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But she always does get the assignment. Then, at the potluck suppers (“our salon,” they call it) Winnie and James host at their apartment every other Tuesday night (they invite other serious journalists and discuss the political implications of everything from cell-phone shields to celebrities with bodyguards, to what’s happened to the journalists who have left real magazines and gone to the Internet—”Anybody can be a writer now. That’s the problem. What’s the point of being a writer if everybody can be one?” James says), Winnie will usually bring up whatever new story she is working on. Everyone will be sitting around the living room, with Limoges plates (Winnie believes in serving guests on only the best china) on their laps, and they will be eating iceberg lettuce with fat-free salad dressing and skinless chicken breasts, and maybe some rice (none of the women in this group are good cooks or care much about food). They will drink a little bit of wine. No one they know drinks hard alcohol anymore.
And then Winnie will say something like “I want to know what everyone thinks about youth violence. I’m writing about it this week.” When she started doing this a couple of years ago, James thought it was sort of cute. But now he gets annoyed (although he never shows it). Why is she always asking everyone else what they think? Doesn’t she have her own thoughts? And he looks around the room to see if any of the other men (husbands) are sharing the same sentiment.
He can’t tell. He can never tell. He often wants to ask these other husbands what they think of their wives. Are they scared of them too? Do they hate them? Do they ever have fantasies of pushing their wives down on the bed and ripping off their underpants and giving it to them in the butt? (James sort of tried something like that at the beginning with Winnie, but she slapped him and wouldn’t talk to him for three days afterward.)
Sometimes James thinks Winnie is scared that he’s going to leave her. But she never says she’s scared. Instead, she says something like “We’ve been married for seven years and have a child. I’d get half of everything, you know, if we ever got divorced. It’d be awfully hard for you to live on half of what we own and only your income minus child support.” (What Winnie doesn’t know is that James is more afraid that she’ll leave him, because she’s right It would be impossible for him to live without her income. And he wouldn’t want to leave his boy.)
James tries not to think about this too much, because when he does think about it, he doesn’t feel like the man in the relationship. When he doesn’t feel like the man, he asks himself what Winnie would ask him if she knew he were feeling that way. Specifically: What does it mean to “feel like a man,” anyway? What does “a man” feel like? And since he never can answer those questions, he has to agree with Winnie—even thinking that way is passé.
Winnie told James this story on their second date: In the seventies, she smoked marijuana (age fourteen), let boys feel her up (and down) at sixteen, and lost her virginity the summer she was seventeen, to a neighborhood boy who was eighteen and very good-looking (she’d had a crush on him for years, but he never paid any attention to her until the night he sensed she would let him have sex with her. Winnie didn’t tell James that part). After he came, he drove her the half mile to her house (they did it in the basement of his parents’ house, where he had a cot set up). He wasn’t impressed that she was going to Smith in the fall, and he didn’t care that she was number three in her high school class (tolerable only because the two students above her were boys). She learned that in certain situations, achievement and intelligence were not a guarantee against being treated badly, and she vowed never to be in that situation again.
Winnie’s birthday is coming, and James is scared.
“EVIL”
Winnie has a sister and a brother. Everybody loves Winnie’s brother. He graduated (from?) UCLA film school and just finished an important documentary about adolescent sex slaves in China. (He sold it to The Learning Channel. Nobody is worried about him.) Everybody is worried about Winnie’s sister, Evie (“Evil,” Winnie calls her sometimes), who is two years younger than Winnie. Eight summers ago, Evie had to go to rehab. Hazelden. Since then, she changes her mind about what she wants to do every six months. Actress. Landscape architect. Singer. Real estate agent. Novelist. Movie director. Fashion designer. Now she wants to be a journalist. Like Winnie.
The week before, Evie showed up at a very important, very serious party for a journalist who had just written a book about a right-wing politician. (He was a New York Times journalist who wrote a book about every five years. His books are always favorably reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. This is what Winnie wants for James.) Evie’s blouse was unbuttoned too low and she was showing off her breasts. (She used to be fairly flat-chested, like Winnie, but a couple of years ago, her breasts mysteriously grew. Winnie thinks she had breast implants, but they never talk about it.) Evie walked right up to the important journalist and kept him engaged in conversation so no one else could talk to him. The other women were fuming. They stood around the crudité platter chomping on carrot sticks. They rolled their eyes and gave Evie dirty looks. But they couldn’t “take care of” Evie the way they normally would have, because Evie was Winnie’s sister.
The next day, Winnie got a phone call from a female colleague who found out that Evie had gone to the important journalist’s hotel room and spent the night with him. “Winnie, I just want you to know that I’m not going to judge you by your sister’s behavior,” she said. Then Evie herself called. “I think I’m going to get an assignment from The New York Times,” she squealed.
“Stay out of my life,” Winnie warned her (quietly). Then she added (cleverly), “Why don’t you get a job at a fashion magazine, if you want to be a journalist so much?”
“Oh no,” Evie said. She swallowed loudly. She was drinking a Diet Coke. She drank five Diet Cokes a day. (Just another thing to be addicted to, Winnie thought.) “I’m going to change my l
ife. I’m going to be really successful. Just like my big sis.”
Evie is a mess, and sometimes James wonders if he should have married her instead.
James sees Evie as little as possible, but every year he asks her to help him pick out Winnie’s birthday present. At first he did it “as a treat for Evie” (it was good for Evie to spend time around a man who wasn’t a user, an asshole, or a scumbag—and Winnie agreed). But then he realized that she was attracted to him.
He calls her up. “Evie,” he says.
“Hey, bro,” Evie says. “Did you hear about my night with . . .,” she says, naming the serious important journalist. “And I might get my first assignment. With The New York Times. I think that’s pretty great, don’t you?” Evie is always chipper, and always acts as though her behavior is that of a normal, decent person. (She is in denial, James thinks.)
“It’s Winnie’s birthday,” James says (staying in control by getting right to the point).
“I know,” she says.
“Any suggestions?” he asks. “I think I want to get her something from Barneys. Jewelry.”
“No, Jimmy,” Evie says. “You can’t afford jewelry worth giving anyone.”
(This is why everyone hates you, he thinks.) “So what, then?” he says.
“Shoes,” she says. “Winnie needs a great pair of high-heeled sexy shoes.”
“Okay,” he says, knowing that high-heeled sexy shoes are the last thing that Winnie would want (or need). He agrees to meet Evie in the shoe department at Bloomingdale’s. He hangs up the phone and feels scared.
Then he realizes he has a hard-on.
WINNIE IS WORRIED
On the day of Winnie Dieke’s thirty-eighth birthday, James Dieke wakes up and is scared. Winnie Dieke wakes up and is depressed. Not that she has anything to be depressed about. She has, after all, hit all her life landmarks in style: first job at twenty-two, first major assignment for a prestigious magazine at twenty-seven, met future husband at twenty-eight, married at thirty, established herself as a “serious journalist” at thirty-one, co-op apartment at thirty-one, pregnant at thirty-two, own column at thirty-four. For the past few weeks, Winnie has been spending a lot of time (too much time, which she knows should be spent thinking about other things, like ideas) reminding herself of everything she’s achieved. Reminding herself how clever she is not to be one of those desperate single women (like Evie). But something is wrong.
Winnie doesn’t want to admit it (she never wants to admit that there possibly could be anything wrong with her life), but that something might be James. Lately, she’s been worried about James. (Irritated, actually, but worried is such a better way to look at it.) James hasn’t been holding up his end of the bargain. He should have written a major, important work by now (preferably about politics: so easy, considering the political climate), which would have elevated her status in the journalistic world as his wife (she didn’t take his last name for no reason). If James had written an important, influential book by now, they would have access to more important, influential people. They would be more important, influential people. But instead, James keeps writing the same kind of pieces. And agonizing over them. Half the time now, James calls her up during the day and says, “I can’t write. I’m stuck. I’m blocked.”
“Oh please, James,” she’ll say. “I’ve got a kazillion things going on. I’ve got the CEO of a major corporation on the other line. If you’re blocked, go to the supermarket and pick up something for dinner. And make sure it doesn’t have any fat in it.” Then she’ll hang up. She wishes he would just get on with it.
