“Where do you live?” Thayer asked casually.
“One Fifth,” she said.
Thayer put it together: Annalisa Rice was one half of the couple who’d bought Mrs. Houghton’s apartment. Her husband was Paul Rice, some scummy hedge-fund guy who was only thirty-two years old and already worth millions. The purchase had been noted in the real estate section of The New York Observer.
After the lunch, Thayer Core returned to his apartment. It was especially depressing, coming from the clean glamour of the Four Seasons. The windows were closed, and
steam hissed from the old radiator. His roommate, Josh, was asleep on the pile of clothing he called his bed, his mouth open, wheezing in the deadly dry air.
Who was Thayer kidding? Josh was a loser—he would never make it in this town. It was the assholes who cleaned up, like Paul Rice, sitting in his giant apartment on Fifth Avenue looking at fish, while his beautiful, gracious wife, who was clearly too good for him, was forced to spend her time looking at fraudulent art with that creep Billy Litchfield. In this state of moral indignation, Thayer went into his room and sat down in front of his computer, ready to write a blistering attack on the Rices and Billy Litchfield and the lunch at the Four Seasons. Usually, his ire carried him through five hundred words of nasty hyperbole, but all at once, his anger deserted him and was replaced by a rare circumspection. He remembered Annalisa’s face, smiling at him with what appeared to be delight in his charm, and completely innocent of his true intentions. Yes, he “hated” those people, but hadn’t he come to New York to be one of them?
He was the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, he reminded himself, and someday he would write the Great American Novel and they’d bow down before his genius. In the meantime, Annalisa Rice would be his Daisy Buchanan.
“Every now and then, one meets a creature of the female persuasion who is so natural, so lovely, it’s enough to make one consider not quitting this hellhole that is New York,” he wrote.
Two hours later, his blog entry appeared on Snarker, earning him twenty dollars. In the meantime, Mindy Gooch, sitting in her generic office in midtown Manhattan, was also working on her blog. “When my son was born,” she wrote, “I discovered I wasn’t Superwoman. Especially when it came to my emotions. Suddenly, I no longer possessed the emotional energy for everyone, including my husband. All my emotions went to my son. My emotions, I learned, were limited, not limitless. And my son used them up. There was nothing left for my husband. I knew I should have felt guilty. And I did feel guilty. But not for the right reasons. I felt guilty because I was perfectly happy.”
She sent the file to her assistant. Then she began surfing through her regular rotation of blogs: The Huffington Post, Slate, The Green Thumb (an obscure site about gardening that Mindy found soothing), and finally, steeling herself against shock, horror, and degradation, Snarker.
Each week, Snarker made fun of her blog in a feature called “Middle-aged Mommy Crisis.” It wasn’t healthy to read hateful comments about oneself (some of the comments said simply, “I hate her. I wish she would die”), but Mindy was hooked. The comments fed her demons of self-hatred and insecurity. It was, she thought, the emotional version of cutting yourself. You did it so you could feel. And feeling awful was better than feeling nothing.
Today, however, there were no items about her. Mindy was relieved—and slightly disappointed. It would make her evening with James more dull, with nothing to rail about. As she was about to close the website, a new item popped up. Mindy read the first sentence and frowned. It was all about Annalisa Rice. And Paul Rice. And his aquarium.
This, Mindy thought, was exactly what she didn’t want to happen. When it came to One Fifth, no publicity was good publicity.
Early the next morning, Mindy Gooch stationed herself at the peephole, intending to confront Paul Rice when he passed through the lobby on his way to work. Skippy, the cocker spaniel, was by her side. Perhaps it was the atmosphere in his home and not his inherent personality, but Skippy had developed a vicious streak. He was perfectly pleasant for hours, and then, without warning, he would attack.
At seven A.M. on the dot, Paul Rice came out of the elevator. Mindy opened her door. “Excuse me,” she said. Paul turned. “What?” he demanded. At that moment, Skippy slipped out the door. Baring his teeth, he closed in on Paul’s pant leg. Paul turned white. “Get your dog off me,” he shouted, hopping on one leg while he tried to shake Skippy free. Mindy waited for a moment, then came out, pulling Skippy away from Paul’s leg. “I could sue you for that,” Paul said. “Dogs are perfectly legal in this building,” Mindy said, baring her own teeth. “But I’m not sure about fish. Oh yes,” she said, noting the look of surprise on Paul’s face. “I know all about your aquarium. There are no secrets in this building.” She went back inside and kissed Skippy on the top of his head. “Good dog,” she cooed. And from then on, a routine was established.
The Halloween party Lola insisted she and Philip attend wasn’t at the Bowery Hotel after all, but in an abandoned building on the next block. Lola was dressed as a showgirl, in a sequined bra and panties, fishnet stockings, and high heels. She looked sensational, like a girl on the cover of a men’s magazine. “Are you sure you want to go out like that?” Philip asked.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“You’re practically naked.”
“No more naked than I am at the beach.” She wrapped a feather boa around her neck. “Is that better?”
Trying to get into the spirit of things, Philip was dressed as a pimp, in a striped suit, white sunglasses, and a fur hat. On Eighth Street, Lola had bought him an imitation diamond necklace, at the bottom of which dangled a diamond-encrusted skull.
“Isn’t this fun?” Lola exclaimed, walking to the party. The streets were filled with revelers dressed in every kind of costume. Yes, Philip thought, taking her hand. This was fun. He hadn’t allowed himself to have this kind of silly fun for years. What had happened to him? When had he become so serious?
“You’re going to love Thayer Core,” she said, tugging on his hand to hurry him along.
“Who’s he?” And seeing Lola’s irritated expression, said, “I know, I know—the young impresario who wants to be a writer.”
“Not wants, is,” Lola said. “He writes every day for Snarker.”
Philip smiled. Lola seemed incapable of making distinctions between the artist and the hack, the real and the wannabe. In her mind, a blogger was the same as a novelist, a star on a reality show was equal to an actress. It was her generation, he reminded himself. They had grown up in a culture of insistent democracy in which everyone was the same and everyone was a winner.
A large crowd was gathered in front of a decrepit building. Gripping Lola’s hand, Philip pushed through. At the entrance were two guys with pierced faces, a transvestite in a pink wig, and Thayer Core himself, smoking a cigarette. He shook Philip’s hand. “It’s a destructor party, man,” Thayer said. “Building’s going to be torn down tomorrow. We do our best to destroy the place until the police get here.”
Philip and Lola went in the door and up a wooden staircase. The air was hot and thick with smoke, lit by a single bulb. There was the sound of retching, and upstairs, music thumped out of two speakers set in the windows. The room was packed. “What is the point of this?” Philip said into Lola’s ear.
“There is no point. Isn’t it great?” Lola said.
They pushed their way up to a makeshift bar, where they were handed a slosh of vodka and cranberry juice in a red plastic cup, no ice. “When can we get out of here?” Philip shouted over the music.
“You want to leave already?” Lola said.