Trading Up (10 page)

“Oh please,” he said dismissively, as if he’d been interrupted by an annoying child. He took a sip of water ( Jesus, did he even
drink
? Janey wondered), and said,

“What about Helen of Troy?” as if this proved everything.

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Janey
knew
he would bring up Helen of Troy—the book had warned that men like him always did. “What about her?” she shrugged. “What about the English, who choose their wives based on family background and character?”

“Are you saying that’s better?” he asked, with the sarcasm of a man who isn’t used to being contradicted.

“I’m not saying it’s better
or
worse,” Janey said, sweeping her hair over her shoulder. “All
I’m
saying is that you shouldn’t make generalizations about the entire male population based on your own immature desires.” And then she sat back in her chair, her heart thumping in her chest, and for a moment, she was afraid that maybe she’d gone too far . . .

But she had certainly put
him
in his place, she thought gleefully, taking the turn onto Ocean Road, and for the rest of the dinner, she had deliberately disagreed with everything he said, so that he was forced to talk to her even though she could tell he didn’t want to. And then, as soon as dinner was over, they had both risen at the same time and walked off in opposite directions, and when she passed him later on her way to the bathroom, she had merely given him a polite nod, as if she hardly knew who he was.

And that, she decided, as she turned into the driveway of her house, was exactly what she planned to do the next time she ran into him.

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f o u r

it was the middle of June and the first weekend of the polo season in Bridgehampton, and the temperature stood at an unusually sweltering ninety degrees.

Under a large, white tent, Janey Wilcox sat on a gilded folding chair, fanning herself with a copy of
Hamptons
magazine. Her hair was pulled back into a chignon, and she was practically naked in a gold tank top and tiny pink shorts, but her bare skin provided no relief against the heat, and rivulets of sweat kept running down her neck and into her cleavage. Two days before, a strange, hot wind had begun blowing in from the north, whipping the sand across the beaches and covering everything in a fine layer of pollen and dust. Beach-going was impossible—indeed, even being outside was uncomfortable—but still the summer social season forged on, and the Hamptons people smiled and had their pictures taken, and talked about the parties they’d been to the night before with valiant enthusiasm.

On Saturday afternoon, the place to be was the Polo, although it was implicitly understood that the game was of little interest to anyone. Actually watching the polo was what you did when you wanted to get away from the swirling, glamorous crowd inside the VIP tent; nevertheless, for the past twenty minutes, Janey and Mimi had been blithely defying social convention by sitting in the VIP seats at the edge of the field, sipping champagne. Mimi was holding a pair of binoculars to her face, and as she removed them, she leaned over to Janey and, pointing to Zizi, said,

“Now that young man is absolutely gorgeous. I believe he’s the only thing that makes this game worth watching.”

Janey giggled and took the binoculars, pretending that she was noticing Zizi for the first time, while thinking that Mimi’s way of occasionally talking like an old 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 53

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woman must be yet another one of the strange affectations of the very rich, which she had discovered two days ago, when Janey had called her up and asked if she wanted to go to the Polo.

“Darling,” Mimi said, as if she were pulling herself out of the grave, “do you know how many polo matches I’ve attended in my life?” And for a moment, Janey had been afraid she was going to decline. But in the next second she said in a schoolgirl voice, “But one must do what has to be done, so of course I’ll go with you.” It would have all been perfect, except that on Friday Mimi called up and said that Selden was going to be out this weekend, and did she mind if he joined them at the Polo? There was nothing to do but pretend she couldn’t think of anything better, when in actuality, she couldn’t have imagined anything worse. And then Mimi had suggested they meet for lunch beforehand, without Selden, so they could talk about him. Selden was the last thing she wanted to discuss, especially when all she could think about in the man department was Zizi. But as she and Mimi really didn’t know each other well, Selden was a good jumping-off point from which to move on to more interesting gambits, specifically conversations about all the other people they did know in common, such as Comstock Dibble.

Janey was sufficiently versed in social politics to know that, until she knew Mimi better and could fathom her motivations, it would be a terrible mistake to reveal the truth about her affair with Comstock Dibble; however, she wasn’t above a vague inference that at some point, Comstock had come on to her, and everybody knew that when it came to women, he couldn’t be trusted. Comstock Dibble was on her mind, due to the very disturbing letter she’d received that morning. The letter had been forwarded from New York City with the rest of her mail; it had probably originally been mailed just before Memorial Day. It was from Comstock Dibble, suggesting that they had some business to conclude about her “screenplay,” but as far as Janey was concerned, the business between them was finished, and the missive was nothing more than a pathetic attempt on the part of Comstock Dibble to scare her—although why he was persisting in his fright campaign, Janey couldn’t imagine. In any case, she meant Comstock to know that she couldn’t be threatened, and she thought the best way to achieve that end was to pretend that she didn’t know a thing about it and, even if she did, couldn’t have cared less.

And so, continuing with the theme of the day, which seemed to be “mild subterfuge,” she squinted fiercely into the binoculars, and followed Zizi’s sublime form as he lifted his arm and swung his mallet with a ferocity that sent the polo ball skid-ding to the opposite end of the field. It was too soon to reveal her true feelings about him, and so she asked innocently, “Who is he?”

“He must be that polo player Pippi was going on about,” Mimi said. “She seemed to think he was interested in her.”

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“But if he’s so interested, where is she?”

“She had an audition.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s one of those men who makes
all
women think he’s interested,” Janey said, thinking that this rule applied to every woman but herself. Studying Zizi’s face through the lenses of the binoculars, she recalled every word of their conversation, and decided that it had felt far too real and genuine to be his usual flirtation.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Mimi said. “One can’t marry a polo player.”

“Why not?” Janey asked fiercely.

Mimi laughed. “In the first place, they haven’t any money. And in the second, they travel all the time”—she held out her hand for the binoculars—“so it’s like being married to a juggler in the circus . . . Well, maybe not quite. He looks like he’d be an awfully good fuck.”

Janey immediately rose to his defense. “I’ll bet he isn’t like that,” she said. “He looks like he has a
soul
.”

“If he does,” Mimi said, handing her back the binoculars, “it won’t last long in the East End.” She appeared to have lost interest in Zizi, because she began looking around. “I’m worried about Selden.”

I’m not,
Janey wanted to say, but instead asked casually, “When was he supposed to get here?”

“Three o’clock,” Mimi said. “And it’s nearly a quarter to four. I hope he didn’t get lost again. You don’t see him anywhere, do you?” Reluctantly, Janey tore her eyes away from the polo field, making a pretense of scanning the crowd behind them through the binoculars. Mimi went on absentmindedly: “George is crazy about Selden. He thinks he’s going to be a huge deal . . .

not that Selden isn’t already, but George says he wouldn’t be surprised if Selden had a G5 in a couple of years.”

“Real-ly?” Janey said. “But you know I don’t care about money.”

“Janey Wilcox!” Mimi exclaimed. “I hardly know you, but if you tell me you don’t care about money, you’ll be lying. And I can’t be friends with a liar!” This was delivered in an eerily juvenile tone, and Janey suspected that it was the tone taken by rich teenage girls in boarding school. She couldn’t tell if Mimi was kidding or serious, and she felt the vast differences between them.

She wanted to be conciliatory, so she said, “I guess every woman cares about money . . .”

“They do,” Mimi said. “It’s no use pretending one doesn’t, because there’s nothing worse than having to support a man . . . And you can’t be put off by the way Selden looks. Really successful men don’t usually look like much of anything.”

“I actually thought he was . . . handsome,” Janey said, nearly choking on the 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 55

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word. And then, to cover up her distaste, she added, “But Mimi, I told you before, I honestly don’t think he liked me.”

“Now, darling,” Mimi said, “I know men, and believe me, Selden is interested.

You wouldn’t believe how excited he got when I told him I was going to the polo with you.”

“Maybe he changed his mind,” Janey murmured, training the binoculars on the entrance to the polo—a narrow track clogged with cars that ran between two fences. “There’s still a long line of cars to get in,” she said. “That’s one of the problems with this place. They can never figure out the parking.” As she scanned the line of cars, her eye was caught by a rare 1948 Jaguar XK

120 with a six-cylinder engine. The car was so extraordinary (the first two hundred were crafted by hand), Janey had seen only one in her life—at a classic car show at the old Bridgehampton racetrack. She had even considered trying to have sex with the owner in order to get closer to the car, but it turned out he wasn’t there. And now, wondering who would be rich enough—and sophisticated enough—to own such a car, she focused the binoculars on the driver’s head.

There was, she thought, something disturbingly familiar about the driver’s hair, and with a jolt she saw that Selden Rose’s face was attached. She wondered what Selden Rose was doing in a car like that—a car that was far too cool for him—and she turned to Mimi. “I just saw Selden Rose. He should be here any minute,” she said with a sigh, thinking it was one of the more unfortunate rules of life that it was always the jerky guys who had the best cars. And with a touch of resignation, she turned her attention back to the field.

Selden Rose had a headful of thick nappy hair that looked like it never grew and therefore never required cutting or maintenance. His big boyish grin exposed fluoride-hardened teeth that were not perfectly straightened by sixties orthodon-tia; he was from outside Chicago and appeared to be as sweet as pie. After meeting him just two or three times, one might take him as merely a strict company man who was working his way up the ladder of a big corporation, but he was much more than that: He was one of a handful of men who had succeeded to the very top, and in reality was as tooth-achingly ambitious as a mouthful of saccharine. As the head of MovieTime, there were only one or two spots above him, and he meant to succeed there, sooner as opposed to later. His goal was to run all of Splatch Verner.

MovieTime was a division of Splatch Verner, a media conglomerate that considered itself bigger and more important than any government and whose business practices were completely American. In other words, on the surface “the company” 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 56

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appeared to take care of its employees, providing them with benefits and stock options; it was politically correct, spouting its commitment to multiculturalism and a guarantee against sexual harassment (information circulated through regular e-mails); but below the surface it was business as usual, run by men who tacitly agreed that their work was the closest thing to going to war without going to war. In the past fifteen years, Splatch Verner had bought up magazine and movie companies, cable stations, publishing houses, Internet servers, telephone and satellite providers, and advertising agencies. The company made entertainment and marketed it and distributed it; it was into branding, and as long as the public bought its product and bought it en masse, no one need question its true motives, which were to make money at all costs. The men who succeeded up the ladder at Splatch Verner understood it was “company policy” to squash anyone who opposed them like a bug; the individual had no chance against them, there would never be a David and Goliath story, and the higher-ups sometimes joked that anyone who threatened them would

“never eat lunch in this world again.”

Selden Rose, being the exemplar Splatch Verner man, was decorative in neither clothes nor manner; the one area in which he meant to express himself was in his choice of his second wife.

Many of his counterparts, who were heads of other divisions and, like him, in their mid-forties, had recently taken second wives, trading in their first wives (who were mostly attractive, a year or two younger, and serious, like Selden’s first wife, who was a lawyer) for more exciting women who were ten or fifteen years younger.

The head of advertising had married a prima ballerina with the American Ballet Theatre, a small, dark-haired girl who was wide-eyed and mysteriously mute; the head of cable was married to a White Russian pianist who claimed to be a direct descendant of the Romanovs. Other second wives included a Chinese Internet genius who had attended Harvard, a Republican political pundit with her own show on CNN, and a fashion designer. Janey Wilcox would not only add to this list, she would surpass it, making him the envy of the company. He was already beginning to label her in his mind “model . . . and international beauty.” Selden Rose parked his car on the grass and got out, adjusting his prescription Ray-Ban sunglasses. Normally he would have put the top on and locked up the car, but he was feeling unusually cavalier. He’d been quite happy to discover at dinner on Friday night that Janey Wilcox was not as stupid as he’d feared she might be—or as stupid as people told him she was—and underneath what he categorized as her