Within fifteen minutes of takeoff their physical desire for each other was mutually understood. Forty-five minutes in and Olga had already rationalized the dubious morality of this lust as the perfect counterbalance for the despicable behavior of Dick’s wife and child. By the time they landed, they had made a plan for him to join her for a nightcap at her hotel once the others had gone to bed.
Afterwards she wondered, would she have made the same decision had they booked her direct?
ACCESS
Her freshman year in college, Olga had taken a part-time job at a preppy clothing store near campus, where she worked in the menswear department. Day after day they would come, her classmates, in their cargo shorts and T-shirts. Casually trying on a $300 sports coat or slipping into a $500 pair of loafers. Sometimes they would pull out a credit card, sometimes they would buy nothing—the indifference always striking her. She studied them, noticing that the wrinkled dress shirts they wore over their college tees, the ones fraying at the cuffs, were also monogrammed. Their watches, and they all seemed to wear watches, were thick banded and heavy. Rolexes and, more often, brands she’d never even heard of before. Sometimes they would come in with girlfriends—always sun-kissed, waifish girls—to look for a shirt or a tie for a formal or fraternity banquet. Weekends brought the moms and dads. Older, starched versions of the sons and girlfriends. Occasionally, one of the women would be wearing a pricier version of Olga’s own work uniform: a button-down, man-tailored shirtdress, which Olga would bind herself into with safety-pins to prevent from gaping where her bust and hips swelled. Olga noted how differently the garment communicated on their lithe, flat bodies. How it bathed them in effortless elegance. She noted how much she felt herself in a costume for a life she could never have.
Olga worked at that store for one full year and none of the boys who came in ever recognized her from class or the dorms or the library. If they did, they never said hello. No one ever asked if she was also a student at the college, and surely no one assumed so. She was, in that environment, to those boys, like a hanger, or a price tag, or the machine that swiped the black American Express cards. Not an object to be desired, but a tool to facilitate the acquisition of desirable things.
But Dick—who if never a customer in that exact store, had certainly bought his Nantucket Reds in a similar establishment—saw her. That, she knew immediately. When she fucked him, she felt that she was fucking every son and father who had made it through an entire transaction without ever once making eye contact. Not even when she handed them the bag of their carefully tissue-wrapped purchases. After she fucked him—and this would last for days, sometimes—she felt as if she had taken her middle finger and poked it in the eye of every flat-chested, narrow-hipped girlfriend, wife, and mother who never even registered her existence as they flicked through the racks of clothes and held up ties questioning aloud if this blue would match the blue in their Lilly Pulitzer dress. When she ignored him—his texts or calls or invitations for weekends away—the knowledge that she was both an object that he desired and the gatekeeper preventing him from having it filled her with delight. The pleasure of being lusted for was amplified by the consciousness that she might be the only thing he’d ever coveted that couldn’t be his.
For nearly a year Olga rode this high, but now, finally, it had begun to wane. When it was just sex, she delighted in the affair, but lately Dick had been pressing for a real relationship, a circumstance that interested her not at all. Dick was tedious and needy in a way that she was repulsed by, yet felt compelled to indulge. He was sweet, but she found him simple: he’d married his college sweetheart, they had kids, he inherited his father’s hardware store empire. He was competent enough to grow the business, but he was hardly an innovator. Even his divorce was boring. Because no one knew about their affair, the financial matters were settled quickly and quietly. And what, after twenty-six years of marriage to one person—five of which were completely sexless—did Dick then want to do? Just repeat the whole thing, but with another woman. No sooner did Dick move out than he was pressing Olga to move in. Had she been a different type of girl, one who valued her sanity less and inherited wealth more, perhaps Olga would have seen this as an opportunity. Instead, she could imagine nothing more boring than a life filled with the minutiae of Dick’s personal wellness routine or intermittent fasting rituals designed to keep him “young.” She couldn’t imagine the horror of suffering a holiday with Victoria and her dough-faced husband, no matter how exotic the locale they were in. She also could not bear the thought of letting Dick get one more thing that he wanted.