Margaret considered the table of ossified cheese cubes. She thought: Those who can’t do, teach. Looked up and smiled—feeling suddenly light—at Bart. “I’m going to start a magazine,” she said firmly. As she said it, the magazine suddenly materialized in her mind, a brilliant synthesis of her feminism, her critical theory background, and her interest in pop culture. She could see the photos, the layout, the essays, the eye-popping cover nestled in between the New Yorker and Ms. on the newsstand. Why not?
He stood back and gave her a head-to-toe examination, taking in her square plastic glasses, her clunky knee-high boots, the dyed black hair chopped into a blunt bob that she’d once thought expressed a cheerful lack of concern about the traditional trappings of femininity. Now she chewed nervously on her lower lip and wished she’d put on lipstick. “That’s really cool,” he said. “You should tell me about it. Perhaps over a drink.”
“A drink?” She nibbled a cheese cube nervously and tried to remember the last time she’d gone on a date. It had been months.
“Cocktail,” he said. “I hear even intellectual magazine editors like to drink them.”
“Well,” she said. “I can’t say no to that, then.” She chewed a bite of hardened cheese a few times and swallowed before she answered. “There’s this poetry reading I was thinking of going to tomorrow night if you want to come…”
“Poetry? I said cocktail. Or we could go for a ride on my motorcycle.”
She could picture it clearly: a throbbing engine between her legs, sitting behind this cocky man with her arms wrapped around him, holding on for dear life. The ultimate submissive female position. She found herself nodding so vigorously that she nearly made herself dizzy. Oh, she was weak, so weak. She needed to go home and reread her Germaine Greer.
“I’ll pick you up at eight.”
Margaret scribbled her address on the back of a stained playbill and bolted away to look for Josephine before she could do anything else stupid, like have sex with him right there in the middle of the lobby.
six weeks, twenty motorcycle rides, forty-one mind-blowing orgasms, and one bailed-upon interview at Stanford later Margaret found herself following Bart down to Los Angeles and renting a small one-bedroom with him near a noisy freeway on-ramp in East Hollywood. She didn’t inform her parents that she was turning down the Stanford professorship until after she’d already packed her boxes; it was easier that way. They did not take it well. Margaret wasn’t sure whether her mother was more upset that Margaret had embarrassed her by standing up their club friend, the dean of the English department, or that Bart hadn’t bothered washing the blue paint from underneath his fingernails before meeting them for dinner at L’Étouffée. Her father had rolled his eyes and muttered something about “throwing away her potential” and the fortune they’d wasted on her education. Lizzie had eaten all five of their desserts, making herself as sick as she’d looked through the entire meal. The dinner had finally ended when her mother began to dab at her eyes. “But you’re smarter than this,” Janice had said, words that somehow fueled Margaret’s fury. “And it’s so far away.”
During the entire six-hour drive down to Los Angeles, Margaret felt sick to her stomach, knowing that she had somehow betrayed her parents’ faith in her and unable to totally convince herself that she didn’t care. But the longer she stayed in Los Angeles with Bart, the more she felt herself lifted forward by the tsunami of their combined ambitions, imagined herself breaking free of the narrow confines of her family’s bourgeois expectations and starting a revolution. Together, she and Bart would be an It Couple. Like Yoko Ono and John Lennon (before the assassination), Sofia and Spike (before the divorce). She would become the enfant terrible writer-editor, he would be the edgy film star. They would have free entry into every event in town, invitations to every movie opening, and dinner parties at the homes of internationally respected artists. The vision was intoxicating.
With Bart by her side, she threw herself into the impoverished-urban-hipster lifestyle appropriate to the as-yet-unacknowledged creative genius. She drank $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon at dodgy bars in East Los Angeles where “real locals” hung out. She went to edgy art openings in Chinatown. She consumed museum memberships like candy and learned to speak Spanish from books on tape. For the first year, life seemed to have a glittering edge. The fact that she and Bart were opposites in all ways was a powerful force of attraction; Bart referred to her in public as “my feminist love slave” and Margaret responded by calling him her “pussy-whipped chauvinist.” The sex was violent and terrific. Sure, their apartment was too small and smelled like old cat piss and refried beans, and it was true that they bickered constantly about who would do the dishes and whether to watch Charlie Rose or E! True Hollywood Story, but she was infatuated, which made everything all right.
And if Margaret had to take a menial job as a bookstore clerk in order to get her magazine off the ground, it wasn’t the end of the world. Her friends—Josephine, who had moved down to Los Angeles not long after Margaret did, and then Alexis, and then Claire—were all broke too, all worked day jobs as waitresses or salesclerks or production assistants on commercials. Snatch was growing, slowly but surely: The first issue, “The Body Issue,” funded by the sale of the diamond stud earrings her parents had given her for graduation and written almost entirely by Margaret herself—including the two centerpiece editorials, “Why Women Should Pee Standing Up” and “In Praise of Obesity,” and the “Deconstructing Pamela Anderson’s Implants” photo spread—had sold out its entire thousand-copy run. Four months later, the second issue (“The Advertising Issue,” which consisted entirely of reviews of the most offensive ads on television) garnered a glowing write-up in Ms. (which called Snatch “the bleeding edge of fourth-wave feminism”) and two thousand subscribers. By the seventh issue (“The Mommy Issue”), when Rolling Stone mentioned her in a story about “the new zines” and a rich kid named Stuart Gelkind called her up, she had a tidy little subscriber list of twelve thousand and had gone from quarterly to bimonthly. Even though the magazine wasn’t exactly making her rich or turning her into a household name, she still felt something palpable within her grasp. She pushed herself harder: wooing writers, negotiating her way onto newsstands, working through most weekends, and even putting on a suit to meet with sales reps. Despite his disapproval of her direction, she thought, her father would have been proud of her work ethic if he could have seen her.
Meanwhile, Bart was, as promised, fanatically pursuing an acting career—although Margaret hadn’t quite anticipated how shallow this pursuit could be. He blew $395 on head shots, and the glossy black-and-white photos—Bart sitting backward on a chair, one palm gently cupping his cheek—spilled from every shelf and drawer. He spent his free time at the gym and wasted hours in front of the mirror trying to perfect his “signature expression.” (“Pacino does the thing where he shows the whites of his eyes; Robert Redford has the bemused double take,” he’d explain. “I’m thinking mine should be left-eye squint, with a matching half smile.”) He memorized the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair, marking photographs of influential producers and agents in case he happened to stand behind one of them at the Coffee Explosion.
His first two years were mostly a bust: a hemorrhoid-cream commercial, a stint as a dead body on 24, a part in a straight-to-video indie. She was beginning to wonder whether he would meet his fame deadline, whether that tsunami of ambition was turning out to be merely a splash in a kiddie pool. But Bart seemed unperturbed. “Everyone starts out slow,” he said as they made up yet another pot of pasta and canned spaghetti sauce. “Even Ewan McGregor got rejected by acting school and had to work at a pizza parlor, and look at him now: Obi-Wan Kenobi. It will come.”
And, unfortunately, it did, in the form of a TV pilot for a prime-time soap set in Malibu called Fahrenheit 88. Tagline: “Paradise Is Hotter Than You Think.” Bart was cast as a surfing instructor with abs of steel, a heart of gold, and a sordid past as a paid assassin. Margaret read the pi
lot script and felt queasy—there was a gratuitous lesbian sex scene in a hot tub, a gold-digging wife scheming to murder her millionaire husband, and about a hundred bubbleheaded bimbettes running around in thong bikinis. She couldn’t think of a sexist cliché they had missed. Her only consolation was that this anachronistic crap would never make it on the air, and if it did, Bart would surely beg out because his standards were higher than that.
How wrong she was. Fahrenheit 88 was the big hit of the season, beloved because of its very vapidity, and Bart, seemingly overnight, became a cult hearthrob. His signature expression—half squint, half smile, like a particularly self-satisfied Marlboro Man—smoldered at Margaret from the side of every bus that drove by her as she trudged down to the Coffee Explosion to scribble her editorials. It appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, underneath the headline “Fahrenheit 88: Hot Doesn’t Even Begin to Describe It.” She couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing commercials for his show.
“What happened to Clooney? What happened to indie?” Margaret begged, but Bart just shrugged.
“Hey, Clooney got his break on Facts of Life. You got to take an opportunity when you see it.”
Margaret knew, when Bart’s checks came rolling in, and he bought himself a new BMW, and then moved them into the two-bedroom bungalow in Los Feliz, and started taking her out to expensive dinners and on little weekend jaunts to Palm Springs spas, that she should have protested on principle. She should never have, say, let Bart cosign on a credit card so that she’d get a lower interest rate or loan her money (“no need to pay it back anytime soon”) to cover her share of the rent. She was letting everything that was wrong with American pop culture—the most sexist show on television!—pay her bills. And yet she couldn’t quite summon the strength to say no. Having money was, she was realizing, so nice. Bart was right: Fame got you not just money but power, and the truth was that she liked it when they went out to dinner and the maître d’ recognized her boyfriend and brought them complimentary desserts, or when they got sent free tickets to see Radiohead, or when Nike delivered a whole box of promotional sneakers to their house (even if she did insist that they donate the shoes to charity as compensation for Nike’s reliance on third-world sweatshop labor).
And yet every time she cuddled up under those five-hundred-thread-count Calvin Klein sheets Bart had brought home, right before she fell asleep the same thought would crash across her mind: I’m selling out.
Later, she would look back at her decision to include a story about Fahrenheit 88 in Snatch’s inaugural “Television Issue” as a mistake, an obvious grab for spiritual atonement that had overwhelmed her common sense. But at the time, her rationale felt impeccable. Fahrenheit 88 was the biggest hit on television, for the second season in a row, and ignoring it would undermine her own credibility as an editor. Her readers had come to expect her eviscerating reviews, her against-the-grain critiques, her ability to call it as it is, and would be let down if she didn’t do the same here. The fact that she was living with one of the show’s leads just gave her that much more critical authority. It was practically her moral imperative to say something. (And, frankly, she wondered whether a little controversy might resolve her flagging subscription rates and her increasing concerns that her moment in the limelight had already come and gone with that Rolling Stone mention, despite the ludicrous sums of money she was pouring into Snatch at Stuart Gelkind’s behest.)
She titled her essay “Fahrenheit 88: A Sunburn on Their Souls.” She carefully didn’t mention Bart by name, since her problem was not precisely with him anyway, and why rock that boat if it didn’t need to be rocked? But she didn’t refrain from calling the show “soft-core porn for the lowest common denominator” and “a sign of the final demise of intelligent discourse in America” and “one dangerous step toward herding women back into their cages.”
The day the issue was shipped to subscribers, she left a copy of Snatch—open to the article—on the kitchen table for Bart to read when he got home from the set. She woke up in the middle of the night and heard him rattling around the kitchen, the liquid burp of alcohol being poured into a glass. Wrapping her robe around herself, she stumbled toward the clatter and found him standing over the kitchen table, staring down at her magazine with a tumbler of tequila dangling from his thumb and forefinger. His face was a mottled shade of purple. Suddenly, she saw what a terrible error she’d made: What did she think, that he’d be thrilled that his girlfriend was eviscerating his career in public? That he’d recognize her superior morals and bow down to her, quit the part, disavow his employers? That he would be enlightened?
She stood there in silence, watching Bart finish the article. When he was done, he gazed accusingly at her, his eyes bloodshot. “They wrote me off the show,” he said. He fumbled in his jeans pocket for a cigarette. “They’re killing off my character.”
“Why? Everyone loved you!” Margaret’s first horrified thought was that Bart had been fired because of her controversial editorial, and, despite her guilt, she snagged on a tiny frisson of excitement that she might have had such an immediate impact. Perhaps, despite her niggling paranoia that she should have started a blog instead, despite her fears that she was hanging on to Stuart Gelkind like a drowning man to a life vest, perhaps Snatch did have a vast cultural cachet belied by its modest readership. Like the Paris Review. Or the Believer.
Bart shook his head. “Ratings were slipping. They thought killing off a character would keep everyone talking.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Margaret. Bart’s breath was rasping, and she realized that he was fighting off tears. She reached out and hugged him, tucked her head into his neck, smelled the sour liquor and sickly-sweet pancake makeup caught at his hairline. She reached for something, anything, that would make him feel better. “But in a way, this is good, right? It frees you up to do something more challenging. Something more, say, Coppola…?”
Bart shrugged himself away from her with a cruel twist. “Guess what, Margaret?” he said, lighting his cigarette. “You really need to get over yourself.”
“I’m just thinking of you,” she said, realizing she’d made a mistake. “I want you to be happy, being the best you can be.”
Bart stabbed his finger at the article on the table. “You know,” he said. “I used to think it was cool that you were so smart. But what’s not cool, darling, is the fact that you think you’re so much smarter than everyone else. It’s really getting tiresome. You aren’t right all the time, you know. And your magazine is just shrill and joyless.”
Margaret could sense that she had made some grave miscalculation and her boyfriend was slipping away from her as a result, but his words triggered her indignance. She had thrown everything else away for him, and for Snatch—how dare he dismiss that? “At least I have principles,” she snapped before marching back to the bedroom and slamming the door closed.
He didn’t break up with her immediately. Instead, he found an acting job—an action film called Thruster that costarred the rising starlet Ysabelle van Lumis—which required him to go to Monaco for three months. With Josephine and Alexis off hobnobbing with agents at Sundance, where their no-budget indie film had won the festival’s top honors, and Claire away doing an art installation in London, Margaret had even more time to pour into her struggling magazine. But something about Bart’s tirade had poisoned her enthusiasm for Snatch, and she found herself pounding away at it more out of habit than genuine passion. Yet Stuart Gelkind was still promising a lucrative sale, and with her mounting debts she needed that money more than ever. Besides, what else did she have going for her? It was her shot—her Sundance, her Fahrenheit 88—and she wasn’t about to walk away.
Secretly, though, she mostly yearned for Bart to come home so they could reconcile. Instead, when he returned, tanned and boasting a very Italian haircut, he told Margaret that she needed to move out of their bungalow immediately and pay him back the more than $12,000 he had managed to lend her.
That was
four months ago. Each day, she seems to miss him more. In occasional moments of searing honesty, she knows that he was right. She wasn’t better than him, her morals weren’t superior, and her career lust no less craven than his own. And, if anything, the failure of her magazine is now proof that he was on to something from the very beginning: Intellectual authenticity was overrated. Fame trumped everything. If he came back, she might even be willing to admit this out loud.
at two-thirty, margaret washes her face, runs a comb through her hair, and scrabbles together a presentable interview outfit of black slacks and a Prada blouse that once belonged to Claire. Her mother is doing something in the attic—it sounds like a power drill is running?—when Margaret creeps down the stairs, filches a five-dollar bill from her mother’s purse, and drives to Le Chat Blanc.
The main drag of Santa Rita is an oak-lined arcade of conspicuous consumption. There’s the boutique that sells children’s clothes hand-sewn by Belgian nuns and a store selling fresh-baked croissants the size of watermelons and another shop that specializes in hand-dipped candles. Where did the old five-and-dime go, the one where she used to buy black rubber bracelets and gold-foil-wrapped chocolates? (Demolished to make way for Starbucks.) What happened to the coffee shop with worn leather booths that she used to hang out in? (Replaced by a faux-retro diner called the Fountain.) It’s like an advertisement for gentrification, and Margaret, thinking of the mom-and-pop businesses that were driven out to make way for $5 chai lattes, feels angry on their behalf (even if she does have a weakness for chai lattes).
Le Chat Blanc is halfway down Centerview Avenue, in a space that was once a musty thrift store where Margaret bought the vintage housedresses her mother hated. It’s a chilly café—more of a bistro, really, the kind of restaurant with parquet floors and framed fin de siècle Parisian liqueur posters and wrought-iron chairs that look like torture devices for the back. According to the menu posted by the front door, it serves up a $16 cheese sandwich and oysters for $3 a pop.
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