One Fifth Avenue

“Mine?” he asked, surprised. “I thought this was what you always wanted.”

“I did. But not like this.”

“You shouldn’t have done it, then.” He shrugged. “You ever hear of ‘free will’?”

“You have to fix this,” Lola said.

“Can’t,” he said. He opened the bag of cheese doodles and stuffed four into his mouth. “Got a job today. Working for Mindy Gooch.”

“What?” Lola exclaimed in shock. “I thought you hated her.”

“I do. But I don’t have to hate her money. I’m getting paid a hundred thousand dollars a year. Working in the new-media department. In six months, I’ll probably be running it. Those people don’t know squat.”

“And what am I supposed to do?” Lola demanded.

Thayer looked at her, unmoved. “How should I know?” he said. “But if you can’t make something out of all this publicity I got you, you’re a bigger loser than I thought.”

June arrived, and with it, unseasonably warm weather. The temperature had been over eighty degrees for three days; already the Gooches’ apartment was too warm, and James was forced to turn on the sputtering air conditioner. Sitting beneath it one morning, perched over his computer and thinking about starting another book, he listened to the sounds of his wife and son packing in Sam’s bedroom next door. He checked the time. Sam’s bus left in forty minutes. Mindy and Sam would be leaving any minute—as soon as they did, he would read Lola’s sex column. When he’d returned from the final leg of his book tour, exhausted and jet-lagged, he’d claimed he was too tired to even think about writing but had managed to get over to Lola’s apartment six times in ten days and, on each visit, had made fantastic love to her. One afternoon, she had stood above him while he spread open her labia and licked her firm little clit; on another occasion, she’d fucked him while he lay on his back, positioning her bottom in front of his face, and he had slid his middle finger in and out of her puckered asshole. In the evenings after these encounters, Mindy would come home and remark that he appeared to be in a good mood. He would reply that yes, he was, and after all his hard labor, didn’t he have a right to be? Then Mindy would bring up the country house. They couldn’t, she conceded, afford a house in the Hamptons, but they could find something in Litchfield County, which was just as beautiful, and maybe even better than the Hamptons because it was still filled with artists and not yet overrun with finance types. In her usual pushy way, Mindy had convinced him to drive up to Litchfield County for the weekend; they’d stayed at the Mayflower Inn to the tune of two thousand dollars for two nights while they looked at houses during the day. Mindy was, James knew, trying to be reasonable, limiting their choices to houses under one point three million dollars. James found something wrong with every one, but in an act of defiance, perhaps, Mindy had signed Sam up for a month of tennis camp in the tony little town of Washington, Connecticut, where Sam would be residing in the dorm of a private school.

Now, while Mindy was packing Sam’s things, James was wondering if he dared take a quick peek at Lola’s column. In her last installment, she had written about the time James had alternated between penetrating her with a vibrator and his own penis. Unlike Mindy, Lola had the good sense to change his name—calling him “The Terminator,” because he caused orgasms that were so strong, they could be terminal—and James was so chuffed, he couldn’t be angry. He had even bought her an enameled Hermés bracelet, which she’d been desperate for, saying all the women on the Upper East Side had one, cleverly paying cash so Mindy couldn’t trace the purchase. He looked longingly at his computer, anxious to know if Lola had written about him again, and if so, what she’d said. But with Mindy in the apartment, he decided it was too risky. What if she caught him? Valiantly resisting temptation, he got up and went into Sam’s room.

“Four weeks of tennis,” James said to his son. “Do you think you’ll get bored?”

Mindy was placing packages of white cotton athletic socks into Sam’s bag. “No, he will not,” she said.

“I hate this business of taking on the customs of the upper classes,” James said. “What’s wrong with basketball? It was good enough for me.”

Mindy snorted. “Your son is not you, James. As a fairly intelligent adult male, you should have figured that out by now.”

“Hmph,” James said. Mindy had been a bit curt with him lately, and since he feared her shortness might be due to a suspicion about his affair with Lola, he didn’t push it.

“Besides,” Mindy said. “I want Sam to feel comfortable in the area. We’ll have a house there soon, and I want him to have lots of new friends.”

“We will?” James said.

Mindy gave him a terse smile. “Yes, James, we will.”

James was suddenly nervous and went into the kitchen to pour himself another cup of c

offee. A few minutes later, Mindy and Sam kissed him goodbye and went off to the bus station; Mindy would go on from there to her office. The second the door closed, James rushed to his computer, typed in the requisite address, and read, “The Terminator strikes again. Wrapping my hot, wet pussy around his cock, he did another one of his dastardly deeds and tickled my asshole while I pumped him for juice.”

“Lola,” James had said after reading the first installment about his sexual exploits. “How can you do this? Don’t you worry about your reputation? What if you want to get a real job someday and your employer reads this?”

Lola only looked at him like he was once again hopelessly out of touch. “It’s no different from all those other celebrities with sex tapes. It hasn’t hurt them. Just the opposite—it’s made their careers.”

Now, continuing to read Lola’s blog, James felt himself getting a hard-on that pushed against his leg, demanding immediate attention. He went into the bathroom and jerked off, hiding the evidence in a tissue that he flushed down the toilet. He looked into the mirror and nodded. The next time he saw Lola, he decided, he would definitely try for anal sex.

Mindy watched Sam get on the bus for Southbury, Connecticut, waving at his window until the bus pulled out of the underground garage. Hurrying through Port Authority, she was relieved to have gotten Sam safely away, where Paul Rice couldn’t hurt him. She flagged a taxi, slid onto the backseat, and fished the folded piece of notepaper out of her bag. “Sam did it” was written in pencil, in Paul Rice’s tiny block lettering. The paper bore the logo of the Four Seasons Hotel in Bangkok. Apparently, Paul Rice had quite a few of these pads.

She refolded the note and put it back in her purse. She’d found the tightly folded paper in her mailbox just the other day, and while James was convinced she wanted a country house for her own self-aggrandizement, she’d begun pursuing it as a way to get herself and Sam out of Paul’s way, without raising suspicion. A man who could take over an entire country’s stock market was probably capable of anything, including persecuting a little boy. While everyone else in One Fifth had been diverted by Billy’s death, Paul hadn’t attended either his memorial service or Annalisa’s party. For all Mindy knew, Paul might still be investigating who cut his Internet wires, and eventually, he might be able to prove it was Sam.

Like Paul Rice, Mindy knew Sam had done it. She would never tell anyone, of course, including James. But it wasn’t the only secret she was keeping. Striding into her office, she passed Thayer Core, sitting in his cubicle like a caged animal, scrolling through a long list of e-mails. Mindy stopped and stuck her head over the edge of the cubicle, looking down at Thayer as a reminder of her authority over him.

“Have you printed out the notes from yesterday’s meeting?” she asked.

Thayer pushed back his chair and, as if to thwart her authority, put his feet up on his desk and crossed his arms. “Which meeting?” he said.

“All of them.” She moved away, then stopped, as if remembering something. “And I also need a hard copy of Lola Fabrikant’s sex column.”