Georgiana played like garbage that evening, too anxious about what might happen after their game, but Brady played even worse. Since the courts were by the East River, his crazy shots went flying off into the water, and even though they started out with six tennis balls they ended with only four. They hit like such idiots Georgiana was pretty sure people thought she was a three-five and she would have been mortified if she weren’t so busy thinking about how Brady’s chest looked in his shirt.
After they finished, they both smiled at each other, flushed and uncomfortable as they delivered their lines. “My apartment is just down the street, want to come over for a beer or a drink?”
“Oh, sure, that would be cool.”
They barely talked as they walked, and when Georgiana unlocked the door to her place she held her breath, suddenly afraid he would change his mind or that she had left, like, a giant teddy bear in the middle of her bed. Once they closed the door they didn’t even pretend to look for a drink. Brady kissed her and she kissed him back. They kicked off their shoes and pulled their shirts over their heads and fell on the bed, tangled up and sweaty and laughing, and when they finished Brady lay on his back looking at the ceiling with a silly smile on his lips.
“You know how they say you can tell how good someone is at sex by watching them dance or play sports?” Georgiana asked. “Well, the great news is that you are much better at sex than you are at tennis.”
“Oh, thank God,” Brady laughed. “I don’t even want to know what the sexual equivalent of hitting two tennis balls in the river might be.”
“I think that would be like, breaking a bone or a piece of furniture.”
“I mean, breaking furniture could be fine. I bet some very prominent sexologists have broken a bed.”
“I think sexologists are the people who study sex, not the ones who are really good at doing it.”
“You think they learn everything from books? I don’t think so. I think they probably need to log field experience to get certified. Like how a hair stylist needs to give student haircuts.”
“What would be the bigger risk then? Letting a student sexologist sleep with you or a student stylist cut your hair?”
“I’d pick the haircut,” Brady said. “I’m not vain, but I am very picky about who I have sex with.”
“Me too,” Georgiana said seriously. She sort of felt like she should confess how inexperienced she was, how few boyfriends she’d had, how little she knew about this whole thing, but at the last minute she bit her tongue. It was going so well, why screw it up by admitting that? She was just so happy.
* * *
—
While they remained formal at work, they fell easily into a routine outside the office: they met for tennis and sex every Tuesday, then sex without tennis on weekends. They didn’t only have sex—sometimes they went for a run through Brooklyn Bridge Park, around the piers and down into Red Hook, where the Statue of Liberty seemed impossibly close, where tugboats were moored along the docks, where they ran past warehouses with open doors and could peer inside and see glassblowers and welders and artists working. They played basketball on the courts at Pier 2, where teenage boys blasted music as they waited for their turns, spitting and leaning against the cement wall. Then they would go back to her apartment and shower—or not—and fall into bed hungry and exhausted.
Sometimes it felt like the extreme physicality of their relationship was all tied up with their intense connection. They were two bodies who loved being alive in their bodies. They were not just mouths and hands and breasts, they were quads and hip flexors and biceps, they were muscles to stretch, to ice, and their sweat was part of everything they did. Georgiana felt most like herself when she was moving, and she could tell that Brady was the same way. When she was running, she never worried about who was looking at her or what she should say; the butterflies and knots in her stomach were replaced by the pleasant burn in her lungs and her legs, knowing that the only thing she needed to worry about was moving, pushing forward, that she belonged entirely to that moment.
Brady didn’t seem interested in meeting her friends or family yet, and she didn’t push to meet his. It was natural to keep their relationship a secret at work, with him being so much more senior, and a decade older; maybe it made the spark even brighter, to know that they existed in a place outside of normal life. Georgiana didn’t need to be his girlfriend; she didn’t need to stake that claim, because she knew, completely and positively, that everything she felt for Brady was reciprocated, that they could call it friendship and he would still look at her in a way that made her insides go hot and electric. They were friends with benefits, and for Georgiana that benefit was that she was sleeping with someone she loved completely.
SIX
Darley
Darley liked to think that she was easygoing: She ignored foot faults in family tennis, she never sent back food in a restaurant, and she even gritted her teeth and smiled when Malcolm lay down on the couch wearing the same germ-encrusted clothing he’d worn on the plane. There was one thing, however, that made Darley insane with annoyance. White moms at the playground, older squash ladies at the club, even, horrifyingly, some of Darley’s own extended family: they said, “Half-Asian babies are so cute.” Or “I wish I could have a half-Korean baby!” Or “Your kids are so lucky to have such an exotic look.” It made a vein pulse in Darley’s temple. The thought that Poppy and Hatcher were so different from all the other kids these women saw, or that they were “exotic” like lychee nuts imported from the tropics, filled her with fury.
For Darley it was a painful reminder of how very white her world had always been. Although they lived in Brooklyn, their entire apartment building was white. Their circle of friends was nearly all white, their Florida club was all white, and when she looked around Cord and Sasha’s wedding, she could count the guests of color on one hand. While Darley’s parents had loved Malcolm from day one, there were still moments when it was painfully obvious that they only ever hung out with white people: When Tilda pronounced “BIPOC” as “BIP-ock,” when Chip called anything with salsa “ethnic food,” when they referred to R&B, hip-hop, or pop music as “gangster rap.”
When Poppy turned one, Darley and Malcolm threw her a party at the Casino. For Malcolm’s family, the first birthday, the dol, was basically a bigger deal than their wedding. The Kims insisted on paying for the entire thing, hiring caterers and buying Poppy a beautiful traditional Korean outfit, red silk with light green sleeves. They served steak and salmon, they passed the baby around for everyone to hold, and then they put her on a big blanket in the middle of the room for the doljabi. The doljabi was a tradition meant to symbolize the child’s personality. Typically, one would lay out an array of objects, including thread, a pencil or book, and money, illustrating longevity, intelligence, and wealth. Whichever item the child crawled to would represent their prospects. For fun, they also laid out a tennis racket, a toy airplane, a test tube, and a calculator. When Poppy crawled toward the test tube, Malcolm’s father cheered—another chemist in the family! The cheering startled Poppy and she burst into tears, and Darley ran to pick her up. They tried again, but she just sat there and chewed on her sleeve. They scooted the tennis racket closer, zoomed the toy airplane around her head, waved the calculator to get her attention, but she was uninterested. They finally gave up and changed Poppy back into her smocked dress before giving her a piece of cake. Darley, six months pregnant and starving all the time, ate her own and then her daughter’s and hoped nobody was thinking what she was: Oh, Poppy is going to take after her mother and do nothing.