Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey

Author:Ceridwen Dovey [Dovey, Ceridwen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7: Eloise

Friday afternoon of Reunion Weekend

(May 25, 2018)

After making stilted conversation with the woman who was clipping bits of dead cuticle skin away from her toenails, Eloise had finally lapsed into silence. It was clear that the woman, who was from Cambodia and did not speak much English, was relieved Eloise had stopped talking. She struck up a conversation in her own language with the woman working next to her, who was painting the toenails of the next chair’s occupant a severe eggplant color.

Several armchairs down, Jules and Mariam were chatting while two women scrubbed their feet and massaged their calves.

Though Eloise had booked for the three of them, the salon was extremely busy – it seemed that almost every alumna in town was there, wanting to look her best at the first official reunion events that evening – so Eloise had not been able to sit next to her friends. She’d told them to take the two adjacent chairs, which they’d probably thought was her being kind. The truth was she needed to think through, one last time, how she was going to tell them about the surrogate.

The massage function of the chair was on, to Eloise’s discomfort, but she somehow felt it would be rude to ask the woman working on her feet to switch it off. The automatic rollers were chugging up and down her spine, pushing her forward and back in jerky motions, while beneath her thighs another roller was moving around erratically, as if she were sitting on a mechanical mouse.

One of her pet hates – and it seemed there were more and more of these lately – was automated equipment that was imperfectly designed. The inevitable war between humans and AI had surely started the day somebody invented a motion-sensing flush for public toilets. Each time she leapt up, pants around her ankles, after her butt was sprayed with filthy water mid pee, she would gladly have poked to death the little red sensor behind the seat. The same went for this inept massage machine that should really be marketed as a torture device.

She breathed deeply and tried to ignore the fact that she was paying a woman to wash her feet. It was wrong at so many levels.

She glanced down the long row of women of all ages, colors, shapes. Some of them had their eyes closed, some were paging through celebrity magazines or thumb-tapping at their phones, some were staring at the large TV on the opposite wall. They all probably thought that it was fine because they were paying for the service, but was it so very different from the rich women of ancient Rome having their bodies pampered by slaves?

Binx liked to point out that Eloise, scholar of the psychology of pleasure, had a problem being on the receiving end of it. It wasn’t just that she struggled to enjoy having her feet massaged by an underpaid woman from Cambodia. At the other end of the scale, it had

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