The table had been cleared, the bottle of vintage port emptied, the Los Angeles sun long set, when Steve, who until now had remained little more than a spectator to our conversation, breached his monastic stillness to ask, “Have you two ever considered swinging?” 

Nate and I were seated across from him and Debra, who looked away toward the bespoke lithograph on the wall. I couldn’t decide if the lithograph, a conglomerate of geometric shapes and colors, was stylish or gauche.  

“Swinging?” Nate asked. 

Steve picked up his long-stemmed wine glass and swirled the liquid within. His upright posture emitted a hauteur at odds with his scruffy beard and nondescript attire. His nails had been chewed to the quick. “You know,” he said. “Wife-swapping. Partner-swapping. Whatever you want to call it.” 

Nate squeezed my thigh beneath the table. He was not a prude, my husband, but his Catholic upbringing made him squeamish at the mention of bedroom conversation. He cleared his throat. “We, uh, have not considered that, no.” 

“Oh, come on.” Steve fixed us with a hard, probing stare. Broaching this topic had evidently required more courage than he let on, and I felt embarrassed for him. Possibly he’d been thinking of it all evening, wondering when the proper lull in conversation would arise, modulating his tone so that the question would sound off-hand, a casual musing. 

“Don’t be coy,” I said, touching Nate’s arm with a small laugh. Then, to Steve: “Well, of course we’ve talked about it.” 

Why had I said this? I didn’t know. Debra and Steve’s effect on me was similar to that of the popular girl I’d befriended in high school, to whom I’d lied about losing my virginity so that she wouldn’t take me for one of those priggish sorts who believed her first time ought to be special. 

“Now let me get your opinion on something,” Steve said, “because Deb and I go back and forth. Do you think it would be better for the other couple to be friends or strangers?” 

I took a sip of wine, my mouth puckering at the astringency. I knew little about Debra, even less about Steve. She and I had met a few months before at a yoga class. I had been sitting cross-legged on my mat, watching athleisure-clad women extend their legs and contort their spines like swans in a courtship display, when a tall blonde asked if she could set her mat beside mine. “Sure,” I said, though the studio was half-empty, and there were several open spots she might choose instead. 

“I’m Debra,” she said, with a slight uptick on the final vowel.

“Catherine,” I replied. 

She carried herself with the elegance of pedigree, her neck so long it seemed to strain the outer limits of gracefulness. There was a breathless, unsettled quality about her. Her alarmed blue eyes stirred in me a maternal urge to reach out and comfort her. 

“It’s my first time here,” she said. “My husband and I recently moved to town, and he suggested this might be a good place to meet people.” 

At the front of the room, the teacher took her seat beside the Tibetan singing bowl. “Child’s pose, please,” she said. The murmurs settled as the other women rested their foreheads on their mats. “I’d like to begin today with a mantra from the spiritual leader Ram Dass: ‘I am loving awareness.’ As you move through the next hour, hold that mantra in your head: I am loving awareness.” 

I tried to do as the teacher instructed, but as we moved through sun salutations, the only words I could hear were Debra’s: A good place to meet people. Was there some assumption I was unaware of that people who did yoga were lonely? Could she sense this loneliness in me?

After class, Debra asked if I’d like to get a drink. I said yes. 

Six months later, here Nate and I were, having agreed to sleep in the guest room of Debra and Steve’s elaborate mansion. The house was nestled into the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, where dozens of panthers had recently been displaced by a spate of wildfires that had left the trees spindly and bare, like those in a Halloween drawing. 

“Theoretically,” I said, “if one were to enter into this swinging arrangement, how would they go about it?” 

Steve and Debra exchanged a glance. Steve proceeded to lay out the details, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. He spoke so low that I had to lean in to hear him, though there was no risk of our being overheard; we were the only four in the house, which was surrounded by thick hedges and a wrought-iron fence. 

Steve had made his money as an early investor in Bitcoin, Debra had said—a shock of wealth to a boy who hailed from coal-mining country, Pennsylvania. At first, he’d been intimidated by her well-to-do upbringing on a former plantation in one of the Carolinas. I scanned his face. It was a bit goofy. A trail of pink dots marred his jawline. In a movie, he’d be cast as the comic relief. 

“What does that mean?” Nate asked. “Those two swaps?” 

“Great question,” Steve said. “Soft swap is kissing, fondling, blow jobs, etcetera.” 

Beside me, Nate reddened. Was he uncomfortable or titillated? It was hard to tell. 

“And full swap?” I prompted.  

Steve smiled. His olive eyes shone with greed. 

“Dessert?” Debra asked, dutifully rising. 

In the kitchen, I watched Debra lean into the gaping mouth of the refrigerator. Her cream-colored dress clung to her backside as she pushed aside a bowl brimming with grapes. 

I made my way to the dirty dishes piled near the sink. I knew which plate was mine—the one with the most leftovers, the buttery potatoes smeared into a thick paste along the bottom. I rolled up the sleeves of my cardigan and turned on the faucet. 

Debra wheeled around. “Oh, no, no. Leave it. Sandra will be in on Monday to clean up.” 

I nodded as if a maid were a luxury to which I too was accustomed; as if Nate and I had not departed the poorly lit one-bedroom we occupied in Los Feliz hours earlier with our dirty gym clothes left on the bathroom floor, this morning’s coffee grinds still in the pot. 

“It’s so hard to find a good housekeeper,” Debra said, peeling a layer of Saran wrap from the top of a Key-lime pie. “Sandra’s not the best, but she’s honest. We caught our last housekeeper stealing out of Steve’s drawers.” 

The housekeeper, of course. Probably Debra and Steve removed the price stickers from their expensive green juices before Sandra arrived, in a gesture of humility. They were wealthy but would be loath to display just how wealthy. Even the outside of their house was relatively unobtrusive, concealed from street view by a front of towering trees. Not until Nate and I had crossed through the slab-like front door did we fully grasp the enormity of the home: six bedrooms, nine baths, a billiard room, an infinity pool overlooking the Valley. There was even a wine cellar downstairs, whose impressive stock made me realize that the bottle we’d purchased on the way over would likely be discarded as soon as we left. 

What did two people do with so much space? They could entertain, host movie nights in their at-home theater, but something about the brio with which they’d welcomed us indicated otherwise. 

As someone who didn’t come from money, I’d always viewed wealth as a binary: you had it or didn’t. Now I saw that wealth, too, occupied a spectrum. There were the people who shopped exclusively at Whole Foods and didn’t think twice about purchasing two-ply toilet paper, and then there were people like Debra and Steve, whose house gave off a stately, undomesticated air, as if every detail had been calibrated by an algorithm, an aestheticized lack. Every appliance, even the faucet, worked on a motion sensor, as if pulling a lever or pressing a button would require too much work. I recalled the meditation seminar Nate and I had attended at the local Y and wondered if all this emptiness was intended to signal Debra and Steve’s heightened states of non-attachment. Such deprivation and self-control, no glaring compulsion to buffer their flimsy senses of self with gratuitous objects like the rest of us. Which came first: the wealth, or the desire to resist its trappings? 

Debra set the pie down on the countertop between us and opened the silverware drawer. The polished utensils caught the gleam of the overhead pendant lights. From the dining room floated the sounds of the men’s voices. Laughter. 

“Nate’s different from what I was expecting,” she said. “Different from how you’ve described him.”  

“The men seem to like each other,” I said. 

“I think so,” she agreed. 

I ached to acknowledge the specter of Steve’s brazen question, but a memory stopped me. It was a memory of the time I’d brought to yoga a picture of a flapper dress I thought Debra might like for an upcoming party she and Steve were attending. I’d seen the dress in a magazine and thought it might be perfect. When I handed Debra the photo, her eyes welled up with tears. Her vulnerability goaded me, and I felt an urge to harm her that I could not explain, an itch to show her how life was for the rest of us. 

Debra rested the pie server on the lip of the ceramic plate. “Shall we?” 

Back in the dining room, Steve was regaling Nate with tales from his and Debra’s stint on an erotic lifestyle cruise, where every surface was fair game for play except the balconies, due to obvious safety concerns.

“We should go on one of those,” Nate said as I sat beside him. He kneaded my shoulders with his thumbs. He was very drunk. 

“We’ll talk about it,” I said. 

I knew I sounded sulky, strait-laced. It wasn’t that recreational sex didn’t pique my curiosity—of course it did—I just didn’t want Nate to want it too. 

“Now, Catherine,” Steve said in an amused tone. “Be a good girl.” 

It was in that very instant that I decided I hated him—hated how he seemed to know things about me even I didn’t know. I wondered what Debra had told him, if she’d relayed the self-deprecating anecdotes I’d shared with her, stories of my failings at work and home I’d carefully cloaked in comedic sketches.

“You’d like it,” Steve said. “There’s even nude karaoke.” He leaned over, propping a spoon in front of Nate’s mouth like it was a microphone. “Sing out, brother.”   

Much to my dismay, Nate opened his mouth and belted the intro to Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’. Steve chuckled. I wanted to smack Nate—couldn’t he see that they’d cast him as the fool? 

Debra fanned the dessert forks into a scallop in the center of the table. A collusive look passed between her and Steve. 

“Nate was just telling me he’d be up for a little fun tonight, actually,” Steve said. 

“Is that so?” I asked. 

Nate flushed even redder. “I mean, I can see why people do it, the cruises, the swapping. It sounds…exciting.” 

I wanted to hide. I wanted to leave this house, with its sinewy lines and suede couches and Art-Deco motifs. I wanted to be back in our tiny apartment, where the windows wouldn’t stay open and the upstairs neighbors were always blazed, the reek of it seeping through the popcorn ceiling.  

“So,” Steve said, “what do you think?” 

The question was directed at me. The others had already agreed, entered into some pact whose terms I had missed. Steve leveled his gaze on mine, and though my impulse was to acquiesce, I sensed that above all, he craved the exhilaration of proving that he could weasel past my boundaries. 

“I don’t know,” I said, demonstratively hedging. “Tell me more.”  

He went on for another ten minutes, parrying from every direction. It was Debra who at last changed the subject. We got around to discussing kids, a requisite topic for all couples of a certain age. Steve said he didn’t want to have regrets, though he didn’t specify what those regrets might be nor how children would get in their way. My eyes slipped to Debra. Her small red mouth was screwed up tight like she’d sucked on something sour. 

Nate and I equivocated. We said, “Perhaps,” and, “Someday.” 

“You’d be a good mother,” Debra said flatly. Her eyes were pretty and blank, like gems.  

Nate and I retired to the guest bedroom which was, like everything else in the house, perfectly designed. An antique duvet outfitted the bed; a drop-light chandelier adorned with copper leaves dangled from the ceiling. In the bathroom, a Mondrian-style sideboard had been repurposed into a vanity. A wicker basket overflowing with sundries rested on its surface, the tiny shampoo bottles embossed with the name of a French atelier. 

I was standing by the dresser, a handsome cherrywood piece that struck such an imposing figure, it had scared me when we’d first entered in the dark. Nate sat on the edge of the bed, unlacing his shoes. I wondered which of us would crack first and make some quip about this evening’s developments. We were still entertaining the plan as if we’d go through with it: that, come midnight, Debra and I would swap places and sleep with each other’s spouses. The notion was absurd, and I thought maybe Nate was trying to test how far he could push me until I crumbled and admitted that fine, maybe I’d cared too much about winning Debra and Steve’s validation, and for what? Hadn’t I repeatedly returned from yoga to complain about Debra’s neediness? I thought of the many times I’d criticized her flagrant desperation to Nate, complaining solely to hide my envy of her ability to be so vulnerable. 

I went over to him and curled up on the mattress. He rubbed my back. “Do you really want to do this?” I asked.   

“Do you not?”

I didn’t know what to say. I liked believing that Debra and Steve considered us worthy of their game. Privately, I wondered if what they felt toward us was more than mere attraction—maybe they loved us or suspected they could, given enough time. 

Nate stood, taking me in from a distance. I hunched my shoulders reflexively, discomfited by his gaze. 

“What?” I said. 

“Did you eat enough?” 

“Yes.” 

I folded my arms, daring him to challenge me. Resigned, he turned, and my resentment swelled to fill the space he left behind. In the floor-to-ceiling window, his glossed expression looked hurt. The window was double-paned, so there appeared to be two of him, transparent against the night. No sign of the mountains that had been so clear just hours before, no panorama of burnt chaparral. 

Nate didn’t push, though we’d both seen the roasted duck breast cut into minuscule cubes on my plate. It was a game I liked to play: how little could I eat without people noticing? I didn’t want anyone to look at me and think I was disciplined—thinness wasn’t enviable if others knew it was hard-won; I wanted them to believe I didn’t crave food at all. I pictured Debra’s willowy body, her size zero waist; she, an embodiment of the Platonic Form of femininity—was that what Nate wanted? 

He tapped his phone where it sat charging on a wireless dock.  Five to midnight. I fought the urge to go into the bathroom and apply another coat of mascara—it felt wrong to want to look better for another woman’s husband than my own. 

“You’re serious about this?” he asked. 

“Why not?” 

I went over to him and ran my hand over his crotch. He glanced up, his expression revealing nothing. We kissed. 

I walked through the hallway toward the master bedroom with one hand pressed to the wallpaper. The darkness seemed blacker than black. The smell was familiar, the same tropical scent I caught whiffs of each time Debra inverted her body into downward dog. I imagined running into her, our eyes locking in an electrifying moment of connection. But the hallway remained empty. 

I stopped in front of the bedroom door. It cast a long, slanted shadow over the floor. Before I could knock, a voice from within called, “Come in.” 

Steve lay on the bed in his white boxer briefs. The mellow lamplight smudged his features so that they appeared soft, kind. The sight of him struck me as ludicrous—this whole evening, a twisted joke whose punchline had landed me here. 

A horizontal mirror stretched across the far wall. In the reflection, I made out several shut doors. A few must be closets, another the bathroom. A voice inside me wondered if the doors led elsewhere, to a dungeon filled with torture implements. I shoved the thought away. I could see myself in the mirror too, backlit by the hallway sconces, and Steve, the curve of his spine. 

Of the many rooms in the house, theirs was by far the most opulent. How strange, that they should concentrate their energies on this room that so few would see. How telling, too, that it was here, away from the eyes of admiring friends, they’d most need their eminence reaffirmed. 

Steve walked over to me and put his lips to my ear, the way men do in movies. “Take off your clothes. Leave on your heels.” 

A giggle rose in my throat, but I did as told. 

“This too,” Steve said, plucking at my bra strap. 

I unclasped my bra and folded it beneath my shirt, grateful for the darkness that I trusted would hide the sweat stains on the underarms of my cardigan. 

“Go to the bed,” he said. 

I started to walk. 

“No. Crawl.” 

Uncertainly, I knelt. The floor was polished, concrete. I crawled to the bed, sensing his eyes on me as I stood and sat down on the edge of the mattress. The sheets were slippery in the manner of quality silk, and I felt for a moment as if I were balanced on a wave that would soon recede. 

“Lie down. Place your hands over your head.” 

I moved as directed, marveling at my inability to say, No; my need to oblige like a tether. Steve worked his fingers beneath my underwear. “What do you want?” he whispered. 

He was naked, touching himself and me at the same time. His penis was hard, fully shaved, and again my mind drifted to the starkness of the house. He knelt so that his knees framed my thighs. In the instant our eyes met, I felt the air change. There was a sacred quality to the depth of Steve’s attention, one that reminded me of Debra’s tears that day in the studio. I wanted to take his hand and tell him that I understood; that we were not so different, he and I. 

Steve pinned down my hands with one of his. “I want you to cluck.”  

“Cluck?” 

“Like a chicken.” 

We considered each other, negotiating. I opened my mouth and clucked. 

“Again,” he ordered. 

I clucked, louder this time, the taunting sound children make in mockery. Steve smirked, and I turned my flaming face away, humiliated not so much by the act—though there was that—but by how eager I’d been to please him. 

The bed squeaked as he began to thrust. It surprised me that he had not put on music; he postured as the type who’d love a good jazz track. He flipped me over so I was face-down on the mattress and began to penetrate me from behind. I yelped. My scream seemed to spur him on, so I screamed again, and again he drove into me, my skin smarting as the pain took hold. I imagined him turning me back around, telling me he loved me. I pictured the four of us—Steve, Debra, Nate, and I—on a sparkling cruise ship together, playing tennis, singing karaoke in the buff, lying out by the whirlpool like old friends. 

He pulled out of me and came into a tissue. The end had been anticlimactic, and now his whole performance—the grunting, the changing of positions—seemed silly, theatrical. An incredible sadness crested within my chest. He sat down beside me, smoothing the coverlet with one hand. Sad, yes. To be awed by him required a certain amount of distance. 

“I’m going to go,” I said. 

I removed my heels and slid into my pants, watching him in the mirror on the far wall the whole time. Head hung, body still, he reminded me of one of those pietà sculptures Nate and I had glimpsed on our honeymoon in Italy. In the hallway, the carpet felt obscenely plush beneath my feet. 

I discovered Nate in the guest bedroom alone. He was reading a book beneath the covers, some mystery novel with a grim forest photo on the front. 

“Where’s Debra?” I asked, whispering in case she was hiding nearby. 

Nate shook his head. “It was too weird. We couldn’t go through with it.”  

He pushed back the duvet, inviting me inside. I opened my mouth to say I’d join him in a bit—I first needed to remove my contacts and makeup—but an abrupt exhaustion overtook me. I climbed in and he reached out, his arms coming around me. 

“How about you?” he asked. “Did you have fun?” 

I swallowed. “We couldn’t do it, either. We just talked.”

“Talked?”

“About the wildfires, the panthers.” 

I thought we’d agreed, I wanted to say. How had I so gravely miscalculated? This whole time, I’d believed we were moving in parallel, but here we were, stranded on two separate isles. 

Nate kissed me on the forehead and shut the light. The moon through the window reminded me we’d forgotten to draw the motorized blackout shades. Wisps of cloud hung suspended in the windless air. For a strained moment, neither of us moved.  

“Well, good night,” Nate said, flipping onto his side. 

“Good night.” 

In the semi-darkness, I recalled the last yoga class Debra and I had taken together before she’d concluded that yoga wasn’t for her. The instructor had disrupted her usual introduction to announce that Ram Dass, the spiritual leader, had died—or, as she put it, “withdrawn his consciousness from his body.” 

“It’s a sad day for all of us,” she said. “Ram Dass said, ‘We are all just walking each other home.’ In his honor, let’s start off class today with some call-and-response chanting.” 

I turned to make a face at Debra, but her eyes were closed. 

The teacher said, “Bow your head, bring your hands to heart center, and repeat after me.” 

She opened her mouth and sang in a clear, confident Sanskrit. When she paused, the class repeated the phrase back to her. An ocean of prayer swelled around me. As I raised my voice to join in, I felt myself on the verge of tears and did not know why.