The way I see it, we’re both going to be dead soon anyway. What do we have left—thirty years, thirty-five, forty if we’re lucky? Except maybe it wouldn’t be that lucky. Have you ever met an eighty-five-year-old who’s honestly enjoying his life? I haven’t. And forget about ninety. Unless you think it’s fun being slumped in a chair reminiscing about the good old days while slowly losing your mind. After that, welcome to the junkyard of human existence. Sure, after we’re gone, our kids will cry for a few weeks and pretend to miss us. But they’ll get over it—they always do—while the rest of the world will soon forget we were ever born, unless by some fluke one of us discovers the cure for cancer in the next ten years. Then again, can you name the guy who eradicated smallpox? Me neither. So, I guess my feeling is, why not grab a little happiness where you find it? Maybe that makes me an asshole, but that’s kind of the position I’ve settled on at this point in my life. Have I had affairs? Yes. Have I had one recently? No. Do I find myself at this particular moment in time strangely besotted with you, Karen Kipple from College? Yes.” Clay stared lustily at Karen. Then he lifted his highball glass off the bar and had a final chug, which made his Adam’s apple bob up and down like a pinball in a machine. Setting the empty glass on the bar, he let out a contented “Ahhh” and added, “I love orange juice—one of the great inventions.”
“Second only to the lightbulb,” offered Karen, swallowing hard.
“Don’t forget the drum machine.”
Karen found herself grinning at Clay, who grinned back. Maybe he’s right, she thought, and none of it matters—not the charity we believe ennobles us or the temptations we punish ourselves for succumbing to. We’re all going to be gone soon anyway.
And Karen was flattered and aroused. And it seemed like her last chance to act like a drunken fool and be the object of someone’s desire before she shriveled up and ceased to be the object of anything but pity. And as bad as her body looked now, it was bound to look worse in five years.
And maybe monogamy was nothing more than a middle-class convention.
And Karen had grown so tired of trying to be good all the time—once the Good Daughter and the Good Student; now the Good Mother, the Good Citizen, the Good Wife.
And since her husband had already accused her of being unfaithful, Karen felt somehow compelled to fulfill his paranoid prophecy and pay him back for always being mad at her. And if he never learned the truth, and if it was only this one time, would she still be hurting him? If a woman falls in a forest—or a five-star hotel room—and no one hears her moan, or at least no one but an acquaintance from college whom she hasn’t seen in twenty-four years, does she still make a sound?
And although it went against all her closest-held convictions, Karen had to admit that Clay’s phenomenal wealth was part of his appeal. It divorced him from the mundane concerns of everyday life—made him seem lofty by association, even if he was really only perched atop a mountain of paper. Indeed, Clay was so rich that he didn’t have to worry about the things that other people, other couples, worried and fought about, like living in the right school district or running up too large a bill at Gap Kids.
While in Clay’s company, Karen didn’t feel as if she were being judged on whether or not she held the correct position either. In fact, he seemed completely uninterested in her politics, her values, her commitment to anything but the here and now.
Even so, doubt snuck in. “I just—” she began.
“You just what?” said Clay, again taking her hand and massaging it.
“I guess I just don’t understand why you…I mean, we don’t even know each other anymore. Not that we ever really did.”
“Speak for yourself, Kipple. In case you never noticed, I had a total thing for you in college.”
“For me? I thought you were in love with Lydia.”
“Well, that was where you were wrong.”
Was he telling the truth? Did it even matter? For once, Karen was in the moment, and the moment beckoned. “Well, how about you order me a non-laced-with-anything, non–Bill Cosby glass of wine,” Karen told him, “and I’ll see how I feel after I drink it?”
“At your service,” said Clay, flagging down the bartender.
At some point soon after, their knees brushed against each other, their breath grew warm on each other’s cheeks. Before long, Clay was whispering in her ear, whispering in a low voice, “I want to kiss you so badly right now,” and then, “I want to be inside you.”