Yesterday, however, had been Friday, and yet there’d been no sign of Simka. Gordon spent most of the night worried, first only a bit, but by four a.m. his mind would not stop racing. Where was Simka? What happened to Simka? What if Simka was gone forever?
Then, at 7:26 a.m., his phone woke him up and told him a new video had finally landed on Simka’s channel.
She looked beautiful, as usual. She was wearing her hair the way he most liked it, falling forward over both shoulders, as thick and shiny as any head of hair he’d ever seen. She had her little mischievous smile on, too, and Gordon could tell she was in a good mood. Simka was always in a good mood, but the glow around her suggested today’s was a particularly good one, particularly, particularly good.
“Before I start today, I just want to take a moment to say thank you to a few of my super-special friends, I really love you and appreciate you and your comments and I love knowing you’re out there, it makes me feel so happy. You are so special to me, I know you might not believe that but I really treasure my special friends, and I want to say a super-special hi to chiefogomo, exactomac, wallabiefifteen, Gordonseven-twenty-six, fariephantom—”
Gordon726!
That was him! He was Gordon726! Simka was talking to him!
Gordon clicked on the screen and listened to the beginning again, waiting to hear his name. It was like a crack in the time-space continuum, Simka whispering his name, her tongue doing unimaginable things to the d in the middle and to the seven and the twenty and the six. She had over two hundred thousand followers, and yet, and yet! She’d singled him out! Gordon726! Simka knew him. He was special to Simka. She loved him and appreciated him.
To be fair, Gordon knew Simka didn’t really know him, and she didn’t really love him, but he had the sense that she did appreciate him! She must have seen something in his comments that stood out to her, stood out enough for her to single him out from among her over two hundred thousand followers.
He started again, from the beginning.
*
“My mother said you’re having a midlife crisis,” Madison said to him the second time they met.
Her name was Madison and she was twenty-six! She’d texted him back that first night saying that she was twenty-nine, but then after they slept together she admitted she was twenty-six, in her sexy kitten voice. He never would have slept with her if he knew she was only twenty-six, but, well, at this point, he figured the damage had already been done.
“You told your mother about me?”
“I tell my mother everything.”
“Did you tell her you’re sleeping with me?”
Madison rolled her eyes at him.
“I don’t understand that eye roll,” said Owen. “Does that mean yes, you told her, or no, you didn’t?”
“I tell my mom everything. She’s my best friend. We text a thousand times a day.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” said Madison. “She said you probably don’t really have an open marriage.”
“Your mom said that?”
“Yeah. And she said I should just be aware of that if I’m going to spend time with you.”
“Well, first of all, I do have an open marriage. That is in fact the truth.”
“She said that’s what you’d say,” said Madison.
“I’m saying it because it’s true. I have a six-month free pass.”
“What happens after six months?”
“We both stop. End of the experiment. Life goes back to normal.”
“I went out with this fireman who told me he and his wife were separated, and then it turned out they were still living in the same house, but he said he slept on the couch. And then his wife found his burner phone in the glove compartment and tracked me down and went batshit on me. It was awful. I was totally in love with him. I had to move back home for, like, eight months. My mom doesn’t want to see me go through all that again.”
“You told your mom all that?”
“My mom’s not uptight about sex,” said Madison.
Her mom’s not uptight about sex.
“She raised me to believe that there’s no such thing as a slut.”
This was the problem with the millennials, in a nutshell. There still was such a thing as a slut. You could say there wasn’t, but there was. For example: Madison. Madison was a slut.
“All of my friends are like me with this stuff,” she said.
“How is that possible? I’ve never met anyone like you, ever.”
“That’s because you’re super-old,” said Madison with a smile. “So, next time, you want to do some molly?”
The world is going to hell in a handbasket, Owen thought on the drive home. It was funny, really, how doing the most transgressive thing of his entire adult life was making him feel like a real fuddy-duddy. That’s how he felt, like a fuddy-duddy. And proud to be one! Proud to be a fuddy-duddy if the alternative was this, having sex with the Madisons of this world, becoming the kind of person who did this. No, he didn’t want to “do some molly.” He didn’t even know what molly was. Something like ecstasy, only better or much, much worse, depending on how your Internet search went. Owen wanted to stand on his front porch and yell at the neighborhood kids. He wanted to watch Fox News and boycott things and get really scared about the direction the country was headed in.
He had a plan. He was going to fuck Madison again. No doubt. Maybe even a few more times. And he was going to keep freezing Izzy out until she got the message and left him alone or sold her house and moved away, whichever came first. Then, in a couple of weeks, he was going to sit Lucy down, tell her how much he loved her and their life and their family and the way they knew each other inside and out, the way they made love and the way they raised Wyatt, and call the whole arrangement off early. Oh, and take her to Bermuda for five days. She’d like that.
Sixteen
Change is the only constant.
—Constance Waverly, quoting Heraclitus
The Wayside was a sleazy motel, and Owen planned on doing something sleazy inside of it. It had a parking area hidden from view, and it was a place where nobody from Beekman would ever go and where out-of-towners routinely died. Well, not routinely, but twice in the time Owen had lived in Beekman, a dead body was found at the Wayside; once, a soccer mom from Westchester who’d driven north and OD’d, the other time, a gangbanger from Newburgh who’d done something unwise on the other side of the Hudson and hid out at the Wayside for three weeks. He was shot, finally, two times in the head, on a trip back from the vending machine. He never even got a chance to enjoy his orange soda and peanut M&M’s, according to the local paper, which had an above-the-fold photo of the Wayside’s parking lot filled with cop cars and volunteer firefighters.
“Nice,” Madison said when she walked in.