“She was one of them,” Paul countered. “And we’re not.”
“Paul,” she said patiently. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m making real money now,” he said. “And I expect to be treated with a certain amount of respect.”
“I thought you were making real money six months ago,” she said, attempting to lighten the situation.
“Forty million isn’t real money. A hundred million is getting there.”
Annalisa felt queasy. She knew Paul was making a lot of money and planned to make more. But somehow it had never hit her that it was going to become a reality. “That’s insane, Paul,” she protested. But it also excited her, the way looking at dirty pictures excited you even though you didn’t want to feel turned on and felt guilty about the excitement.
Perhaps too much money was like too much sex. It crossed the line and became pornographic.
“Come on, Annalisa. Open the door. Let me see you,” Norine said.
There was something pornographic in this, too. In this being seen, this unrelenting demand to be constantly seen everywhere. Annalisa felt worse than naked, as if her private parts were on display, open to all for examination.
“I don’t know,” Annalisa said, coming out. The gold lamé golf suit consisted of a skirt cropped mid-thigh and a shirt cut like a polo shirt (they’d been Lacoste shirts when she was a kid; she’d called them “alligator shirts,” a testament to how blissfully unfashionable she’d been growing up), pulled together by a wide belt slung low on the hips. “What am I supposed to wear under this?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Norine said.
“No underpants?”
“Call them panties, please,” Norine said. “If you want, you wear gold lamé panties. Or maybe silver lamé. For contrast.”
“Paul would never allow it,” Annalisa said firmly, hoping to put an end to the discussion.
Norine took Annalisa’s face in her hands, holding it between her manicured fingers, and squeezed Annalisa’s face like a child’s. She shook her head, pursing her lips. “You mustn’t, mustn’t say that again,” she said in a baby voice. “We don’t care what Daddy Paulie likes or dislikes. Repeat after me: ‘I will choose my own clothes.’ ”
“ I will choose my own clothes,” Annalisa said reluctantly. Now she was stuck. Norine never seemed to understand that when Annalisa said Paul wouldn’t like something, it meant she didn’t like it but didn’t want to offend Norine.
“Very good,” Norine said. “I’ve been doing this a long time — too long —
but the one thing I know is that men never mind what their wives are wearing as long as the wives are happy. And look great. Better than the other men’s wives.”
“But what if they don’t?” Annalisa said, thinking she’d had enough of this exercise.
“That’s why they have me,” Norine said with unbridled confidence.
She snapped her fingers at her assistant. “Photo, please,” she said.
Julee held up her phone and snapped Annalisa’s picture.
“How is it?” Norine asked.
“Good,” Julee said, clearly terrified. She passed the phone to Norine, who peered at the tiny image.
“Very good,” Norine said, showing Annalisa the photograph.
“Ridiculous,” Annalisa said.
“I think it’s fabulous,” Norine said. She handed Julee the phone and crossed her arms, preparing for another lecture. “Look, Annalisa,” she said. “You’re rich. You can do anything you want. There’s no bogeyman around the corner who’s going to punish you.”
“I thought God punished us,” Annalisa said under her breath.
“God?” Norine said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. Spirituality is only for show. Astrology, yes. Tarot cards, yes. Ouija boards, Kundala, Sci-entology, and even born-agains, yes. But a real God? No. That would be inconvenient.”
In her office, Mindy wrote: “Why do we torture our husbands? Is it necessary or the inevitable result of our inherent frustration with the opposite sex?” She sat back in her chair and regarded the sentence with satisfaction. Her blog was a success — over the past two months, she’d received 872 e-mails congratulating her on her courage in addressing topics that were off-limits, such as whether a woman really needed her husband after he had given her children. “It’s all about the existential question,” Mindy wrote. “As women, we’re not allowed to ask existential questions. We’re supposed to be grateful for what we have, and if we’re not, we’re losers. Can’t we take a break from imposed happiness and admit that despite what we have, it’s okay to feel empty? It’s okay to feel that something is missing and life may be meaningless? Instead of feeling bad about it, why can’t we admit it’s normal?”
This same unsentimental eye was applied to men and relationships.
Mindy’s conclusion was that marriage was like democracy — imperfect but still the best system women had. It was certainly better than prostitution.
Mindy reread her opening sentence for the week’s blog entry and considered what she wanted to say next. Writing a blog was a bit like going to a shrink, she thought — it forced you to examine your real feelings. But it was also better than a shrink, because you got to do your navel-gazing in front of an audience of several thousand as opposed to one. And in her experience, that one — the shrink — was usually half asleep and expected money. “This week, I realized I spend at least thirty minutes a day nagging my husband,” she wrote. “And to what end?
There are no consequences.” She looked up and saw that her assistant was standing in front of her desk.
“Do you have an appointment with a Paul Rice?” the assistant asked, as if Paul Rice were a thing as opposed to a person. Catching the surprise on Mindy’s face, she said, “I didn’t think so. I’ll have security send him away.”
“No,” Mindy said a little too eagerly. “He’s from my building. Send him up.”
She put her feet back in her shoes and stood, smoothing her skirt and rearranging her blouse, over which she was wearing a woolly vest. The vest was not sexy, and she debated taking it off but wondered if it would be obvious that she had made an effort. Then she realized she was being ridiculous: Paul Rice wouldn’t know she’d been wearing the vest all day. She took it off. She sat down behind her desk and fluffed her hair.
She rummaged in the top drawer of her desk, found an old lip gloss, and rubbed a dab on her mouth.
Paul Rice appeared in her doorway. He was dressed in a beautifully tailored suit with a crisp white shirt. He looked, Mindy noted, expensive. More like a sophisticated European as opposed to an ink-stained mathematician. But mathematicians wouldn’t be ink-stained anymore.
They did their work on computers, like everyone else.
Mindy stood up and leaned over the desk to shake his hand. “Hello, Paul,” she said. “This is a surprise. Have a seat.” She gestured to the small armchair in front of her desk.
“I don’t have long,” Paul said. He pointedly held out his wrist and looked at his watch, a large vintage gold Rolex. “Exactly seven minutes, to be precise. Which should be the amount of time it takes my driver to circle the block.”
“Not at four-thirty in the afternoon,” Mindy disagreed. “It will take him at least fifteen minutes in rush-hour traffic.”
Paul Rice stared at her, saying nothing.
Mindy began to feel slightly excited. “What can I do for you?” she asked. Since she’d met Paul at the board meeting, it had crept up on her that she was secretly affected by him. She found him sexy. Mindy had always been a sucker for a man of genius, and Paul Rice was rumored to be one. Plus, there was all his money. Money didn’t matter, but men who made a lot of it were always interesting.