(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.
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.) James thinks (and Winnie thinks too) that someday, something bad is going to happen to Tanner. It has to. He'll get arrested or (Winnie hopes) he'll fall in love and the woman won't fall in love back, or (James hopes) he'll do three bad movies in a row and his career will be over. But it never does happen. Instead, Tanner keeps getting richer and more successful. He makes bad blockbuster movies, and the critics are beginning to take him seriously. He dates female movie stars and has affairs on the side. He plays golf and skis. He smokes cigars (and does drugs whenever he wants). He supports the Democratic Party. He makes at least twenty million dollars a year (and maybe more). For doing (James thinks) nothing.
James would like to hate Tanner, but he can't. He would, however, hate him if he were not his friend. He would probably agree with Winnie—that Tanner is the product of a misguided, badly educated, shallow society that elevates people solely on the basis of their looks, and if the public really knew what Tanner Hart was like, they wouldn't shell out seven or eight or nine dollars to see him in a movie.
On the other hand, they probably would.
And if they didn't, they would probably want Tanner to do something worse. Much worse. Like lead an army and rape and pillage.
This is, James thinks, the thing that Winnie doesn't understand about men. And never will understand.
It is, James thinks happily, the thing that will prevent Winnie from ever really becoming a threat to his masculinity. It is what allows him to stay home and visit porn sites on the Internet or play chess against his computer, or even hang around with his boy, playing violent computer games (James does feel a little guilty about this, but he tells himself he's preparing his boy for the real world, and besides, the boy is so good at them, quick and clever) while Winnie goes to work in a high-rise office building. (She thinks she's a man, but she's not, James thinks, even if she does wear suits, and, when he met her, shirts with straps that tied around the neck like a bow tie.) This is the thing that James knows and Winnie doesn't: Men can't be tamed.
Men are by nature violent.
Men always want to have sex with lots of different females.
James has always known this (don't all men know this, and haven't they been telling women for the past thirty years, but the women haven't been listening?). But now, he thinks, he knows it in a different way.
James has been reading up on chimpanzees. He's been studying everything he can about chimps.
Chimps are violent. They sneak off in the middle of the night and raid other chimp tribes. The big chimps (the alpha males) pick out a small chimp (a beta male) and kill him mercilessly while the small chimp screams in pain and terror. Then the alpha chimps steal a few female chimps and have sex with them.
At first, James began looking into this chimp business (as he's begun to think of it) to get even with Winnie. (He can't remember what he was planning to get even with her for.) But then he got into it. Lately, he's been looking up scientific articles on the Internet. E-mailing researchers. He isn't sure how all this information adds up, but he knows there's a piece in there somewhere. An important piece. James has a theory: Tanner is an alpha male.
This is why Tanner can get away with whatever he wants, and James can applaud him. (Hell, James can be bad with him and get away with it.) "Winnie," James says, when she gets home from work and has taken off her shoes (she always takes off her shoes as soon as she gets home. She says they hurt, even though her shoes tend to be sensible one inch loafers). "I think I've got an idea for a new piece.”
"Hold on," Winnie says.
"Winnie," James says. He follows her. She has gone into their son's tiny bedroom, where he is trying to read a book about dinosaurs to the Jamaican nanny.
"Pur ... pur ...," the boy says.
"Purple," Winnie says. (Impatiently, James thinks. Winnie has no patience for their son, has no patience for children in general.) "You should let him figure it out for himself,”
James says. Knowing by the expression on Winnie's face that he has said the wrong thing. Again. "James," Winnie says. "If I waited for everyone around me to figure it out on their own, I'd be waiting for the rest of my life.”