Four Blondes

“What?”

“Evie’s ‘piece.’” Winnie tosses the paper to him. She stands up. “Are there any more bagels left? I’m still hungry.”

In the afternoon, Winnie calls Evie. “Congratulations,” she says.

“Hey!” Evie says. “Thanks.”

“So how does it feel to be a journalist?”

“Great,” Evie says. “I’m working on another piece for them next week. See? I got the lingo right. I said ‘piece,’ not ‘article.’” There is the sound of shuffling in the background. Evie laughs. “Can you hold on?”

“Is someone there?” Winnie asks. (God, Evie is so rude, she thinks.)

“Mmmm, yeah. . .” Evie says, naming the famous important journalist.

“That’s perfect,” Winnie says. “Because James and I wanted to know if you

and . . .” she says, naming the serious important journalist, “wanted to come to dinner next week. Our treat. We’ll work it around his schedule. Oh, and Evie?”

“Yes?” Evie says, somewhat suspiciously.

“Just remember one thing,” Winnie says.

“What’s that?” Evie says.

“You’re one of us now,” Winnie says (smoothly, so that Evie won’t suspect how difficult it is for her to choke out those words). “And we are the media.”

II

WINNIE’S BAD HABIT

Winnie has developed a bad habit and she can’t help herself.

Every morning now, when she enters her office—a large black building on Sixth Avenue that screams “I’m important”—she hurries through the lobby and into the elevator (she once calculated that she spends an hour a day waiting for elevators and riding in them, and wishes someone would invent a faster one), walks quickly along the beige-carpeted hallway and enters her office—a small, bland white room with a window, three sickly spider plants, and a small blue couch—and flips on her computer.

She types in her password. Takes off her coat. Types in “www.ama” and hits enter, at which point the computer goes immediately to Amazon.com. And then (she can’t help herself, she can never help herself) she types in the name of the serious, important journalist.

She has been doing this every morning for the past two weeks.

She checks his book’s sales ranking, then she scrolls down over the reader reviews.

Her favorite one is this:

Boring and Utterly Pointless

“Imagine if your most boring poly-sci professor wrote a book and forced everyone in the class to read it? You (sic) want to kill the guy, right? Read the ingredients on your cereal box instead. It’s more interesting.”

As always, Winnie feels thrilled and terrified at the same time.

Ever since she discovered the site (she’d known about it before but didn’t acknowledge it, as people like her still bought their books from actual bookstores), she hasn’t known what to think. Part of her is outraged. These people shouldn’t be buying books. They’re too stupid to read. They have no imagination. No ability to read and comprehend. If a book doesn’t conform to what they believe about the world in their own narrow, unsophisticated minds, they pan it. They’re like the dumb kids in class who never understood what the teacher was talking about and got angry instead of understanding what everyone else in the class understood—that they were too dumb to understand. But part of her is (not even secretly) afraid that they might be right. The book is a little boring. Winnie read two chapters and skipped to the end and didn’t pick it up again. But it’s an important book. Why does some git in Seattle who’s probably never written more than an e-mail have the right to pan it? To tell other people not to buy it?

Winnie is disturbed.

The world is not right. (Or is it right, and she’s not? Maybe she’s like the dumb kid in the class. But she knows she isn’t. Dumb. Sometimes she thinks there should be a test for dumbness while a baby is still in the womb, and all the dumb fetuses should be aborted. She knows what the argument against it would be: “Who will decide what dumb is?” She has the answer: She would. She’d be happy to decide.)

Then she checks the sites of the ten or so other writers she and James know who have published books in the last year. She checks their sales ratings. If the ratings are very bad, like around 286,000, she can’t help it. She feels good.

She has to stop doing this. But she can’t. It’s research. What will happen if James writes a book? She wants to be prepared. She will have to numb herself against the inevitable bad reader reviews. She knows she can’t take them personally, but she will. She takes everything personally. Especially herself.