Sybil closed her eyes and flattened herself on the living room couch, allowing the quiet to seep in. But then it felt too quiet, too isolating. So she popped up, pulled her phone from her pocket, and though she should have tapped her music app, she went right to the podcasts. She was deep into an unsolved mystery of a man who had disappeared in Florida gator country, and she was pretty sure she was one Google discovery away from finding new evidence.
Back on her feet, the second thing Sybil noticed tonight was the scent. Sybil had been cursed with an oversensitive sense of smell since childhood. It was no good walking around with a nose that detected everything. In medical school, she had to lull herself into a type of semihypnosis not to gag at formaldehyde, and once Charlie hit puberty, her own home was a near nuclear site. Mark himself had a specific sweat smell that in their early days turned her on. In recent years, maybe his hormones shifted or maybe hers did (hers definitely did), but sometimes she’d walk by him in the hallway, and she could almost taste the acridity. When Sybil told Natalie about it, her friend had suggested that maybe Mark was rotting from the inside out. She’d meant it metaphorically, but Sybil then thought about all the medical diagnoses in which this was possible and envisioned Mark afflicted with each and every one. She really did need to decide what to do about Mark and the anesthesiologist.
Tonight the pied-à-terre did not reek like Mark’s maleficent odor, but instead had the very slight lilt of an expensive perfume. It was probably two days old, nothing that Mark thought would linger. But Sybil was a bloodhound, and here was the evidence. Mark obviously did not wear perfume, and ostensibly, Eloise could have ditched college for a night or two and cometo the apartment, but Eloise wore cheap Brandy Melville body spray. This stuff was straight-up Parisian. Also, Sybil had Eloise’s location on her phone, so surely she would have noticed if Eloise had driven to the city from DC for the night.
She opened the fridge, as the podcast narrator broke down the science of how an alligator could eat a dead body, and she saw a half-drunk bottle of Cabernet.
Fuck you,Mark.
She slammed the door closed.
She moved to the bedroom, the narrator’s voice growing distant. The bed wasn’t made, and the perfume was even stronger in here.
I want to murder you, Mark.
She made her way back into the living room and sank into the couch, then bounced back up, wondering if Mark and the anesthesiologist had fucked on the couch too. She grabbed her phone, paused the podcast—as interesting as the science was of how long it takes a gator to digest human flesh—and punched in Natalie’s number. It was tenp.m.; she had an hour to kill before heading to Zeke’s, and Natalie’s household would still be buzzing.
“Thank god,” Natalie said on the first ring. “Save me from my children. They are animals. Absolute lunatics. How did you make it through the teenage years?”
Most of Sybil’s friends were older than she was: She had the twins still in her late twenties, so she was considered the “young mom” at preschool; many of the women were on their first child at their mid-thirties after a slog of a career and finding their husband along the way. Natalie was the exception. They met when Eloise started babysitting Natalie’s kids in eighth grade because Natalie, newly divorced, had a life outside of them.Imagine that, Sybil thought now, wishing that it had occurred to her back then too.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Sybil said, dipping down, touching her toes, trying to stretch out her back, which continued to be furious at her for her lack of rest, “how much would it scare you to see me naked?”
For some reason, in the heady swirl of the anesthesiologist’s perfume, she’d thought of Zeke. But once she said it aloud, the idea felt preposterous, absurd, nearly humiliating. She knew that she used to be pretty in a buttoned-up sort of way. Mark, obviously, in med school, couldn’t get enough and used to tell her that she wasedible. Edible! But good god, her breasts after two kids and at the age of forty-six? Her cesarean scar? The way her body had recently begun feeling less and less in her control, like she was going through reverse puberty—the periods that looked like massacres, the hot flashes that left pit stains in under ten seconds, the way the brain fog drifted in like she was on the edge of the San Francisco Bay.
“Oh. My. God,” Natalie screeched. “Are you finally leaving him? Please, please say you are leaving him.”
“I’m not leaving him,” Sybil said, righting herself, then rotating a shoulder until it popped. “But I guess…I’m thinking about leaving him. But…I mean…do men actually want to sleep with women…of a certain age?”
“I’m coming over,” Natalie said. “I think this is my chance to finally convince you.” Then: “Jesus Christ, Truman, if I have to tell you to brush your teeth one more time, I’m going to post about your hygiene habits on TikTok!” Then: “Sorry. I don’t think Corey makes them shower the entire weekend when they’re with him.”
“You’ll miss them when they leave you though,” Sybil said, and she thought of Charlie and Eloise. God, what she wouldn’t do to have them back, to have kept the status quo forever. What would happen if she murdered Mark, chopped him up and fedhim to alligators? Would anyone blame her for going mad and reinventing herself at midlife? Men did it all the time.
“You keep saying that, and yet I can’t wait to prove you wrong.”
“Well, you can’t come over. I’m in the city. At the apartment.”
“On a Sunday? You’re in New York City at your apartment? And you’re calling me asking if someone will want to sleep with you? Girl! What are you not telling me?”
Sybil hadn’t told Natalie about the insomnia other than occasional comments about fitful sleep, jokes about the bags under her eyes. She wasn’t sure why. Natalie wasn’t yet perimenopausal, and maybe Sybil wasn’t ready to admit that she was rocketing toward elderly, or maybe it was that if she verbalized it—how heavily her life weighed on her, how desperately she missed her children, how she’d lost so much ofeverythingto a man who she saw now hadn’t deserved to be given anything—she knew that it would be time, finally, to do something about it. She certainly wasn’t ready to tell her best friend that she’d met several strangers online and now was meeting them a couple times a week at midnight, like they were a group of newly befriended vampires. Natalie wouldn’t judge her for it, but Sybil wasn’t sure that she wasn’t judging herself.
“Nothing nearly as sexy,” Sybil said. “Have an early mammogram. Made sense to stay over.”
“Well, at least someone is feeling your boobs,” Natalie said.
“Oh, shut up,” Sybil laughed but very acutely and unavoidably thought of Zeke.
10
Night Four
Zeke
They’d agreed tomeet at Zeke’s apartment since Betty had taken the overnight shift off to get settled there. Zeke was nervous as shit. One, because he’d probably gotten a little over his skis at inviting Betty to move in, and two, he hadn’t hosted anyone other than his sister and parents in the four years that he’d lived here. His agent, Timothy, made a habit of showing up unannounced, but he didn’t care about impressing Timothy, who bought his beach house thanks to Zeke’s last Nike contract.
He’d asked his assistant to order some platters from Zabar’s, and now it looked like he was hosting a wedding in his kitchen. He surveyed the spread and moved too quickly, forgetting for a moment that his elbow had split in two. Jolts of sharp pain radiated up to his shoulder.
“Motherfucker!” he yelped, his voice bouncing off his cabinetry and reverberating back to him. The kitchen was the size of some New York City one-bedroom apartments, and he’d had the entire place soundproofed anyway, so it’s not as if Bettycould hear him. And he didn’t even really know her well enough to expect her to come running. He opened the fridge with his good arm, grabbed a can of Bud Light (he was sponsored so they sent it by the case), popped it open one-handed and leaned against the wall to try to steady himself. His fucking eyelid spasmed again.
