In Five Years(47)

“I love this job,” I say.

“I know you do,” he tells me. “But it’s important to make sure the job is not unkind to you.”

“That’s impossible. We’re corporate lawyers. The job is inherently unkind.”

Aldridge laughs. “Maybe,” he says. “But I don’t think I’d have lasted this long if I thought we hadn’t struck some kind of deal.”

“You and the job.”

Aldridge takes off his glasses. He looks me square in the eye when he says: “Me and my ambition. Far be it from me to tell you what your own deal should be. I still work eighty-hour weeks. My husband, god bless him, wants to kill me. But—”

“You know the terms.”

He smiles, puts his glasses back on. “I know the terms.”



The IPO evaluation begins in mid-November. We’re already creeping further into October. I call Bella at lunch, while bent over a signature Sweetgreen salad, and she sounds rested and comfortable. The girls from the gallery are over, and she’s going over a new show. She can’t talk. Good.

I leave work early, intent on picking up one of David’s favorite meals—the teriyaki at Haru—and surprising him at home. We’ve been strangers passing in the night. I think the last time I had a full conversation with him was at the hospital. And we’ve barely touched our wedding plans.

I turn onto Fifth Avenue and decide to walk. It’s barely 6 p.m, David won’t be home for another two hours, at least, and the weather is perfect. One of those first truly crisp fall days, where you could conceivably wear a sweater but because the sun is out, and still strong overhead, a T-shirt will do. The wind is low and languid, and the city is buzzy with the happy, contented quality of routine.

I’m feeling so festive, in fact, that when I pass Intimissimi, a popular lingerie company, I decide to stop inside.

I think about sex, about David. About how it’s good, solid, satisfying, and how I’ve never been someone who wants her hair pulled or to be spanked. Who doesn’t even really like to be on top. Is that a problem? Maybe I’m not in touch with my sexuality—-which Bella, casually——too casually—has accused me of on more than one occasion.

The shop is filled with pretty, lacy things. Tiny bras with bows and matching underwear. Frilly negligees with rosettes on the hem. Silk robes.

I choose a black lace camisole and boy shorts, decidedly different from anything I own, but still me. I pay without trying them on, and then make my way over to Haru. I call in our order on the way. No sense in waiting.



I can’t believe I’m doing this. I hear David’s key latch in the door and I’m tempted to run back into the bedroom and hide, but it’s too late now. The apartment is littered with candles and the low stylings of Barry Manilow. It’s like a cliché sex comedy from the nineties.

David walks in and drops his keys on the table, sets his bag down on the counter. It’s not until he reaches to take off his shoes that he notices his surroundings. And then me.

“Woah.”

“Welcome home,” I say. I’m wearing the black lingerie with a black silk robe, something I got as a gift on a bachelorette weekend eons ago. I go to David. I hand him one end of the belt. “Pull,” I say, like I’m someone else.

He does, and the thing comes apart, falling to the floor in a puddle.

“This is for me?” he asks, his index finger stretched out to touch the strap of my camisole top.

“It would be weird if it weren’t,” I say.

“Right,” he says, low. “Yeah.” He fingers the strap, edging it down over my shoulder. From an open window a breeze saunters in, dancing the candles. “I like this,” he says.

“I’m glad,” I say. I take his glasses off. I set them down on the couch. And then I start to unbutton his shirt. It’s white. Hugo Boss. I bought it for him for Hanukkah two years ago along with a pink one and a blue-striped one. He never wears the blue one. It was my favorite.

“You look really sexy,” he says. “You never dress like this.”

“They don’t allow this in the office, even on Friday,” I tell him.

“You know what I mean.”

I get the last button undone and I shake the shirt off him—one arm then the other. David is always warm. Always. And I feel the prickle of his chest hair against my skin, the soft folding my body does to his.

“Bedroom?” he asks me.

I nod.

He kisses me then, hard and fast, right by the couch. It catches me by surprise. I pull back.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “Do it again.” And he does.

He kisses me into the bedroom. He kisses me out of the lingerie. He kisses me underneath the sheets. And when it’s just us there, on the precipice, he lifts his face up from mine and asks it:

“When are we getting married?”

My brain is scrambled. Undone from the day, the month, the glass-and-a-half of wine I had to prepare myself for this little stunt.

“David,” I breathe out. “Can we talk about this later?”

He kisses my neck, my cheek, the bridge of my nose. “Yes.”

And then he pushes into me. He moves slowly, deliberately, and I feel myself come apart before I even have a chance to begin. He keeps moving on top of me, long after I’ve returned to my body, to my brain. We are like constellations passing each other, seeing each other’s light but in the distance. It feels impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy. And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.