Кэндес Бушнелл - One Fifth Avenue

On the morning of Mrs. Houghton’s death — on that same morning when Philip Oakland was wondering about his career and Schiffer Diamond was wondering about sex — Mindy Gooch went to her office and, as she did most days, conducted several meetings. She sat behind her long black desk in her cushy black leather swivel chair, one ankle resting on the other knee. Her shoes were black and pointy, with a practical one-and-a-half-inch heel. Her eleven o’clock meeting consisted of four women who sat on the nubby plaid couch and the two small club chairs, done up in the same ugly nubby plaid fabric. They drank coffee or bottled water. They talked about the article in The New York Times about the graying of the Internet. They talked about advertisers. Were the suits who controlled the advertising dollars finally coming around to the fact that the most important consumers were women like themselves, over thirty-five, with their own money to spend? The conversation turned to video games. Were they good or evil? Was it worth developing a video game on their website for women? What would it be? “Shoes,” one of the women said. “Shopping,” said another. “But it already exists. In online catalogs.” “Why not put the best all in one place?” “And have high-end jewelry.” “And baby clothes.”

This was depressing, Mindy thought. “Is that all we’re really interested in? Shopping?”

“We can’t help ourselves,” one woman said. “It’s in our genes. Men are the hunters and women are the gatherers. Shopping is a form of gathering.” All the women laughed.

“I wish we could do something provocative,” Mindy said. “We should be as provocative as those gossip websites. Like Perez Hilton. Or Snarker.”

“How could we do that?” one of the women asked politely.

“I don’t know,” Mindy said. “We should try to get at the truth. Talk about how terrible it is to face middle age. Or how lousy married sex is.”

“Is married sex lousy?” one woman asked. “It’s kind of a cliché, isn’t it?” said another. “It’s up to the woman to stay interested.” “Yes, but who has time?” “It’s the same thing over and over again. It’s like having the same meal every day of your life.” “Every day?” “Okay, maybe once a week. Or once a month.”

“So what are we saying here, that women want variety?” Mindy asked.

“I don’t. I’m too old to have a stranger see me naked.” “We might want it, but we know we can’t have it. We can’t even talk about wanting it.” “It’s too dangerous. For men.” “Women just don’t want it the way men do. I mean, have you ever heard of a woman going to a male prostitute? It’s disgusting.” “But what if the male prostitute were Brad Pitt?” “I’d cheat on my husband in a second for Brad Pitt. Or George Clooney.”

“So if the man is a movie star, it doesn’t count,” Mindy said.

“That’s right.”

“Isn’t that hypocritical?” Mindy said.

“Yeah, but what’s the likelihood of it happening?”

Everyone laughed nervously.

“We’ve got some interesting ideas here,” Mindy said. “We’ll meet again in two weeks and see where we are.”

After the women left her office, Mindy stared blankly at her e-mails.

She received at least 250 a day. Usually, she tried to keep up. But now she felt as if she were drowning in a sea of minutiae.

What was the point? she wondered. It only went on and on, with no end in sight. Tomorrow there would be another 250, and another 250 the day after, and the day after that into infinity. What would happen if one day she just stopped?

I want to be significant, Mindy thought. I want to be loved. Why is that so difficult?

She told her assistant she was going to a meeting and wouldn’t be back until after lunch.

Leaving the suite of offices, she rode the elevator to the ground floor of the massive new office building — where the first three floors were an urban mall of restaurants and high-end shops that sold fifty-thousand-dollar watches to rich tourists — and then she rode an escalator down into the damp bowels of underground corridors and walked through a cement tunnel to the subway. She’d been riding the train ten times a week for twenty years, about a hundred thousand rides. Not what you thought when you were young and determined to make it. She arranged her face into a blank mask and took hold of the metal pole, hoping no male would rub up against her, rub his penis on her leg, the way men sometimes did, like dogs acting on instinct. It was the silent shame endured by every woman who rode the subway. No one did anything about it or talked about it because it was performed mostly by men who were more animal than human, and no one wanted to be reminded of the existence of these men or the disturbing baseness of the natural male human. “Don’t take the train!” exclaimed Mindy’s assistant after Mindy regaled her with yet another tale of one such incident. “You’re entitled to a car.” “I don’t want to sit in traffic in Manhattan,” Mindy replied. “But you could work in the car. And talk on the phone.” “No,” Mindy said. “I like to see the people.”

“You like to suffer, is what,” the assistant said. “You like to be abused. You’re a masochist.” Ten years ago, this comment would have been insubordi-nation. But not now. Not with the new democracy, where every young person was equal to every older person in this new culture where it was difficult to find young people who even cared to work, who could even tolerate discomfort.

Mindy exited the subway at Fourteenth Street, walking three blocks to her gym. By rote, she changed her clothes and got onto a treadmill.

She increased the speed, forcing her legs into a run. A perfect metaphor for her life, she thought. She was running and running and going nowhere.

Back in the locker room, she took a quick shower after carefully tucking her blow-dried bob under a shower cap. She dried off, got dressed again, and thinking about the rest of her day — more meetings and e-mails that would only lead to more meetings and e-mails — felt exhausted. She sat down on the narrow wooden bench in the changing room and called James. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Didn’t we discuss this? I have that lunch,” James said.

“I need you to do something for me.”

“What?” James said.

“Get the keys to Mrs. Houghton’s apartment from the super. I can’t have those keys floating around. And I need to show the real estate agent the apartment. Mrs. Houghton’s relatives want it sold quickly, and I don’t want the place sitting empty for long. Real estate is at a high now. You never know when it might drop, and the price of that apartment needs to set a benchmark. So everyone’s apartment is worth more.”

As usual, James zoned out when Mindy talked real estate. “Can’t you pick them up when you get home?” he asked.

Mindy was suddenly angry. She had excused much over the years with James. She had excused the fact that at times he would barely make conversation other than to respond with a two-syllable word.

She’d excused his lack of hair. She’d excused his sagging muscles. She’d excused the fact that he wasn’t romantic and never said “I love you” unless she said it first, and even then he only, when obligated, said it three or four times a year. She’d excused the reality that he was never going to make a lot of money and was probably never going to be a highly respected writer; she’d even excused the fact that with this second novel of his, he was probably going to become a bit of a joke. She was down to almost nothing now. “I can’t do everything, James. I simply cannot go on like this.”

“Maybe you should go to the doctor,” James said. “Get yourself checked out.”