Ten Thousand Spoons

Nadia waited as Trina shut off her computer, and studied the picture of her with her husband tacked to the cubicle wall. They were smiling broadly, and his arms were wrapped around her from behind as if he were protecting and comforting her, and also simultaneously showing her off proudly.

Trina frowned and shook her head as they rode the elevator down to the somber marble atrium. "I've told her multiple times, I wouldn't do it. If my husband so much as looked at another woman I'd change the locks! But of course, my man would never do something like that. No real Kitts-and-Nevis man would."

She turned to Nadia with sad, sympathetic eyes incongruous to her off-color remarks and said, "It's a good thing your mum had the sense to marry a white man. And Canadian, too…. That Justin Trudeau is wonderful."

They'd had plans to see each other, but as Nadia walked the icy vortex of Vesey Street, she had a text from Rad that he'd have to take a rain check. He told her to buy herself something expensive and sexy to wear next time they were together and Venmo him. He promised to call her that evening. Nadia sighed; he still hadn't seen the redone bedroom.

She got off the E-train at the Fifth Avenue Fifty-Third Street station and went to the Saks flagship store. She felt out of her depths wandering the floors of the massive store, and tried to imagine what a banking mogul's mistress should wear. In the shoe department, she found a pair of black satin Zanotti sandals with a teetering stiletto heel that made it very hard to walk. In lingerie, she found a Fleur du Mal silk mesh and metallic foil bra and thong that looked sexy and theatrical like something from a Victoria's Secret show and a silk kimono in the matching print. Instead of the opaque Fruit of the Loom tights she normally wore to work, she found gossamer sheer Wolford stockings with a lacy seam across the rear, and imagined Rad tearing away the thin silk nylon in a blind fury to remove any barrier to getting inside of her.

Shopping bags in hand, she wandered through racks of cocktail dresses pressing back hanger after hanger, until she found a Monique Lhuillier mini dress made of a diaphanous grey tulle and slinky silvery embellishments. It was the type of dress a celebrity would wear to an awards event. It was only on the rack in a size two, but in the dressing room, the gauzy material stretched and fit her frame. It looked like she was completely naked but for the silver dripping waves over her breasts and waist and hips and forearms.

As she spun in the dressing room's three-way mirror, a saleswoman passing by grinned cheekily and commented, "That's a mantrap dress, honey." A different saleswoman rang the dress up for her, and Nadia felt lightheaded and weak in the knees with her thoughts of Rad as she watched the slinky, tiny but heavy dress tucked into a weatherproof Saks garment bag: the way he pressed his face into the sparse down at the juncture of her thighs and hummed as he inhaled deeply and sighed as he said, "This is where I've wanted to be all day."

Nadia wandered to the Rockefeller Center station in a dreamy, sensual fog. All of her nerves were sensitive. She boarded the cramped uptown D-train; each rocking movement of the train turning screeching underground corners reignited her feelings and made her gooey and malleable. She felt desperate, and wished she was still meeting Rad that night.

She closed her eyes and imagined their next time together:

That he'd text her plans to meet him after work and they'd stay downtown to go to Batârd.
That he'd order for them: foie gras and venison and champagne.
He'd have asked her what she bought at Saks that day he couldn't meet her; she'd say it was a surprise, and arrive at the restaurant wearing the Lhuillier tulle dress, and Rad, in one of his dapper business suits, would spin her around and call her "a vision".
That they'd sit side by side in a plush banquette instead of across from each other at a table.
And he'd run his hand up her back meaningfully, in that caress she'd come to recognize meant that he was already hard and only propriety and her shyness were holding him back from fucking her in public, and lean over her to kiss her temple and gently bite her cheek.

"I can't wait to rip this dress off you," he'd whisper against her skin, raising goosebumps on her shoulders and making her nipples stiffen.

But the next time Rad came to visit, he came uptown to her flat on a Sunday afternoon more than a week after the last time they'd seen each other, and he was in gym clothes. It was part of his excuse; his wife had taken their girls to a playmate's birthday party at Ladurée on Madison Avenue, and he was going for a long run in Central Park.

She'd straightened her waist-length hair such that it shone like glass and moved like a waterfall, and done her makeup so her hazel eyes were more grey than gold and seductively unreadable, and she opened the door wearing nothing but the skimpy Fleur du Mal bra and thong and Zanotti stilettos. But if Rad noticed any of it, he didn't comment on it. He slammed her front door and carried her to the bedroom, climbed over her on the fur blanket still wearing his joggers and muddy trainers, pulled her thong aside and entered her without a word.

He didn't stay long. He kissed her chastely at the door, and though she didn't request it, said he'd have a salted caramel macaron at Ladurée on her behalf. She didn't have the chance to model the silk robe for him, or the silver gray Lhuillier dress. Later, she noticed that his trainers had streaked grimy mud across the mink and fox fur blanket. She had no idea what to do to get it cleaned; when she called a furrier and dry cleaner for estimates, the numbers made her balk.

During the week, Rad texted her that he'd get away that Sunday to see her again. That he'd told his wife he'd joined the Manhattan team of the NYC Soccer League with games on Sundays, and so he could spend nearly the whole afternoon while his family assumed he was playing football. Nadia didn't put on the Fleur du Mal panty set: instead, she just wore her regular cotton bra and panties. After Rad fucked her, he didn't want to go out, and so she put on sweatpants and ordered from UberEats. The silver embellished cocktail dress hung in her closet untouched, its five-figure tag still dangling from its zipper.

And yet, Nadia looked forward to Sundays all week. On Sunday mornings, she went down to Patisserie des Ambassades in Spanish Harlem and bought baguettes and croissants and croquettes and stopped at Whole Foods on Lenox Avenue on the way back uptown for eggs and fresh butter and fruit, and fixed a brunch spread like an editorial in Better Homes and Gardens. Rad rarely touched any of it but would always say it looked scrummy and then open a bottle of wine that they would share in bed.

He told her stories about his childhood: weeks each summer spent visiting relatives in Cheltenham in the Cotswolds. And he told her about boarding school at Harrow and how he'd never gotten over his embarrassment the first day of advanced French class when he said "Mon morse ne fonctionne pas," rather than "Ma montre ne fonctionne pas." His stories were peppered with the names of friends and cousins and old chums from school, terms and idioms and other jargon with meanings specific to him and his own set, but that he never stopped to explain to her.

Sometimes he asked her questions, like how many partners she'd had (three, and it absolutely thrilled him that one had been a woman) and how old she'd been her first time (nineteen, which he marveled made her innocent and a late-bloomer) and what she thought about when she was alone and touched herself (another woman, Dear God, please say it's another woman: a blonde with big tits). After they talked and drank and made love, Rad would hold her close with a contentment Nadia yearned to feel herself and say, "This is a good thing we've got." Then he'd spring out of bed and pull his thermal jogging leggings on over his muscular rear and lace up his trainers and check his phone. He'd be absorbed in it for a few moments, his face sometimes serious and sometimes amused, and his thumbs flying fast over the glass screen, and Nadia would feel desperate to know who he was talking to and what about.

When she kissed him good-bye at her front door, she sometimes smelled herself on him. He'd told her not to wear any perfume and so she didn't. But sometimes, she would smell the intimate scent of sex laced in his beard or sometimes in his hair. She would feel the rush of a possessive thrill, wishing that his wife might get a whiff of the same and force Rad into a serious conversation about where he'd been and with whom. But she knew that his excuse, that he'd spent the afternoon playing football, allowed him to take a shower when he got home, first thing, if he didn't simply stop at an Equinox club at Brookfield or Court Street along the way.

She missed Rad when she didn't see him, but work kept her busy. Fall had come and gone and she'd shown her merits and been assigned a labor law case, her first big case with the firm. And really, her first big case at all—prior to, she'd only been to court for appearances and motion practice and to depositions with secondary witnesses. It was her first time supervising the paralegals with their discovery demands and production.

And she realized that she was more reliant on Trina than she could ever have anticipated: while Nadia knew the letter of the law, Trina knew its practice in New York County. She knew how to handle dates and who to call for records and was on a first name basis with all the law clerks for all the court offices. Where Nadia didn't know about case management, Trina picked up the slack.

At lunchtime, Nadia suggested a new Caribbean food truck at the corner of John Street that had a huge Twitter following. Trina laughed at her for ordering ackee and saltfish with biscuit and cabbage (it's lunchtime, not breakfast!) and bun and cheese (it's Thanksgiving, not Easter!), but Nadia was delighted. As they walked back to the office in the sunny but freezing weather, Trina reported the latest status of her sister's marriage. Nadia wanted to change the subject; true, she wasn't the one cheating with Trina's sister's husband, but she nonetheless felt dirty every time Trina brought it up.

"If I were my sister, I'd kill him," Trina said, scowling. "I'd kill his bitch-ass sidepiece, too. I'd burn all of his clothes. I'd destroy his business; I'd call all of his clients and tell them what a louse he is. I love my sister, and God bless her for her patience. But I don't understand how she can just wait this way, without doing anything!"

Nadia imagined Rad's wife waiting at home for him on Sundays. She didn't know what his wife looked like or even her name. She tried to imagine her, but each time, she could only imagine a taller, older version of a classmate from elementary school: a British girl with bucked teeth named Claire Davies whose mother dressed her in circle skirts and did her brunette hair in pigtails.

Was Rad's wife one of those women who spent their mornings jogging their puffin-like toddlers to Equinox, and working out in Lululemon and shopping at Saks? Or was she a busy career woman herself, dressed in Akris power suits and working late hours in some glossy office without any time to worry about where her husband was? On Sundays, did she even notice he was gone?

When they were together, were things good or were things deteriorating between them? Or was his wife happily oblivious to his dalliances? Did she know, and was she, like Trina's sister, patiently waiting out his affair?

If so, Nadia knew how to wait, too. In the evenings she sat at her dining table and read notated stacks of plaintiff's discovery responses and labor law-related cases to outline her deposition questions and arguments for motion practice. She ate premade salad mixes straight out of their plastic boxes and watched reruns on Hulu, and waited for Sundays.

One Saturday when Rad called at nearly midnight, she heard people laughing and talking in the background so loudly that she asked him where he was. It sounded like he was in a nightclub, but he was only calling from his brownstone in Park Slope. "I can't hear you that well," he said, laughing, "We're having a little party. I'm a bit tipsy. Miss me?"

She was watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which she'd never seen before and Rad said was hilarious. She'd paused the show when her cell phone rang. She pictured him walking up the stairs of his third or fourth floor, and nodding quietly over his mobile phone as he passed by some of his guests along the way, and wondered, a bit irritated, why he'd called her if he couldn't really talk.

"Nadia, tell me. Don't you miss me?" he asked again. She told him that she did.

"Mmm, I knew it. Send me pics, baby."

The next day, when Rad came to visit, Nadia asked him what his wife looked like. She waited until he'd fucked her and then come back from brushing his teeth in her bathroom with her toothbrush. He didn't seem surprised by the question. "It's hard to say. To me, she just looks like my wife…. Some people say that Teegan favors Rosie Huntington-Whiteley."

Teegan.

Nadia hadn't known Rad's wife's name before. When he left, she slowly swiped her phone awake and opened Google. Whereas she couldn't find photos online of Radnor, there were lots of search results for Teegan Tovey.

And especially lots in a public Instagram account @ttovtimes2 with hundreds of thousands of followers. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was a painfully accurate comparison, and repeatedly mentioned in the hundreds of comments below many glamorous photos. Nadia buried herself under the fur blanket and Frette sheets on the Restoration Hardware platform bed and, like Trina’s sister, didn't leave her bedroom for the rest of the afternoon.

Monday came, and Trina's sister and her husband were still fighting. Over the weekend, he'd returned to their home in Kew Gardens, but only to pack two suitcases and leave again. He didn't say when he'd be back. Trina's sister said she refused to keep living that way and wanted a divorce.

Nadia sat in her doorless office and listened as Trina congratulated her sister for finally coming to her senses. That there were better men in the world just waiting to come out of the woodwork. That the boys were going to be okay; that they would be better off without dysfunction and chaos in their home, and that all that had happened wouldn't set them back academically.

"Jared's nearly done. We're just waiting for Harvard, sweetie, but that's a given. It's alright if his grades slipped some, it doesn't matter whether he's salutatorian," Trina insisted gently. "Besides, he'll be working here at the firm part-time over Winter Break, and that's far better for him at this point than whether he was second or seventh in his class at Stuyvesant!"

Nadia stared at her own phone and scrolled once again through the hundreds of glossy Instagram posts by @ttovtimes2. Photos of beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed Teegan Tovey, sometimes in gossamer designer gowns, and other times wearing perfectly casual blouses and jeans, smiling happily at iconic, exotic sites around the world, sometimes with friends just as glamorous and blonde and sometimes with her perfectly adorable children. There were a slim handful of selfies with, as Teegan called Rad, her "studly hubs."

There was a post that was nearly a year old wishing a joyous holiday season to her many followers, and the photos showed off Christmas decorations around her Park Slope brownstone: boxwood wreaths hanging from wide satin ribbons in the enormous bay windows and over the stately fireplace mantle, garland laced with juniper gliding up the original Nineteenth Century staircases and multiple, exquisitely decorated trees—even a tree in the children's third-floor playroom and one enormous one outside on the backyard terrace. She wondered if Teegan Tovey had put up that year's Christmas decorations yet.

She imagined Teegan, her blonde hair in a confoundingly sleek ponytail and dressed in a perfectly fitting parka and leggings, followed by a nanny pushing her daughters, dressed likewise in puffy parkas and cashmere hats and mittens, in the two-seat jogging pram, to take the girls for cocoa at Colson before a playdate in the nearby park with her friends' children. Their nannies would supervise the children for the women, so that Teegan and her girlfriends, all close like sisters, could talk about recent little triumphs and frustrations and hilarity. And when the subject of husbands and lovers came up, Teegan would blush softly at some intimate, unshareable memories and smile proudly, none the wiser, as she said that Rad was busy as always at work and she and the girls missed him on weekends since he'd recently joined a football club.

Nadia wished that Rad would call or text her. It had been four days since their last conversation. Trina was off the phone with her sister and talking to their office's managing partner, Phil. His serious nature made Nadia nervous, but Trina was always easy and affable talking to him.

"Yes, Jared's still coming to work this year. He'll be here tomorrow, Phil. He had tests and things, but his Winter Break started today and he'll start here tomorrow morning."

"'Winter Break'? Back in my day, they just called it 'Christmas vacation' and you got the week off between Christmas and New Year."

"Well, they've changed it: the colleges take a Winter Break, and so the college-prep kids get the same. I've told him to help Nadia while he's here, since she's got so many documents that just came in on her labor-law case."

There was light laughter from Phil. "So, where's he going for college? Did he decide on Harvard yet?"

Nadia caught parts of Trina's response but clearly heard Phil as he mused, "I tell you, that boy's really something! Kids today, most wouldn't give up their vacation to come work in an office all day. Sure can't get my grandkids to do it. Ah, well. When he's president someday, then I'll be able to say I knew him when I was just an old Irishman from Brooklyn and he was just a high school intern."

When Nadia got to the office after court the following morning, Jared was already there and stationed by the Xerox printer-scanner with a stack of her paper files. She didn't say anything as she passed him, but she immediately realized that the school photo tacked to Trina's cubicle was more than a few years old. There was nothing childish about Jared's appearance; he was very tall and muscular and looked much older than his eighteen years. He wore a pale blue button-down oxford and grey slacks and black leather shoes and a striped tie which all were in step with the regular office attire of the middle-aged, paunchy male attorneys of the sleepy law firm but somehow awkwardly incongruent to his young, athletic frame. His coarse black hair was just a few shades darker than his clear skin and close cropped in a fade with smooth tight waves and clean edges.

Jared’s neck was the first thing Nadia noticed when he stopped by her office: his thick neck and powerful traps. They were noticeable even under his dull oxford shirt and made him look intimidatingly strong. They flexed subtlely when he rapped on her door with a coffee mug in one hand.

"My aunt was making tea" he said, staring down at her, "I thought I'd make you a cup too."

She raised her paper Starbucks cup. "Thanks, but I drink coffee."

He nodded and stepped into her office. "What kind?" he asked as he sat in one of her two guest chairs and placed the mug on her small conference table. "I can pick it up for you tomorrow morning."