Mack found a different consolation. The insult of Zoltan’s bilking his own benefactors enabled Mack to write him off as a bad investment—a lesson he’d early mastered at the Business School. The next time he felt charitable toward the arts, he decided, he’d fund a fellowship or endow a prize. Now that his biggest gamble, the L.A. deal, had succeeded, and his tax abatement had been granted in full, he was able to laugh off the insult, like Liberace on the way to the bank. Already, long before completion, the project was almost fully rented, with a small apartment reserved for himself and Vicky D., his new girlfriend (or, as Zoltan would say, “mistress”), who happened to look remarkably like Maja Stern. Sometimes, sitting opposite Vicky at La Mer, peering down at her plump Hollywood breasts, Mack imagined she was Maja reincarnated. But the resemblance ended with the physical, for she wanted much more of him than to be a mere dinner companion. With one successful boutique and plans to expand (with a little venture capital from him), she was not the type to threaten scandal or suicide; and though, as he sometimes thought, she might harbor a secret wish to capture him, she knew better than to bug him as Maja had bugged Zoltan or to even think of asking him to leave his wife.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALIX KATES SHULMAN is the author of the feminist classic Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and three other novels; three memoirs, including the award-winning Drinking the Rain; two books on the anarchist Emma Goldman; and A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Salon, The Nation, and The Guardian. She lives in New York City. www.alixkshulman.com
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