Men, Women & Children: A Novel

by Chad Kultgen

  He almost enjoyed this feeling of extreme detachment from the world he lived in, but he found himself unable to enjoy anything. Even the happiness he usually felt in Brandy’s company had slipped into something more like mild amusement, which was the strongest emotion he found himself capable of producing that Monday morning.

  Kent Mooney spent his lunch hour at home installing Spector Pro on his son’s computer. Once the program was installed, he selected certain settings that were designed to look specifically for account usernames and passwords. He linked the Spector Pro reporting function to his own computer and set the program to run invisibly whenever his son’s computer was on.

  He made himself a sandwich and turned on the television for a few minutes but was too lost in his memories of sex with Dawn Clint to watch. He thought specifically of the way her breasts and thighs felt in his hands and of the way her vagina smelled and tasted. That morning, he had received a text message from Dawn Clint that read, “I can’t wait to see you again, if you know what I mean :).” After receiving the text, Kent thought briefly about attempting a sexual encounter with Dawn without using Viagra, but dismissed the possibility almost immediately.

  After returning to work, he researched Viagra addiction on the Internet and found that, although the drug was not found to be responsible for physical addiction, it did sometimes trigger a strong psychological addiction in users who became fearful that they would be unable to achieve a satisfactory level of sexual performance without it. In most of these cases, the user merely decided to use Viagra before every sexual encounter. Although Kent wanted to know that he was still capable of performing sexually without the drug, he convinced himself that, at least for the second sexual encounter with Dawn, he would use the drug. He saw no harm in that.

  On his way to the field house after school, Chris Truby crossed paths with Hannah Clint. They hadn’t communicated with each other since Hannah spread the rumor that they had sexual intercourse. Hannah had no interest in being confronted by Chris, being caught in her lie—especially not at school, where the truth might be overheard by one of her peers. She made her best attempt to avoid him, but he approached her and said, “Hey,” and a conversation couldn’t be helped. She was thankful they were alone.

  She said, “Hey.”

  He said, “So how’d that video that I cut for you work out?”

  She said, “We ended up sending it in—you know, like, using it and everything. We’re supposed to hear back this week, when I’ll be flying to L.A. for the next round of casting.”

  He said, “Wow. Cool.”

  She said, “Yeah.” There was a pause as they stared at one another for a few seconds.

  He said, “So, what’s the deal?”

  She said, “What do you mean?”

  He said, “I mean, what’s the deal?”

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  He said, “We haven’t really talked since last week, and now, like, everyone in the school thinks we had sex. I don’t get it.”

  She said, “Well, I’m pretty sure we had sex, and I might have told some of my friends about it. So I guess that’s the deal.”

  He said, “We didn’t really have sex, though.”

  She said, “Would you rather I tell everyone that you couldn’t get it up?”

  He said, “No, I guess I just don’t know why you told anyone we had sex in the first place.”

  She said, “Because I thought you were my best shot at losing my V-card, but you seriously fucked that one up. So I just told everyone I lost it, and that’s good enough. If they think I lost it, then I pretty much lost it, right?”

  He said, “That’s a pretty fucked-up way of looking at it, but whatever.”

  She said, “Whatever.”

  He said, “Well, so what’s the deal?”

  She said, “What do you mean?”

  He said, “I mean, what’s the fucking deal, like, with us?”

  She said, “There is no deal with us. I’m pretty sure you’re, like, a weird guy who has some serious sexual issues, and I’m not that into dealing with it.”

  He said, “So are we just supposed to not talk to each other anymore?”

  She said, “We can talk if you want, but I don’t see the point.”

  He said, “Whatever.”

  She said, “I know.”

  Chris continued walking down the hall toward the field house and did not turn to look back at Hannah as she walked down the hall in the opposite direction. He wondered if this would be a problem for the rest of his life, or if he would find a girl eventually who would indulge his sexual preferences, or if his preferences would change in time to be more normal. He hoped it was the latter. Hannah wondered if all guys were like Chris and would only be able to become sexually aroused through means that she found unappealing, or if Chris was an anomaly. She hoped it was the latter.

  Dawn Clint received an e-mail alerting her that a new member had joined the private section of her daughter’s website and wondered how long the website would remain viable. She assumed, but wouldn’t consciously acknowledge, that the men who were subscribers were sexual deviants, quite possibly full-blown pedophiles, and presumed that their interest in her daughter would wane as she got older. She had gotten used to the extra money every month and was hopeful that her daughter would be selected as a member of the cast on the reality show they were waiting to hear back from. It would mean that perhaps her daughter would be able to generate a viable stream of income through her appearance on a legitimate television program.

  Hannah had always told her mother that she wanted to be an actress, but Dawn knew that wasn’t true. Dawn thought she wanted to be an actress, but she had realized at some point, while living in Los Angeles, that what she really wanted was to be a celebrity, to warrant attention from strangers, and to make a very good living doing what she felt was easy work. She knew her daughter felt the same way. She had no respect for the craft of acting, no interest in the art of it. She wanted to be on the covers of magazines and wanted to live in a mansion. That was all.

  Dawn wondered what had changed—if it was generational. Her mother, Nicole, did love acting, loved the craft, respected the art. For her mother, the minor amount of attention she had generated as a result of success in the field was secondary to the work itself. Dawn remembered having felt that way at some point as a little girl. She remembered watching the movies her mother was in, and listening to the stories her mother would tell her about working with amazing directors who were able to help guide her through emotional mazes in order to have her arrive at an amazing performance. Dawn had never experienced that, and after years of trying fruitlessly to navigate the seemingly impossible system of casting agents, talent agencies, commercial agents, fake producers and directors, and so on, somewhere along the way she had stopped caring about the quality of her work or the meaning behind the art. She had just wanted a job that would give her exposure and money. And she could see that her mother’s interest in the art, which she had shared in the beginning, had just never existed in her daughter. For her daughter it had always been just about the fame, and Dawn saw no problem with that.

  Just as she was about to log out of her e-mail account, a new message arrived in her in-box from the producers of the reality show Undiscovered. Dawn was nervous for her daughter. This e-mail contained news that could potentially change her life forever. Dawn opened the e-mail and read.

  The e-mail was from a producer named Wendy Gruding. She explained that, although they had loved Hannah’s initial application and subsequent video, they would be unable to invite her to Los Angeles for the formal casting interview. After doing some internal research, they had discovered Hannah’s modeling website and come to the conclusion that it was material their parent company might deem unwholesome, due to the concerns of various advertisers that would likely be buyers of advertising time in the show once it aired. Wendy further explained that even taking the site down before the show aired wouldn’t be enough to
make their production company reconsider, because the images on the website could have been downloaded or copied to anyone’s hard drive who had viewed the site, and once the show was on the air, they couldn’t risk one of those images surfacing and causing potential damage to their parent company’s reputation. Wendy thanked Dawn and Hannah for their time and patience during the selection process and wished them luck in the future with all of their endeavors.

  Dawn archived the e-mail and logged out of her account. The sinking feeling in her stomach was one she hadn’t felt since her youth, when she had been rejected for a television or movie role herself. She was unsure about how she should inform Hannah, and she felt as though it was partially her fault for maintaining her daughter’s website. She convinced herself that she was not to blame, that this was the nature of the industry—no one was willing to take a chance on anything because of the potential loss of advertisers. In that moment it became clear to her why it was that no one cared about the craft anymore, why an entire generation of young actors, writers, and directors didn’t care about the art they made. It was because the art was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was how many cans of soda, how many bottles of laundry detergent could be sold. If the companies hiring the artists didn’t care about the art, why should the artists?

  It was this realization that ultimately changed Dawn’s mind about the website. Dawn had found something in Kent that had substance and value. It was different and better than any relationship she had been in, even her relationship with Hannah’s father in Los Angeles. It was real, and she wanted Hannah to have that one day, too. Dawn knew that her daughter wanted to pursue a career in entertainment, but she began to see that it had nothing to do with acting, it was about fame—it was the ideal of this new generation that wanted everything handed to it without carving out a place in the world through hard work and trial, without having to do anything other than exist. She wanted more for her daughter. She wanted her daughter to be a better person than that, to think in a different way from the rest of her generation. Dawn felt responsible, in some part, for this problem. She had been the one to encourage her daughter, even to create and maintain a website that she knew was of a questionable nature, in order to promote her daughter. In that moment, the website became a symbol to Dawn of everything she no longer wanted her daughter to be.

  Dawn logged onto the hosting account for the website and took it down. She assumed her daughter would become aware of this transgression very quickly and decided that she would tell her the truth when asked. She would tell her daughter that the reality show had rejected her, and she would tell her daughter that her mother loved her and that she wanted better things for her in life than the things she herself ended up with.

  chapter

  twenty-one

  Rachel Truby left work a few hours early on Friday, having already told her husband that she was spending the night and the following morning with her sister. She was, instead, spending the night and the following morning at a hotel with Secretluvur. As she drove, she realized that she’d forgotten to check the message from Secretluvur that contained the exact hotel where she was to meet him in a neighboring town. Rachel went home, packed a few things, and, for the first time since beginning her life of regular infidelity, logged into her account on AshleyMadison.com from the family desktop computer. She wrote down the name and address of the hotel on a Post-it note, put it in her pocket, and then went to shut her computer down. She noticed, however, that an update had been downloaded and was ready to be installed, which required a restart. She clicked the button authorizing the update to be installed and happily left her house, without realizing she had to click one more button in order for the computer to automatically restart itself after the installation was complete.

  Don Truby came home from work that evening with the intention of scheduling another rendezvous with Angelique Ice, as he had done a few times before when his wife decided to spend the night at her sister’s house. Don had meant to do this on his work computer, but now he noted that he was finally comfortable enough with the process to use the computer that he shared with his wife for this purpose.

  He walked into their bedroom, sat down in the computer chair, ran his finger over the touchpad, and brought the screen out of its black energy-saving state to see his wife’s Ashley Madison account become visible on the screen behind a pop-up window that asked if the user would like to automatically restart the computer upon installation of an update. It took Don Truby almost a minute to fully process exactly what it was that he was staring at. Initially he assumed it was a pop-up ad or some other result of adware, and he was a second away from closing the window when he realized that he was looking at an in-box that was full of messages from a user named Secretluvur. It took him a few moments of reading these messages before the possibility that this account belonged to his wife entered his mind, but eventually he understood exactly what he was looking at: a document of his wife’s infidelity, with at least one man, that had been occurring for the better part of a month.

  Don’s initial emotional reaction was, he suspected, the common one: He was sad and outraged. He wanted to confront her, to demand some kind of explanation, possibly a divorce. He wanted to know why she would be more interested in having sex with a stranger she’d met online than she was in having sex with her own husband. All of these things formed Don’s initial reaction.

  His second reaction, however, was almost the opposite. As he sat in the chair, staring at a picture of Secretluvur and at the address of the hotel his wife was heading to—the hotel where she would have sex with this man—Don’s original purpose for coming into the room came back to him. He logged off his wife’s account and logged on to the Erotic Review on the computer he shared with his wife in order to communicate with Angelique Ice. The hypocrisy of his anger seemed absurd to him.

  He realized in that moment that he had a decision to make. In the weeks since he had been cheating on Rachel with a prostitute, he was certainly happier, and it seemed to Don that his relationship with his wife had improved as a result of his happiness. With the new information that his wife’s happiness had nothing to do with his own, but rather with her own experimentations in unfaithfulness, Don understood that they were more alike than he thought. He liked seeing his wife happy. He assumed she enjoyed seeing him happy. If their happiness could only come as a result of each of them having sex with other people, then Don decided he would have to deal with that. And, beyond their mutual happiness, Don never wanted to have to tell his wife the truth about his visits with Angelique Ice, which he thought would only be fair to divulge if he confronted her about her own secret life.

  He logged back on to his wife’s account and decided it would be best to install the update, as she had no doubt had planned to do. He saw no need to give her any reason to feel anxiety or suspect that he knew anything about her infidelity.

  Don liked Angelique Ice, and although he knew he would purchase her services again in the future, he began to think about looking for something different that night. A new girl, a second girl, would signify to Don that, from that night forward, his sexuality would have nothing to do with his own wife. Despite this sentiment, Don found himself in the mood for a prostitute who looked more like Rachel than Angelique Ice did.

  He entered his search criteria and found a prostitute named Summer Sweet who looked enough like a younger version of Rachel that Don was persuaded to make an appointment with her for later that night after his son’s football game. He hoped that having sex with her would remind him of having sex with his wife one last time, and then he would try never to think about his wife in a sexual capacity again. She would be the mother of his child, the warm body on the other side of the bed, and the person with whom he had occasional conversations about the minutiae of his life, and that is all she would be.

  Kent Mooney received an e-mail notice at work from the Spector Pro software he installed on his son’s computer that contained the username and password t
o his son’s Battle.net account. This was what Tim used to log in to his World of Warcraft account. Kent decided he would eat lunch at home and log in to his son’s account in order to experience firsthand exactly what it was that his son found so alluring about the game.

  He made himself a sandwich and sat down at his son’s computer, looking around his son’s room as he waited for the machine to boot up. He realized he hadn’t been very attentive to his son in the months since his ex-wife, Lydia, had moved to California. He had lost touch with his son, and he considered logging in to his son’s World of Warcraft account as much an attempt to understand his son as it was an attempt to police his online activity. Some part of him thought that, if he could form a basic understanding of the things that were important in his son’s life, then maybe they could repair their relationship on some small level, and maybe that repair would lead to Tim coming back to his former self just enough to give his father a glimmer of the way things used to be—just enough for Tim to want to play football again.

  The computer finished booting up and Kent clicked on the World of Warcraft icon. Although he knew little about video games, he knew enough about computers in general to handle the process easily. He typed in the username and password supplied to him by the Spector Pro software and was taken to a screen that contained all of Tim’s characters on the Shattered Hand server. Kent chose the character that was already selected, the last character Tim had played, his main character, Firehands, and entered the world. After a brief load screen, Kent was in control of Firehands, who stood in the center of a floating city called Dalaran. Other characters ran past him in all directions. It was a far more complex experience than Kent had expected. The city itself was too large and complicated for Kent to navigate properly. Beyond that, he didn’t even know how to make the avatar move. He used the mouse to swivel the character’s point of view but found that clicking on things only highlighted or targeted them.