The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not any more. These days, lots of kids are born when their mummies and daddies aren’t married. Nobody cares.”

  “Is Auntie Annie one too?”

  “No. Granny and Grandpa were married by then.” There was no need for his sister to deal with the same stigma he’d had to endure.

  “And also, you can’t be one if you’re a girl.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You just can’t.”

  And it was true, he realized as he was saying it. The word had mutated, and all bastards were men. Girls could be all sorts of horrible, terrible things, but they couldn’t be that. He spent Friday night and Saturday in a clammy, isolating sweat of fear.

  He promised himself that he wouldn’t look at the column until he’d dropped the children off on Monday morning, because he didn’t want to be more distracted on Sunday than he already was; he found himself reading it as soon as it was available online, soon after midnight on Saturday night. He scanned it, looking for his new name, but it didn’t seem to appear very often—a couple of times at the be ginning, once at the end, nothing in the main body of the piece, as far as he could see. He read it again, properly this time, and his heartbeat started to slow. He’d been spared. She’d chosen to write about her romantic history, the long, sorry story of her sexual relationships with men, starting with her seduction by a school friend’s father when she was seventeen. (That old chestnut. How many times had he heard that story? If he’d been seduced at seventeen by, say, Ian Fielding’s mother, he’d have been a very happy young man.) She was placing the failure of their marriage in context. It was pretty good, the column. He’d forgotten that Elaine could actually write. It was painful, though, and raw, and angry, and self-hating. She was more or less saying that, by the time she met Charlie, she had been ruined: she’d already slept with too many men who had lied to her, disappointed her, pretended to like her and admire her but actually wanted only to turn her into something else . . .

  something that even Don Draper would have regarded as too geishalike. We watch those women in Mad Men and smile, relieved that we live in different times. But that’s still what men want. It’s just that now they know they’re not allowed to say it. When I met Bastard, I had already given up. Yes, he spent ten years trying to knead and pummel me into the shape he wanted me to be in. But actually, I didn’t feel much of it. I had given up by then. My romantic soul had already left my body.

  So . . . it wasn’t his fault! Charlie clenched his fist in triumph. If Elaine had been sitting next to him at the computer, he would have hugged her. On Sunday he took the kids swimming, and for a pizza, and to a film, and they stayed up later than they should have done on a school night to watch the results of a singing competition on TV; he felt like a new man. Next week, she would eviscerate him again, but next week was seven days away.

  3.

  “Is that Charlie?”

  “Speaking.”

  He had a mouthful of sandwich, which he was eating in a very expensive menswear shop. If he wasn’t taking a client out, then he spent most lunchtimes eating on the move—mostly because he couldn’t bear the people he worked with but also because he loved the neighborhood. His office used to be in town, but he was happier here, among the brand-new high-rise office blocks and the spotless chain stores. None of this had even existed when he had begun his working life. He and the rest of his clever, unpleasant colleagues had willed it into being, somehow.

  The assistants were giving him dirty looks, and he was returning fire. You need people like me, because the whole world is turning to shit, he wanted to say. So if not me, then who? And if I want to eat sandwiches, even sandwiches with mayonnaise oozing out of them, then I will.

  “Hi. You don’t know me. My name’s Helena Wyatt. A . . . well . . . someone I know who used to work with you gave me your number.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m . . . Well, you might know me as Bitch.”

  “Who?”

  “Bitch.”

  These days, he was wary of every call he got from people he didn’t know. There had been others, after the radio researcher—journalists and diarists from other newspapers, a strange man from a pressure group called Angry Dads. He didn’t say anything for a while—he needed to scroll through as much adult memory as he had available to him. Did he know or even think of anyone as Bitch? He did not.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know anyone by that name. Actually, I’m not afraid. I’m proud.”

  “You don’t look at the paper your wife writes for?”

  “I try not to. I’ve been reading her thing online.”

  “Ah. That explains it. Well, they’ve found someone to write a column called Bitch. My ex-husband. It’s on the same page as Bastard!”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes. So. We’re Bastard and Bitch. There’s quite a fuss about it.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Oh, you know . . . ” And then for a few moments she was unable to go on. Charlie could hear her trying to stifle sobs.

  “Do you want to meet for a drink later?” she said eventually.

  At work that afternoon, there was crisis after crisis, meeting after meeting. Voices were raised, and it was almost certainly all going to end with someone getting fired. It wasn’t going to be Charlie, though. He was too smart to get lured into that. After New York had been up for three or four hours and it became clear that the world—their world, yes, but actually everybody’s world, now—would survive yet another day, things calmed down a little, and he retreated to a conference room to investigate Bitch.

  Bitch was by Anonymous, although after Charlie had finished reading, he Googled “Helena Bitch Anonymous” and found the name of the author seventeen thousand times, in 0.23 seconds. He was a well-known controversialist, someone quite happy to make his money from saying things that he knew would upset people, especially people who read liberal broadsheet newspapers, or listened to debate programs on the BBC. He was a snob, and an unrepentant drunk, too. The column was misogynistic—even Charlie the Bastard could see that. It was also unconvincing and lazy and unfocused, and for a moment Charlie was proud of Elaine. She was capable of persuading anyone that he embodied all the qualities associated with the title she’d chosen for the column. Anyone reading Anonymous, however, would see immediately that he was a nasty, inadequate little man who didn’t deserve access to the children he claimed his ex-wife was keeping him from. Charlie looked at the online debate about Bitch, the blogs and Twitter and the comment pages under the column, and found only abhorrence and venom, all of it directed at Anonymous, with the odd twerp attempting to cause trouble by defending the indefensible. Bitch wasn’t the soul mate Charlie had been yearning for. She was way more sinned against than sinning.

  She was terribly pretty, too, if one was prepared to forgive the wan vulnerability, which Charlie presumed was temporary and related to circumstance. They met in a quiet and expensive Covent Garden hotel; she looked so young and fragile that Charlie initially discounted her when he scanned the bar looking for a likely owner of the voice he’d heard on the phone. She ended up approaching him, and he tried to joke about it.

  “Clearly I look like a bastard, whereas you look nothing like a bitch,” he said.

  She smiled warily. Charlie gave her plenty of time and room to disagree, but she offered nothing.

  “Oh, well,” he said. More time, more room, more nothing. “Friends are telling me to see a solicitor,” she said. “Have you thought about that?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . Well, I suppose because everything she says is true, more or less.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.” Actually, he could see that talking to someone about what Elaine had written could be very useful. “In your opinion, what’s the worst thing she’s said about me?”

  “I didn?
??t like that bit about watching pornography at your mother-in-law’s.”

  “Really? Why?”

  That particular misdemeanor he didn’t feel too anguished about. Not the porn part, anyway, and its inappropriateness. The isolation, the loneliness, the alienation, and the depression were another story, but neither Bitch nor Elaine was interested in that one.

  “I don’t know. It seemed . . . disrespectful.”

  “It was two o’clock in the morning. It was my laptop. I had my headphones in. Elaine just happened to wake up.”

  For a moment, Charlie was tempted to remind her of a few of his other offenses, argue that some of them were much more offensive, but in the nick of time he saw that this might be an unwise course of action.

  “Is everything he’s saying about you a lie, then?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Helena. “What’s the truth? Yes, I have asked him for more money, because he’s not giving us anywhere near enough. Yes, I’ve stopped him from taking the kids anywhere, because they’re scared of him at the moment. You’ve probably got exactly the same stories.”

  Charlie thought for a moment. He really liked this woman. Or, rather, he was really attracted to her, and nothing she had said so far had weakened the attraction. He suddenly saw that Elaine’s column was a sort of gift: Helena didn’t have to discover his worthlessness slowly, month after disappointing month. It was being revealed to her quickly and bluntly. He didn’t have to pretend that he was anything other than the person Elaine was portraying, and any subsequent evidence of sensitivity, intelligence, or parental competence would surely seem dazzling against this background.

  “Well,” he said. “Mine are a little different. There isn’t really another side to them. Like, I don’t know. I really did tell her sister to fuck off at her daughter’s christening. In a church. I suppose the other side is, most days I didn’t do that. It was really a one-off.”

  Helena laughed. This was good, he could see. It was working.

  “What makes writers think they have the right to do this to us, do you think?”

  “Did you know you were marrying a writer?”

  “Yes. It was what he always wanted to do. Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s it, you think?”

  “Yes. It’s our own stupid fault.”

  “I won’t make that mistake again,” said Helena. It wasn’t a come-on, exactly, but at least he didn’t belong to the tiny percentage of the workforce that she’d excluded from consideration. This was as close as he’d come to a boost in confidence for a while.

  Charlie suggested dinner. Her mother was visiting, so Helena called her and persuaded her to put the children to bed.

  There were other dinners after that, even though Helena’s status as Bitch lasted only another week. Her ex-husband’s column was dropped, after much media debate and a couple of expressions of discomfort from advertisers, companies that sold women’s cosmetics and tampons.

  “I’m sorry,” said Helena. “It’s not fair.”

  “His column was useless,” said Charlie. “And horrible.”

  “But you’re not a bastard.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re not more angry about it.”

  He shrugged. The truth was that Helena had no idea whether he was a bastard or not. It was easy to be nice to an attractive woman over a dinner table. The despair came later, with children and tiredness and the sheer drudgery of marriage and monogamy. The reason Charlie wasn’t as outraged as he could have been was that his conscience wasn’t entirely clear, what with the infidelity and the drinking and the willful lack of involvement in family life. Taking abuse in a national newspaper without attempting to hit back was actually a pretty good way of wiping the slate clean. He was hoping that when this was all over, his spiritual overdraft would have been paid off, and he’d be allowed to use the cash machine again.

  It was a while before Charlie and Helena were in a position to sleep together. Charlie now had his children every weekend, and Helena’s children still didn’t want to stay the night with their father, even in their own home. That still left plenty of time for the sexual act, of course, and Charlie had offered to book a hotel on a working afternoon, but Helena didn’t want to get dressed and go home after they had made love. Eventually she explained her dilemma to her daughter’s single, childless godmother, who offered to come and stay over on a weeknight. They were, finally, all set.

  And that was the week Elaine chose to write about Charlie and sex. There were many accusations, all of them damaging and none of them untrue. They could be summarized thus:

  (1) Bastard didn’t enjoy giving oral sex and could only rarely be persuaded to do so. He was, however, an enthusiastic and demanding recipient.

  (2) He was prone to premature ejaculation.

  (3) In recent years he had been able to achieve an erection only by pretending that Elaine was his school history teacher, Miss Edwards.

  None of this was information that Charlie, or indeed any man, would wish to share with a potential lover forty-eight hours before their first night together. And in the unlikely event that he had chosen to do so, he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to do so via the national press. He had money, and his children were well, and he wasn’t in a foxhole somewhere in Afghanistan—he appreciated that. Worse things happen at sea, of course they did, but not more embarrassing things. No sailor had ever felt as humiliated as this, surely. It was hard to imagine anything more excruciating than his next conversation with Helena.

  Elaine had been clever about it, because she was a clever writer. The column wasn’t about how useless Charlie was in bed. It was a column about male sexuality and the modern world and the Internet and feminism and a million other important subjects. But Charlie doubted whether that was what anyone would be talking or thinking about once they’d read it.

  “Which one was Miss Edwards?” his mother asked when she called on Sunday evening. “Was she the redhead?”

  He was wrong about there being nothing more excruciating than his next conversation with Helena. He may even have been wrong about worse things happening at sea, or in foxholes.

  “I really don’t want to have this conversation with you. Why are you still reading that bloody column?”

  “Because everyone tells me about it anyway. I don’t see why I should be the last to know.”

  “If you insist on talking about what Elaine wrote today, I will have to see a psychotherapist every day for the rest of my life.”

  “Well, it sounds as though you need to anyway.”

  “Can you not just . . . be on my side? Isn’t that what a parent is supposed to do?”

  “Who said I wasn’t? I just can’t remember what your history teacher looked like. I’m not against you just because I’ve forgotten a teacher from thirty years ago.”

  Charlie suddenly realized that Miss Edwards would be in her sixties now, probably. He needed to wipe the image of an elderly lady from his mind before Tuesday, just in case the younger version was needed.

  “Yes, she was the redhead.”

  “Oh,” his mother said. “Gosh.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

  “I don’t need you being . . . surprised by redheads. What I need is for you to say, ‘This must be awful for you. How are you bearing up?’”

  “It’s awful for all of us. Your father doesn’t want to leave the house.”

  “Why don’t you try talking to Elaine about it? Instead of me? There’s nothing I can do.”

  “You could not make the same mistake again. How about that?”

  “Which mistake? Marrying Elaine?”

  “Any of it.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind, in the unlikely event that I ever fall for someone with her own newspaper column and an insatiable desire to expose all.”

  But that was the only lesson there was to learn. All the other things Elaine
had written about weren’t mistakes. They were expressions of who he was and what he’d become, and he couldn’t do anything about any of it, apart from retrace his steps back and back and back, until he was fifteen or ten or three years old, and start again.

  Helena didn’t call him after the sex column, and he couldn’t bear to call her. On Tuesday he sent her a text saying, “Still on for tonight? Cxxx.” He didn’t hear from her for an hour, and he spent the whole of it feeling sick. He had changed his mind about the benefits of having his sins enumerated and described in advance. He was going to be the first man in the history of the world ditched for being no good at sex even before he’d had a chance to prove it one way or the other. But then his iPhone pinged. “If you are. Hxx.” One less kiss than he had offered, he noticed, but two beat the dreaded one. One, in his experience, indicated downright hostility.

  They met in the hotel room, early evening. There was a good deal of awkwardness. Helena sat down in the one armchair, so Charlie sat on the sofa. They weren’t even facing each other.

  “Do you want to talk about . . . about what Elaine said on Sunday?”

  “Not really.”

  “No. Me neither.”

  Charlie poured her some champagne. The sound of the fizz drew attention to their silence. It was loud enough to make them want to smother it with whatever came into their heads. What came into Charlie’s head was a cough, and then a snatch of “Rolling in the Deep,” which he hummed. What came into Helena’s head was an observation about the column they didn’t want to discuss:

  “I mean, it’s different, with different people, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Of course it is. Shall I open a tin of nuts?”

  “It might not be like that with us.” And then, perhaps after having considered all the territory the “that” had to cover, she said, “I mean, you know. Some of it.”