Three days after Billy Litchfield’s memorial service, Enid called her, and Lola, not recognizing the number, took the call. “I hear you’re back in New York, dear,” Enid said.
“That’s right,” Lola said.
“I wish you hadn’t come back,” Enid said with a disappointed sigh. “How do you plan to survive?”
“Frankly, Enid, it’s none of your business,” Lola said, and hung up. But now she was on Enid’s radar, and she had to be careful. She wasn’t sure what Enid might do.
That evening, however, standing across from the building, she saw only Mindy Gooch going in, pulling a little cart filled with groceries behind her.
“I need a job,” Lola said to Thayer a few minutes later, plopping onto the pile of dirty clothes that Josh called his bed.
“Why?” Thayer asked.
“Don’t be an idiot. I need money,” Lola said.
“You and everyone else in New York under the age of thirty. The baby boomers took all the money. There ain’t any left for us young’uns.”
“Don’t joke,” Lola said. “I’m serious. James Gooch has gone away again. And I only got five hundred dollars out of him. He’s so cheap. His book has been on the best-seller list for two months. And he gets five thousand dollars for every week he’s on the list. As a bonus.” She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “I told him he should give me the money.”
“What’d he say?” Thayer asked. “You’ve had sex with him, right? So he owes you. Because there’s really no reason for you to have sex with him other than money.”
“I’m not a whore,” Lola grumbled.
Thayer laughed. “Speaking of which, I might have a job for you. Someone e-mailed us a request today. They’re looking for writers. Female writers. For a new website. It pays a thousand dollars a post. That made me suspicious. But you might check it out.”
Lola took down the information. Doing nothing in New York City was much more expensive than she’d imagined. If she spent too much time in her tiny studio apartment, she began to go crazy. By the time nine P. M. rolled around, she had to get out and took sanctuary at one or two of several nightclubs in the Meatpacking District. The doormen knew her and usually let her in for free—pretty, unattached young women were considered an asset. And she rarely paid for a drink. But she still had to eat, and she had to buy clothes so she would look good to get the free drinks. It was a vicious cycle. To maintain even this lifestyle, she needed cash.
The next day, Lola went to the address on the e-mail. The building wasn’t far from her own: It was one of the grand new structures that had popped up around the High Line, overlooking the Hudson River. She was going to Apartment 16C, and rather than calling up, as they would have done at One Fifth, the doorman merely asked her to sign in on a time sheet, as if she were going to an office. Knocking on the door, she was greeted by a youngish man with an alarming tattoo around his neck; upon closer inspection, she saw that not just his neck was tattooed but his entire right arm. He was also wearing a ring in his left nostril. “You must be Lola,” he said. “I’m Marquee.” He didn’t bother to shake her hand.
“Marquee?” she asked, following him into a sparsely furnished living room with an unobstructed view of the West Side Highway, the brown waters of the Hudson, and the New Jersey skyline. “Your name is Marquee?” she asked again.
“That’s right,” Marquee said coolly. “You got a problem with it? You’re not one of those people who has a problem with names, are you?”
“No,” Lola said with a scoff, letting Marquee know right away that he wasn’t going to intimidate her. “I’ve just never heard of anyone with that particular name.”
“That’s because I made it up,” Marquee said. “There’s only one Marquee, and I want people to remember it. So, what’s your experience?” he asked.
Lola looked around the living room. The furnishings consisted of two small couches, which at first glance appeared to be covered in white fabric. On closer inspection, Lola saw they were covered in bare white muslin, as if they were wearing only their undergarments. “What’s yours?” she said.
“I’ve made some money. But you can see that,” he said, indicating the apartment. “You know how much a place like this costs?”
“I wouldn’t want to guess,” Lola replied.
“Two million. For a one-bedroom.”
“Wow,” Lola said, pretending to be impressed. She stood up and walked to the window. “So what’s this job?”
“Sex columnist,” Marquee said.
“That’s original.”
“It is,” Marquee said without irony. “See, the problem with most sex columns is—there’s no sex in them. It’s all that relationship bullshit. Nobody wants to read that. My idea is brand-new. No one’s ever done it before. A sex column that’s really about sex.”
“Isn’t that called porn?” Lola asked.
“If you’re going to call yourself a sex columnist, I say, show me the sex.”
“If you’re going to hire me to have sex, I suggest you show me the money,” Lola replied.
“You want cash?” Marquee said. “I’ve got cash, and plenty of it.” He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and waved it in front of her. “Here’s the deal. A thousand dollars a pop.”
“I’ll need half up front,” Lola said.
“Fine,” Marquee said, peeling off five one-hundred-dollar bills. “And I’m going to need details. Length and width. Distinguishing characteristics. What went where and when.”
That evening, instead of going to a club, Lola stayed home and wrote about sex with Philip. She found it surprisingly easy, cathartic, even, working herself up into a froth about the cruelty he’d exhibited in dumping her for Schiffer Diamond. “He had a fat penis with swinging balls in a sack of prickly skin. And he had wrinkles on the back of his neck. And little hairs beginning to sprout from his earlobes. At first I thought those little hairs were cute.” Finishing the entry and reading it over, she found herself longing to do it again and decided Philip deserved more than one measly post. By changing his name and profession, she ought to be able to get at least three more entries out of him. And then thinking about the best way to spend the money, she paged through one of the tabloid magazines and found a bandage-wrap Hervé Léger dress that would look amazing on her.
A few days later, Enid Merle was cleaning out her kitchen cabinets. She did it every year, not wanting to become one of those old women who accumulated dust and junk. Enid had just taken down a metal box filled with old silver when her buzzer rang. She opened the door to find Mindy Gooch standing in the hallway in a huff. “Have you seen it?” Mindy asked.
“What?” Enid asked, slightly annoyed. Now that she and Mindy were friendly again, Mindy wouldn’t leave her alone.
“Snarker. You’re not going to like it,” Mindy said. She strode through Enid’s living room to her computer and brought up the website. “I’ve been complaining about these posts by this Thayer Core for months,” she scolded, as if the posts were somehow Enid’s fault. “And no one took them seriously. Perhaps someone will, now that there’s one about Philip.”
Enid adjusted her glasses and peered over Mindy’s shoulder. “The Rich and the Restless” was written in small red block letters, and underneath, in large black type, “Hell Hath No Fury” next to a photograph of Lola taken outside the church at Billy’s memorial service. Enid pushed Mindy aside and began reading.
“Lovely Lola Fabrikant, spurned lover of seedy screenwriter Philip Oakland, gets even with him this week by penning her own brilliant version of sex with a man who bears a satisfying resemblance to the aging bachelor.” The words “brilliant version” were highlighted in red, and clicking on them, Enid was taken to another website called The Peephole, featuring yet another photograph of Lola, followed by a graphic description of a young woman having intercourse with a middle-aged man. The description of the man’s teeth, hands, and the little hairs on his earlobes was unmistakably of Philip, although Enid co
uldn’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.
“I hate this business of taking on the customs of the upper classes,” James said. “What’s wrong with basketball? It was good enough for me.”
Mindy snorted. “Your son is not you, James. As a fairly intelligent adult male, you should have figured that out by now.”
“Hmph,” James said. Mindy had been a bit curt with him lately, and since he feared her shortness might be due to a suspicion about his affair with Lola, he didn’t push it.
“Besides,” Mindy said. “I want Sam to feel comfortable in the area. We’ll have a house there soon, and I want him to have lots of new friends.”
“We will?” James said.
Mindy gave him a terse smile. “Yes, James, we will.”
James was suddenly nervous and went into the kitchen to pour himself another cup of c
offee. A few minutes later, Mindy and Sam kissed him goodbye and went off to the bus station; Mindy would go on from there to her office. The second the door closed, James rushed to his computer, typed in the requisite address, and read, “The Terminator strikes again. Wrapping my hot, wet pussy around his cock, he did another one of his dastardly deeds and tickled my asshole while I pumped him for juice.”
“Lola,” James had said after reading the first installment about his sexual exploits. “How can you do this? Don’t you worry about your reputation? What if you want to get a real job someday and your employer reads this?”
Lola only looked at him like he was once again hopelessly out of touch. “It’s no different from all those other celebrities with sex tapes. It hasn’t hurt them. Just the opposite—it’s made their careers.”
Now, continuing to read Lola’s blog, James felt himself getting a hard-on that pushed against his leg, demanding immediate attention. He went into the bathroom and jerked off, hiding the evidence in a tissue that he flushed down the toilet. He looked into the mirror and nodded. The next time he saw Lola, he decided, he would definitely try for anal sex.
Mindy watched Sam get on the bus for Southbury, Connecticut, waving at his window until the bus pulled out of the underground garage. Hurrying through Port Authority, she was relieved to have gotten Sam safely away, where Paul Rice couldn’t hurt him. She flagged a taxi, slid onto the backseat, and fished the folded piece of notepaper out of her bag. “Sam did it” was written in pencil, in Paul Rice’s tiny block lettering. The paper bore the logo of the Four Seasons Hotel in Bangkok. Apparently, Paul Rice had quite a few of these pads.
She refolded the note and put it back in her purse. She’d found the tightly folded paper in her mailbox just the other day, and while James was convinced she wanted a country house for her own self-aggrandizement, she’d begun pursuing it as a way to get herself and Sam out of Paul’s way, without raising suspicion. A man who could take over an entire country’s stock market was probably capable of anything, including persecuting a little boy. While everyone else in One Fifth had been diverted by Billy’s death, Paul hadn’t attended either his memorial service or Annalisa’s party. For all Mindy knew, Paul might still be investigating who cut his Internet wires, and eventually, he might be able to prove it was Sam.
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