The Startup Wife(64)

A woman emerges from the pool. Her body is long and entirely unaffected by the laws of gravity. I stare and stare as she towels off. She gets a drink from the pool bar and sits down beside me. She’s just as improbable up close. “I’m Eleanor,” she says. “You’re wondering where I came from, aren’t you?” She pauses, smiling. “You were thinking escort agency.”

“I totally wasn’t,” I lie, trying not to rest my gaze on her breasts, or her ass, or any other part of her that she has neglected to cover up but probably should have. “Why, do you get that a lot?”

“I didn’t mean to sound defensive—it’s a bit of a fishbowl in here.”

“So what are you?”

“An associate at Pemberton.”

“The Pemberton?”

“The very one.”

“God gave you brains too?”

“It’s not fair, I know.”

“What about all the other women?”

She looks around. Points to a couple with their arms entwined. “She’s a partner at Believe Capital. That one over there is a corporate lawyer, and my friend Adrienne—in the swimming pool with the bald guy—just raised seven million in Series A funding.”

“You guys do this a lot?”

“My third time. I’ve gone to other things, similar vibe. I find the small talk at receptions painful. At least we all know why we’re here.”

“Why are we here?”

“To put our shoulders to the wheel of the patriarchy.”

“But seriously. Why? Did someone tell you you had to come?”

“It’s not that obvious,” she says. “They just invite you, and if you don’t come, it’s like everyone else is in on a joke and you’re left out. Then the next time, you hear them whispering around the coffee bar, and maybe they give you one more shot. And see if you show up.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“But we’re disrupting everything,” she says with an exaggerated laugh. “Surely we can disrupt the mono-normative sexual rules we inherited from the Victorians?”

I nod. “Totally. Tech is here to set us free from all that.” Eleanor’s drink is finished. She glides away, and I’m left thinking I probably imagined her.

Someone taps my shoulder. It’s Cyrus. “Hey, I’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh, hello.” My voice quivers.

Cyrus kneels down beside me. “I’m really, really sorry,” he says.

I start to cry. “Whatever.”

“We shouldn’t have come. I will talk to Craig, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I was… I was curious.”

“Curiosity killed the Cyrus,” I say, sniffing.

He cups my cheek, brushes my tears away. “Look, we have three options here. We can go upstairs, find an empty room, and have sex like everyone else. Or we can keep watching to see if there’s anything else on the agenda, like maybe a movie or a late-night buffet. Or we can go home.”

“But the cuddle puddle is strictly non-penetrative,” I say.

“There are other things we could do.”

“Do you wish you had more sex before you married me?”

“No.”

“How much sex have you had?” I ask, wondering why we have never had this conversation.

“I would say a medium amount.”

“Me too,” I offer, even though he hasn’t asked. “Medium to small. Although I guess it’s all relative. What do you mean by medium? Under ten or under a hundred?”

“Under ten,” he says.

I’m relieved. We link arms, pick our way back through the house, passing another bar, a vinyl library, a man stirring a giant vat of paella, a circle of people chanting om, and finally, through the double doors in front. Our cab is here; we get in and fall asleep on opposite corners of the backseat in the hour it takes to return to our hotel.





Thirteen

BFFS




On the surface, Marco is a normal person. He can make eye contact and have perfectly ordinary conversations about things that other people might be interested in, say, the weather, or how lovely it is that we have our own nondairy mixologist called Mylkist at the cafeteria now. But a few sentences in—and I check this multiple times to make sure I’m not just being judgmental—Marco will always steer the conversation in such a way that he ends up telling a story about someone, or something, or all of humanity, dying. At times the transition is so subtle that you wouldn’t even notice it, but occasionally, it’s obvious that while he’s commenting on your shoes, he’s really thinking death/apocalypse/end times thoughts. Let’s say the conversation starts like this in the stairwell:

“Hey, Asha, how’s it going?”

“Going great, how’re you?”

“I was just heading to the seminar on work-hobby balance.”

“Work-hobby?”

“Yeah, you know, if you love something enough, it doesn’t even feel like work, so you call it a hobby, but really, it’s taking all your time and you’re totally obsessed.”

“I know what that’s like. Anyway, see you around—”