It was degrading. Kristin knew what she was doing was degrading. But her nerves were frayed and her equilibrium was in shambles. Her self-esteem was in shambles. She knew this was a bad idea—no, this was a terrible idea—but she was incapable of stopping herself. She emerged from the master bathroom shower Thursday morning, toweled herself off, and then stood stark naked before the full-length mirror in the adjacent bedroom. Her and Richard’s bedroom. She studied her body with pitiless, hardhearted eyes, finding only the ways it had been diminished by age, methodically ratcheting up the self-hatred. She was forty, and while she knew that forty was not old, it also was not twenty. She believed she was still pretty…but was she now only pretty for forty? (She heard the cultural ageism in that question, and chastised herself. But she also knew that she couldn’t transcend aesthetic preconceptions any more than her breasts could transcend gravity.) She stared for a long moment at her nipples, objectifying and then loathing them. She had a hint of rib, but did she need a hint more? She examined the crease of her lips, the slope of her nose. She ran her fingers over her cheekbones. She cringed when she saw that she needed a bikini wax—and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn’t the pain. It was the whole idea that she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.
She needed to spend more time at the gym. She needed a different lipstick. She needed…
She needed, she told herself, to get dressed. And so she did, but the damage to her psyche had been done.
She had read articles over the years about a man’s supposed biologic craving for young women: it was all about primeval procreation, in theory, the need to plant seed in fertile soil. Maybe. But the idea of Richard desiring a woman perhaps less than half his age—half their age—was at once appalling and infuriating. She thought of a line from Nabokov: “Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.” Lolita. In this case, however, Kristin felt that she was at the disadvantage—not the young thing. The truth was, she feared, all men were Humbert Humbert. Maybe they weren’t pedophiles lusting after twelve-year-olds, but didn’t Lolita look old for her age? Older, anyway? Sure, there were MILFs in porn, but Kristin had a feeling that considerably more men wanted their porn stars to be students at Duke University than moms from the bleachers at a middle-school soccer game. She—a forty-year-old female history teacher—may not yet have morphed into Shelley Winters, but it was getting harder and harder to compete with the real-life Lolitas of the world.
Yet men’s tastes in pornography weren’t really the issue, were they? It was one thing for a middle-aged man to access his inner ninth grader and lust after a porn star on his tablet or TV screen; it was quite another to bring a prostitute (or, far sadder, a sex slave) upstairs in this very house. Some lines were more blurred than others—at the word blurred, her mind conjured an appalling music video from a few years back—but the line between lusting after a porn star and fucking an escort was clear. Berlin Wall clear.
When she was dressed, she sat on the bed to put on her shoes. She had grabbed a pair of modest heels today from her closet. She wondered if this was how the girl had sat before her husband last Friday night on another bed in another room just down the hall. She saw the girl vividly in her mind. Her insouciance. Her mouth, half open with carefully feigned desire. Her youth. She closed her eyes, wishing her imagination were impervious to pain.
…
Nicole stirred the berries and granola in her yogurt parfait. She was nauseous, sick with loss and despair, but she felt that she had to order something. Across the booth (thank God he had gotten a booth, she had thought when she first arrived, and thank God he had arrived before her), Philip was wolfing his western omelet as if he hadn’t eaten in days. She feared he had missed all the signals she had offered since she had gotten to the restaurant. He had stood and embraced her, apologizing with uncharacteristic zeal, and she had not lifted her arms to hug him back. He had tried to peer into her eyes in a way he almost never did—with an earnestness that suggested he was not simply hearing whatever she had to say, he was listening—and she had looked down at the toes of her boots. He had offered to take her jacket and hold it for her while she had slid into her side of the booth, and she had replied that she would be more comfortable keeping it on. She glanced down at the engagement ring since she knew this was the last time she was ever going to see it.
“It was a nightmare,” Philip was saying now. “You can’t imagine how awful it was to see that crazy bitch stabbing the Russian dude. I will never be able to scrub that image from my eyes. Never. We thought she was going to try and kill one of us next.”
She wasn’t completely surprised that he was trying to elicit her sympathy. And, the truth was, she knew that it must have been terrifying.
“And then we heard the gunshots, and that’s when we thought we were all going to get killed. I mean, Chuck Alcott fell to the floor, just sobbing—sobbing!—like a baby. And I know I ducked.”
“You ducked.”
He sipped his coffee and nodded as he swallowed. “Maybe more than ducked. You know, it was a reflex. I knelt behind the couch.”
She assumed that knelt was a euphemism. Knelt suggested a gradual descent and some premeditation. She was pretty sure that even duck was a euphemism: it was likely that he had thrown himself to the floor as if someone had tossed a hand grenade into the room.
“I mean, guns and knives at what was supposed to be a harmless bachelor party?” he added. “That’s nuts!”
She agreed that it must have been horrifying for him to have witnessed the murder of the two bodyguards, but there was never anything harmless about this bachelor party. And so she told him precisely that.
“Look, I know it got a little out of control,” he said. “We all drank too much. But you know how sorry I am, right? I wouldn’t have told you if I wasn’t sorry and knew I could assure you that I would never, ever do something like that again.”