Page 5 of Mean Moms

A New Friend!

“You are bad , Frost,” breathed Art Chary into Frost Trevor’s neck.

Frost kept going, grinding down on her friend’s husband, as if trying to rub a stain out with her entire body.

She did it over and over, until she felt her pelvis start to tingle and her legs begin to shake.

Then she seized, her hair flying forward, her breasts swinging, her nipples catching in Art’s mouth.

She collapsed on top of him, gently nibbling his shoulder as she allowed herself to relax.

“Bad girl,” he said again, his face nuzzled into her neck.

Frost lay like that for a few minutes, inhaling Art’s scent.

Then she rolled to his side, staring at his defined chest, almond colored with barely any hair, rising with slow breaths.

His left hand was placed gently on top of it, his gold wedding band dulled by time.

Frost knew that its inside was inscribed HONEYDEW FOREVER , matching the inside of Morgan’s ring.

It was a private joke between the two of them: the name of the dive bar in Cambridge where they’d met, when Art was getting an MBA at Harvard and Morgan had been studying for her master’s in nutrition from Tufts.

Morgan, her high-heeled boots still covered in snow, had slipped on spilled beer, crashing into the bar and cutting her forehead on its edge.

Art, who’d been premed at Yale before deciding to switch to econ, had rushed to her aid, whisking her away to the emergency room with a supportive arm around her shoulder.

Out of all of them, Frost thought as she gently licked Art’s salty skin, Morgan loved her husband the most. And she didn’t blame her.

He was the most handsome dad at school and one of the most successful.

Art was also charismatic and kind; though he’d made a killing on Welly, the company’s mission included charity as part of its ethos.

For every pair of sneakers purchased, Welly gifted another to a person in need.

Morgan seemed to absolutely adore Art—she was always touching the dramatic swoop of his hair, giving him kisses on the cheek, banging into him like a fly to a zapper—which wasn’t something Frost could say about her own husband, Tim.

Frost looked at her phone. It was already two forty-five, and she needed to be at Atherton for pickup by three thirty.

King and Alfred had tennis lessons at the John McEnroe Tennis Academy at Randall’s Island, and they were excited to show their coach how much progress they’d made over the summer.

The family had brought along a private pro to Europe, the boys training on dusty clay courts in Spain and France while Frost had watched them, plying herself with white wine.

Though a summer abroad had sounded glamorous, and all her friends had proclaimed jealousy from the comfort of their Hamptons mansions, the trip hadn’t been a success.

The idea of it—as a cozy family escape, and a marriage kick-in-the-butt for Tim and Frost—had been better than the reality.

Tim, a movie producer, had been working the whole time, trying to get a project out of development hell, a midbudget drama about a dysfunctional family of circus performers called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Flying Wallendars!

Who would ever pay to see something with that stupid title?

But when Frost had said that to Tim, he’d totally snapped, accusing her of being dismissive of his work.

So Frost, bored and restless and pissed, drank too much while King and Alfred fought constantly.

She gently shook Art’s arm. He always fell asleep after sex, no matter the time of day.

Frost found it endearing. It reminded her of her sons, who could nap anywhere—at the dinner table, on a cold, hard floor, their beautiful eyes with that telltale hooded look, and then…

bam. Art fluttered awake. He looked up at her and smiled.

“Well, that was nice,” he said, taking her hand and kissing it. Frost nodded.

“I have to go get the boys and you have to get out of here,” she said, playfully dragging him across the bed, made up in Frost’s favorite white silk sheets.

They were in her apartment, her own private space.

She and Tim had bought it last year, after she’d said she wanted somewhere to make her art, somewhere that was just hers.

Tim had thought it was unnecessary—“Frost, come on, we have an entire house at your disposal, can’t you just designate a room to be your studio?

Can’t you fit these”—he’d pointed at the mixed-media collages Frost had been working on, lying vulnerably on their Vern + Vera dining table—“in the basement?”

Frost shook her head. She couldn’t work in her home.

There were too many distractions. She needed somewhere empty, somewhere spare and clean.

She’d kept at it, bothering Tim until he’d begrudgingly agreed to purchase this one-bedroom condo for $2,200,000 in cash in a new building on Twenty-Second near Park, a few blocks from their home in Gramercy.

She’d converted the living space to a studio, filling it with easels and materials, ranging from colored paper to wax to small objects she’d found on the street: coins, receipts, a solo leather glove.

The apartment was now her favorite place on earth.

She’d come here after drop-off and spend the morning hours tinkering with her current project—a photo collage portfolio of It Girls through the years, from Ali MacGraw to Chloe Sevigny to a picture of herself, Frost Trevor, at sixteen, staring blankly at the camera, alone in a banquette at a nameless club.

She’d layer materials over each photograph, obscuring the location, altering each girl’s face with paper.

One she gave a large blue eye, cut out from a magazine, on another she glued a picture of a pit bull over naked breasts.

It was meant as a commentary on the worth of a certain type of woman, their sad disposability after a period of intense societal worship.

Frost didn’t really consider herself an artist, though she was desperate to be one, a desire she’d only newly admitted to herself.

She’d grown up in the world. Her mother was a trailblazing female art dealer, and she owned an imposing seven-story, Norman Foster–designed gallery on the Lower East Side.

Her father was an uber-successful literary agent, working with the likes of David Foster Wallace and Philip Roth, among other male luminaries.

Frost had been the only child in a stunning apartment on Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Sixth Street; her bedroom had one of Andy Warhol’s Jackie prints hanging on the wall.

Frost had also been lucky enough to have been born beautiful, with copper-red hair and sparkly brown eyes.

She was a bright, aimless kid, attending Chapin, one of the best girls’ schools in Manhattan, but never putting her heart into it.

By the time she was twelve, she was sneaking into clubs with her older friends, drinking vodka sodas, smoking Marlboros, and staying out till all hours.

She’d given her first blow job when she was thirteen, to an NYU student she’d met at a party at Bowlmor Lanes on University.

She gave many more after that. Page Six would frequently publish pictures of her and her semi-famous friends, photographers trailing them on nights out.

Her parents, though kind, were absentee, always at events, traveling the world for their jobs.

Frost had wanted their attention, but it had never appeared.

Frost toweled off after her shower, glancing in the mirror and pinching her cheeks before going back into the bedroom.

Art was sitting on her desk chair and checking his phone.

They never spoke of Morgan or Tim, never even mentioned their names.

They’d been seeing each other sporadically for over a year, since last July, the night of the “Zoo-ly Fourth” theme party at Trina and Bud Cunningham’s East Hampton house, right on the ocean.

The outdoor space had been transformed into a fantastical zoo, including a bird barn and a polar area with penguins (an industrial-grade meat locker company came to facilitate).

The pièce de résistance was a trio of live zebras that the Cunninghams had shipped from an exotic animal farm in Texas.

The gossip that night had revolved around: A.

if a group of zebras was called a “zeal” or a “dazzle”; B.

the legality of converting a Hamptons estate into a zoo; and C.

the fact that Caroline Morehouse’s husband, Dave, had brought what looked to be a nasal spray for allergies, but in fact contained ketamine, which partygoers were spraying into their noses and getting high, high, high.

Frost had done K before, back when it was a club drug referred to as Special K, but not for a while—she was now strictly a booze-and-gummy kind of gal, having given up the hard stuff after the twins were born.