“Sometimes. I transcribe tapes, copy notes from interviews.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now imagine doing it with numbers, and not all the numbers, just the ones and the zeros.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s what I’ve done every day for more than twenty years.”
At other tables people were laughing and joking around, but in our little comer there was a solid five seconds of blank silence. No one knew what to say about the tedium of my life. Everyone, I was sure, felt sorry for me-everyone except Mona, who, I hoped, would never bring me to another work-related event.
She glared at me and I pretended not to notice.
After that the conversation broke down and people turned to whomever it was they sat next to. I was placed beside a young woman named Daria Hunt, who edited a section of the magazine called Toys.
“What’s that?” I asked, as I was supposed to do.
“The magazine is for twenty- to thirtysomethings, mostly white,” the tiny, pale-skinned woman said, “upwardly mobile, urban, conservatives-thinking-they’re-liberal, prescription-drug dependent or alcoholic, college-educated, postfeminist, post-Christian office workers. Maybe Wall Street, maybe Fifth Avenue. And what, you ask, would this surprisingly large group of people want to know more than anything?”
I was completely entranced, forgetting the handsome but humble ex-cop and the mysterious, mistaken Star. Daria Hunt filled up my horizon with her sharp wit and extraordinarily accurate sound bites.
“I have no idea,” I said slowly, the counterpoint to her fast tongue.
“Toys,” the plain Jane with the bedroom eyes said.
“Like Legos?”
“Maybe. Yeah, Legos for the thirty-year-old, latent-adolescent stockbroker who both lives and works on Maiden Lane. He also needs a sixty-inch plasma TV, a radio-controlled multicolored lamp that goes from green to red depending on how the stock market is doing at any given moment, and a handheld, twelve-ounce computer that could land a rover on Jupiter while downloading gobs of porn featuring women who only look like children and men he really wants for himself.”
“I see,” I said. “And what do the women in this select group want?”
“Sex,” Daria said, throwing up her hands. “Sex stories, sex toys, sexy underwear, sex inhibitors, sex stimulants. Sex aroma therapy, orgasm gauges, dental dams, female condoms, and let’s not forget video phones for a secret worldwide link where they can anonymously expose themselves to men anywhere, at any time, while never having to smell their panting breath or unwashed nethers.”
“Do you have all those things?”
For some reason this question threw Daria out of her well-rehearsed, world-weary persona. She cocked her head and looked at me sideways. Maybe there was something to me.
“In my office,” she said at last.
“Wow. That’s really amazing. I guess businesses send you free samples hoping for a favorable review.”
“I have enough condoms in my, excuse the expression, drawers to keep the red-light district of Paris going for a week.”
I like plain-looking women. What they lack in movie-star headshot style, they make up for in intensity. I think maybe my posture and tone imparted these predilections to the young, pseudo-jaded editor.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” a voice over the loud speakers said. “My name is Trina MacDonald—”
Before she could continue, the audience broke out into loud applause and cheers. A few people rose to their feet; Mona did.
This was a mild shock to me. Here I had never even heard the name Trina MacDonald and my wife of twenty-two years stood to applaud her. I wondered, if I were to receive an award for assembler language programming, would she get up out of her chair, slap her hands together, and call out for everyone to hear.
“Thank you, thank you,” Trina MacDonald’s amplified voice boomed. “Please sit down. This is too much, really. Diablerie is just another periodical aimed at the heart of America.”
There was some polite laughter and the people who had risen returned to their seats.
“Tonight is not about fund-raising or rabble-rousing or vying for power in the White House. You, every one of you here tonight, have been invited to celebrate the start of this oh-so-important publication...”
She said more but the renewed applause drowned out the words.
After the ovation subsided, she spent the requisite time thanking the people without whom this undertaking would have, could have, never gotten off the ground. When their names were called out, those people stood to be adored by the crowd. Mona was singled out. So was Daria.
This social business taken care of, Trina, a fiftyish and in-shape woman clad in a form-fitting, green sequined gown, got serious.
“Diablerie is a really good time. Our stories are about the world today, about how to get ahead and stay there without going mad. It also covers some of the stories about people who were given up for lost but who made it back by resuscitating themselves when the monitor had gone flatline. One of those women is Barbara Knowland. She was lost in the sex-crazed, drug-filled nightmare that has destroyed so many misguided, self-medicating Americans. She was accused of murder and nearly convicted when a series of lucky events kept her from a long Me in prison. But it was this terrible possibility that woke Barbara up. She decided to get straight and write about that Me, to use her experiences to deliver her from depravity. I can only hope Diablerie will be able to do the same thing for its readers.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Barbara Knowland.”
Trina held out a hand and a woman rose from a table up front. It was a short woman in a blue dress. Star.
The peacock shawl fluttering behind her, Star ascended the stairs to the podium. She and Trina kissed and then the publisher left the stage like an aging movie star who had just passed her mantle into younger, abler hands.
Star was carrying a folded square of paper that she placed on the podium. Then she went about moving the microphone down so that it would accommodate her shorter stature. She unfolded the paper, looked at it, looked up, squinting at the spotlight, and then down at the audience.
She took in a quick breath, as if she was about to speak, but no words immediately followed.
“My name is Barbara,” she said at last, “but for more than twenty years I was known as Star. One dictionary I looked up that word in said, I quote, ‘a pinpoint of bright light in the darkness.’ ” She looked around. The audience was completely silent. “That was me. I lived on communes with virgins and murderers. I sold sex in the cities for men I called my boyfriends. I carried drug-Med condoms in my stomach across fifteen borders, and I was tethered by a chain to the back of a truck while Leon Cargill raped, murdered, and dismembered men, women, and children right there next to me.”
She stopped for a moment then. Maybe others thought that she was experiencing pain from those appalling memories, but I didn’t think so. I had met the real Barbara, Star. The woman who chided me for forgetting some long-ago tryst was not going to show real weakness. You could see that in her small, bicolored eyes.
“And then just when I thought the nightmare was over, the police charged me for the crimes. For a while there, when they thought Leon was too crazy to stand trial, they wanted to make me the mastermind. They speculated about my death sentence in the daily papers in Memphis. They found blood on my clothes and in my shoes. They said all kinds of terrible things about me. That’s when I turned to Buddhism, when I started meditating.”
Barbara/Star reached under the wood podium and came out with a small bottle of water. She guzzled from this. No sipping or tasting for her — no, she turned the bottle upside down with her lips wrapped around the mouth and emptied three quarters of the contents.