A Dangerous Age

Couture royalty meets downtown grit and heady artists mingle with freewheeling socialites in A Dangerous Age, a sophisticated, indulgent, and delicious novel of contemporary New York City, perfect for fans of The Real Housewives Club and Sex and the City.

"This is the next beach book, especially for chick-lit fans and those who enjoy the TV show Sex and the City."

Auteur

Kelly Killoren is a model, jewelry designer, former editor of Elle Accessories, and the author of several books, including A Dangerous Age. An avid equestrian, Killoren lives in New York City with her two teenage daughters.

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A Dangerous Age

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Billy Sitwell’s apartment

167 Ludlow, Lower East Side

Tuesday, June 3

Girls’ night

Lu, we’re listening,” Sarah said. “Go.”

“Okay, first question: underwear. Are you boy shorts, G-string, or commando?”

We were sitting on the floor of Billy’s apartment, legs crossed Indian style like some nursery school powwow. There were sticky spots on the floor that we were all—except for Billy, because they were her spots—trying to subtly avoid, and the apartment was unbearably hot. Lotta had already raised an eyebrow at me about it more than once.

“Other,” Billy said.

I was making us take a sex quiz for a fluff piece I was writing for Cosmo. “ ‘Other’ isn’t an option,” I replied.

Long-limbed Lotta with her deep-blue Nordic eyes and smoky accent gave a dramatic sigh. “How many questions are there? And are we ordering anything? I’m starved.”

Billy was already on top of it, making a charcuterie plate from the oddball things in her refrigerator and the crackers and crudités we’d brought.

“There’s just a few,” I said to Lotta, who nodded but wasn’t listening because she was texting, or on Snapchat, or commenting on her Instagram feed. “It’s nothing big.”

Life doesn’t unfold: it pops open, the way a man rips off lingerie. That’s a thing my mother, Cheri, likes to say, and she’s right. Twenty-four years ago I was seventeen, sitting in first class on a flight from Chicago to JFK. I was drinking champagne because Cheri said we deserved it. I was leaving my small Midwestern town to be a model. I had an agent, I had a contract, and I was sitting across the aisle from Titus Brockton, one of the most famous artists in the world. Picasso-like famous. I didn’t know who he was but Cheri did. He was dipping a tiny spoon into a small tin of caviar. I noticed this right off because it was the first time I’d seen anyone eat caviar. It was also the first time I’d been on a plane. The dream was right there in front of me. Love, adventure, career—I was ready for all of it.

Fast-forward to tonight at the start of a restless New York summer. I’ll be forty-two next month and I didn’t see this coming. I’m sitting in the same apartment with the same friends, having a version of the same conversation we’ve been having for twenty years. The rearview mirror looks more like a halfhearted quickie than the sultry, slow striptease I’d imagined.

The four of us get together every Tuesday—we’ve done it for years since we all found each other here, when we were young and eager and fresh. We’re not so fresh anymore. We share two divorces and two failed careers, among other things. We’re in staggered states of disarray.

Billy’s unemployed and broke. Her mortgage check just bounced, again. She’s trying to finish and sell the cocktail-entertainment book she quit her job for, which hasn’t seen one full draft that I know of, and she’s running an “adventure supper club” out of her apartment for extra cash. Strangers pay to come to her home and get drunk while she feeds them kinky foods they can tell their friends about—things like fermented eel bisque and sheep’s bladder au vin. She’s a high-end foodie hooker.

Lotta’s recreational drug use is turning into a full-time job. She’s forty-five and still closing down Marquee. Every night. It’s become more than she can manage, and we’re not sure what to do about it. It’s not a good long-term plan.

Sarah’s filthy rich with an adoring fiancé and six frozen embryos, so she seems the most solid, but now she wants to be a “socialite.” We don’t quite get it. She’s going to galas and funding philanthropies, and she’s assembled a “team” whose sole job, it seems, is to keep her on Page Six. She’s also now completely obsessed with her hair.

Me? I’m a cliché. I married young, I had so much time. I thought I’d have two kids, a doting husband, and some sort of intellectually fulfilling career by now. Instead I have a set of outdated head shots, a pile of underwhelming clips, and my marriage is falling apart. Not in the Burton-Taylor way, either, with passion and smashed plates, but quietly, without fanfare. Like it never even happened. We’ve fallen out of love or lust or something or everything, I’m not even sure. It’s the oldest story in the book.

Tonight, though, it’s the girls. We’re all here. We’re all good.

We have a system with our Tuesdays. The first one is fitness. We take a class until we get bored or exhausted by it, then move on to something else. We switched from Bikram yoga to SoulCycle last month because Lotta could not stand the heat. Before that, we did Barry’s Bootcamp, climbing subway stairs and jumping park benches. We got in fantastic shape but it nearly killed us. Sarah was sidelined with an ankle sprain for eight weeks.

Second Tuesdays are cocktails. Locations vary, but Rose Bar and the Standard are our go-tos. Third Tuesdays are always a proper dinner out, where we are seated at a table and handed menus. Until three months ago, Billy was the restaurant critic for Gastro Eat magazine, and she can get us in anywhere on no notice, which is no small feat in New York. Then on the fourth Tuesday we stay in, rotating apartments. If there are five Tuesdays in a month, we skip the fifth, and that’s how it works.

Tonight is first Tuesday. We’ve switched it around, which sometimes happens, so they can help me with my piece. So instead of a park run, we’re at Bill’s and on edge. It’s eighty-five degrees outside and she doesn’t believe in air-conditioning. Billy is always saving the environment in small and insignificant ways, and one of those is refusing to artificially cool her air. That’s how she puts it.

“It makes no sense,” Lotta reminds her each time we’re here when it’s hot. “You won’t artificially cool your air in June, but in December you artificially heat it. What’s the difference?”

If we were a TV show, all of it would look great. Cocktails, witty lines, a minor drama to resolve, and then we’d shop. We could do this forever on television.

Sarah pecked at her phone, while Billy judged the wines we’d brought. Lotta cracked a window open and fanned herself with one of the books stacked up on Billy’s chair.

“Sarah,” Billy said, “are you crazy? This is a two-hundred-dollar Bordeaux. I’m not opening it.” Sarah shrugged.

Though it was Bill’s night to host, I’d taken charge and there was a growing impatience in the room. After my modeling career, I got a journalism degree and put it to work writing hard-hitting articles for m…