“I hate this business of taking on the customs of the upper classes,”
James said. “What’s wrong with basketball? It was good enough for me.”
Mindy snorted. “Your son is not you, James. As a fairly intelligent adult male, you should have figured that out by now.”
“Hmph,” James said. Mindy had been a bit curt with him lately, and since he feared her shortness might be due to a suspicion about his affair with Lola, he didn’t push it.
“Besides,” Mindy said. “I want Sam to feel comfortable in the area. We’ll have a house there soon, and I want him to have lots of new friends.”
“We will?” James said.
Mindy gave him a terse smile. “Yes, James, we will.”
James was suddenly nervous and went into the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee. A few minutes later, Mindy and Sam kissed him goodbye and went off to the bus station; Mindy would go on from there to her office. The second the door closed, James rushed to his computer, typed in the requisite address, and read, “The Terminator strikes again.
Wrapping my hot, wet pussy around his cock, he did another one of his dastardly deeds and tickled my asshole while I pumped him for juice.”
“Lola,” James had said after reading the first installment about his sexual exploits. “How can you do this? Don’t you worry about your reputation? What if you want to get a real job someday and your employer reads this?”
Lola only looked at him like he was once again hopelessly out of touch.
“It’s no different from all those other celebrities with sex tapes. It hasn’t hurt them. Just the opposite — it’s made their careers.”
Now, continuing to read Lola’s blog, James felt himself getting a hard-on that pushed against his leg, demanding immediate attention. He went into the bathroom and jerked off, hiding the evidence in a tissue that he flushed down the toilet. He looked into the mirror and nodded. The next time he saw Lola, he decided, he would definitely try for anal sex.
Mindy watched Sam get on the bus for Southbury, Connecticut, waving at his window until the bus pulled out of the underground garage.
Hurrying through Port Authority, she was relieved to have gotten Sam safely away, where Paul Rice couldn’t hurt him. She flagged a taxi, slid onto the backseat, and fished the folded piece of notepaper out of her bag. “Sam did it” was written in pencil, in Paul Rice’s tiny block lettering. The paper bore the logo of the Four Seasons Hotel in Bangkok. Apparently, Paul Rice had quite a few of these pads.
She refolded the note and put it back in her purse. She’d found the tightly folded paper in her mailbox just the other day, and while James was convinced she wanted a country house for her own self-aggrandizement, she’d begun pursuing it as a way to get herself and Sam out of Paul’s way, without raising suspicion. A man who could take over an entire country’s stock market was probably capable of anything, including persecuting a little boy. While everyone else in One Fifth had been diverted by Billy’s death, Paul hadn’t attended either his memorial service or Annalisa’s party. For all Mindy knew, Paul might still be investigating who cut his Internet wires, and eventually, he might be able to prove it was Sam.
Like Paul Rice, Mindy knew Sam had done it. She would never tell anyone, of course, including James. But it wasn’t the only secret she was keeping. Striding into her office, she passed Thayer Core, sitting in his cubicle like a caged animal, scrolling through a long list of e-mails. Mindy stopped and stuck her head over the edge of the cubicle, looking down at Thayer as a reminder of her authority over him.
“Have you printed out the notes from yesterday’s meeting?” she asked.
Thayer pushed back his chair and, as if to thwart her authority, put his feet up on his desk and crossed his arms. “Which meeting?” he said.
“All of them.” She moved away, then stopped, as if remembering something. “And I also need a hard copy of Lola Fabrikant’s sex column.”
When Mindy was safely in her office, Thayer muttered, “Can’t you read it on your computer? Like everyone else?” He got up and strolled through the maze of cubicles to the printer, where he retrieved Lola’s column. He read it briefly and shook his head. Lola was fucking James Gooch again. Could Mindy really be so dense that she didn’t know Lola was writing about her own husband? Ugh. It meant he and James Gooch now had one degree of separation. But James gave Lola money, and since Thayer enjoyed the same privileges as James for free, he couldn’t really object.
“Here you go,” Thayer said with a flourish, placing the printout on Mindy’s desk.
“Thank you,” she said, continuing to stare at her computer.
Thayer stood for a moment, watching her. “Can I have a raise?” he asked.
This got her attention. Putting on her reading glasses, she picked up the printout and glanced at it, and then him. “How long have you been here?” she asked.
“A month.”
“I’m already paying you a hundred thousand dollars a year.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Check back with me in five months, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Fucking old bag, Thayer thought, returning to his cubicle. But surprisingly, Mindy wasn’t that bad, not as bad as he’d thought she’d be. She had even taken him out for a beer and asked him all kinds of uncomfortable questions about where he lived and how he was surviving. When he told her he lived on Avenue C, she grimaced. “That’s not good enough for you,” she said. “I see you in a better place — like a walk-up in the West Village.” She’d given him advice about getting ahead, suggesting he attempt to appear “more corporate” by wearing a tie.
For some reason, he had taken her advice. The woman was right, he’d thought, upon returning to his disgusting apartment. It wasn’t good enough for him. He was twenty-five years old. There were men his age who were billionaires, but he was making a hundred thousand a year, an enormous sum compared to that of his friends. After scouring Craigslist, he’d found an apartment on Christopher Street, a walk-up with a bedroom that was barely large enough to contain a queen-size bed. It was twenty-eight hundred a month, which ate up three quarters of his monthly salary, but it was worth it. He was moving up in the world.
Seated behind her desk with her reading glasses perched on her nose, Mindy carefully read the latest installment of Lola’s sex column. Lola had quite a way with the description of the sex act and, not content to limit it to plumbing, also provided a detailed account of her partner’s physical characteristics. The first four columns had featured Philip Oakland as her lover, but this column and the previous one were most definitely about James. Although Lola called the man the Terminator, which made Mindy laugh out loud, the description of his penis, with its “constellation of tiny moles on the shaft, forming, perhaps, Osiris,” was James. Nor was it only the comments about his penis that gave him away. “I want to know every part of you. Including the dirty place,” the Terminator had said. It was exactly the same argument James had used on Mindy in the early years of their marriage when he’d wanted to try anal sex.
Putting the column aside, Mindy went back to her computer and, typ-ing in the address of the Litchfield County real estate agency, scrolled down and found the photographs and description of a house. The past weekend, looking at real estate, the agent had explained that there was very little in their price range — there was hardly anything on the market for under a million three. She did have the perfect house for them, but it was a little more expensive. Did they want to look at it anyway?
Yes, they did, Mindy said.
The house was a bit of a wreck, having only been recently vacated by an aged farmer. But these kinds of houses almost never came up. It still had twelve original acres, and the house, built in the late seventeen hundreds, had three fireplaces. There was an old apple orchard and a red barn (falling down, but barns were very inexpensive to restore), and it was located on what was considered one of the best streets in one of Litchfield County’s most exclusive towns — Roxbury, Connecticut. Population twenty-three hundred. But what a population. Arthur Miller and Alexander Calder had lived nearby, as well as Walter Matthau. Philip Roth was only miles away. And the house was a steal — only one point nine million.