Four Blondes

“I just love that line you say in the ad . . . .How does it go again?”

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I’m going somewhere,” Janey said.

“That’s it,” the real estate agent said. “Don’t we all feel that way, though.”

Janey opened the door to the house. Her house, she thought. Her house alone. It smelled a little musty, but all summer houses smelled musty the first day you opened them up. In an hour, it would pass. In the meantime, she’d take a swim.

She went into the master bedroom and stripped off her clothes. The room was at least six hundred square feet, with a California king bed and a marble bathroom that contained a Jacuzzi and sauna. The house was terribly expensive, but what the hell? She could afford it.

Not bad for a single woman.

She opened the sliding glass door and walked out to the pool. It was unusually long. Sixty feet. She stood at the edge by the deep end. She paused. For a moment, she wished that Bill would show up. Walk up her flagstone path, up the steps and through the white picket gate to the pool. “Janey,” he’d say. He’d fold her naked body into his arms, kissing her hair, her face . . . “I love you,” he’d say. “I’m going to leave my wife and marry you.”

It was never going to happen.

Janey stuck her toe in the water. It was ninety degrees.

Perfect.

She dove in.

HIGHLIGHTS (FOR ADULTS)

I

THE DIEKES

This is a story about two people with jobs. Two people with very, very important jobs. Two very very important people with two very, very important jobs who are married to each other and have one child.

Meet James and Winnie Dieke (pronounced “deek,” not “dyke”). The perfect couple. (Or, in their minds anyway, the perfect couple.) They live in a five-room apartment on the Upper West Side. They graduated from Ivy League colleges (he Harvard and she Smith). Winnie is thirty-seven. James is forty-two (in their minds, the perfect age difference for a man and a woman). They’ve been married nearly seven years. Their lives revolve around their work (and their child). They love to work. Their work keeps them busy and neurotic. Their work separates them from other people. Their work (in their minds anyway) actually makes them superior to other people.

They are journalists. Serious journalists.

Winnie writes a political/style column (“Is that an oxymoron?”James asked her when she first told him about the job) for a major news magazine. James is a well known and highly respected journalist—he writes five-to-ten-thousand-word pieces for publications like the Sunday Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The New Yorker.

James and Winnie agree on just about everything. They have definite opinions. “There is something wrong with people who don’t have intelligent, informed opinions about things,” Winnie said to James when they met for the first time, at a party in an apartment on the Upper West Side. Everyone at the party was “in publishing” and under thirty-five. Most of the women (like Winnie) were working at women’s magazines (something Winnie never talks about now). James had just won an ASME award for a story on fly-fishing. Everyone knew who he was. He was tall and skinny, with floppy, curly blond hair and glasses (he’s still tall and skinny, but he’s lost most of his hair). There were girls all around him.

Here are a few of the things they agree on: They hate anyone who isn’t like them. They hate anyone who is wealthy and successful and gets press (especially Donald Trump). They hate trendy people and things (although James did just buy a pair of Dolce & Gabbanna sunglasses). They hate TV; big-budget movies; all commercial, poorly written books on The New York Times best-seller list (and the people who read them); fast-food restaurants; guns; Republicans; neo-Nazi youth groups; the religious right wing anti-abortion groups; fashion models (fashion editors); fat on red meat; small, yappy dogs and the people who own them.

They hate people who do drugs. They hate people who drink too much (unless it’s one of their friends, and then they complain bitterly about the person afterward). They hate the Hamptons (but rent a house there anyway, on Shelter Island, which, they remind themselves, isn’t really the Hamptons). They believe in the poor (they do not know anyone who is poor, except their Jamaican nanny, who is not exactly poor). They believe in black writers (they know two, and Winnie is working on becoming friends with a third, whom she met at a convention). They hate music and especially MTV (but Winnie sometimes watches “Where Are They Now?” on VH1, especially if the artist in question is now a drug addict or alcoholic). They think fashion is silly (but secretly identify with the people in Dewar’s ads). They think the stock market is a scam (but James invests ten thousand dollars a year anyway, and checks his stocks every morning on the Internet). They hate Internet entrepreneurs who are suddenly worth hundreds of millions of dollars (but Winnie secretly wishes James would go on the Internet and somehow make hundreds of millions of dollars. She wishes he were more successful. Much more successful). They hate what is happening to the world. They don’t believe in a free lunch.

They do believe in women writers (as long as the women do not become too successful or get too much attention or write about things the Diekes don’t approve of—like sex—unless it’s lesbian sex). James, who is secretly afraid of homosexuals (he’s afraid he might be one, because he’s secretly fascinated with both his and Winnie’s assholes), says he is a feminist, but always puts down women who are not like Winnie (including her sister). Who are not serious. Who do not have children. Who are not married. Winnie gets physically ill at the sight of a woman she considers a slut. Or worse, a whore.

The Diekes don’t know people who go to clubs or stay out late, or have sex (except Winnie’s sister). People who stay up late can’t, by their definition, be “serious.” It takes the Diekes all day (and often well into the evenings) to get their jobs done. By then, they are so exhausted, they can only go home and eat dinner (prepared by the Jamaican nanny) and go to sleep. (Winnie has to get up at six to be with her child and go running. The child is four. Winnie hopes that the child will soon be able to run with her.) At home, they are cozy and superior, and sometimes (when they’re not working) sit around in fuzzy flannel pajamas w

ith their child. Winnie and the child wear slippers in the shape of stuffed animals, and Winnie makes their slippered, stuffed-animal feet talk to one another. The child is a sweet and happy and beautiful child who never complains. (He crawls into bed with Winnie as often as he can. He says, “Mommy, I love you.”) He is learning to read. (Winnie and James know he is a genuis.) “But he’s a real boy,” Winnie always says to her friends, who, like her, are well adjusted and earning incomes over a hundred and fifty thousand a year, who also have one or two children. It always shocks Winnie when she says this. It makes her a little afraid, because she does not like to admit that men and women are different. (If men and women are different, where does that leave her?)

Winnie believes (no, knows) that she is as smart as James (even though she’s not sure that he will ever admit it) and as good a journalist as he is and as good a writer. She often thinks that she is actually better than he (in every way, not just journalism), but he (being a man) has gotten more breaks. James’s style of writing and her style of writing (which she picked up from James, who picked it up from other writers of his ilk) was not hard to figure out how to do, once she understood the motivation. Ditto for their conversational style: pseudo-intellectual and desperately clever at the same time—“cl-intellectual.” (Tell me I’m smart—or I’ll wound you.)

Winnie is deeply bitter and James is deeply bitter but they never talk about it.

JAMES IS SCARED

James is scared about his work. Every time he finishes a piece, he’s scared he won’t get another one. When he gets another assignment (he always does, but it doesn’t make any difference), he’s scared he won’t make the deadline. When he makes the deadline, he’s scared his editor (or editors—there are always faceless editors lurking around in dark little offices at magazines), won’t like the piece. When they like the piece, he’s scared that it won’t get published. When it does get published, he’s scared that no one will read it or talk about it and all his hard work will have been for nothing. If people do talk about it (and they don’t always, in which case he’s scared that he’s not a great journalist), he’s scared that he won’t be able to pull it off again.

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.