“That’s not what I’m saying. But this is about me, too, Lucas. Being with you—it’s taught me a lot about myself. What I want, and what I need, and who I am. I owe you so much.”
“I’m so happy to have been the vehicle of your self-discovery,” Lucas said, his face contorted with scorn. Carmen hated this. She hated to be the person who’d done this to him. All she wanted was to wrap her arms around him, to shield him from this hurt. But that would be like trying to protect him from fire by dousing him in gasoline.
“Well, it’s the truth. You’ve made me a better person. A stronger person. And I know it’s not fair. I know it sucks, being where you are right now. And this is not how I wanted it to happen. But I’ve been tethered for too long. Lucas, you know what I’m talking about.”
Lucas’s bottom lip had stopped shaking. “The truth,” he said, parroting her. “What is the truth? Was it not what we’ve experienced over these past few months? Was it not what you wrote about me? What’s the goddamned truth, Carmen?”
“That was all true. But it’s also true that—”
“Of course,” Lucas said. “So many truths. So many truths! I should have known better than to trust your version. Maybe people would like to know that we’ve been making our columns up for months and it was your idea.”
“Lucas, be careful,” she said. Carmen wasn’t going to retaliate; she’d stand here and take insults from him. She was leaving in two weeks, no matter what. Had there been any doubt in her mind—and, at their most intimate moments, there had been some doubt—it was gone now. But Lucas was on the verge of harming himself. He could still have a gig at Empire after she left, if he was smart about it.
“Oh, I don’t need to be careful. You do,” he said. “I’m not the one who’s been making up columns for years.”
Her stomach dropped, just plummeted into her feet. She was suddenly hyperaware of the cameras: dozens of phones trained on them. The Lucas and Carmen meltdown was filmed before a live studio audience. How did he even know this? Jays. It must have been Jays. “Lucas…” She touched his arm, but he shook her off.
“When we first met, you raked me over the coals for months because of my lack of experience. But the whole time—long before I arrived—you’d been lying to everyone. You pretended to go out and meet men, date men, take men home. For column after column after column. But you weren’t doing very much of it. How many of those bankers and lawyers and artists were based on real people? Thirty percent? Forty? Sure, writing a sex and relationships column isn’t exactly serious journalism, but readers expected honesty, Carmen. They expected the truth. I expected the truth. That’s all we’ve all expected from you, but you just keep on lying.”
Shivers of heat ran up Carmen’s arms. Sweat prickled the back of her neck and her upper lip. This had not happened. Lucas had not exposed her to the world. He had not retaliated against her with flippant, destructive cruelty. Not her lover and best friend.
Briefly, she considered arguing with him. She could make a case for herself, expose the inherent sexism in her professional situation, the power imbalance that had compelled her to act as she had, wrongly or not. Or she could throw this all back in his face, condemning him for being complicit in so much of it. But as stunned as she was that Lucas had sunk so very low, she couldn’t summon the energy or the will. She meant what she’d told him at Christmas: She was done fighting.
And so there was only one thing to do. Carmen pushed into the crowd. They stared at her like she was naked, like she was dirty. Couldn’t they just get out of her way? Everywhere she looked, there were phones trained on her, bodies hemming her in. She felt like she might throw up.
“Put your phones away!” The emphatic voice rang through the gallery, as though from a Broadway stage. Behind the voice came a frail, eccentrically dressed woman, elbowing gawkers left and right.
“Is that Miranda Kelly?” someone whispered loudly.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” Mira pronounced, finally reaching her granddaughter. She looked back at Lucas with fiery eyes before collecting her granddaughter and leading her away.
In the elevator, Carmen felt she could breathe again. “It’s true,” she whispered. “What Lucas said.”
Mira slipped her gnarled, ring-studded fingers into Carmen’s. “Honey,” she said. “I don’t care.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER 42
New Yorkers know exactly what to expect of their seasons. Fall is crisp and blissfully prolonged. Winter is interminable. Summer is glorious when you’re sitting in an air-conditioned room. And then there is spring, the season of budding trees and brownstone flower boxes, of oxford shoes and ballet flats, of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks finding true love. The city savors spring like a wartime ration. Come spring, even the most cynical New Yorker believes in serendipity.
But not Lucas. MOMA had left him heartbroken and humiliated, feeling that he’d misunderstood or mistaken everything he knew about Carmen. How had this become his pattern? Carmen, Sofia, Mel—all horrible, unnecessarily cruel miscalculations. He felt stuck in a kind of at-bat purgatory: there at the plate, forever on his second strike, destined to bean balls into foul territory for eternity. And yes, he felt guilty for exposing Carmen. But given what she’d done to him, wasn’t it justifiable—at the very least, understandable?
Still, whenever Lucas closed his eyes he saw only Mira’s profound disappointment as she led her granddaughter away.
It was all too much. Lucas called in all of his vacation days and spent two straight weeks floating facedown on the living room couch, takeout containers lapping at his feet. The only screen he’d look at was the television, a device mercifully void of social media.
Finally, Tyler staged an intervention. On an afternoon in mid-March, he thrust open the windows and a blustery wind hit Lucas like the shock of cold water.
“Hey!” Lucas moaned. In response, Tyler handed over his phone.
“Look at the ‘Screw Off!’ comments,” he commanded.
“Are you serious? Can’t everyone move on?”
“Just do it.”
Lucas sighed, took the phone, and winced. “This one says: ‘If Nice Guy was any nicer, he’d be Hitler.’”
Tyler snatched the phone back and groaned. He scrolled around for a few seconds, then handed it back to Lucas. “Here, now read.”
Lucas did. There was a stream of comments going back weeks, not all of them nice but many of them sympathetic. Men of all ages, and even some women, seemed to understand his heartbreak—to celebrate it, even. “‘Every man has been in Nice Guy’s shoes. The rest of us are just lucky no cameras were around,’” Lucas read aloud. Then he looked at Tyler. “And the point of this is?”
“The point is that you’re not a villain. You had haters before, and you have defenders now. It’s OK. People are complicated. And look at this!” Tyler pulled Lucas’s phone from beneath a pile of lo mein cartons. “You’ve got a dozen missed calls and texts from your family. Fuck it, I’m reading them.
“‘Mom and Dad are really worried. Call them!’
“‘Honey, we love you. Please call us!’
“‘Luke, your mother is beside herself with concern.’
“‘L, Mom is freaking! Dad says he’s sorry for being so judgmental.’”
Lucas took the phone from Tyler. “OK, not what I expected.”
“And check out your inbox. Look at all those interview requests.”
“You looked through my email?”
“Dude, I was worried.”
Lucas scrolled through the list, stunned. Instead of ridiculing him, as he’d assumed, the masses wanted his side of the story. Instead of a laughingstock, the Internet had turned him into a lovestruck, lovelorn everyman. Maybe his career wasn’t over. He got up off the couch. “I’m done with this shit,” he said, surveying the mess he’d made. “And you know what?” It might have been the cold air or the MSG coursing through his bloodstream, but suddenly Lucas felt high. “Screw her!” L
ucas announced. “Screw. Her!”
“Yes, exactly,” Tyler said. “Now for the love of god, go take a shower.”
* * *
The other thing Lucas had missed during his hibernation was Jays’ public apology in the magazine:
To our valued readers,
As you are likely aware, our Brand Ambassador Lucas Callahan brought forward disturbing accusations against his “Screw the Critics” partner, longtime Empire sex columnist Carmen Kelly. He claimed that Kelly had fabricated portions of her columns for years, deceiving readers by manufacturing men she supposedly slept with and describing sexual escapades that did not actually happen. We take accusations like these seriously; Empire is nothing without the trust of its readers, and we would never knowingly violate that bond. An internal team investigated these accusations, and I regret to confirm that they are true. It hurts me more than I can say to have let down our loyal readership. You expected the highest standards of journalistic truth and were sorely disappointed. As of this morning, Carmen Kelly is no longer a writer or Brand Ambassador for Empire.
And yet there is reason for optimism. As of print time, over 14 million of you have watched Lucas face his toughest critic. You have seen his generosity and his courage. But more than this, you have seen his genuineness. In a culture where so much is faked, fabricated—and, in the parlance of reality TV, “produced”—Lucas has always been honest. Even when that honesty opens him up to scrutiny and criticism, he is a model of integrity. You, dear readers, understand this. In the last two weeks, we have received hundreds of emails, tweets, and Facebook posts from you. And all of you want the same thing: to see our Lucas pick himself up again. Which is exactly what he’s going to do.
This is not the end of Lucas, or of the column “Screw the Critics.” And I hope that you will once again put your trust and faith in Empire, so that it will not be the end of our relationship either. There is so much of this story left to tell.
Lucas didn’t actually see the letter until he walked back into Empire’s office, a day after he finally took a shower. As the elevator opened up, he remembered the last time he walked in after an extended absence—only a few weeks ago, after his star had risen, and he was disappointed that the office largely ignored him. Now he wished for exactly that—knowing he wouldn’t get it. Alexis was the first to spot him and rushed over for a hug. “Lucas, you poor thing,” she said. Everyone gathered around, wanting to know how he was holding up. Franklin strung together multiple sarcasm-free sentences of support. Even that braggart Pete Sullivan, the kid who took Lucas’s job, seemed genuinely supportive. “My dad was just saying how romantic disasters make for the best memoirs,” he said.
Jays noticed the commotion and emerged from his office. The staff hushed as the Editor walked toward Lucas with arms open wide. (The hug would quickly be reported on “Screw Off!,” thanks to Rogue Empire: “Jay Jacobson just bear-hugged Nice Guy, the first confirmed hug Jay Jacobson has ever given another human being. It’s getting real here.”) Soon Lucas was installed on Jays’ distressed-leather couch. “I’m happy you’ve come back,” the Editor said. “Now it’s time to find you a new partner.”
Jays, as Lucas might have guessed, had plans. “Screw the Critics” would be reborn as “Love the Critics.” No longer simply a critique of sex, it would become a raw and detailed exploration of an entire relationship—from friendship, to intimacy, to love. The new column wasn’t, Jays assured him, about the mushiness of romance but rather the complicated process of melding two lives. “Carmen wasn’t capable of it,” Jays said. “But I know you are. And we’ll find you a partner who will be, too. So let’s get you out on the town—keep your profile high—and we’ll find a new lady.”
Within days, Jays had whipped together a nonstop social calendar, and Lucas threw himself into his post-Carmen life, grateful for the distraction. Now there were nightly parties full of It-Girl artists and fashionistas, twentysomething magazine editors, novelists and Instagram influencers. A lot of these women were eager to jump into bed. Two women in particular—impossibly skinny and always greeting him like the third in a trio of besties—seemed to show up at every party. Were these his first stalkers? His groupies? He enjoyed the attention, and yet it all felt wrong. Like these women simply wanted to take him for a test drive, to find out whether Nice Guy performed as advertised. If only he could have sex with abandon. If only he could do it with the anonymity that Carmen once told him to savor. But he couldn’t. All he wanted was to find his new partner, a woman he could fall in love with, someone untainted by all this nonsense.
The parties did serve at least one valuable purpose: They were a distraction. Alone, away from his beautiful crowd, he thought only of Carmen. He recycled their last few weeks together, searching for answers. He loved her and hated her, and he didn’t know how to reconcile the two. He was desperate to know what she was thinking, but he had no way to find out. Contacting her directly was out of the question, and she’d deleted all of her social media accounts. He was sure she’d done it on purpose, specifically to hurt him. Instead of taunting him with the chronicle of her fabulous new LA life, she’d cut him out. She didn’t care enough about him to make him jealous.
At the end of April, Empire began accepting applications for “Love the Critics.” Women submitted a thirty-second video introduction, a résumé, and a writing sample. Any New York–based female between the ages of twenty-one and thirty could apply. The response was overwhelming, so Alexis was brought in to filter out what many in the office began calling the slut slush. Lucas sat beside her in the conference room with his laptop and headphones as the eligible women of New York flashed like subliminal messages before his eyes.
“That one’s cute,” he’d say, and Alexis would move her into the follow-up folder. “Oh no,” Lucas would then say a moment later, “this next one is way cuter.” And then the previous one would go into the slush. It didn’t make him feel good, sorting women this way, although doing it with Alexis felt mildly better. At least another woman was involved in the ugly task. “It’s really no different than swiping left or right,” she said. And in truth, there was something cathartic about moving so many applications around however he wanted to. Pathetic as this might have been, it was the only thing that made him feel even moderately in control.
CHAPTER 43
On a gray Monday afternoon in April, Carmen trudged up from the Christopher Street subway. Another day wasted. She’d spent the morning applying for jobs she wouldn’t get: copywriting, native ad writing, grant writing—basically, résumés and cover letters hurled into the darkness, on the off chance one landed with a manager who didn’t immediately recognize her name. If only she had another marketable skill. But writing was all she could do. At the Legal Aid office, where she’d just had a fruitless meeting about Mira’s eviction case, she’d started thinking about the benefits of practicing law. Not thankless public interest law of course, but high-powered, big-firm law. She’d hired one such lawyer after signing her Netflix contract. He was smarmy, racking up the billable hours, but he was also flush.
Which Carmen decidedly was not. After Jays published his apology—“An internal team investigated these accusations, and I regret to confirm that they are true”—Netflix’s legal team had canceled her contract. Carmen was then forced to ditch her high-powered lawyer for Legal Aid, but the nonprofit’s office was overextended and Mira’s eviction date was swiftly approaching. It went without saying that Mira would move into Carmen’s apartment. But Mira could barely manage a single flight of stairs, let alone four. And then what? “I’m an aging sex columnist who lied,” she told her grandmother. “I’m unemployable.” Mira assured her that things would change. “People have short memories,” she said. “Take heart.” But according to public opinion, Carmen didn’t have one.
If she couldn’t drum up work, she and Mira would have to move, even leave the city. Carmen had begun to fantasize about the open plains of Nebraska and the thick forests of New Hampshire, pl
aces where nobody had heard of “Screw the Critics” or Empire. Online, she’d been reduced from a person to a persona, a target that people were eager to hit with misogyny and schadenfreude. Terrible hashtags—it was her misfortune to have a name beginning with the letter C—proliferated like weeds. Carmen deleted her social media accounts, but it didn’t stop the assault.
And how could she leave the city? Being from here—of here—had given her the confidence to scrimmage with Jays, back when they were merely flirting. It was the source of her nerve, what allowed her to bite back, to test his limits and her own. It had made her fearless in the face of an absurd power imbalance. So what if he drew a little blood? She’d been a survivor in this town; she could handle it. When she first started at Empire, she was so smug around the other new hires—her peers from Michigan, California, and even New Jersey—because she drank crappy bodega coffee and knew the subway map by heart. But she’d taken the city for granted, underestimated it.
* * *
Carmen had barely exited the subway station when a cold spring rain began to fall. Cursing, she ducked into the closest doorway. It was Kettle of Fish, one of the many local haunts she’d been avoiding—and not just because it was where she’d first met Lucas. The close quarters of the Internet were no match for those of the West Village. For nearly a decade, Carmen had walked these streets, frequented these stores, encountered many of these people. She knew her neighbors and they knew her, and her business. Since MOMA, they’d been watching her, judging her, pitying her. People call New York vast and impersonal, but those people are strangers to the town. On an island merely 13.4 miles long and just 2.3 miles wide, neighborhoods are like small towns. When people ignore one another, they’re simply providing the illusion of privacy. Most days, it’s a gift: emotional space, where physical space doesn’t exist. But in reality, everyone is seen. Everyone is watched. Which meant that when Kettle of Fish’s longtime bartender caught Carmen’s eye through the window, she had to go in—or suffer a new groundswell of hyper-local gossip.
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