Four Blondes

  Evie picks out some shoes. All high-heeled sandals. Fuck-me shoes, Winnie would call them. He watches as Evie’s foot slides into the sandal. She has good legs. Great legs, actually. She models the shoes, turning this way and that. “Jimmy,” she says, “I really want you to be happy for me. I’m trying. Trying to make something out of my life. Why can’t you and Winnie be supportive? For a change.”

  “We are,” James says.

  Evie puts her hand on his shoulder for balance as she leans down to take off the shoe. He doesn’t brush her hand away. She looks at him suggestively, and for once, he looks at her suggestively back. If she can break the rules, he thinks, maybe he can too.

  He spends four hours shoe-shopping with Evie. They go to Barneys. Bergdorf’s. Saks. They go to lunch (Gino’s). Evie drinks wine and he does too (he objects at first, ordering bottled mineral water, but then, after Evie has nearly consumed her first glass, he quietly orders a glass for himself, over his shoulder, as if she might not notice). Finally, they decide on the perfect pair of shoes for Winnie. Manolo Blahniks. Sandals. The shoes cost five hundred dollars. He pays gleefully. He and Evie part on the street corner. “I’m going to call you tomorrow,” she says. “So we can discuss my article.”

  “It’s a piece, Evie, a piece. Not an article,” he says.

  He walks away. The little bit of alcohol (and it really was only a little bit, one glass only) is wearing off and he feels slightly queasy, like a thing that’s been left out in the elements for too long. What has he done (has he done anything)? He hails a cab. For the first time in his marriage, he wishes he didn’t have to go home. (But he can’t think of where he’d like to go instead.)

  WINNIE LOOKS AROUND

  Winnie still considers it her job to be the good-looking one in the relationship. Being good-looking is part of mastering the world. It is part of being perfect. (It is not about being beautiful. Beautiful women are self-indulgent. Beautiful women are stupid because they don’t have to try.) She is five-seven and weighs 125 pounds. If she let herself go, let her body reach its natural weight, she’d probably weigh between 130 and 135 pounds. But she won’t let herself go. (It’s about control.)

  Winnie thinks about weight a lot (probably too much. She should be thinking about more important things, like ideas. But who can help it?). She is very, very against women’s magazines using skinny young models. It’s one of her pet peeves. (She wrote a two-part series about the topic, called “Skin and Bones is Not Sexy,” and afterward, she went on two newsmagazine programs on TV, where she destroyed her opponent, a fashion editor from a women’s magazine.) But she would never want to be “fat” herself. (She feels bad when she sees friends who have gained weight. She feels superior. But only because she knows they are unhappy.) She keeps her weight under control by running around the reservoir in Central Park every weekday morning at seven A.M. (she knows it could be dangerous, but it would be more dangerous to gain weight). She weighs herself afterward. Examines her naked body in the mirror. Turns sideways to make sure her stomach isn’t bulging and her breasts aren’t sagging. But they both are. A little bit. (It’s frustrating. It makes her hate herself. She reminds herself that she’s had a child, which doesn’t help much.) If she is two pounds overweight, she takes care of it. Taking care of herself is part of being a nice girl.

  Sometimes, when Winnie looks around (meaning her office or the sites she goes to on the Internet), she feels like she’s the only nice girl left in the world. (Sometimes she feels like it’s a crime.) When Winnie was growing up, everyone was from a “nice” family. (They might not have been that nice behind closed doors, but no one talked about it.) Winnie’s mother was always perfectly dressed. Her house was beautifully decorated (with antiques and silk draperies). She cooked and cleaned. Winnie didn’t. And her mother didn’t make her. They both knew that Winnie would have “a career” and “a cleaning lady.” (They would never call anyone “a maid” or “a servant.”) Her father was remote but not unpleasant. He was just a father, like everybody else’s father. He wasn’t that important. He paid the bills. Her parents are still married.

  Sometimes, when Winnie looks around, at the young women who now work in her office, she wonders what happened to the nice girl. (She knows what her assistant would say: “The nice girl is s-o-o-o-o-o over.” Then she would look at Winnie. She wouldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t have to. Winnie would know what she was thinking: that Winnie was over.) None of the young women are nice girls anymore (and they don’t care). They wear black and flaunt their (ample, sometimes already sagging) bosoms. They wear short skirts. Dresses that look like lingerie. They have tattoos. And piercings. They live downtown in dirty little apartments and have sex a lot and talk to one another about it the next day. No one can say anything to them. Everyone is afraid of sexual harassment.

  Sometimes (and Winnie can’t believe this) Winnie is afraid of them. She can’t believe she is already ten years older than they are. She has nothing in common with them. Even when she was ten years younger, she wasn’t like them. She was more ambitious. And more focused. She didn’t use sex to get ahead. (Although she did marry James, which, she has to admit, didn’t exactly hurt her career.) She didn’t come to the office hungover, and she didn’t take drugs. (Last year, one of these young women was caught shooting up heroin in the ladies’ room. She was found nodding out in a stall. By a cleaning lady. The girl was sent to rehab. She wasn’t fired. She couldn’t be. She came back two months later.

  Eventually, she was gently moved to another magazine.)

  These young women aren’t scared of anything. (They’re hungry. And arrogant. They’ll do anything to get ahead.) Last year, two young women were caught plagiarizing. One of them plagiarized two paragraphs from a piece Winnie had written three years before. When Winnie read it, she felt sick. (She felt violated. By another woman. She couldn’t believe another woman would do this to her. She thought women were supposed to stick together.)

  Nothing happened. (Winnie complained. The management said she should be flattered the young woman plagiarized her. It was a compliment.) Eventually the young woman was promoted.

  Winnie would like to try to be friends with these young women. But she’s afraid the gulf is too wide. She would like to say, “Hey, when I was young, I was a rebel too.” But she knows they would look at her blankly. (That’s what they always do. To gain control. Stare blankly.) She would like to tell them that when she was a teenager, wanting to move to New York City and do “great things” was considered daring. As was having seven lovers before she met James. (One was a one-night stand. And one was an affair with a professor. Who was twenty years older. He was the first man to perform oral sex on her.) But she won’t tell them. She knows they would laugh. She knows that, by the time they’ve gotten to twenty-five, these young girls have already had a hundred lovers. (And probably a veneral disease. Or an infection. From a piercing or a tattoo.)

  On the day of Winnie Dieke’s thirty-eighth birthday, she wakes up and feels depressed.

  That afternoon, Winnie does what she has been doing on the afternoon of her birthday for the past ten years: She goes to Elizabeth Arden.

  She pampers.

  She has her hair highlighted and blown dry. She has a manicure and a facial. She has a bikini wax. (She would never shave down there. Shaving reminds her of what happened when she had the baby. She’s not sure she wants to do that again.)

  The bikini wax hurts. She hates it, but she has one every two months. It gives her ingrown hairs, which she sometimes picks at absently with a pair of old tweezers before she gets into bed. (James ignores this. He has gross habits too, like picking his nose while he’s reading and rolling the snot into a little ball and examining it before he flicks it away onto the carpet.) During the bikini wax, Winnie wears paper panties. She has to spread her legs a little (but only a little, she tells herself), and the woman (the facialist) has to touch her a little down there. They both pretend that she isn’t, just as Winnie desperately
tries to pretend that she isn’t thinking about sex. But she always does. She tries not to. She tries not to think about the young women in her office and how they’ve probably had sex with other women as well as men. Tries not to imagine that women know what other women want. They want someone to spread their legs. Instead, Winnie wonders what will happen when she gets gray hairs. Down there. It’s going to happen someday. What will James think?

  Does she care?

  She and James don’t have sex much anymore. When they do, it’s always the same. He performs oral sex on her. She has an orgasm. They have intercourse. He comes. Winnie has never had an orgasm from “just fucking.” (She doesn’t believe it’s possible. She secretly thinks that women who say they can are faking it.)

  After the bikini wax, when the woman leaves the room and Winnie puts on her own underpants (practical black cotton bikinis), she always wants to touch herself down there, but she doesn’t. There are limits to how far she will go. Especially when it comes to being “sexy.” She will not wear lingerie. Overly short skirts. See-through blouses. Or ridiculous shoes.

  “What are these, James?” she asks later, standing in the bedroom. The strappy sandal, so delicate it looks like it might break from simply walking across a room, dangles from her finger.

  “It’s your birthday present,” James says.

  “Why?” Winnie asks.

  “You don’t like them,” James says in a hurt voice (knowing it’s the only way he might possibly get out of this horrendous situation he’s created, which he is beginning to enjoy).

  “You know I don’t wear shoes like this. I don’t approve of shoes like this,” Winnie says.

  “Evie got that assignment from The New York Times,” he says.

  “Did Evie pick out these shoes?” Winnie asks.

  “It’s disgusting. She got it by sleeping with. . .,” he says, naming the famous journalist Evie picked up at the book party a couple of weeks before. “She says she’s still seeing him.”

  Winnie looks at James. When she first met him, she wanted to be him. (Everybody wanted to be James then. He was going to have a big career. The kind of career that Winnie wanted. James was the next best thing.)

  “Do you think people still want to be you, James?” she asks. Casually. (He knows that when Winnie asks these questions out of left field she is laying a trap for him. But he’s too weary, and a little hungover, to figure this one out.)

  “Why would anybody want to be me?” James asks.

  “That’s just what I was wondering,” Winnie says. She carefully packs the sandals back into their box. “This is really a pain, you know,” she says. “I want to return these, but I don’t know when I’m going to have the time.”

  “Do it on your lunch hour.”

  “I don’t have a lunch hour,” Winnie says. “Not anymore. The magazine is expanding my column. To two pages. So I’m going to be twice as busy.”

  “Well, good for you.”

  “Can’t you sound a little more excited? I’m a big deal now.”

  “I am excited,” James says. “Can’t you tell?”

  “Why don’t you get dressed now, James,” Winnie says.

  He and Winnie are going out. He changes his shirt and puts on a tie. He feels angry. (He can never do anything right.) He taught Winnie everything she knows (or thinks he did). When they first met, Winnie would sit for hours, listening to him and asking him questions about his work. When she got drunk (they used to get drunk quite a bit at the beginning and have easy, passionate sex), she would sometimes say that she wanted to be a serious journalist too. That she had ambitions and aspirations. That she was smart. James never really paid attention. He wouldn’t have cared if she was dumb. (And now he sometimes wishes that she were. Dumb.)

  At first, James saw Winnie as one-dimensional. And only in relation to him. She was the high school girl he could never get in high school. Then he saw that she had other qualities. With Winnie, situations that felt awkward before (parties, socializing) felt natural. After a year, everyone started asking when they were going to get married. Suddenly, he found himself asking the same question. (He wasn’t sure where it came from. Inside? Or was he just repeating what everyone else was saying?) She wasn’t perfect (he couldn’t put his finger on why), but he didn’t think he’d meet anyone better. Plus, all his friends were getting married. Buying co-ops. Having kids (or talking about it). He would be the odd man out again, like in high school.

  And he’s still the odd man out. (He wishes he were still with Evie. He wishes he were getting a blow job from her right now.)

  “Come on, James,” Winnie says.

  They go to Bouley for Winnie’s birthday, where, as usual, they pretend (and it really is just pretending now, James thinks) to get along. When the bill comes, they each put down their credit cards and take their receipts, which they will turn into their magazines as a business expense.

  EVIE’S “PIECE”

  “Have you read it?” James asks. It’s a few days later. Sunday morning. Early. The Sunday morning Evie’s piece is scheduled to appear in The New York Times.

  “Read what?” Winnie asks. She’s in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. It’s really the only time she cooks (if you can call it that, James thinks), cutting grapefruit and putting out slices of smoked salmon and smearing cream cheese on bagels.

  “Evie’s piece,” James says.

  “Oh. Is it in this weekend?”

  “She says it is.”

  “Really?” Winnie says. “I haven’t talked to her.”

  “She calls me,” James says.

  “I hope you don’t talk to her either.”

  “She’s still seeing . . .,” he says, naming the famous important journalist.

  “That’s nice,” Winnie says. She puts the platters out on the dining room table. She unfolds a paper napkin. She begins eating.

  “Aren’t you curious?” James asks.

  “I’ll get to it later,” Winnie says. “In the meantime, I’m thinking that maybe we should run our salon more efficiently. Maybe we should e-mail people a question the day before, so everyone has time to think about their answers. I think we’ll get better responses that way.”

  “I thought we were” (you were, James thinks) “getting good responses.”

  “We can always do better, can’t we, James?”

  Winnie eats two bagels stuffed with cream cheese and salmon. “Be right back,” she says. “Have to brush my teeth. Onions.”

  She goes into the bathroom, and, as she has been doing after almost every meal lately, sticks her finger down her throat and throws up.

  When she returns, James is reading the paper.

  “You’re disgusting,” she says.

  “What? I’m not supposed to read the Times just because Evie has a piece in it?”

  “Oh come on, James,” Winnie says. She snatches up half of the paper. She begins turning the pages (she can’t help herself, James thinks, she can never help herself). Finally, she gets to the Styles section. There, under the heading “Thing” is a tiny box with a story on meat loaf At the bottom is Evie’s byline.

  “Did you know about this?” Winnie asks.

  “What?”

  “Evie’s ‘piece.’” Winnie tosses the paper to him. She stands up. “Are there any more bagels left? I’m still hungry.”

  In the afternoon, Winnie calls Evie. “Congratulations,” she says.

  “Hey!” Evie says. “Thanks.”

  “So how does it feel to be a journalist?”

  “Great,” Evie says. “I’m working on another piece for them next week. See? I got the lingo right. I said ‘piece,’ not ‘article.’” There is the sound of shuffling in the background. Evie laughs. “Can you hold on?”

  “Is someone there?” Winnie asks. (God, Evie is so rude, she thinks.)

  “Mmmm, yeah. . .” Evie says, naming the famous important journalist.

  “That’s perfect,” Winnie says. “Because James and I wanted to know if you
and . . .” she says, naming the serious important journalist, “wanted to come to dinner next week. Our treat. We’ll work it around his schedule. Oh, and Evie?”

  “Yes?” Evie says, somewhat suspiciously.

  “Just remember one thing,” Winnie says.

  “What’s that?” Evie says.

  “You’re one of us now,” Winnie says (smoothly, so that Evie won’t suspect how difficult it is for her to choke out those words). “And we are the media.”

  II

  WINNIE’S BAD HABIT

  Winnie has developed a bad habit and she can’t help herself.

  Every morning now, when she enters her office—a large black building on Sixth Avenue that screams “I’m important”—she hurries through the lobby and into the elevator (she once calculated that she spends an hour a day waiting for elevators and riding in them, and wishes someone would invent a faster one), walks quickly along the beige-carpeted hallway and enters her office—a small, bland white room with a window, three sickly spider plants, and a small blue couch—and flips on her computer.

  She types in her password. Takes off her coat. Types in “www.ama” and hits enter, at which point the computer goes immediately to Amazon.com. And then (she can’t help herself, she can never help herself) she types in the name of the serious, important journalist.

  She has been doing this every morning for the past two weeks.

  She checks his book’s sales ranking, then she scrolls down over the reader reviews.

  Her favorite one is this:

  Boring and Utterly Pointless

  “Imagine if your most boring poly-sci professor wrote a book and forced everyone in the class to read it? You (sic) want to kill the guy, right? Read the ingredients on your cereal box instead. It’s more interesting.”