A memory: Shortly after they were married, while vacationing in Barbados, Barnett insisted they rent a small sailboat, just the two of them. When she prudently mentioned his lack of sailing experience, he looked puzzled and a tad put off, as if the ability to tack and come-about had been part of his genetic endowment, along with a strong jawline and the Protestant work ethic. The excursion was a terrifying disaster, the boat almost capsizing a dozen times, the boom nearly taking off their heads as it whipsawed back and forth. Finally a launch was sent by the resort to tow them in. Her legs buckled when she staggered onto shore, but Barnett leapt off the boat like Hernando Cortés laying claim to Barbados for Greenwich, Connecticut. “That was fun,” he said jauntily, and she was about to challenge him—indeed, she nearly grabbed an oar to pummel him—when she realized there was no point: Barnett had already transformed what was patently a near-death experience for both of them into “fun.”
Which made his inability to find the bright side in his current situation inauspicious to say the least.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she suggested, still standing in front of his desk. “It’ll be fun.”
“Fun?”
“We’ll go to the park.” She almost mentioned the towhee nest. She’d been to the Rambles every day since she’d discovered it. Any day now the three chicks, all beak and eyes, were going to hop off the edge of the nest and, after a terrifying plunge, begin to fly.
“First you want me to work harder, apparently, and then you want me to take a walk. I’m getting mixed signals here, Lily.” He pressed an index finger to his temple, as if bleeding a radiator. “I have enough on my mind.”
“I want to help, that’s all.”
His face softened. “Come here, sweetheart,” he said gently. He clicked a few keys and took one last, longing glance at the screen as she circled the desk. She placed a consoling hand on his arm. Perhaps some quick afternoon sex would restore his color, not to mention his resolve.
“At least my eyesight isn’t going,” he said as he brushed the front of her blouse. “You’ve got a stain, right here.”
She withdrew her hand. “I’m going out. Don’t forget, you promised William you’d take him to baseball practice today.”
“I did?” His eyes drifted back to the computer screen.
“Four o’clock. He knows the place.”
Guy had almost forgotten how to knot a tie. Back in the New Jersey veal farm, he’d been too insignificant to have to wear one, and now, as CEO of Positano Software, he was the dress code and ties were banished from the office, even when calling on a major client—no one, not even a C-level executive on Park Avenue, trusted a tech guy in a tie. But Rosemary had insisted that he wear one to the co-op board interview and after some debate he’d agreed. He had two: a butter-yellow one that screamed “eighties investment banker wannabe” and a striped one from the Gap that whimpered “loser.” He went with loser and, after several false starts, managed to fashion a passably tight knot.
“I feel like I’m choking,” he told Rosemary. “Who said beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes?”
“Thoreau. I wonder what he’d say about a board interview to buy a two-point-two-million-dollar co-op.”
Just weeks had passed since their bid on the apartment was accepted. Lucinda Wells had been eager to close the deal quickly, preparing an exhaustive “board package” that included their tax returns, statements from their bank, brokerage accounts, letters of reference. It was like applying to college, only Columbia had never cared how much money he made and how much he’d managed to save. Becoming CEO of a public company had made him feel exposed, even vulnerable—suddenly his salary and benefits and options were public knowledge, instantly available to any voyeur with an Internet connection. Worse, he had to watch what he said about the company, lest he be seen by regulators as making “forward-looking statements.” Imagine having laws to prevent people from making “forward-looking statements.” Where would America be without the forward-looking? (Guy was a Democrat and would remain one, no matter how high Positano’s stock rose. But sometimes the government went too far, he was beginning to think.) If going public had made him feel exposed, applying to live in a co-op was a humiliating striptease performed not for mere strangers but prospective neighbors. At least investors didn’t care what you wore or whether you smoked or if you had a dog or how many times a month you screwed your wife.
Lucinda had called both of them every day that week, often several times a day, with advice and strategy for the interview. Every possible objection the board might have was raised in advance and dealt with. His salary was on the low side—not unusual for a tech CEO, whose compensation was primarily stock, but a major concern to co-op board members, whose overriding interest was that all residents make their monthly maintenance payments. Lucinda’s advice: Tell them that the board, the company’s board, would be reviewing his compensation in a month, and that he had begun a regular plan of share divestiture. Neither happened to be true, of course. Thorough Lucinda had done her own credit check on Guy and Rosemary and come up with quite a bit of credit-card debt, fifteen thousand dollars’ worth, divided among several cards, money he’d needed to get the company started. Lucinda’s advice: Be honest (for a change). Regale them with tales of buying computers and office equipment and supplies with personal credit. “You’re Steve Jobs and the pathetically tiny junior four you’re trying to escape from is the garage in which an empire was founded. They ought to put a plaque on the door.”
And so on. Guy wondered if Lucinda ever slept, her feverish brain working 24/7 to prepare innocent clients for the horrors of the Inquisition.
He decided halfway through the preparation process that he hated her. She tried mightily to adopt a commiserating tone with them when discussing the board interview, and she obviously wanted the sale to go through, but in the real-estate war in which they were now engaged, she was clearly a collaborator, working both sides. She might hedge conversations with “I know this is ridiculous…” or “This is absurd, however…” But she quite obviously bought into the stupid rules and “concerns” of these boards who lorded their power over hardworking people like him, young men (well, youngish men) whose entrepreneurial companies were growing a shitload faster than their arthritic old banks and insurance companies. (Young women, too: Even in his thoughts he was evolving, thanks to Rosemary.) It’s a game, Lucinda liked to say, just play by the rules until you’re in. But it was more than a game to her, he felt certain, much more than a game.
Barnett was with William at his baseball practice in Central Park, and Nanny was picking up Sophie from a friend’s place on East End Avenue. That left only Consuelo in the apartment; she spent afternoons in her sunless slot of a room behind the kitchen, emerging only to begin dinner preparation at around five. Restless, Lily began walking through the apartment. They’d hired a well-known decorator when they’d bought it sixteen years earlier, and it hadn’t changed significantly since then. Lily had added a few chairs, a painting or two, family photographs in every room, but the apartment seemed impervious to her. In a lavishly illustrated feature on the apartment in Architectural Digest, their decorator had described the process of doing the Grantham home as a collaborative undertaking with her clients, but she’d been as collaborative as Napoleon, ignoring or scoffing at every one of Lily’s suggestions.
She passed by the study, her least favorite room, with its shelves of books-by-the-yard and myriad photographs of Barnett’s relatives wielding fishing rods, racquets, golf clubs, and cocktails, but on second thought decided to have a look. It was so rarely unoccupied these days. The computer monitor was black, and there was a disturbing absence of papers on the desk. She would have liked some indication that Barnett was mounting a vigorous defense. She picked up an envelope, which turned out to be a solicitation for an investment newsletter, and as she replaced it her hand brushed the mouse. A faint crackling sound, and then the monitor lit up, startling her. Like the children, she w
as under orders not to touch Barnett’s computer. Consuelo wasn’t even allowed to dust it, as if one inadvertent key stroke would erase all their wealth.
Well, there wasn’t any wealth to erase, as it turned out.
The browser went right to some sort of financial site. On the left of the screen was a long list of stock symbols. She was dismayed to recognize several tech stocks—you couldn’t buy a candy bar for what some of these losers were selling for. She opened Barnett’s mailbox next and skimmed his in-box for evidence that he was working on clearing himself. It was surprisingly empty, and the few e-mails she read were solicitations for still more investment advice. She clicked back to the browser and opened up a list of the sites he’d most recently visited. The site at the top of the list, the one, apparently, he’d been visiting when she’d reminded him it was time to take William to his practice, was something called Womanimations.com. She opened it.
After a few seconds’ delay the page loaded. She read a brief warning about adult-oriented content and then clicked on the words “I Agree,” thereby attesting to her adult status and desire to view sexually explicit material. This took her to a new page consisting of a menu without any sort of illustration, a commendably spare, even elegant design, she had to admit. She began to read the dozen or so choices: Anal, Dildos, Fucking…The list, helpfully, was alphabetically arranged.
What the hell, she thought, and selected “Dildoes.” She was instantly greeted with a page of small photographs, at the top of which was a banner ad for something called Premium Escorts. Each of the photographs showed a woman, either alone or with another woman or, in surprisingly few cases, with a man. She clicked on one at random and, in a new window, it filled the screen instantly—God bless the cable modem. An unfashionably voluptuous platinum blonde crouched on all fours, glancing back at another woman, this one not quite as blond, who was inserting a dildo the size of a rolling pin into her. Lily leaned closer to the screen to discern which orifice the dildo was penetrating as it moved back and forth, back and forth, at least five or six times a second. She quickly realized that the same action (and the recipient’s blissful, mouth-distended reaction) was being repeated over and over. This wasn’t a video but an animation of a photograph. Thus, the name of the site: Wom-animations. Clever. Well, cleverish. And boring, though in an admittedly hypnotic way. How could anyone (how could Barnett?) watch this sordid little scene for more than a second or two? Or was repetitiveness perhaps the point, distilling an entire erotic scenario into one infinitely repeated action, eschewing any sort of foreplay and follow-up and, by relentlessly focusing on the act itself, freezing time at the very instant of satisfaction—wasn’t this, really, what sexual participants, or at least men, longed for?
Lily considered this and a variety of related issues as the two women continued to thrust and react, thrust and react. For example, was Barnett into dildos? And if so, why hadn’t he ever mentioned it? (Well, thank God he hadn’t, but still.) Or did he patronize the anal page? Or the fucking section? Shouldn’t she know this about the man she’d been sleeping with (albeit it rather conventionally) for seventeen years? Thrust and react. Thrust and react. And what in the world did this have to do with finding the missing money and restoring his reputation and their security?
Nothing, obviously. She re-opened the list of Barnett’s recently visited sites and explored one, and then another, and then another. All were sex sites, protected by stern but ineffectual warnings, and all began with lists of very targeted options spelled out in clinical detail: Interracial/Anal, for example, or Lesbian/Threesomes. She supposed it must be comforting to learn that you were not alone in your desire to watch a video of a man sliding his penis between the balloony breasts of a bouffanted transvestite (Tit Fucking/She-Men). Or that others shared your passion for watching the amazingly elastic mouth of a sad-eyed woman accommodate two elephantine penises simultaneously (Oral/Two Cocks). Did anyone (did Barnett?) want to do these things, or was observing them on a computer screen gratification enough?
She found herself disgusted and fascinated. And quickly bored. After fifteen minutes exploring the sites Barnett had recently visited, she could have sworn the same woman showed up in all of them (teased platinum hair, turgid red lips, a figure that took the concept of hourglass to a cartoonish level), doing pretty much the same thing in an inexhaustible number of positions in animations, videos, and still photographs. Each page was festooned with banners advertising escort services and “toys” and the occasional offer for discount plane tickets or low-interest credit cards. She and her family were about to be thrown off Park Avenue while platinum-haired sluts with tits the size of the medicine ball D’Arcy once threw at her abs twice a week were getting rich as Croesus selling banner ads to airlines and banks.
She logged off and sat there for a few minutes. Barnett had been doing nothing to advance his case since he’d been dragged from the Temple of Dendur. All those hours at his desk, when she’d assumed he been tracking down the missing funds, had been spent instead trolling the Internet for sex. Their money was raining down on Park Avenue like confetti and he was passively jerking off to a multimillionaire with 44D tits who could painlessly give birth to a Lexus. She felt furious and hurt and afraid…
…and (she could hardly believe it herself) free. In a few short weeks all the ties to everything that was familiar in her life had been cut free, save those that connected her to the children. Her entire life was up for grabs, and now, with no money, their friends deserting them like rats, their reputations obliterated, her husband addicted to online sex, she was free to conduct her life in an entirely new way—or not, as she pleased.
She felt light-headed, giddy with freedom, and wanted to do something right away to acknowledge her new status. But what? A jolt of panic shot through her: Perhaps she wasn’t free, just trapped—what was that line from the Janis Joplin song, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”? Perhaps she’d buy a Janis Joplin CD and blast it through the apartment’s state-of-the-art sound system. Picturing Barnett’s reaction, not to mention the kids’ and Nanny’s, gave her momentary pleasure, but playing “Bobby McGee” for the first time in three decades wasn’t exactly storming the Bastille. Perhaps she’d buy a dildo, a big, ugly one the size of a rolling pin. Well, perhaps not. She considered logging onto the Internet again to find sex sites that turned her on…but what would such sites contain? Naked men? Couples? Lesbians? The truth was, on those rare occasions when she surfed the Internet, she searched for sites advertising homes for sale in places like Paris or Santa Barbara or Santorini. Real estate was her porn. How unfair that men could meet their needs so easily—and, with a cable modem, so quickly. She could run away for a while, just disappear, but she’d have to take the children with her, so in the end that wouldn’t be running away at all. She checked her watch. It wasn’t yet six o’clock. She picked up the phone, dialed information, and asked for the number of the Broadway Nut Shoppe. When a recording offered to call the number automatically, she happily pressed “one” to activate the service, never mind the seventy-five-cent fee, which counted as an extravagance, given their current circumstances. She was free.
Nine
The co-op board interview had been going amazingly well when Guy’s cell phone rang and ruined everything. The three board members seemed, if anything, awed by Guy’s connection to Positano Software and asked more questions about the outlook for the company’s stock price than about Guy and Rosemary’s finances or the likelihood of their acquiring a dog (allowed but not encouraged). The interview took place in the apartment of Sheila Ratliff, the oldest of the three. The apartment was stuffy and badly decorated, a classic seven two floors above the unit they were buying (or hoping to). Rosemary had been effusive nonetheless in praising the decor, to the obvious delight of Sheila Ratliff, who must have read in their application where Rosemary had worked and what she had specialized in. (“I must confess, these aren’t real Tiffany,” she’d said conspiratorially when she sho
wed them into the living room, pointing to a pair of sconces so garishly hideous, even Guy could tell they were worthless.) Sheila Ratliff, about eighty, was short and white-haired, with pale blue eyes and the suspicious, more or less permanent scowl you saw on old women at the checkout in Zabar’s, where they watched the cashiers ring up their small purchases with predatory vigilance. The other two inquisitors were men, both in their forties, Guy guessed, probably lawyers, the default profession of the upwardly mobile. All three threw mostly softballs that evening, although one question nearly tripped them up.
“Do you plan to renovate?” asked Sheila Ratliff.
Guy was about to jump in with an enthusiastic affirmative, perhaps followed by something glib about the state of the Gimmels’ apartment, when Rosemary leaned forward and preempted him in a reassuring voice.
“We will be renovating.” Sheila Ratliff’s expression darkened as she glanced protectively around her untouched living room. “But our first concern will be to preserve the integrity of the apartment. You can’t re-create these moldings, no matter how much money you have.”
Sheila Ratliff’s face relaxed as the five of them dutifully observed the crown moldings along the ceiling. All Guy could see was peeling paint and chipped plaster—he wouldn’t hesitate to tear them out and start over.
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