Case in point: Carmen had not come to Empire to be its sex columnist. Years ago, she’d been hired to write on a variety of issues and, likely because she was an attractive woman in a mostly male newsroom, been shunted into the role of sex whisperer. The gig was steady, at least, but felt like a closet reminiscent of her childhood bedroom. Now, as then, she was doing whatever she could to make the space her own, while also preserving her dignity. The requirements of her job didn’t make it easy. Maybe it was inevitable that Jays would turn on her. But it hurt to see how enthusiastically her beloved city—and its women! her peers!—reveled in her misfortune.
And then, just as she was on her way to Empire to give that narcissistic shit Jays a piece of her mind, he had called—personally—and asked her to lunch. Hearing his voice, so cordial and smug, made her want to throw the phone at a nearby store window. But he was the source of her monthly paycheck, which was high enough that she could almost forgive the lack of benefits. So now, instead of yelling at him in his office, Carmen sat at a table for two at The Standard Grill, waiting for Jays to roll in. She hated being first.
Like a desperate lover, she had primped for this lunch, hoping both to punish (show him what he was missing) and to pander (woo him back). As much as a feminist as she was in the pages of the magazine, she’d been less than exacting in her own love life—her real love life. She hated herself for this. Still, she’d gotten her hair blown out and donned some killer stilettos.
Jays was a sucker for Louboutin. “Tough on the outside,” he’d once whispered into her ear, “but raw and red underneath.” He liked her to wear them and nothing else. He bought her a pair that never left his bedroom. Instead, he liked to watch her run her tongue up and down the silky leather. He’d wanted to stick the heel in her ass, and she’d let him get as far as the outer rim. She had agreed to stand over him as he lay on the ground and hover one heel just above his crotch. Closer, Carmen. Closer. It was terrifying. (What if she tripped?) But it was also empowering. (What if she did trip?) Sex with Jays was unlike any she’d ever had. And she never wrote about any of it. It was too difficult to explain, these acts that sounded like crass fetishism or erotica schlock but, in fact, represented a rare mutual vulnerability.
“Hey, Car.” Jays strode up and kissed her on the cheek. Their on-again-off-again affair of two years had only been officially over for just three months, though Jays looked predictably unflappable. Carmen hoped he would not try to make small talk or force her through the painful process of looking over the menu. Food added indignity to difficult conversations.
The waiter arrived. He knew Carmen, and he wasn’t making eye contact. Which meant he’d read Nice Guy’s attack. Well, screw him.
“Listen,” Jays said as soon as the waiter walked away with their drink orders. “I’m a shit for printing that column. I’m well aware.”
“Owning up doesn’t make you a better person,” Carmen said. But it was the smart play. Jays knew the one thing that politicians never learned: Denial increases the appearance of guilt. The truth—or some semblance thereof—killed all desire for gossip.
“Look, Car. It’s not personal.”
She snorted.
“I’m not trying to bullshit you. If you were running the magazine, and that guy’s rebuttal popped up in your inbox, wouldn’t you publish it, too? That column was publicity gold. It was going to get attention. And frankly, I hate to say it, but your column has been getting a lot less attention lately. It’s repetitive, besides which, I think we both know you’re aging out of the single-woman-on-the-prowl shtick.”
As he made his case, Carmen began issuing her own silent refutations. The column was going just fine, thank you. Certainly none of the men she’d been writing about seemed to think that she was “aging out” of anything. In fact, she had every reason to believe that she was growing more desirable as she approached her sexual prime. Surely Jays knew that women hit maximum orgasm capacity in their early thirties. If anyone needed an age check, it was him! Forty-two and still treating the city like a frat house. She realized that she was clenching her fists under the table.
“Anyway, what happened this week was new and exciting. So that’s what I wanted to discuss. How do we capitalize on it?”
She just looked at him. She wanted to hate him, but she felt both his physical proximity and his emotional distance like an ache. She wanted to take his beloved Louboutins and stomp on his heart. She wanted nothing except for him to say, Carmen, I love you. But he wasn’t going to do that, and the reason, she knew, was simple. People called Jays inscrutable, but his actions followed a consistent logic: Jays did what was good for Jays. It wasn’t personal. He was never spiteful. When Jays treated you well, it was because you were good for Jays. When Jays treated you poorly, it was because your suffering was good for Jays. Now Carmen burned with embarrassment, because she’d stupidly believed—or deluded herself into believing—that these rules didn’t apply to her. Somehow she’d convinced herself that she was the one genuine, non-transactional thing in Jays’ life.
Or maybe part of her had known the truth all along. Maybe she kept coming back because she liked being good for Jays. Because it made her feel good.
“How do you mean—capitalize?” she asked.
“That’s what I’m asking you. We learned something this week about what our readers want, and I want to give them more of it. But it’s your column. What do you think?”
Carmen couldn’t remember the last time Jays asked her advice about anything. She thought about it for a moment, as Jays looked at her expectantly. “What if I do a series in which I only date nice guys for a month?”
Jays pursed his lips. “No, no. I don’t think that’s what got people fired up.”
Over the next few minutes, Carmen tossed out every idea she could think of. Pick one nice guy, and try to turn him into a jaded asshole? Or better yet, hold a nice guy contest to see if any of them could turn her into a wide-eyed ingénue? She was even willing to set up a janky cardboard booth in Central Park, like Lucy’s psychiatry booth in Peanuts, that said “Will Date Nice Guys,” and then write about what happened next. But Jays just kept shaking his head, repeating, “We need to fire people up.”
Carmen was growing frustrated. “What do you want—a series in which every ex of mine trashes me in a nasty column?”
“Of course not,” Jays said. “We’re not hanging you out to dry. This is still your space. Your voice.”
Your space, your voice. Never had she heard him talk like this before and it caused her to flush with excitement. “There’s so much I could write about, Jay. I could get into the nitty-gritty sexual politics of all kinds of relationships. I could cover ageism, the LGBTQ community, go inside the world of fetishes, investigate polyamory and open marriages. Instead of writing about myself, I could actually start reporting. Real journalism.”
“Interesting,” Jays said, “but I don’t think it would be provacative.”
“But it would be! I’d be looking deep into the how and why of how people think and love and fuck. That would definitely change things up.”
Jays just shook his head. “We can’t replace a first-person sex and relationships column with a detached intellectual foray into sexual politics. Readers want titillation. They want you. And, besides, I already have plenty of reporters to do that other stuff.”
And if I don’t have reporting experience, she thought, it’s because you haven’t given me any. Now Carmen was angry. Her column was a box whose boundaries could be stretched, but never broken. What a coward Jays was. He claimed to be innovative and cutting edge, but he was afraid to take any significant risk. Just like 99.9 percent of magazine editors everywhere. “You want provocative?” She searched for something so patently absurd that Jays would finally realize how narrow-minded he was being—and that it was time to start taking her seriously. “OK, here’s provocative. Why not set up a sexual cage match between me and that guy who slammed me? Every week we can fuck and then fight about i
t.”
Jays’ face lit up. “That’s great! Tell me more.”
“Wait, what? I was joking.”
“Jokes are where some of the best ideas come from. Seriously, Carmen, I think you’ve stumbled onto something brilliant.”
“I mean…” She felt like she was walking into a trap. Had Jays already thought of this? Had he merely been waiting for her to think of it, too? In any case, he was off and running.
“We could do it as a weekly series. A kind of back-and-forth between you and Nice Guy. And—oh! We could call it ‘Screw the Critics.’ A nice double-entendre.”
Jays wasn’t a wordsmith. It probably took him hours to come up with that. When did he think of it? Carmen wondered. Yesterday? This morning?
“I don’t know, Jay. It’s like putting sex with me on Rotten Tomatoes: ‘Last night’s sex was twenty percent fresh and eighty percent totally twisted’? It feels wrong.”
“Look, unless you’re totally repulsed by this guy, then why not try it out? At least you’ll have the chance to fight back. As it stands, Nice Guy’s got the last word.”
Jays knew exactly where to aim. She was not totally repulsed by Nice Guy, despite his inexperience. And yet this arragement felt … not like prostitution, exactly, but perhaps like being mated at a zoo. But what choice did she have? She considered the question. Jays understood her circumstances here, and the position he was putting her in. She could say no, and risk whatever happened next. Based on how the conversation had started, Jays would likely cancel her column. She could walk away entirely, but that left her with no job and no platform, and it would look like she’d been defeated by Nice Guy’s rebuttal. No. Neither option sounded good. She hadn’t wanted to be a sex columnist in the first place, but that’s what she was. At the very least, she couldn’t let it end like this, bested by Nice Guy and Jays—a pair of little boys.
“You can take some time to think it over,” Jays said, breaking the silence.
Carmen looked up and met his eyes. If she was going ahead with this, it would be on her terms. She was already thinking ahead, to her next meeting with Nice Guy and how she was going to call the shots. But first, she had to deal with the man sitting across from her. “I want a full-time position with benefits,” she said.
Jays looked startled. He had clearly not expected her to negotiate, a sign of how truly cocky he’d become. He should have known better; she wasn’t just going to roll over. And he’d clearly forgotten how well she knew him. He wanted it to happen. He already felt invested. She could see it in his face. That’s what gave her leverage—not a lot of leverage, really, but enough.
“I want a full-time salaried position. No more contract. And I want to have a title. Call me editor-at-large, and put it on the masthead.”
Jays opened his mouth to respond, but Carmen cut him off.
“And I want an office. For the one day a month that I feel like coming in. I don’t care who you have to kick out.”
Jays sucked in a breath. “All right,” he said.
“And,” she interjected before he could steal her momentum, “I’m setting the terms of this thing. I’m not just going to jump back into bed with Nice Guy. We’re going to take it slow, build up to the climax, as it were. If you give the readers what they want right away, they’ll get bored.”
“Always an eye for narrative.” Jays nodded approvingly. “But you and Nice Guy have to file successful reviews for at least two months. Otherwise the deal’s off.”
“What do you mean ‘successful’?”
“I want four hundred thousand online readers per column.”
“Online readers?”
“It’s a digital world, Carmen. I’m watching Web traffic now,” he said. “So if we’re good here, I’ll set it up with Nice Guy and then send you his email. You can file your first review by the regular deadline and we’ll take it from there.”
“You put all of this in writing for my lawyer,” she said. “Then we’ll move forward.” She stood up and collected her bag. She felt tall and powerful, towering above Jays in her Louboutins. And, yet, the rush of total victory eluded her. Negotiating the terms of a contractually bound fuck buddy was not what Sheryl Sandberg had in mind when she instructed women to Lean In.
Still, Carmen felt competent. She hadn’t been totally steamrolled—a small and perhaps pathetic kind of success, but also the only one available to her. Working with what she had, she’d harnessed that same resourcefulness from her childhood bedroom. She wasn’t much different from Jays, in this way. She was taking care of herself, first and foremost, as always.
CHAPTER 9
It was Sunday night, just a few days after Jays had presented his proposition to Nice Guy: a regular sexual exchange between him and Carmen to be followed by columns penned by each, reviewing the other’s performance. Lucas was elated. Jay Jacobson had given Nice Guy and his skills (all his skills) a strong vote of confidence. Because if the Editor didn’t think Nice Guy could spar with Carmen—on the page and in bed—he wouldn’t have offered up such prime real estate in the magazine.
Of course, all this happened by email. And Jays had no idea that Lucas was Nice Guy. And so long as Nice Guy remained anonymous, Jays had written, there would be no money. Clearly, the Editor was trying to incentivize Nice Guy to come forward. But that was out of the question, both for the sake of Lucas’s job at Empire and for his reputation. (Imagine if his family and Mel discovered what he was up to?) Still, if the columns became wildly successful, Lucas reasoned, he’d have enough leverage to make Jays revisit the financial question. In the meantime, he was going to be published every two weeks in Empire! Life was good.
But for now, he’d have to keep his identity—and therefore his elation—under wraps. He arrived at a Chelsea restaurant to join Tyler and Sofia for dinner. The restaurant was narrow and dark, with oil-stained carafes of Chianti on display. It was owned by Sofia’s cousin, who plied them with free antipasti and wine. Sofia said the place was once the headquarters of a small-time Mafioso who gifted the restaurant to Sofia’s great-uncle to repay a debt.
“It’s a cute story,” Tyler said. “And obviously apocryphal. Seeing as you’re in the facts business, Luke, could you help me prove the lady wrong?”
“Leave him alone,” Sofia said. “It’s Sunday night.”
“Lucas is always working,” Tyler said. “He’s a regular Tracy Flick.”
Lucas met Tyler’s eyes and quickly looked away. Noser had already mounted a campaign to uncover Nice Guy’s identity, helmed by Tyler himself.
“Tyler is threatened by anyone who appears to be working harder than him,” Sofia said.
“I’m absolutely working harder,” Lucas said. He’d learned that a head-on approach always worked best with Tyler. Sure enough, Tyler nodded approvingly.
“Anyway, there’s no reason for the two of you to compete. You’re barely in the same field. Empire’s the equivalent of the literary beach read and Noser’s basically a tabloid.”
“I thought we were both in journalism,” Tyler said.
“Is that what they’re calling Noser these days?” Lucas said.
Sofia laughed.
“You work at Noser, too!” Tyler protested.
“I’m a contract photographer.” Sofia waved her hand dismissively. “I might as well be working for the Sears catalog. It doesn’t matter. My work isn’t who I am.”
Both Lucas and Tyler stared, as though she’d just spoken heresy.
“You have to be invested in your work,” Sofia said. “Of course you do. But the idea that my passions should—or even could—be contained within my daily endeavor to pay the bills is absurd. The pictures I take in exchange for a paycheck aren’t exactly art—”
“Ask Sofia to show you some of her extra-curricular work,” Tyler said. “It’s fairly risqué.”
“I’m intrigued,” Lucas said, hoping for specifics.
But Sofia wasn’t finished with her argument “When all of your passion goes into your wo
rk, what’s left for, I don’t know, passion? Most people I know—most women especially—aren’t really living. They’re singularly focused on the end game: the best job, the best man, and so on. They spend all their days slamming doors shut instead of throwing them open. I’m sorry if I sound like a bitch, but that’s sad.”
“If you couldn’t already tell, Sofia doesn’t have a lot of female friends,” Tyler said.
“God forbid you ever meet my ex,” Lucas said, and the others laughed. “But seriously. You’re genuine. You obviously don’t let anybody punish you for being yourself. I wish I could have learned that lesson about six years ago.”
Sofia looked up quickly, then back at her wineglass.
A moment passed.
“So, Lucas,” Tyler said, breaking the silence, “tell Sofia about that party you went to last week at Hamish McGregor’s penthouse.”
Sofia looked impressed. “He’s the city’s hottest art dealer.”
“All the furniture looked like spaceships,” Lucas said. “And some of the people there might have been walking sculptures. It was superweird.”
“McGregor has sold a ton of work to Jays,” Tyler said. “It’s on display in his various interests. Honestly, Luke, your editor has a finger in pretty much everything, not to mention half of the women in—”
“Ugh, stop.” Sofia scowled.
Tyler grinned. “Anyway, he’s an investor in three or four hot restaurants, a couple of cushy bars, a club downtown. I’ve heard he’s angling his way into development—high-end condos and a hotel.”
“Sounds like you’ve been nosing around,” Lucas said.
“Congratulations, you’re the first person to think of that pun!” Tyler said.
Lucas, slightly less confident than he was a second ago, sipped his wine.
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