Four Blondes

Her assistant comes into her office. Winnie looks up. The assistant’s dark hair is messy. She is wearing sloppily applied red lipstick; a short black skirt with no stockings; a rumbled black V-neck sweater (at least she is wearing a bra); clunky black shoes. She looks like (pardon the expression) someone rode her hard and put her away wet.

The assistant flops down on the couch. “What’s up?” she says. (What’s up? Like Winnie is the assistant and has just plopped into her office.)

Winnie is never sure how to respond to this greeting.

“How are you?” she says. Briskly. Reminding the assistant that this is an office. And she is her boss.

The assistant picks at her manicure. Fingernails painted a mud brown. “I’ve got a urinary tract infection. I’m wondering if I can take the rest of the day off.”

Someone did ride her hard and put her away wet.

“No,” Winnie says. “I’ve got that big Internet conference this afternoon and I need you here. To cover the office.” (The magazine is expanding their Web site, and they want Winnie to be involved. Very involved. It could mean more money.)

“It hurts,” the assistant says.

(Winnie wants to tell her—scream at her—to stop having so much sex, but she can’t.) “Buy some cranberry juice. And take five thousand milligrams of vitamin C.”

The assistant just sits there.

“Is that it?” she asks.

“Is what it?” Winnie says.

“What you just said.”

“About what?”

“About you know.”

(No, I don’t know, Winnie wants to scream.) “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.”

“About what?”

“Whatever,” the assistant says. She stands up. She goes back to her cubicle. (Like a dog.)

Winnie tries to concentrate on her e-mails. Her shrink tells her not to envision if/then scenarios.

What if Tanner kept James out for two nights and James slept with prostitutes? What then?

She can’t help herself. She can never help herself.

JAMES HAS A THEORY

In the week before Tanner comes, Winnie is concerned and James is excited. They both know something bad could happen, and they’re going to have to talk about it.

James and Winnie know when Tanner comes to town, James can get away with doing bad things. Tanner is bad. (He’s a bad influence.) Tanner is so bad, in fact, that when James

does bad things with him, Winnie always blames Tanner. Winnie thinks (knows?) that James would never do these bad things if it weren’t for Tanner. And she’s right. James wouldn’t. He doesn’t have the guts to defy Winnie.

But Tanner does. Tanner doesn’t care what Winnie thinks. (He probably thinks she’s boring. Which James is beginning to think himself. He wishes Winnie would do something interesting, like go away. Then maybe he could fall in love with her again. Or find somebody else. Like a six-foot-tall Swedish woman with large breasts.) Winnie would like to control Tanner (the way she controls James), but she can’t. Winnie can’t do anything to Tanner.

Tanner is a big movie star and Winnie is not.

Tanner is a celebrity. Compared to Tanner, Winnie is an insignificant journalist. Compared to Tanner, Winnie is a woman. Women don’t mean anything to Tanner, except as something to have sex with. (James wishes he could feel the same way. If he did, maybe then he would feel like a man. But he can’t. Winnie is the mother of his child. She grew their son inside her body. Green stuff came out right after his son emerged, and he wished someone had warned him it was coming. It was like the green stuff in the body of a lobster. Sometimes, when he is performing oral sex on Winnie, he thinks about the green stuff. He can’t help it. He feels guilty. And sometimes he thinks about that time he had sex in college. With the crazy girl. Who asked him to fuck her up the butt and then gave him a blow job afterward. He felt guilty about that too.)

But more than anything, Tanner is a man. When James and Tanner were roommates at Harvard, Tanner had one or two different women every weekend. (And once five. He fucked every one of them, too.) Women chased him. They sent him notes. They called. They threatened suicide and Tanner had no respect for them. He didn’t have to. “Let the bitch kill herself,” he once said. James laughed, but later, he couldn’t help himself, he called the girl and took her out for a coffee. He listened to her talk about Tanner for three hours, and then he tried to fuck her. (She would only let him put his fingers in her vagina. “I want Tanner,” she sobbed through the whole pitiful, aborted encounter.)