Four Blondes

“Can’t you sound a little more excited? I’m a big deal now.”

“I am excited,” James says. “Can’t you tell?”

“Why don’t you get dressed now, James,” Winnie says.

He and Winnie are going out. He changes his shirt and puts on a tie. He feels angry. (He can never do anything right.) He taught Winnie everything she knows (or thinks he did). When they first met, Winnie would sit for hours, listening to him and asking him questions about his work. When she got drunk (they used to get drunk quite a bit at the beginning and have easy, passionate sex), she would sometimes say that she wanted to be a serious journalist too. That she had ambitions and aspirations. That she was smart. James never really paid attention. He wouldn’t have cared if she was dumb. (And now he sometimes wishes that she were. Dumb.)

At first, James saw Winnie as one-dimensional. And only in relation to him. She was the high school girl he could never get in high school. Then he saw that she had other qualities. With Winnie, situations that felt awkward before (parties, socializing) felt natural. After a year, everyone started asking when they were going to get married. Suddenly, he found himself asking the same question. (He wasn’t sure where it came from. Inside? Or was he just repeating what everyone else was saying?) She wasn’t perfect (he couldn’t put his finger on why), but he didn’t think he’d meet anyone better. Plus, all his friends were getting married. Buying co-ops. Having kids (or talking about it). He would be the odd man out again, like in high school.

And he’s still the odd man out. (He wishes he were still with Evie. He wishes he were getting a blow job from her right now.)

“Come on, James,” Winnie says.

They go to Bouley for Winnie’s birthday, where, as usual, they pretend (and it really is just pretending now, James thinks) to get along. When the bill comes, they each put down their credit cards and take their receipts, which they will turn into their magazines as a business expense.

EVIE’S “PIECE”

“Have you read it?” James asks. It’s a few days later. Sunday morning. Early. The Sunday morning Evie’s piece is scheduled to appear in The New York Times.

“Read what?” Winnie asks. She’s in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. It’s really the only time she cooks (if you can call it that, James thinks), cutting grapefruit and putting out slices of smoked salmon and smearing cream cheese on bagels.

“Evie’s piece,” James says.

“Oh. Is it in this weekend?”

“She says it is.”

“Really?” Winnie says. “I haven’t talked to her.”

“She calls me,” James says.

“I hope you don’t talk to her either.”

“She’s still seeing . . .,” he says, naming the famous important journalist.

“That’s nice,” Winnie says. She puts the platters out on the dining room table. She unfolds a paper napkin. She begins eating.

“Aren’t you curious?” James asks.

“I’ll get to it later,” Winnie says. “In the meantime, I’m thinking that maybe we should run our salon more efficiently. Maybe we should e-mail people a question the day before, so everyone has time to think about their answers. I think we’ll get better responses that way.”

“I thought we were” (you were, James thinks) “getting good responses.”

“We can always do better, can’t we, James?”

Winnie eats two bagels stuffed with cream cheese and salmon. “Be right back,” she says. “Have to brush my teeth. Onions.”

She goes into the bathroom, and, as she has been doing after almost every meal lately, sticks her finger down her throat and throws up.

When she returns, James is reading the paper.

“You’re disgusting,” she says.

“What? I’m not supposed to read the Times just because Evie has a piece in it?”

“Oh come on, James,” Winnie says. She snatches up half of the paper. She begins turning the pages (she can’t help herself, James thinks, she can never help herself). Finally, she gets to the Styles section. There, under the heading “Thing” is a tiny box with a story on meat loaf At the bottom is Evie’s byline.

“Did you know about this?” Winnie asks.