In the middle of the day in the middle of the week, when he imagined most people in America were wasting the company’s time at their dull and unrewarding office jobs, Thayer Core took the subway to Fifty-first Street and walked up Fifty-second to the Four Seasons, where he would eat caviar and drink champagne under the pretense of reporting on how the privileged filled up their many hours of free time.
It was his third attendance at such a lunch, which appeared to be a regular once-a-week event, the purpose of which was the promotion of a movie (independent, often worthy, and usually boring). The guests were supposed to discuss the movie, like one of those middle-aged-lady book clubs that his mother belonged to, but no one ever did. Instead, they cooed over each other about how fabulous they were, which was especially galling to Thayer, who saw them as old and frightening and misguided.
Nevertheless, he had managed to keep himself invited each week by not yet writing about the event in Snarker. He would have to soon. But in the meantime, he planned to enjoy his free lunch.
Thayer was always one of the first people to arrive, in order to do so anonymously. He took off his coat and was about to hand it to the coat-check man when he saw that Billy Litchfield had come up behind him.
The sight of Billy filled Thayer with bile. Billy, Thayer had decided, was what could happen to a person who stayed too long in New York. What was his point? He appeared to do nothing but go to parties. He was a hanger-on to the rich and privileged. Didn’t he get bored? Thayer had been going to parties for only two years, and already he was bored out of his mind. If he wasn’t careful, time would pass, and he would end up like Billy Litchfield.
And now Billy had seen his coat.
“Hello, young man,” Billy said pleasantly.
“Hello,” Thayer muttered. No doubt Billy Litchfield couldn’t remember his name. He held out his hand aggressively, forcing Billy to take it.
“I’m Thayer Core,” he said. “From Snarker?”
“I know exactly who you are,” Billy replied.
“Good,” Thayer said. Giving Billy a backward glance, he bounded up the steps ahead of him, if only to remind himself — and Billy — of his youth and energy. Then he took up his usual position at the bar, where he could observe and overhear and largely be ignored until lunch.
Billy handed his overcoat to the coat-check man, wishing he could have avoided shaking the hand of Thayer Core. Why was he here? Billy wondered. Thayer Core was a blogger on one of those vicious new websites that had popped up in the last few years, displaying a hatred and vitriol that was unprecedented in civilized New York. The things the bloggers wrote made no sense to him. The readers’ comments made no sense to him. None of it appeared to be written by humans, at least not humans as he knew them. This was the problem with the Internet: The more the world opened up, the more unpleasant people seemed to be.
It was one of the reasons he’d begun taking the pills. Good old-fashioned Prozac. “Been around for twenty-five years. Babies take it,” the shrink said. “You’ve got anhedonia. Lack of pleasure in anything.”
“It’s not a lack of pleasure,” Billy protested. “It’s more a horror of the world.”
The doctor’s office was located on Eleventh Street in a two-bedroom town house apartment. “We’ve met before,” the doctor said the first time Billy walked in.
“Have we?” Billy said. He was so hoping this wouldn’t be true, that he and his psychiatrist would have no acquaintances in common.
“You know my mother.”
“Do I?” Billy said, trying to put him off. But there was a degree of comfort in the information.
“Cee Cee Lightfoot,” the doctor said.
“Ah. Cee Cee,” Billy said. He knew Cee Cee well. The muse to a famous fashion designer who had died of AIDS back in the days when fashion designers had muses. How he missed those times, he thought.
“What happened to your mother?” he asked.
“Oh, she’s still around,” the doctor said with a mixture of what sounded like despair and amusement. “She still has a one-bedroom apartment here.
And a house in the Berkshires. She spends most of her time there.”
“What does she do?” Billy asked.
“She’s still very, very active. She’s involved with charity. She rescues horses.”
“How wonderful,” Billy said.
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.
“Not so good,” Billy said.
“You’ve come to the right place,” the doctor said. “We’ll have you feeling good in no time.”
And the pills — they actually worked! No, they didn’t solve your problems, didn’t make them go away. But one no longer cared quite so much.
Now Billy took a seat at the bar and ordered a glass of water. He stared at Thayer Core and briefly felt sorry for him. What a terrible way to earn a living. The young man must be filled with self-loathing. He was only a few feet away, but an enormous ocean of thirty years of knowledge separated them like two continents in which neither population understood the other’s customs and mores. Billy decided he didn’t care about that, either, and, glass of water in hand, went off to work the room.
Thirty minutes later, the luncheon was in full swing. “I love your TV
show,” shrieked a woman dressed in a beaded suit to Schiffer Diamond, leaning across Billy to address her.
Schiffer looked at Billy and gave him a wink. “I thought no one was going to talk about the TV show. I was promised.”
Ever since Lady Superior had aired three weeks ago on Showtime, Schiffer had been invited everywhere and decided to enjoy herself in the little playground of New York society. Everyone wanted to fix her up.
So far she’d dated a famous billionaire who’d been more intelligent and pleasant than she’d expected, but who, after a three-hour dinner, had said he didn’t believe they were suited to each other and should move on; and a famous movie director who was desperately looking for a third wife. Today she was seated next to Derek Brumminger, who was sixty-three years old and rugged and pockmarked (by both acne and life, Schiffer decided), who had been fired two years before from his position as CEO of a major media corporation and been given eighty million dollars in compensation. He had just returned from a yearlong worldwide journey on which he had tried to find himself and failed. “I realized I wasn’t ready to retire. I don’t want to get off the stage. And that’s why I came back,” he said. “What about you?”
“I’m not ready to get off the stage, either,” she said.
At the next table, Annalisa Rice was sitting next to Thayer Core. “That must be a very interesting job, blogging,” she said.
“Have you ever done it?” Thayer asked.
“I’ve sent e-mails,” she said.
“It’s the kind of thing anyone can do. And does,” Thayer replied with a mix of disdain and loathing.
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“It is,” Thayer said. “It’s a bullshit way to make a living.”
“Being a lawyer might be worse,” she joked.
“It might be,” he agreed. “I thought I was going to be a novelist. What did you think you’d be?”
“I always wanted to be a lawyer. Once you’re a lawyer, you’re always a lawyer, I suppose. But today I went to see a piece of art — everyone was talking about it — and it turned out to be a pair of running shoes and a plastic dinosaur glued to a baby’s blanket. For half a million dollars.”