by Sarai Walker
“Oh right, Leeta. Julia said Leeta thought we should meet, so here you are.”
“Leeta gave me a copy of your book.”
“I’m glad she did. I never turn down the chance to meet interesting women. You might say I’m a collector of women.” Her house was certainly full of women. She reached across the table and gave my hand an affectionate squeeze. It was rare that someone touched me, but both Julia and Verena had placed their hands on me.
I told Verena about how Leeta had spied on me and how Julia wanted the spreadsheet of email addresses. “What’s Julia’s story?”
“She inhabits a world of intrigue and secrets that I find exhausting. I do know that she’s working on an exposé of Austen Media, among other things. She mentioned something about hoping you could dig up dirt on Kitty.”
So that’s what Julia wanted. I wasn’t the ideal person to dig up dirt, given that I didn’t even work in the office.
“When she told me that someone like you answers Kitty’s mail, I was intrigued,” Verena said.
“Someone like me?” I knew what she meant, but I was hurt that she said it.
“People probably attack her for only having thin girls on staff and appearing in the magazine, but she can say, ‘Hey, one of my assistants is fat.’ It’s like the person who says, ‘I’m not racist, my best friend is black.’ The really sick thing is that Kitty doesn’t even want you working in that office.”
“She said it was Human Resources’ idea for me to work from home,” I said.
“Do you really think that’s true, hon?”
I stared into the small yard that was ringed with rosebushes and tall trees, hot in the face. I felt like a whale that’d washed up in Verena’s red-walled house, a grotesque creature on display. “I don’t want to look like this, you know. I hate looking this way. I don’t need to be reminded of what everyone else thinks of me.”
“They’re the ones that have the problem, not you. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
I didn’t respond, my lips pressed together tightly, curled into a frown.
Verena looked confused. “Have I said something wrong?”
“I don’t like being called fat.”
“I see,” Verena said. “I don’t think fat is a bad thing, so I didn’t realize I had offended you. I thought we were on the same wavelength and that’s why Leeta wanted us to meet.”
“I don’t know why Leeta wanted us to meet.”
“I can see that now.” Verena apologized, but I was still upset.
“It’s easy for you to say that being big isn’t a bad thing. You don’t have to live this way.” She may have had a fat mother once, but that wasn’t the same. I told Verena that I wouldn’t be overweight for much longer, that I was having weight-loss surgery in a few months. “Dieting doesn’t work, you said so in your book. It’s time for me to do something else.”
“That’s the message you took away from my book?” If she weren’t so pale, the color would have drained from her face. “Oh, Plum, don’t do that. Don’t butcher yourself. I beg you to reconsider.”
Here we go, I thought. Another thin woman, like my mother, trying to dissuade me from the surgery. “I’ve already made up my mind.”
“The only difference between my mother and the doctor who will perform your surgery is that my mother didn’t have a license to practice medicine. They’re all charlatans.” Rose colored her pale cheeks. She was about to say something else, then caught herself. She placed her palms flat on the kitchen table and inhaled deeply, trying to prevent further upset. I could tell she was the type of person who didn’t like to lose her cool. As I watched her, I saw the idea register on her face. The news of my surgery had tightened her features, but now her muscles were loosening. She sat up straight and asked me, “How are you going to pay for your surgery?”
I told her that my insurance was paying for part of it, but that I would owe about $7,000, which I would pay with savings and credit cards.
“What about the expenses that come after—new clothes, plastic surgery? You’ll need more surgery, you know. If you lose weight that quickly, your skin will hang off your body.”
I had already started buying the clothes, but I knew she was right about needing more surgery. I told her I would find a way to pay for it all.
“Let’s make a deal,” she said. “I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars. You were a Baptist member. You paid your dues and you paid for that horrid Baptist food. With interest, and considering pain and suffering, I’d say I owe you twenty thousand.”
I wanted to laugh, thinking she was kidding, but the serious look she was giving me said otherwise. “Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money to you, but it’s nothing to me,” she said.
“What do I have to do?”
“I’d like for you to think seriously about the surgery. You can’t undo it later.”
“I’ve already thought about it seriously.”
“What I mean is that I want you to think about it in a different way.”
I needed a psychological evaluation before the surgery, which was a requirement of the doctor and insurance company. Verena was still a licensed therapist, despite not practicing, and suggested she could evaluate me. “We could meet several times over the next few weeks,” she said. “I’ll give you a series of tasks to help you be sure you’re making the right choice.”
“What kind of tasks?”
“Nothing too difficult. If at the end you decide to go ahead with the surgery, I’ll sign the form and give you the money. If you decide you don’t want the surgery, I’ll give you the money. Either way, you win.”
“Wouldn’t it be against the rules for a therapist to pay her patient?”
“Rules don’t interest me. Don’t think of me as a therapist anyway—think of me as Eulayla Baptist’s daughter. When you took the Baptist Oath all those years ago, you became a part of the Baptist family, remember?”
I remembered. I would have grown excited about the thought of $20,000—it was more money than I could have ever imagined anyone giving me—but it didn’t seem real. Only a few weeks before, the idea of sitting under the shadow of Eulayla Baptist’s fat jeans and talking to her infamous daughter would have been unimaginable. It was Leeta who had led me here. She had followed me around the neighborhood, but now it was as if she was leading me somewhere.
“I feel protective of former Baptists,” Verena said. “It’s a guilt thing.”
“There are masses of us out there.”
“I know, but you’re right in front of me. I’m not asking you to sign a contract in blood. You can change your mind at any time.”
I thought about the things I could do with the extra money. It would be like winning the lottery. I knew she was going to do everything possible to change my mind about the surgery, but I’d play along. “Okay, why not?”
Verena beamed. “We’ll call this the New Baptist Plan,” she said. “The original Baptist Plan failed you, but this time things will be different. The New Baptist Plan will completely transform you, I guarantee it.”
• • •
Sunset
Every day on page three of the Daily Sun there was a full-page color photo of a topless young woman. The British newspaper, which interviewed prime ministers and helped decide elections, had been printing photos of topless young women on page three for decades. These “Page Three Girls,” as they were affectionately known, sometimes went on to achieve great things in modeling or reality TV. A couple of them ended up strangled by ex-boyfriends or jealous lovers, but that could happen to any girl. Over the years, there had been halfhearted campaigns to ban the photographs in the newspaper, but they were never successful.
The newly installed CEO of Empire Media, who oversaw the newspaper division, was only forty years old and a woman. She represented a new generation in the company, but like her male predecessors, she carried on the page-three tradition in the Daily Sun and ignored any complaints she received. Empire Media owned newspapers an
d television stations in the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong, and Australia. “The sun never sets on Empire Media,” their founder liked to say. The CEO was aware of what had happened in Los Angeles to Simmons and Green—Empire Media’s many publications and news channels had chronicled it all. “Who is Jennifer?” the front page of the Daily Sun had asked. In her own way, the CEO was fond of Jennifer, whatever she was. The mystery was good for business. The CEO was fond of her until, one day, she wasn’t.
One morning she received news that her twin brother and his young son had been kidnapped on a trip to Scotland. It was several days before the kidnappers made contact and until then the CEO and her family didn’t know what they wanted. When their request finally came, it was laughable. The CEO laughed. The kidnappers didn’t want money. What they wanted was for the CEO to end the topless models on page three. “No more naked girls,” said the note, signed with the name Jennifer. “Show us some cock.”
Amateurs, she thought. They didn’t know who they were messing with. Her twin brother’s wife, unhinged by panic and rage, demanded that the CEO give the kidnappers what they wanted. The CEO thought her sister-in-law was a spoiled woman, prone to irrational behavior. “We have to negotiate,” the CEO told her. “We don’t give in to terrorists.”
“They have my husband and child!” she screamed. “Give them all the cock they want!”
The CEO refused, despite her close relationship with her brother. She had a reputation in the business for being ruthless, which she couldn’t afford to lose now. It wasn’t easy being a woman in a man’s world. She and the police in London waited for further communication from the kidnappers. It came in the form of a blond scalp stuffed inside a Jiffy Pack, delivered by the postman. The whole family was blond, but forensics determined the scalp with the receding hairline was from the CEO’s twin brother rather than from her nephew.
The next day on page three of the Daily Sun there were no tits, but a naked man instead. Each day after that, a naked full-frontal man appeared in the newspaper, as directed by the kidnappers.
“Savages,” the CEO called these criminals. The scalping had convinced her they were American.
When the cocks started appearing on page three, there were immediate protests from media watchdog groups, from parents and government ministers, who claimed the photos were indecent. Many newsagents began to keep the Daily Sun behind the counter, lest anyone be offended. Some of them refused to sell it at all or even touch it. The circulation dropped by half during the first week. In media surveys, men said they were too embarrassed to read the paper. “I’m not gay,” said a man who was interviewed. The CEO knew cocks were bad for business. Breasts she could get away with. Women knew their place, but with men it wasn’t as simple.
As the cocks continued to roll off the presses, the hunt for the kidnappers intensified, as did the news coverage. Empire Media executives were well connected throughout the Metropolitan Police, Parliament, and MI5. All American Jennifers living in the United Kingdom fell under immediate suspicion.
One such Jennifer appeared on The Cheryl Crane-Murphy Report via satellite from London. Jennifer Chu, a thirty-two-year-old from Seattle, was studying for a master’s degree in international relations at the London School of Economics. She had been detained by the police for twenty-four hours and interrogated.
Cheryl Crane-Murphy was perched at her desk in New York, wearing an American flag pin on her lapel. “It’s not a good time for American Jennies, is it?”
Jennifer Chu nodded. “Talk about needles and haystacks. The name Jennifer is as close to a generic woman’s name as you can get. There are tons of us out there.”
“What I really want to know is—and I think I speak for all of my American viewers here—what the heck is going on over there in the U.K.? Are there pictures of naked ladies in the daily newspaper or what?”
“Not anymore,” said Jennifer Chu, trying to suppress a smile. She explained that when she first arrived in London, she was shocked to see topless models in the newspapers, to see the iconic red telephone booths filled with graphic advertisements for prostitutes, to walk into any corner shop or newsagent and be faced with explicit pornographic magazines. “This city is like one big red-light district. I know these kidnappers are, like, evil and stuff, but I think they’ve done a public service.”
The cocks continued to appear on page three of the Daily Sun and as they did, the kidnappers turned their attention to another target. Townsend’s was a chain of newspaper and magazine shops spread across Britain, popping up in every train station and shopping center and airport. The front of every shop was stocked with the usual fashion and home decorating magazines, the financial publications and gossip rags, but there were also myriad lads’ magazines, as they were called. The lads’ magazines weren’t on the top shelf, but were at eye-level for everyone to see. The graphic covers featured naked women, often in pairs or even in triplicate, rubbing their barely concealed nipples together, putting their tongues in each other’s mouths.
In the wake of the Empire Media scandal, the CEO of Townsend’s received a threatening note, which the police deemed to be credible. The note, signed Jennifer, demanded that the lads’ magazines be removed from every branch of Townsend’s and replaced with soft-core gay male porn. The CEO took immediate action. The lads’ magazines were exchanged for those that featured images of buff young men, hairless and muscled and bronzed, with bulging underpants (if they were wearing underpants). The men played with their nipples and flashed their man patches.
After the renovation, Townsend’s was filled with women and girls. It was funny to see images of semi-naked, sexed-up men. For women it was like being in a carnival funhouse, where nothing was as it was supposed to be. News reports claimed that men felt uncomfortable going into the shops, since the women were leering and laughing. Businessmen in Armani suits tried to conduct themselves with dignity, but it was difficult to do with all those perfect male butts in their faces, with those men staring at them with a look that said fuck me.
In London, images of men with fuck me looks were beginning to proliferate. Threats of kidnap and murder had spread, and images of female bodies were disappearing rapidly and being replaced with male ones. Men’s body parts were scattered around the city: men’s lips, torsos, legs, and buttocks. Pieces of men would flash by on the sides of buses, enough to brighten any girl’s day. Before, the covers of the men’s and women’s magazines alike had featured women, but now most of them featured men instead. London was being renovated, and the wallpaper covering every surface of the city was no longer decorated with women. The default Londoner, the implied viewer of everything, was no longer male.
Tourism increased, with women from many countries anxious to see what was happening firsthand, but there were also unforeseen consequences. London was scheduled to host the G8 Summit, but world leaders complained. The French president commented on a British television advert that featured a man washing his hair with a new floral-scented shampoo; the man was so excited by the shampooing experience that he made orgasm sounds as he massaged his head. “I cannot be taken seriously in such an environment,” the French president said. Other world leaders echoed his comments, and so the G8 Summit was moved from London to Berlin.
The imam of an East End mosque was taken hostage soon after that. While he was being held in captivity, a video was released to the media in which he ordered all good Muslim men to wear blindfolds. “It’s not right that women should cover themselves from our gaze. Who has the problem here: women, who have committed the heinous crime of merely existing, or men, who choose to objectify women? If the sight of uncovered women offends you, stay at home or wear a blindfold. Better yet, pour acid into your eyes. Then you’ll never have to see anything that offends you again.”
Was New York next? That’s what everyone wanted to know.
• • •
VERENA AND I SAT ON A BENCH across the street from the Austen Tower, watching the workers set up concrete
barricades. “That’s to prevent car bombs,” she said, biting into her sandwich. “They know something we don’t.”
The events in London had just started to unfold, and rumors were circulating that on this side of the Atlantic, Austen Media had also been threatened. I looked up at the glistening silver trunk. If Austen had been threatened, then it wasn’t a good idea to sit on a bench outside the building, but Verena wanted to see what was happening for herself and asked me to join her at lunchtime.
“Listen to this,” she said, and read to me from a copy of the New York Daily that had been left behind on the bench. “In an internal Austen Media memo leaked to several online sources, Stanley Austen instructs the editors of his nine women’s magazines to remove all references to blowjobs from upcoming issues, which he said is a ‘prudent cautionary measure in these volatile times.’ In response to this news, lingerie chain V— S— has threatened to withdraw their advertising from several Austen publications, including teen title Daisy Chain.” Verena laughed and ripped the article out of the paper, putting it in her pocket.
She had finished her sandwich, but mine was still wrapped in the white paper: tuna with lettuce and tomato on rye bread. I was hungry, having eaten my bowl of oatmeal (105) and green apple (53) hours before, but I was worried about the sandwich. It felt like a brick in my hand. The tuna was loaded with mayonnaise and the whole thing could have easily been packed with five hundred, even six hundred, calories.
“I shouldn’t be laughing about any of this,” Verena said. “I abhor violence and destruction. My parents died in a fireball of metal and glass.”
An image in my mind: Eulayla Baptist’s fat jeans, consumed with flame.
She set down the newspaper and saw that I hadn’t unwrapped my sandwich. “You’re not going to eat that, are you?”
“It’s not on my plan.”
“Must I remind you that you’re on the New Baptist Plan now? Repeat after me: No calorie counting and no weighing.”