Four Blondes

by Candace Bushnell

  Acclaim for Candace Bushnell’s Four Blondes:

  “Will draw howls of recognition from women everywhere . . . Bushnell tells it like it is. . . . Hip and funny.”—Paige Smoron, Chicago Sun-Times

  “Candace Bushnell is back in fine, blunt form. . . . Situations and images softly echo F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. . . . There are also wisps of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. . . . Mixed with the glitzy surfaces is impressive depth.”—Alyssa Haygoode, The Boston Globe

  “Each of the four novellas—coyly titled ‘Nice N’Easy,’ ‘Highlights (For Adults),’ ‘Platinum,’ and ‘Single Process’—is about a woman who refuses to give in to lowered expectations. . . . Delicious.”

  —Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News

  “Welcome to the (even) seamier side of Sex and the City. . . . By rights we should detest the four blondes of this addictive story collection . . . yet we sympathize. . . . By breathing life into her sex-happy social set, she reveals the tarnish beyond the glitz.”—Anne-Marie O’Neill, People

  “Extremely funny . . . Like Wilde or Nancy Mitford, Bushnell has chosen to examine human behavior in a world that appears at first implausibly one-dimensional. That she can elicit sympathy and indeed empathy for these characters is a testament to her skill as a writer, particularly her gift for brilliantly waspish dialogue.”

  —Stephanie Merritt, The Observer (London)

  “Bushnell’s Four Blondes is a younger and hipper version of Jackie Collins-style literature that goes down like a glass of champagne. . . . You’ll feel giddy and buzzed.”—Patricia Talorico, Wilmington News Journal

  “Because her terrain is similar to that of ‘80s It-writers Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney, she’s been compared to them, but the real New York writer Bushnell resembles, at least thematically, is Edith Wharton. . . . What’s a girl to do? Have a cocktail and read Candace Bushnell.”

  —Karen Karbo, The Oregonian

  “Four Blondes is a punchy cluster of stories about sex, looks, money, more sex, power and that occasional niggling feeling called love. . . . Fun . . . [filled with] a mosaic pithy observations.”

  —Rebecca Rodriguez, Star-Telegram (Minneapolis)

  “Alluring . . . Candace Bushnell is some kind of genius. . . . And not just a genius, either, but actually a shrewd and witty writer who makes her stories shine with . . . shimmering stylishness and sinewy humor. . . . Bushnell has her immaculately manicured finger on the pulse of post-feminist urban angst.”—Melanie McGrath, The Evening Standard (London)

  “This is Jacqueline Susann meets Edith Wharton, a novel of manners with no manners, pop literature that smartly captures the mores and obsessions of our times and does so with wit, insight, and a lot of talk about sex. . . . Bushnell’s satire is on-target and unstrained.”

  —Mark Lindquist, The Seattle Times

  “Bushnell knows lots of things very few people know. . . . If Bushnell doesn’t qualify as a contemporary novelist of manners, what does her fiction conjure? . . . It is the grotesques of Flannery O’Connor.”

  —Dawn Trouard, The Fort Worth Star-Ledger

  “A bone-chilling collection that establishes Bushnell as a satirist of considerable bite . . . Brings to mind the anomie of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls . . . [and] Mary McCarthy’s The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt or even Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton.”

  —Heather Hodson, Telegraph Magazine (London)

  FOUR BLONDES

  Also by Candace Bushnell:

  Sex and the City

  FOUR BLONDES

  CANDACE BUSHNELL

  Copyright © 2000 by Candace Bushnell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bushnell, Candace.

  Four Blondes / Candace Bushnell.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8021-3825-X (pbk.)

  1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 4. City and town life—Fiction. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 6. Sex customs—Fiction. I. Title. PS3552.U8229 F68 2000

  813’.54—dc21 00-042026

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  08 09 10 11 12 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

  For Anne,

  best friend and best blonde

  CONTENTS

  Nice N’Easy

  Highlights (For Adults)

  Platinum

  Single Process

  NICE N’EASY

  I

  Janey Wilcox spent every summer for the last ten years in the Hamptons, and she’d never once rented a house or paid for anything, save for an occasional Jitney ticket. In the early nineties, Janey was enough of a model to become a sort of lukewarm celebrity, and the lukewarm celebrity got her a part (“thinking man’s sex symbol”) in one of those action movies. She never acted again, but her lukewarm celebrity was established and she figured out pretty quickly that it could get her things and keep on getting them, as long as she maintained her standards.

  So every year around May, Janey went through the process of choosing a house for the summer. Or rather, choosing a man with a house for the summer. Janey had no money, but she’d found that was irrelevant as long as she had rich friends and could get rich men. The secret to getting rich men, which so many women never figured out, was that getting them was easy, as long as you didn’t have any illusions about marrying them. There was no rich man in New York who would turn down regular blow jobs and entertaining company with no strings attached. Not that you’d want to marry any of these guys anyway. Every rich guy she’d been with had turned out to be weird—a freak or a pervert—so by the time Labor Day came around, she was usually pretty relieved to be able to end the relationship.

  In exchange, Janey got a great house and, usually, the man’s car to drive around. She liked sports cars the best, but if they were too sporty, like a Ferarri or a Porsche, that wasn’t so good because the man usually had a fixation on his car and wouldn’t let anyone drive it, especially a woman.

  The guy she had been with last summer, Peter, was like that. Peter had golden-blond hair that he wore in a crew cut, and he was a famous entertainment lawyer, but he had a body that could rival any underwear model’s. They were fixed up on a blind date, even though they’d actually met more than a dozen times at parties over the years, and he asked her to meet him at his town house in the West Village because he was too busy during the day to decide on a restaurant. After she rang the buzzer, he left her waiting on the street for fifteen minutes. She didn’t mind, because the friend who fixed them up, a socialite type who had gone to college with Peter, kept emphasizing what a great old house he had on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton. After dinner, they went back to his town house, ostensibly because he had to walk his dog, Gumdrop, and when they were in
the kitchen, she spotted a photograph of him, in his bathing suit on the beach, tacked to the refrigerator door. He had stomach muscles that looked like the underside of a turtle. She decided to have sex with him that night.

  This was the Wednesday before Memorial Day, and the next morning, while he was noisily making cappuccino, he asked her if she wanted to come out to his house for the weekend. She had known he was going to ask her, even though the sex was among the worst she’d had in years (there was some awkward kissing, then he sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing himself until he was hard enough to put on a condom, and then he stuck it in), but she was grateful that he had asked her so quickly.

  “You’re a smart girl, you know,” he said, pouring cappuccino into two enameled cups. He was wearing white French boxer shorts with buttons in the front.

  “I know,” she said.

  “No, I mean it,” he said. “Having sex with me last night.”

  “Much better to get it out of the way.”

  “Women don’t understand that guys like me don’t have time to chase them.” He finished his cappuccino and carefully washed out the cup. “It’s a fucking bore,” he said. “You should do all of your friends a favor and tell them to quit playing those stupid girl games. If a girl doesn’t put out by the second or third date, you know what I do?”

  “No,” Janey said.

  He pointed his finger at her. “I never call her again. Fuck her.”

  “No. That’s exactly what you don’t do. Fuck her,” Janey said.

  He laughed. He came up to her and squeezed one of her breasts. “If everything goes well this weekend, maybe we’ll spend the whole summer together. Know what I mean?” he said. He was still squeezing her breast.

  “Ow,” Janey said.

  “Breast implants, huh?” he said. “I like ‘em. They should make all women get them. All women should look like you. I’ll call you.”

  Still, when he hadn’t called by noon on Friday, she began to have doubts. Maybe she’d read him wrong. Maybe he was totally full of shit. It was unlikely, though—they knew too many people in common. But how well did anybody really know anyone else in New York? She called up Lynelle, the socialite who had fixed them up. “Oh, I’m so glad you guys hit it off,” Lynelle said.

  “But he hasn’t called. It’s twelve-thirty,” Janey said.

  “He’ll call. He’s just a little . . . strange.”

  “Strange?”

  “He’s a great guy. We have this joke that if I weren’t married to Richard, we’d be married. He calls me his non-future-ex-wife. Isn’t that hysterical?”

  “Hysterical,” Janey said.

  “Don’t worry. You’re just his type,” Lynelle said. “Peter just has his own way of doing things.”

  At one-thirty, Janey called Peter’s office. He was in a meeting. She called twice more, and at two-thirty, his secretary said he’d left for the day. She called the town house several times. His machine kept picking up. Finally, he called her at three-thirty. “Little anxious?” he asked. “You called eleven times. According to my caller ID.”

  They drove out to the Hamptons in his new Porsche Turbo. Gumdrop, a Bichon Frise with blue bows in his topknot, had to sit on her lap, and kept trying to lick her face. All the way out, Peter kept making his hand into a gun shape, pretending to shoot at the other motorists. He called everyone “a fucking Polack.” Janey tried to pretend that she thought it was funny.

  In Southampton, they stopped for gas at the Hess station. That was a good sign. Janey always loved that gas station, with the attendants in their civilized white and green uniforms—it really made you feel like you were finally out of the city. There was a line of cars. Peter got out of the car and went to the bathroom, leaving the engine running. After a few minutes, the people behind her started honking. She slid into the driver’s seat just as Peter came running out of the bathroom, waving his arms and screaming, “You fucking Polack, don’t touch my car!”

  “Huh?” she said, looking around in confusion.

  He yanked open the car door. “Nobody drives my fucking car but me. Got that? Nobody touches my fucking car but me. It’s my fucking car.”

  Janey slid gracefully out of the car. She was wearing tight jeans and high-heeled sandals that made her an inch taller than he was, and her long, nearly white, blond hair hung straight down over a man’s white button-down shirt Her hair was one of her most prized possessions: It was the kind of hair that made people look twice. She lifted her sunglasses, aware that everyone around them was now staring, recognizing her as Janey Wilcox, the model, and probably beginning to recognize Peter as well. “Listen, Buster,” she said into his face. “Put a lid on it. Unless you want to see this little incident in the papers on Monday morning.”

  “Hey, where are you going?” he asked.

  “Where do you think?” she said.

  “Sorry about that,” Peter said after she got back in the car. He rubbed her leg. “I’ve got a bad temper, baby. I explode. I can’t help it. You should know that about me. It’s probably because my mother beat me when I was a kid.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Janey said. She adjusted her sunglasses.

  Peter roared out of the gas station. “You are so hot, baby. So hot. You should have seen all those other men looking at you.”

  “Men always look at me,” Janey said.

  “This is going to be a great summer,” Peter said.

  Peter’s house was everything Lynelle had promised. It was a converted farmhouse on three acres of manicured lawn, with six bedrooms and a decorator-perfect interior. As soon as they arrived, Peter got on his cell phone and started screaming at the gardener about his apple trees. Janey ignored him. She took off her clothes and walked naked out to the pool. She knew he was watching her through the sliding glass doors. When she got out of the water, he stuck his head out. “Hey baby, is the heat turned on in the pool? If it isn’t, I’ll call the guy and scream at him.”

  “It’s on,” she said. “I think we should figure out what parties we want to go to this weekend.” She took out her own cell phone and, still naked, settled into a cushiony deck chair and started dialing.

  In mid-May of the summer Janey was to turn thirty-one (her birthday was June first, and she always told everyone she was a “summer baby”), she went to the nightclub Moomba three times in one week. The first night was a party for the rap artist Toilet Paper. She stood in the middle of the room with one hip pushed out, letting photographers take her picture, then someone escorted her to a table in the corner. Joel Webb, the art collector, was there. Janey thought he was cute, even though everyone said he’d had a nose job and cheek implants and liposuction and wore lifts in his shoes because he was only five foot four. But that wasn’t the problem. It was his house. For the past three years, he’d been building a big house in East Hampton; in the meantime, he’d been renting what Janey considered a shack—a rundown three-bedroom cottage.

  “I need a girlfriend. Fix me up with one of your gorgeous friends, huh?” he said.

  “How’s your house coming?” Janey said.

  “The contractors promised it would be done by July fourth. Come on,” he said, “I know you can think of someone to fix me up with.”

  “I thought you had a girlfriend,” Janey said.

  “Only by default. We break up during the year, but by the time summer comes, I get so lonely I take her back.”

  Two nights later, Janey showed up at Moomba with Alan Mundy, whom everyone was calling the hottest comic in Hollywood. She’d met Alan years ago, when she was doing that film in Hollywood—he was a nobody then and had a tiny part in the movie, playing a lovesick busboy. They sort of became friends and sort of stayed in touch, talking on the phone about once a year, but Janey now told everyone he was a great friend of hers. Her booker at her modeling agency told her Alan was coming into New York on the sly, so Janie called his publicist and he called her right back. He’d just broken up with his girlfriend and was probably lonely. “Jane
y, Janey,” he said. “I want to see all the hot places. Tear up the town.”

  “As long as we don’t have to patch it back together when you’re done,” she said.

  “God, I’ve missed you, Janey,” he said.

  He picked her up in a Rolls Royce limousine. His hair had been dyed red for his last movie role, and he had an inch of black roots. “Whatcha doing now, kid?” he asked. “Still acting?”

  “I’ve been acting every day of my life,” Janey said.

  Inside the club, Alan drank three martinis in a row. Janey sat close to him and whispered in his ear and giggled a lot. She had no real interest in Alan, who in actuality was the kind of geeky guy who would work at a car wash, which was exactly what he used to do in between jobs before he became famous. But nobody else had to know that. It raised her status enormously to be seen with Alan, especially if it looked like they could potentially be an item.

  Alan was drunk, sticking the plastic swords from his martinis into his frizzy hair. “What do you want, Janey?” he asked. “What do you want out of life?”

  “I want to have a good summer,” Janey said.

  She got up to go to the bathroom. She passed Redmon Richardly, the bad-boy southern writer. “Janey, Janey,” he said. “I’m soooo glad to see you.”

  “Really?” Janey said. “You were never glad to see me before.”

  “I’m always glad to see you. You’re one of my good friends,” Redmon said. There was another man at the table. Short brown hair. Tanned. Slim. Too handsome. Just the way Janey liked them. “See? I always said Janey was a smart model,” Redmon said to the man.

  The man smiled. “Smart and a model. What could be better?”

  “Dumb and a model. The way most men like them,” Janey said. She smiled back, aware of the whiteness of her teeth.

  “Zack Manners. Janey Wilcox,” Redmon said. “Zack just arrived from England. He’s looking for a house in the Hamptons. Maybe you can help him find one.”