Four Blondes Read online

  James is scared of the Internet. (He secretly wishes it had never been invented. It scares him that it wasn’t, ten years ago). Every time he sends an e-mail (and he seems to be spending more and more time sending e-mails these days, and less time doing actual work, but isn’t everybody?), he’s frightened it will go to the wrong people. When the right people get it, he’s frightened they’ll send it to the wrong people. James knows he should send short, to-the-point e-mails, but something happens when he logs on. He feels angry and superior (he feels frustrated. He knows he’s smarter than most people on the Internet. He wants them to know it, and is afraid they don’t). He’s convinced that Internet spies are watching him. He knows his credit card number is going to be stolen. (He knows that someday, probably soon, all real books and magazines will be replaced with Internet books and magazines. He pretends, along with his friends, that this won’t happen. That Internet books and magazines will only add to what already exists. He knows they will not. He knows they will probably mean that he’ll be out of a job.)

  But most of all, James is scared of his wife. Winnie. Winnie doesn’t seem to be scared of anything, and that scares him. When Winnie should be scared—when she has an impossible deadline, or can’t get people to cooperate on interviews, or doesn’t think she’s getting the assignments she wants—she gets angry. She calls people and screams. She sends e-mails. (She spends most of her time on her computer. She prides herself on her e-mails. They are pithy and clever, unlike james’s, which are rambling, vicious, and too introspective. Winnie sometimes accuses him now of overwriting.) She marches into her editors’ offices and has hissy fits. “I hope you’re not implying that my work isn’t good enough,” she says threateningly. “Because I’ve already done a kazillion” (that’s one of her favorite words, kazillion) “pieces for you, and they were good enough. So if you don’t want to give me the assignment. . . .” She lets her voice trail off. She never says the words: “sexual discrimination.” Everyone is just a tiny bit scared of Winnie, and James is scared that one of these days she won’t get the assignment, or she’ll get fired.

  But she always does get the assignment. Then, at the potluck suppers (“our salon,” they call it) Winnie and James host at their apartment every other Tuesday night (they invite other serious journalists and discuss the political implications of everything from cell-phone shields to celebrities with bodyguards, to what’s happened to the journalists who have left real magazines and gone to the Internet—”Anybody can be a writer now. That’s the problem. What’s the point of being a writer if everybody can be one?” James says), Winnie will usually bring up whatever new story she is working on. Everyone will be sitting around the living room, with Limoges plates (Winnie believes in serving guests on only the best china) on their laps, and they will be eating iceberg lettuce with fat-free salad dressing and skinless chicken breasts, and maybe some rice (none of the women in this group are good cooks or care much about food). They will drink a little bit of wine. No one they know drinks hard alcohol anymore.

  And then Winnie will say something like “I want to know what everyone thinks about youth violence. I’m writing about it this week.” When she started doing this a couple of years ago, James thought it was sort of cute. But now he gets annoyed (although he never shows it). Why is she always asking everyone else what they think? Doesn’t she have her own thoughts? And he looks around the room to see if any of the other men (husbands) are sharing the same sentiment.

  He can’t tell. He can never tell. He often wants to ask these other husbands what they think of their wives. Are they scared of them too? Do they hate them? Do they ever have fantasies of pushing their wives down on the bed and ripping off their underpants and giving it to them in the butt? (James sort of tried something like that at the beginning with Winnie, but she slapped him and wouldn’t talk to him for three days afterward.)

  Sometimes James thinks Winnie is scared that he’s going to leave her. But she never says she’s scared. Instead, she says something like “We’ve been married for seven years and have a child. I’d get half of everything, you know, if we ever got divorced. It’d be awfully hard for you to live on half of what we own and only your income minus child support.” (What Winnie doesn’t know is that James is more afraid that she’ll leave him, because she’s right It would be impossible for him to live without her income. And he wouldn’t want to leave his boy.)

  James tries not to think about this too much, because when he does think about it, he doesn’t feel like the man in the relationship. When he doesn’t feel like the man, he asks himself what Winnie would ask him if she knew he were feeling that way. Specifically: What does it mean to “feel like a man,” anyway? What does “a man” feel like? And since he never can answer those questions, he has to agree with Winnie—even thinking that way is passé.

  Winnie told James this story on their second date: In the seventies, she smoked marijuana (age fourteen), let boys feel her up (and down) at sixteen, and lost her virginity the summer she was seventeen, to a neighborhood boy who was eighteen and very good-looking (she’d had a crush on him for years, but he never paid any attention to her until the night he sensed she would let him have sex with her. Winnie didn’t tell James that part). After he came, he drove her the half mile to her house (they did it in the basement of his parents’ house, where he had a cot set up). He wasn’t impressed that she was going to Smith in the fall, and he didn’t care that she was number three in her high school class (tolerable only because the two students above her were boys). She learned that in certain situations, achievement and intelligence were not a guarantee against being treated badly, and she vowed never to be in that situation again.

  Winnie’s birthday is coming, and James is scared.

  “EVIL”

  Winnie has a sister and a brother. Everybody loves Winnie’s brother. He graduated (from?) UCLA film school and just finished an important documentary about adolescent sex slaves in China. (He sold it to The Learning Channel. Nobody is worried about him.) Everybody is worried about Winnie’s sister, Evie (“Evil,” Winnie calls her sometimes), who is two years younger than Winnie. Eight summers ago, Evie had to go to rehab. Hazelden. Since then, she changes her mind about what she wants to do every six months. Actress. Landscape architect. Singer. Real estate agent. Novelist. Movie director. Fashion designer. Now she wants to be a journalist. Like Winnie.

  The week before, Evie showed up at a very important, very serious party for a journalist who had just written a book about a right-wing politician. (He was a New York Times journalist who wrote a book about every five years. His books are always favorably reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. This is what Winnie wants for James.) Evie’s blouse was unbuttoned too low and she was showing off her breasts. (She used to be fairly flat-chested, like Winnie, but a couple of years ago, her breasts mysteriously grew. Winnie thinks she had breast implants, but they never talk about it.) Evie walked right up to the important journalist and kept him engaged in conversation so no one else could talk to him. The other women were fuming. They stood around the crudité platter chomping on carrot sticks. They rolled their eyes and gave Evie dirty looks. But they couldn’t “take care of” Evie the way they normally would have, because Evie was Winnie’s sister.

  The next day, Winnie got a phone call from a female colleague who found out that Evie had gone to the important journalist’s hotel room and spent the night with him. “Winnie, I just want you to know that I’m not going to judge you by your sister’s behavior,” she said. Then Evie herself called. “I think I’m going to get an assignment from The New York Times,” she squealed.

  “Stay out of my life,” Winnie warned her (quietly). Then she added (cleverly), “Why don’t you get a job at a fashion magazine, if you want to be a journalist so much?”

  “Oh no,” Evie said. She swallowed loudly. She was drinking a Diet Coke. She drank five Diet Cokes a day. (Just another thing to be addicted to, Winnie thought.) “I’m going to change my l
ife. I’m going to be really successful. Just like my big sis.”

  Evie is a mess, and sometimes James wonders if he should have married her instead.

  James sees Evie as little as possible, but every year he asks her to help him pick out Winnie’s birthday present. At first he did it “as a treat for Evie” (it was good for Evie to spend time around a man who wasn’t a user, an asshole, or a scumbag—and Winnie agreed). But then he realized that she was attracted to him.

  He calls her up. “Evie,” he says.

  “Hey, bro,” Evie says. “Did you hear about my night with . . .,” she says, naming the serious important journalist. “And I might get my first assignment. With The New York Times. I think that’s pretty great, don’t you?” Evie is always chipper, and always acts as though her behavior is that of a normal, decent person. (She is in denial, James thinks.)

  “It’s Winnie’s birthday,” James says (staying in control by getting right to the point).

  “I know,” she says.

  “Any suggestions?” he asks. “I think I want to get her something from Barneys. Jewelry.”

  “No, Jimmy,” Evie says. “You can’t afford jewelry worth giving anyone.”

  (This is why everyone hates you, he thinks.) “So what, then?” he says.

  “Shoes,” she says. “Winnie needs a great pair of high-heeled sexy shoes.”

  “Okay,” he says, knowing that high-heeled sexy shoes are the last thing that Winnie would want (or need). He agrees to meet Evie in the shoe department at Bloomingdale’s. He hangs up the phone and feels scared.

  Then he realizes he has a hard-on.

  WINNIE IS WORRIED

  On the day of Winnie Dieke’s thirty-eighth birthday, James Dieke wakes up and is scared. Winnie Dieke wakes up and is depressed. Not that she has anything to be depressed about. She has, after all, hit all her life landmarks in style: first job at twenty-two, first major assignment for a prestigious magazine at twenty-seven, met future husband at twenty-eight, married at thirty, established herself as a “serious journalist” at thirty-one, co-op apartment at thirty-one, pregnant at thirty-two, own column at thirty-four. For the past few weeks, Winnie has been spending a lot of time (too much time, which she knows should be spent thinking about other things, like ideas) reminding herself of everything she’s achieved. Reminding herself how clever she is not to be one of those desperate single women (like Evie). But something is wrong.

  Winnie doesn’t want to admit it (she never wants to admit that there possibly could be anything wrong with her life), but that something might be James. Lately, she’s been worried about James. (Irritated, actually, but worried is such a better way to look at it.) James hasn’t been holding up his end of the bargain. He should have written a major, important work by now (preferably about politics: so easy, considering the political climate), which would have elevated her status in the journalistic world as his wife (she didn’t take his last name for no reason). If James had written an important, influential book by now, they would have access to more important, influential people. They would be more important, influential people. But instead, James keeps writing the same kind of pieces. And agonizing over them. Half the time now, James calls her up during the day and says, “I can’t write. I’m stuck. I’m blocked.”

  “Oh please, James,” she’ll say. “I’ve got a kazillion things going on. I’ve got the CEO of a major corporation on the other line. If you’re blocked, go to the supermarket and pick up something for dinner. And make sure it doesn’t have any fat in it.” Then she’ll hang up. She wishes he would just get on with it.

  James is frustrated and Winnie is frustrated but they can’t talk about it.

  When Winnie tries, when she gently suggests (the way shrinks are always telling you to do it, picking the “right” moment, when you’re both relaxed) that maybe he should really get to work on a book proposal, he sulks. He turns on the TV and watches some idiotic, mindless show like Hercules. Sometimes Winnie freaks out and unplugs the TV. Sometimes she just screams. But the argument always ends with Winnie shouting, “Do I have to do everything? Do I have to work and take care of our child” (even though she doesn’t really take care of the child—the nanny does most of the caretaking, and Winnie only spends an hour with him in the morning and two hours in the evening) “and keep our careers on track? Do I have to make us famous?”

  “We’re already famous,” James shouts back (thinking, You make me sick and why did I marry you? but never having the nerve to say it, because Winnie would probably leave and people would find out). “We’re as famous as we’re going to get, Winnie. What else do you want me to do?”

  “I’m doing more,” Winnie says, calmer now, because she doesn’t have the stamina to go on screaming forever (but she does, James thinks, have the stamina to do enough screaming). “Why don’t we move to Washington?”

  “I don’t want to move to Washington. All my editors are here,” James says. And then he plugs in the TV or retrieves the remote control from where it has been flung under a chair, and goes back to watching Hercules.

  Winnie and James never tell their friends about these arguments. On the weekends, when they’re hiking or gardening or antiquing with their friends (everybody piles into somebody’s car and they go to a nursery and buy plants or go “poking around” in western Connecticut), they present a united front They respect and admire each other and each other’s work and they are best friends. Even when they had that horrendous discussion with their friends one Saturday evening (they all agreed the next morning that maybe a little too much red wine had been consumed—four bottles between the eight of them—and vowed never to let it happen again) about what social class they were from and what social class they now belonged to, they all remained good friends. And they might not have. While Winnie’s class background was established beyond a doubt (“textbook, practically,” James had said)—she came from a well-to-do Irish family and grew up in a tenroom colonial house on twenty acres in Pennsylvania, where her father was a judge—James’s was not. His father owned three dry-cleaning stores on Long Island. Dry cleaning was definitely blue-collar, but no one could agree on whether or not the fact that he “owned three stores” elevated him to white-collar.

  James knows what is wrong with his life. With his writing. He’s been losing his drive at about the same rate that he’s been losing his hard-on.

  On the morning of Winnie’s birthday, James Dieke wakes up and is afraid. He’s going to do something to Winnie. Something she won’t like. And he’s excited.

  At noon, James goes to Bloomingdale’s to meet Winnie’s sister. As he walks toward the shoe department, he realizes his worst fear has taken place—Evie is not there.

  He stands in the middle of the shoe department, not knowing what to do. Everybody is watching him. He is on display (like a shoe). He picks up a shoe and puts it down. A salesman comes over. What kind of a man is a salesman in a women’s shoe department? The man asks if he can help him. James says, “No, I’m waiting for someone. My wife. It’s her birthday.” Why has he lied to the salesman? Why has he told him anything? What if the man (a stranger) finds out that Evie is not his wife? He will think Evie is his mistress. What if Evie were his mistress? What if he were secretly fucking his wife’s sister? (It could happen. Evie fucks everyone, has a new boyfriend every two weeks, sleeps with married men, sleeps with men she meets in classes at the Learning Annex, at AA, at the snack bar in the Met.) When Winnie is feeling charitable, she says that they shouldn’t judge Evie, that Evie can’t help herself because she’s a sex addict.

  James walks around the shoe department. He thinks about leaving, about teaching Evie a lesson. (He can think of lots of lessons he’d like to teach Evie.) But she might show up any minute. He sits down.

  He tries to look comfortable. (He’s getting angry.) When he was four, he once got separated from his mother while she was shopping at Bloomingdale’s. He had wandered into the lingerie department. It was full of pointy bras and gi
rdles hanging from racks above his head. It was like a forest, and he had circled around and around, thinking he was going to see his mother around the next clump of Lycra (was it Lycra they used then, or something else?). He didn’t. He sat down. He cried. (He wanted to scream.) He was scared, more scared than he’d ever been in his life, before or since. And angry. He thought his mother had abandoned him. On purpose. He didn’t know what to do. (He was just a little boy.)

  “Hello, Jimmy.” Evie comes up behind him and puts her hands over his eyes. He doesn’t move. (He must not reward her inappropriate behavior. But he feels silly sitting in the shoe department at Bloomingdale’s with a sexy woman’s hands over his eyes.)

  “Dammit, Evie,” he says. “I don’t have much time.” (Reminding her of whom she is dealing with.)

  “Deadline?” Evie says (smartly, he thinks).

  “I’m always on deadline,” he says. “It’s about responsibility. Something you’re not familiar with.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Evie says. She is a little bit crushed, he can tell. But he has to crush her. (He can’t let her flirt with him. Evie must learn about boundaries. Then maybe she’ll be able to find a man, keep him, and get married. Become a healthy member of society.)

  “Let’s make this quick, then,” Evie says. She turns and smiles. “I’ve got a deadline too. I wanted it to be a surprise, a wonderful surprise for you and Winnie. I got that assignment from The New York Times! Oh Jimmy,” she says. “You’re going to have to help me. I’m going to be calling you every day, asking for advice. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “How’d you do that?” James asks. He wants to be happy for her, but he can’t. Evie doesn’t deserve to get an assignment from The New York Times. She’s never written a piece before in her life. He wants to scream (as he so often wants to scream these days), What is the world coming to? “Well, good for you,” he says.