Evie puts her hand on his shoulder for balance as she leans down to take off the shoe. He doesn't brush her hand away. She looks at him suggestively, and for once, he looks at her suggestively back. If she can break the rules, he thinks, maybe he can too.
He spends four hours shoe-shopping with Evie.
They go to Barneys. Bergdorfs. Saks. They go to lunch (Gino's). Evie drinks wine and he does too (he objects at first, ordering bottled mineral water, but then, after Evie has nearly consumed her first glass, he quietly orders a glass for himself, over his shoulder, as if she might not notice). Finally, they decide on the perfect pair of shoes for Winnie. Manolo Blahniks. Sandals. The shoes cost five hundred dollars.
He pays gleefully. He and Evie part on the street corner. "I'm going to call you tomorrow," she says. "So we can discuss my article.”
"It's a piece, Evie, a piece. Not an article," he says. He walks away. The little bit of alcohol (and it really was only a little bit, one glass only) is wearing off and he feels slightly queasy, like a thing that's been left out in the elements for too long. What has he done (has he done anything)? He hails a cab. For the first time in his marriage, he wishes he didn't have to go home. (But he can't think of where he'd like to go instead.)
Winnie still considers it her job to be the goodlooking one in the relationship. Being good-looking is part of mastering the world. It is part of being perfect. (It is not about being beautiful. Beautiful women are self-indulgent. Beautiful women are stupid because they don't have to try.) She is five-seven and weighs 125 pounds. If she let herself go, let her body reach its natural weight, she'd probably weigh between 130 and 135 pounds. But she won't let herself go. (Ifs about control.) Winnie thinks about weight a lot (probably too much. She should be thinking about more important things, like ideas. But who can help it?). She is very, very against women's magazines using skinny young models. It's one of her pet peeves. (She wrote a two part series about the topic, called "Skin and Bones is Not Sexy," and afterward, she went on two newsmagazine programs on TV, where she destroyed her opponent, a fashion editor from a women's magazine.) But she would never want to be "fat" herself.
(She feels bad when she sees friends who have gained weight. She feels superior. But only because she knows they are unhappy.) She keeps her weight under control by running around the reservoir in Central Park every weekday morning at seven a.m. (she knows it could be dangerous, but it would be more dangerous to gain weight). She weighs herself afterward. Examines her naked body in the mirror.
Turns sideways to make sure her stomach isn't bulging and her breasts aren't sagging. But they both are. A little bit. (Ifs frustrating. It makes her hate herself. She reminds herself that she's had a child, which doesn't help much.) If she is two pounds overweight, she takes care of it. Taking care of herself is part of being a nice girl.
Sometimes, when Winnie looks around (meaning her office or the sites she goes to on the Internet), she feels like she's the only nice girl left in the world. (Sometimes she feels like ifs a crime.) When Winnie was growing up, everyone was from a "nice" family. (They might not have been that nice behind closed doors, but no one talked about it.) Winnie's mother was always perfectly dressed. Her house was beautifully decorated (with antiques and silk draperies).
She cooked and cleaned. Winnie didn't. And her mother didn't make her. They both knew that Winnie would have "a career" and "a cleaning lady." (They would never call anyone "a maid" or "a servant.") Her father was remote but not unpleasant. He was just a father, like everybody else's father. He wasn't that important. He paid the bills. Her parents are still married.
Sometimes, when Winnie looks around, at the young women who now work in her office, she wonders what happened to the nice girl. (She knows what her assistant would say: "The nice girl is s-o-o-o-o-o over." Then she would look at Winnie. She wouldn't say anything. She wouldn't have to. Winnie would know what she was thinking: that Winnie was over.) None of the young women are nice girls anymore (and they don't care). They wear black and flaunt their (ample, sometimes already sagging) bosoms. They wear short skirts. Dresses that look like lingerie. They have tattoos. And piercings.
They live downtown in dirty little apartments and have sex a lot and talk to one another about it the next day. No one can say anything to them. Everyone is afraid of sexual harassment.
Sometimes (and Winnie can't believe this) Winnie is afraid of them. She can't believe she is already ten years older than they are. She has nothing in common with them. Even when she was ten years younger, she wasn't like them. She was more ambitious. And more focused. She didn't use sex to get ahead. (Although she did marry James, which, she has to admit, didn't exactly hurt her career.) She didn't come to the office hungover, and she didn't take drugs. (Last year, one of these young women was caught shooting up heroin in the ladies' room. She was found nodding out in a stall. By a cleaning lady. The girl was sent to rehab. She wasn't fired. She couldn't be. She came back two months later. Eventually, she was gently moved to another magazine.) These young women aren't scared of anything. (They're hungry. And arrogant. They'll do anything to get ahead.) Last year, two young women were caught plagiarizing. One of them plagiarized two paragraphs from a piece Winnie had written three years before. When Winnie read it, she felt sick. (She felt violated. By another woman. She couldn't believe another woman would do this to her. She thought women were supposed to stick together.) Nothing happened. (Winnie complained. The management said she should be flattered the young woman plagiarized her. It was a compliment.) Eventually the young woman was promoted.
Winnie would like to try to be friends with these young women. But she's afraid the gulf is too wide. She would like to say, "Hey, when I was young, I was a rebel too." But she knows they would look at her blankly. (That’s what they always do. To gain control. Stare blankly.) She would like to tell them that when she was a teenager, wanting to move to New York City and do "great things" was considered daring. As was having seven lovers before she met James. (One was a one-night stand. And one was an affair with a professor. Who was twenty years older. He was the first man to perform oral sex on her.) But she won't tell them. She knows they would laugh. She knows that, by the time they've gotten to twenty-five, these young girls have already had a hundred lovers. (And probably a venereal disease. Or an infection. From a piercing or a tattoo.) On the day of Winnie Dieke's thirty-eighth birthday, she wakes up and feels depressed.
That afternoon, Winnie does what she has been doing on the afternoon of her birthday for the past ten years: She goes to Elizabeth Arden.
She pampers.
She has her hair highlighted and blown dry. She has a manicure and a facial. She has a bikini wax. (She would never shave down there. Shaving reminds her of what happened when she had the baby.
She's not sure she wants to do that again.) The bikini wax hurts. She hates it, but she has one every two months. It gives her ingrown hairs, which she sometimes picks at absently with a pair of old tweezers before she gets into bed. (James ignores this. He has gross habits too, like picking his nose while he's reading and rolling the snot into a little ball and examining it before he flicks it away onto the carpet.) During the bikini wax, Winnie wears paper panties. She has to spread her legs a little (but only a little, she tells herself), and the woman (the facialist) has to touch her a little down there. They both pretend that she isn't, just as Winnie desperately tries to pretend that she isn't thinking about sex. But she always does. She tries not to. She tries not to think about the young women in her office and how they've probably had sex with other women as well as men. Tries not to imagine that women know what other women want. They want someone to spread their legs. Instead, Winnie wonders what will happen when she gets gray hairs. Down there. It's going to happen someday. What will James think?