The description of the man’s teeth, hands, and the little hairs on his earlobes was unmistakably of Philip, although Enid couldn’t bear to read the details about his penis.
“Well?” Mindy demanded. “Aren’t you going to do something?”
Enid looked up at Mindy wearily. “I told you to hire him — this Thayer Core — months ago. If you had, this would have ended.”
“Why should I be the one to hire him? Why can’t you?”
“Because if he works for me, he’ll only continue to do the same thing.
He’ll go to parties and make things up and write unpleasant things about people. If you hire him, he’ll be working for a corporation. He’ll be stuck in an office building, taking the subway like every other working stiff, and eating a sandwich at his desk. It’ll give him a new perspective on life.”
“What about Lola Fabrikant?”
“Don’t worry about her, my dear.” Enid smiled. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll give her exactly what she wants — publicity.”
Two days later, the “true” story of Lola Fabrikant appeared in Enid Merle’s syndicated column. It was all there: how Lola had tried to fake a pregnancy to get a man, how she was obsessed with clothes and status, how she never gave a thought to being responsible for her own actions, or even what she might do for anyone else — making her the ultimate example of all that was wrong and misguided about young women today. Portrayed in Enid’s best schoolmarmish tone, Lola came off as the poster child for bad values.
On the afternoon the piece came out, Lola sat on the bed in her tiny apartment, reading all about herself on the Internet. The newspaper lay beside her computer, folded open to Enid’s column. The first time Lola read it, she burst into tears. How could Enid be so cruel? But the column wasn’t the end of it, having ignited a firestorm of negative comments about Lola on the Internet. She was being called a slut and a whore, and her physical features had been dissected and found somewhat lacking — several people had hypothesized, correctly, that she’d had a nose job and breast implants — and hundreds of men had left messages on her Facebook page, describing what they’d like to do to her sexually.
Their suggestions weren’t pleasant. One man wrote that he would
“shove his balls down her throat until she choked and her eyes bulged out of her head.” Until that morning, Lola had always enjoyed the Internet’s unfettered viciousness, assuming that the people who were written about somehow deserved it, but now that the negativity was directed at her, it was a different story. It hurt. She felt like a wounded animal, trailing blood. After reading another post about herself in which someone wrote that the Lola Fabrikants of the world deserved to die alone in a flophouse, Lola once again burst into tears.
It wasn’t fair, she thought, holding herself while she rocked on the thin mattress. She had naturally assumed that when she did become famous, everyone would love her. Desperate, she texted Thayer Core again. “Where are you????????!!!!!!!!” She waited a few minutes, and when there was again no response, she sent another text. “I can’t leave my house. I’m hungry. I need food,” she wrote. She sent the text, followed immediately by another: “And bring alcohol.” Finally, an hour later, Thayer responded with one word: “Busy.”
Thayer eventually turned up, bearing a bag of cheese doodles. “This is all your fault,” Lola screamed.
“Mine?” he asked, surprised. “I thought this was what you always wanted.”
“I did. But not like this.”
“You shouldn’t have done it, then.” He shrugged. “You ever hear of
‘free will’?”
“You have to fix this,” Lola said.
“Can’t,” he said. He opened the bag of cheese doodles and stuffed four into his mouth. “Got a job today. Working for Mindy Gooch.”
“What?” Lola exclaimed in shock. “I thought you hated her.”
“I do. But I don’t have to hate her money. I’m getting paid a hundred thousand dollars a year. Working in the new-media department. In six months, I’ll probably be running it. Those people don’t know squat.”
“And what am I supposed to do?” Lola demanded.
Thayer looked at her, unmoved. “How should I know?” he said. “But if you can’t make something out of all this publicity I got you, you’re a bigger loser than I thought.”
June arrived, and with it, unseasonably warm weather. The temperature had been over eighty degrees for three days; already the Gooches’ apartment was too warm, and James was forced to turn on the sputtering air conditioner. Sitting beneath it one morning, perched over his computer and thinking about starting another book, he listened to the sounds of his wife and son packing in Sam’s bedroom next door. He checked the time. Sam’s bus left in forty minutes. Mindy and Sam would be leaving any minute — as soon as they did, he would read Lola’s sex column.
When he’d returned from the final leg of his book tour, exhausted and jet-lagged, he’d claimed he was too tired to even think about writing but had managed to get over to Lola’s apartment six times in ten days and, on each visit, had made fantastic love to her. One afternoon, she had stood above him while he spread open her labia and licked her firm little clit; on another occasion, she’d fucked him while he lay on his back, positioning her bottom in front of his face, and he had slid his middle finger in and out of her puckered asshole. In the evenings after these encounters, Mindy would come home and remark that he appeared to be in a good mood. He would reply that yes, he was, and after all his hard labor, didn’t he have a right to be? Then Mindy would bring up the country house. They couldn’t, she conceded, afford a house in the Hamptons, but they could find something in Litchfield County, which was just as beautiful, and maybe even better than the Hamptons because it was still filled with artists and not yet overrun with finance types. In her usual pushy way, Mindy had convinced him to drive up to Litchfield County for the weekend; they’d stayed at the Mayflower Inn to the tune of two thousand dollars for two nights while they looked at houses during the day. Mindy was, James knew, trying to be reasonable, limiting their choices to houses under one point three million dollars. James found something wrong with every one, but in an act of defiance, perhaps, Mindy had signed Sam up for a month of tennis camp in the tony little town of Washington, Connecticut, where Sam would be residing in the dorm of a private school.
Now, while Mindy was packing Sam’s things, James was wondering if he dared take a quick peek at Lola’s column. In her last installment, she had written about the time James had alternated between penetrating her with a vibrator and his own penis. Unlike Mindy, Lola had the good sense to change his name — calling him “The Terminator,” because he caused orgasms that were so strong, they could be terminal — and James was so chuffed, he couldn’t be angry. He had even bought her an enameled Hermés bracelet, which she’d been desperate for, saying all the women on the Upper East Side had one, cleverly paying cash so Mindy couldn’t trace the purchase. He looked longingly at his computer, anxious to know if Lola had written about him again, and if so, what she’d said. But with Mindy in the apartment, he decided it was too risky. What if she caught him? Valiantly resisting temptation, he got up and went into Sam’s room.
“Four weeks of tennis,” James said to his son. “Do you think you’ll get bored?”
Mindy was placing packages of white cotton athletic socks into Sam’s bag. “No, he will not,” she said.