“What I’d like to do now is to go around the room and have everybody introduce themselves. And please say a few words about why you’re here.” The instructor, a fifty-year-old man with a mustache and an ill-fitting suit that looked like it had been dry-cleaned too many times, nodded at a woman in the front row. “Why don’t we start with you,” he said.
“Well,” the woman said. “I’m Susan Fazzino and I’m forty-three . . .”
“We don’t need ages,” the instructor said.
“Okay . . . I’m married and I’ve got two kids, a boy and a girl, and I was a teacher and I’m looking for a way to make more money. With flexible hours.”
“Very good,” the instructor said. “But if your career in real estate takes off, you’ll be working twelve hours a day.”
“Oh! I didn’t know that.”
Janey sat back in her chair and tapped her pencil on her notebook. God, this was boring. She’d only been in the course for ten minutes, but already her mind was wandering.
“I’m Nelson Pavlak . . .”
Well, she supposed she was lucky to have gotten off as easily as she did. “Janey,” Comstock had said. He actually had the nerve to stop by her house the next afternoon on his way back to the city as she was packing up her things. “Nothing has to change just because I’m getting married. We can continue. Morgan knows me. She knows that I’m not going to be faithful to her. She just doesn’t want it in her fa
ce.”
“Why would anyone marry a man who they knew was going to cheat?” Janey said viciously. “She must be pretty desperate.”
“She’s European,” he said, unwrapping a cigar. And then: “Christ, Janey. Don’t be so conventional. It’s such a bore.”
“Do you fuck her up the butt too?” Janey asked, folding towels.
“Actually, I don’t. We’re trying to get pregnant. . .”
“. . . I’m Nancy McKnight. And I’ve always wanted to be a real estate agent . . .!”
“. . . Everybody knows why he’s marrying her,” Allison had said. “And it’s not love. She’s got money. And status. I’ll give her that. But doesn’t she understand that he’s using her? Someone should warn her. Christ on a cross. She must be forty-five. She’s already been married twice. You’d think by now she’d know better.”
“She’s what he wants,” Janey had said. She was surprised at how little she felt, considering she’d thought she was madly in love with him.
“Of course,” Allison said, pouring herself the last of Janey’s wine. “Think about it. No matter how much money he has, or success, or power—I mean, who cares if he is the head of a movie company and hangs out with actors—the one thing he couldn’t get was Fifth Avenue. What co-op board,” she asked, “would let him in?”
“Now they all will,” Janey said. She imagined Comstock in the lobby of a glossy Fifth Avenue apartment building. His suit would be wrinkled and he’d be sweating, handing out twenty-dollar tips to the doormen . . . .
“. . . And what about you?” the instructor said, nodding at Janey.
Janey jumped.
“I’m . . . Janey Wilcox. The model,” she said. “Or anyway, I used to be a model. I’m . . . trying to change my life. So I thought I should probably change my career as well . . .”
“We have lots of people who change from another career into real estate. But how much education do you have? There’s a lot of math involved in real estate.”
“Well,” Janey said. “I have a year and a half of college . . . and I think I used to be good at math when I was a kid.”
Everyone laughed.
“Very good, Janey,” the instructor said, pulling at his mustache. “If you need any extra help, I’m available.”
Oh God.
Janey walked home. It was September, still warm and still light. She swung her books in a Gucci satchel Harold had bought her. He was trying to make it as enticing as possible, but in the end, she knew it wouldn’t make any difference. Her days would stretch before her. There would be a certain blandness to them, but after all, wasn’t that what most people’s lives were like? Most people got up every morning and went to a job. They dated ordinary people and went to the movies. They didn’t go to black-tie events. They didn’t model in fashion shows. They didn’t date best-selling authors or billionaires or movie moguls. They didn’t have their names in the gossip columns, good or bad, and they especially didn’t have summer houses in the Hamptons. And they survived.
Hell, they were probably happy.
She would never be happy that way. She knew she wouldn’t, just as she knew she would never finish the screenplay. She would never turn up in Comstock’s office and throw the finished manuscript down on his desk and say, “Read that, you asshole!” Write what you know, everybody said. And maybe it was stupid and maybe she was a loser, but that was what she knew. She could still remember the first time she’d come to New York, when she was sixteen, to become a model. Her mother had actually let her take the Amtrak train from Springfield to New York City with her brother, and had actually paid for them to stay overnight in a hotel. Which was such a weird thing for her mother to do, because she never did anything for Janey. Before or after. But that one time she had said yes, and Janey and her brother, Pete, had taken the train to Penn Station, passing the grungy little towns and cities along the way, the scenery becoming browner and more crowded and more industrial and more frightening (but Janey had loved it), until they passed through a long tunnel and arrived in New York City. It smelled of urine back then. It wasn’t safe. They stayed at the Howard Johnson’s on Eighth Avenue, and the horns and the clatter and the cars and the shouts kept them up all night, but Janey didn’t mind a bit.