As always, Winnie feels thrilled and terrified at the same time.
Ever since she discovered the site (she’d known about it before but didn’t acknowledge it, as people like her still bought their books from actual bookstores), she hasn’t known what to think. Part of her is outraged. These people shouldn’t be buying books. They’re too stupid to read. They have no imagination. No ability to read and comprehend. If a book doesn’t conform to what they believe about the world in their own narrow, unsophisticated minds, they pan it. They’re like the dumb kids in class who never understood what the teacher was talking about and got angry instead of understanding what everyone else in the class understood—that they were too dumb to understand. But part of her is (not even secretly) afraid that they might be right. The book is a little boring. Winnie read two chapters and skipped to the end and didn’t pick it up again. But it’s an important book. Why does some git in Seattle who’s probably never written more than an e-mail have the right to pan it? To tell other people not to buy it?
Winnie is disturbed.
The world is not right. (Or is it right, and she’s not? Maybe she’s like the dumb kid in the class. But she knows she isn’t. Dumb. Sometimes she thinks there should be a test for dumbness while a baby is still in the womb, and all the dumb fetuses should be aborted. She knows what the argument against it would be: “Who will decide what dumb is?” She has the answer: She would. She’d be happy to decide.)
Then she checks the sites of the ten or so other writers she and James know who have published books in the last year. She checks their sales ratings. If the ratings are very bad, like around 286,000, she can’t help it. She feels good.
She has to stop doing this. But she can’t. It’s research. What will happen if James writes a book? She wants to be prepared. She will have to numb herself against the inevitable bad reader reviews. She knows she can’t take them personally, but she will. She takes everything personally. Especially herself.
Maybe it would be better if James didn’t write a book. (Maybe it would be better if they moved to Vermont and worked for a small local newspaper. After two months, it would be like they were dead—everyone they knew would forget about them, and Winnie isn’t ready to do that. Yet.)
The phone rings. She picks it up.
“Yes,” she says.
“It’s me.” (It’s James.)
“Hi,” she says. She suddenly remembers that she has all these things to do. Like work.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I’m stressed. I’ve got a kazillion things to do.”
You’ve always got a kazillion things to do, and I wish you’d shut up about it, James thinks. Wondering: Why don’t you pay attention to me? Why don’t you make me feel good? Why is it always about you? Aloud, he says, “I got a call this morning. From Clay. Tanner’s coming to town.”
“Is he?” Winnie says. She isn’t sure how she feels about this information yet.
“He has a movie premiere. On Thursday.”
“Ugh,” Winnie says. For the first time in days, she knows that James is thinking the same thing she is. “Another—”
“Yup. Bang-’em-up, shoot-’em-up, big-budget movie, courtesy of Paramount Pictures.”
“I suppose we have to go,” Winnie says, emitting a long sigh.
“You don’t have to,” James says. “But I’m going to.”
“If you’re going, I’m going,” Winnie says.
“Fine,” James says in a small voice.
“Don’t you want me to go?” Winnie says. Threatening.
(Why does she always become immediately threatening? James thinks. Even wasps let you swat them away before they sting you.)
“I do want you to go,” James says. “But you hate things like that.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“I don’t hate them. I think they’re boring. You know how I feel about celebrity worship.”
“Tanner wants me to be there,” James says.
“I’m sure he wants us both to be there. But that doesn’t mean we have to do whatever Tanner wants.”
“He’s only in town twice a year,” James says. “I want to go.”
(I’m sure you do, Winnie thinks. So you can ogle dumb blondes.) “Fine,” she says. She hangs up the phone.
Now she has to be “concerned” (a much better word, more accurate than “worried”) about James for a week. Specifically about what he’s going to do (how he’s going to behave) when Tanner is in town. She will spend hours (time that should be spent doing something important, like thinking of ideas) reacting to James’s as yet unenacted behavior. She will obsess over if/then scenarios. Such as: If James stays out all night with Tanner (again), then she will divorce him. If James flirts (pitifully, desperately) with the actresses in the film (again), then she will lock him out of the house. If James drinks too much and throws up out the cab window (again), then she will throw all his clothes out the window. (James does not understand that he is skating on thin ice. Very thin ice.)
His black marks are mounting: She’s known him for ten years and still can’t trust him. He doesn’t do exactly what he’s supposed to do. He can’t be relied upon (even to get the right groceries at the supermarket). He acts like a baby (he is a big grown-up baby). He’s turning out not to be important. (And he doesn’t pay the bills.)
She might (actually) be better off without him: It would mean one less person to take care of.
Winnie hits a button on her computer and goes to her e-mails.
Her assistant comes into her office. Winnie looks up. The assistant’s dark hair is messy. She is wearing sloppily applied red lipstick; a short black skirt with no stockings; a rumbled black V-neck sweater (at least she is wearing a bra); clunky black shoes. She looks like (pardon the expression) someone rode her hard and put her away wet.
The assistant flops down on the couch. “What’s up?” she says. (What’s up? Like Winnie is the assistant and has just plopped into her office.)
Winnie is never sure how to respond to this greeting.
“How are you?” she says. Briskly. Reminding the assistant that this is an office. And she is her boss.
The assistant picks at her manicure. Fingernails painted a mud brown. “I’ve got a urinary tract infection. I’m wondering if I can take the rest of the day off.”
Someone did ride her hard and put her away wet.
“No,” Winnie says. “I’ve got that big Internet conference this afternoon and I need you here. To cover the office.” (The magazine is expanding their Web site, and they want Winnie to be involved. Very involved. It could mean more money.)
“It hurts,” the assistant says.
(Winnie wants to tell her—scream at her—to stop having so much sex, but she can’t.) “Buy some cranberry juice. And take five thousand milligrams of vitamin C.”
The assistant just sits there.
“Is that it?” she asks.
“Is what it?” Winnie says.
“What you just said.”
“About what?”
“About you know.”
(No, I don’t know, Winnie wants to scream.) “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
“About what?”
“Whatever,” the assistant says. She stands up. She goes back to her cubicle. (Like a dog.)
Winnie tries to concentrate on her e-mails. Her shrink tells her not to envision if/then scenarios.
What if Tanner kept James out for two nights and James slept with prostitutes? What then?
She can’t help herself. She can never help herself.
JAMES HAS A THEORY
In the week before Tanner comes, Winnie is concerned and James is excited. They both know something bad could happen, and they’re going to have to talk about it.
James and Winnie know when Tanner comes to town, James can get away with doing bad things. Tanner is bad. (He’s a bad influence.) Tanner is so bad, in fact, that when James
does bad things with him, Winnie always blames Tanner. Winnie thinks (knows?) that James would never do these bad things if it weren’t for Tanner. And she’s right. James wouldn’t. He doesn’t have the guts to defy Winnie.
But Tanner does. Tanner doesn’t care what Winnie thinks. (He probably thinks she’s boring. Which James is beginning to think himself. He wishes Winnie would do something interesting, like go away. Then maybe he could fall in love with her again. Or find somebody else. Like a six-foot-tall Swedish woman with large breasts.) Winnie would like to control Tanner (the way she controls James), but she can’t. Winnie can’t do anything to Tanner.
Tanner is a big movie star and Winnie is not.
Tanner is a celebrity. Compared to Tanner, Winnie is an insignificant journalist. Compared to Tanner, Winnie is a woman. Women don’t mean anything to Tanner, except as something to have sex with. (James wishes he could feel the same way. If he did, maybe then he would feel like a man. But he can’t. Winnie is the mother of his child. She grew their son inside her body. Green stuff came out right after his son emerged, and he wished someone had warned him it was coming. It was like the green stuff in the body of a lobster. Sometimes, when he is performing oral sex on Winnie, he thinks about the green stuff. He can’t help it. He feels guilty. And sometimes he thinks about that time he had sex in college. With the crazy girl. Who asked him to fuck her up the butt and then gave him a blow job afterward. He felt guilty about that too.)
But more than anything, Tanner is a man. When James and Tanner were roommates at Harvard, Tanner had one or two different women every weekend. (And once five. He fucked every one of them, too.) Women chased him. They sent him notes. They called. They threatened suicide and Tanner had no respect for them. He didn’t have to. “Let the bitch kill herself,” he once said. James laughed, but later, he couldn’t help himself, he called the girl and took her out for a coffee. He listened to her talk about Tanner for three hours, and then he tried to fuck her. (She would only let him put his fingers in her vagina. “I want Tanner,” she sobbed through the whole pitiful, aborted encounter.)
James thinks (and Winnie thinks too) that someday, something bad is going to happen to Tanner. It has to. He’ll get arrested or (Winnie hopes) he’ll fall in love and the woman won’t fall in love back, or (James hopes) he’ll do three bad movies in a row and his career will be over. But it never does happen. Instead, Tanner keeps getting richer and more successful. He makes bad blockbuster movies, and the critics are beginning to take him seriously. He dates female movie stars and has affairs on the side. He plays golf and skis. He smokes cigars (and does drugs whenever he wants). He supports the Democratic Party. He makes at least twenty million dollars a year (and maybe more). For doing (James thinks) nothing.
James would like to hate Tanner, but he can’t. He would, however, hate him if he were not his friend. He would probably agree with Winnie—that Tanner is the product of a misguided, badly educated, shallow society that elevates people solely on the basis of their looks, and if the public really knew what Tanner Hart was like, they wouldn’t shell out seven or eight or nine dollars to see him in a movie.
On the other hand, they probably would.
And if they didn’t, they would probably want Tanner to do something worse. Much worse. Like lead an army and rape and pillage.
This is, James thinks, the thing that Winnie doesn’t understand about men. And never will understand. It is, James thinks happily, the thing that will prevent Winnie from ever really becoming a threat to his masculinity. It is what allows him to stay home and visit porn sites on the Internet or play chess against his computer, or even hang around with his boy, playing violent computer games (James does feel a little guilty about this, but he tells himself he’s preparing his boy for the real world, and besides, the boy is so good at them, quick and clever) while Winnie goes to work in a high-rise office building. (She thinks she’s a man, but she’s not, James thinks, even if she does wear suits, and, when he met her, shirts with straps that tied around the neck like a bow tie.)
This is the thing that James knows and Winnie doesn’t: Men can’t be tamed.
Men are by nature violent.
Men always want to have sex with lots of different females.
James has always known this (don’t all men know this, and haven’t they been telling women for the past thirty years, but the women haven’t been listening?). But now, he thinks, he knows it in a different way.
James has been reading up on chimpanzees.
He’s been studying everything he can about chimps.
Chimps are violent. They sneak off in the middle of the night and raid other chimp tribes. The big chimps (the alpha males) pick out a small chimp (a beta male) and kill him mercilessly while the small chimp screams in pain and terror. Then the alpha chimps steal a few female chimps and have sex with them.
At first, James began looking into this chimp business (as he’s begun to think of it) to get even with Winnie. (He can’t remember what he was planning to get even with her for.) But then he got into it. Lately, he’s been looking up scientific articles on the Internet. E-mailing researchers. He isn’t sure how all this information adds up, but he knows there’s a piece in there somewhere. An important piece.
James has a theory: Tanner is an alpha male.
This is why Tanner can get away with whatever he wants, and James can applaud him. (Hell, James can be bad with him and get away with it.)
“Winnie,” James says, when she gets home from work and has taken off her shoes (she always takes off her shoes as soon as she gets home. She says they hurt, even though her shoes tend to be sensible one-inch loafers). “I think I’ve got an idea for a new piece.”
“Hold on,” Winnie says.
“Winnie,” James says. He follows her. She has gone into their son’s tiny bedroom, where he is trying to read a book about dinosaurs to the Jamaican nanny.
“Pur . . . pur. . .” the boy says.
“Purple,” Winnie says. (Impatiently, James thinks. Winnie has no patience for their son, has no patience for children in general.)
“You should let him figure it out for himself,” James says. Knowing by the expression on Winnie’s face that he has said the wrong thing. Again.
“James,” Winnie says. “If I waited for everyone around me to figure it out on their own, I’d be waiting for the rest of my life.”
“I suppose you’re talking about me,” James says.
“I don’t know what I’m talking about anymore,” Winnie says. Lying. She just wants to avoid a fight.
James follows Winnie into the kitchen. Winnie takes off her earrings and puts them on the kitchen counter. She opens the refrigerator door and takes out three carrot sticks.
“I think I’m going to do a piece on chimpanzees,” James says.
Winnie says nothing. She raises her eyebrows and bites a carrot stick in half.
“There are all these new theories,” James says. “Theories than can apply to humans. For instance, Tanner is an alpha male.”
“Did you talk to Tanner?” Winnie says.
“No,” James says. “But I’m going to talk to him. About this theory. I could even write about him. Use him as an example.”
Winnie gives a short, mean laugh. “You know his publicists would never let you do that.”
“I could change his name.”
“Did you talk to Clay?” Winnie says. (Ignoring him again. She used to suck up to him when he talked to her about his work.)
“I told you I did. How else would I know Tanner was coming to town?”
“How are . . . Clay and Veronica?”
“I don’t know,” James says. Helplessly. Once again, he’s losing control of the conversation.
“Is Veronica still threatening to divorce Clay?”
“Was she threatening to divorce him?”
“That’s what she said. The last time we saw her. When Tanner was in town.”
“Oh yeah. I remember,” James says. He has
to be conciliatory. It’s his only chance now. Somehow Winnie has managed to turn the conversation around to a slippery, potentially unpleasant, topic. In which he is about to lose.
“I wish Clay would wise up,” Winnie says. “She’s going to walk if Clay behaves the way he did the last time Tanner was in town.”
“Have you talked to Veronica?” James asks.
“I only talk to her when Tanner is in town. Really, James, I don’t have time.”
“I know.”
“And she’s not that interesting. At the end of the day, she’s just a housewife.”
“You’re right.”
“Do you mind?” Winnie says. “I’ve still got some calls to make. We had that big Internet meeting today, and they might want me to run it.”
“That’s great,” James says. He goes back to the tiny room he calls his office. He feels relieved. Like he has barely escaped something bad. He sits down in front of his computer.
No matter what happens, he reminds himself that he and Winnie have a better marriage than Clay and Veronica. Veronica is Tanner’s sister, and she’s an even worse bitch than Winnie. (She was once beautiful, but she let herself get fat.) Clay and Veronica have two children. Clay is a sculptor. He’s becoming famous now. He has affairs. (Veronica must be like a millstone around his neck. She doesn’t work and never has. At least if something happened between him and Winnie, Winnie would be able to take care of herself.)
An hour later, Winnie comes into his office.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says. “About that idea of yours.”
“Yes?” James says.
“It has an inherent flaw. If Tanner is an alpha male, what are you, James?”
She smiles and leaves the room.
III
SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS
Tanner Hart is on. Sitting in the back corner of the VIP room at Chaos (a room that can only be reached by private elevator, which can only be accessed by a separate entrance, guarded by two bouncers and a young lady with a list), Tanner Hart is chain-smoking Marlboro reds and drinking martinis. Tanner Hart is laughing. Tanner Hart is frowning. Tanner Hart is nodding, his eyes wide with surprise, mouth open. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, yes I do remember meeting you on the set of Switchblade how have you been since then? You had a dog right and something happened to the dog, something with an elephant? Oh, a cat a cat.” And then to somebody else: “Hey that night that was pretty hot, huh, stick around you going someplace let’s talk later after all this but you’re doing well, right? You look great.”
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