Class(63)

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.”

By then, it was too late—too late for resolve, too late to ask Chahrazad’s mom her name again…

At the hotel, they shared a bottle of 1996 Krug Clos d’Ambonnay—Karen made a mental note of the vintage so she could tell Troy—toasting their lack of a future as they drank. Then they watched an Animal Planet rerun of a show called Puppy Bowl, in which dogs played football. At some point after that, they fell backward. As their bodies came together, Karen felt as if the two of them were in a giant snow globe with sparkly silver bits swirling all around them, enveloping them in a dizzy dream. For as long as the sky kept falling, they lay safe inside, hidden from view, removed from time and space. “Karen Kipple,” Clay kept whispering as he ran his hands down her, then pushed himself inside her until she couldn’t see straight, couldn’t tell the walls from the ceiling, or the ceiling from the floor. It was only after the last of the sparkly silver bits had settled, and she and Clay lay collapsed on the bed, that reality began to reassert itself. The image of Ruby’s rosy cheeks springing to mind, Karen glanced at the clock on the bedside table, then bolted upright. “Shit—I have to go,” she said, throwing her legs over the side of the bed.

“Why?” said Clay, his lids half closed as he reached out an arm to pull her back.

“Because,” she said, sliding out from under him. She felt as if her mouth were filled with paste.

“Kiss me one more time.”

She kissed him one more time, but her head was already elsewhere. A swirling mix of panic, satiety, shame, and delirium now filled it, propelling her homeward.

In the elevator down to the lobby, Karen closed her eyes and imagined the snow globe splitting and herself falling through the bottom. Down and down and down she fell until she reached the red-hot magma at the earth’s core and was instantly burned into oblivion. But when the elevator doors opened, she found the ground still cold and firm beneath her feet and her flesh unscathed. She hurried through the lobby and exited onto the street, her eyes scanning the curb in search of a taxi. She found one idling in front of an Indian restaurant nearby and climbed in.



Karen arrived home to find Ashley sitting on the sofa watching the Real Housewives of Somewhere-or-Other without the sound. To her surprise and relief, there was no sign of Matt. “Hi! Sorry I’m late,” she said, waving her arms around. “Dinner went on forever.” When had she become such a good liar?

Or maybe she wasn’t as good as she thought. “No problem,” said Ashley, but she was looking at her employer funny. Did Karen look suspiciously disheveled? Or was she projecting? Maybe twenty-year-old Ashley couldn’t have cared less where the geriatric mother of her evening charge had been. When Karen was Ashley’s age, she’d barely noticed the existence of people over forty. They might as well have been furniture, which she also hadn’t noticed. These days, when Karen walked into a room, the first thing she checked out was the decor.