Trading Up (35 page)

He looked at his watch—it was past six-thirty. He wondered, with a touch of amusement, if some misadventure had delayed her, and then he was struck by the thought that perhaps she was afraid to come home, afraid that he would be angry about the $50,000. Well, he wasn’t angry about it anymore, and now he was beginning to worry. Craig Edgers would be arriving at any minute, and he wanted her to be there . . .

He dialed her number, but her cell phone went immediately to voice mail, and he suddenly felt guilty. Was it possible that some instinct told her that he was planning to use her a little, and had caused her to stay away? He knew that her sometimes inappropriately high regard for herself would take high-handed offense at being regarded as an object, to be trotted out like a dumb racehorse. But on this particular evening, her potential displeasure was overridden by his selfish desire to show her off a little in front of his old friend.

Craig Edgers had been Selden’s roommate during their last two years at Harvard, and even though they’d pretty much lost touch in the past few years, Selden wasn’t surprised when Craig had called him the week before, ostensibly “wanting to catch up.” Craig had read about his move to MovieTime in the business section of the newspaper, and about his marriage in the gossip columns, and he’d confessed that he’d always wanted to meet a Victoria’s Secret model. Selden couldn’t resist the idea of showing off Janey to Craig, and had invited him and his wife for a drink.

But Craig had immediately said that he’d prefer to come without his wife, Lorraine, which, Selden understood, would allow him to gawk openly at Janey without fear of retribution. Nevertheless, he thought, it was an indication of his
own
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the subterfuge that he had deliberately “forgotten” to mention to Janey that his old college roommate would be dropping by.

Sitting on the couch, he noticed that a book lay sprawled open facedown on the coffee table, like a woman abandoned after sex. The book was an expensive hardcover edition of Plato’s
Republic;
next to it was the pink, girlish highlighter Janey used to underline passages that stirred her mysterious emotions. In a protective gesture, he picked up the book and folded the highlighter inside it. Normally, he wouldn’t have minded if she’d left the book out for days, but its prominent display on the coffee table coupled with the telltale pink highlighter was just the sort of obvious stab at intellectual pretension that Craig would pinpoint and deride mercilessly.

Selden looked around for a place to hide the book, and chose the drawer in the little writing table. The drawer was filled with papers—scraps of notepads with phone numbers and doodles, bills, empty envelopes, and a couple of official-looking letters—but he squished the book on top and shoved the drawer closed. With the book out of sight, he felt better, knowing that if Janey tried to engage Craig on an intellectual level, Craig wouldn’t hesitate to destroy her, stripping away her ideas with the precision of a surgeon’s knife.

Craig Edgers was one of those men whose only satisfaction in life came from his unshakable belief that he was vastly superior in intellect to the rest of the population. All he had ever wanted to be was a “great novelist”; even as a student, he’d possessed a bitter envy toward everyone else’s work, which seemed to be the burden of the “unrecognized genius.” He’d been poisonous after graduation, when Selden had moved to LA and immediately landed a job finding material for a famous producer. In his first week, Selden had discovered the book
Discarded Land,
which became a multimillion-dollar movie, securing Selden’s place in the entertainment business and earning him his first $100,000; meanwhile, Craig had moved to New York and taken a low-paying job as a fact checker for
The New Yorker.
In the intervening years, Selden’s star had continued to rise, while Craig had struggled. Despite publishing numerous essays and writing three novels—and being considered “a promising literary talent” in the small circles in which such things mattered—

Craig’s work had gone largely unnoticed.

But all that had changed in the last three months, when Craig had published his great tome,
The Embarrassments,
in September. The book had immediately jumped to number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list, and Craig was being lauded as the next Tolstoy. He was on talk shows and panels, and his picture was everywhere—although Selden suspected it was an old photograph, probably taken years ago when Craig was still in his thirties.

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stood by the door in curious anticipation—this would be, he thought, the first time he had seen Craig as a success, and he wondered how it might have affected him. In a moment there was a knock, and Craig came in, reeking of cold air and cigarettes.

He was, Selden thought, greeting him with a bear hug, as badly dressed as ever, but he was now about thirty pounds overweight.

Craig wandered casually into the living room, taking a look around.

“Jeez, Rose,” he said, with an underlying sneer that after twenty years of struggling for recognition had probably become a permanent part of his verbal reper-toire, “I thought you were a big deal now. I didn’t expect to find you living in a hotel.”

“And I thought the whole point of becoming a successful novelist was to be able to dress like you weren’t an unsuccessful one,” Selden said.

“Yeah, well, you always had the touch, Rose, I didn’t,” Craig said, plopping onto the couch and struggling out of a worn, tweed overcoat. “There’s a goddamned bliz-zard out there.”

“What can I get you?” Selden asked. “Vodka okay?”

“Lorraine will smell it on my breath, but what the hell. Did you ever think you’d end up marrying your mother?”

Selden laughed. “I had one mother; that was enough.”

“Hence the ten-years-younger supermodel, huh?”

“That’s right,” Selden said evenly, thinking it was too early in the evening to let Craig get his goat.

“Sure,” Craig said, scratching his hair, which, Selden saw, needed a wash. “By the way,” he asked, “do you ever hear from Sheila?” Selden stiffened. “She remarried on the day the divorce papers came through.” He went into the kitchen and poured vodka over two glasses of ice, thinking the last thing he wanted to talk about was Sheila and the reasons for the demise of their marriage. “Hey Edgers,” he called out. “Now that you’re finally successful, aren’t you afraid of losing your edge?” He walked back into the living room, handed Craig a glass, and raised his own in a toast. “You know, money and fame have a way of making you forget how awful the world really is . . .”

“Tell me about it,” Craig said mournfully. “I spend half my day trying to remind people how much they’re supposed to hate me, because they’re all so fucking stupid and I’m so fucking smart. But everyone agrees with me now, except for Lorraine.

Every day she tells me that even though my book has been on the best-seller list for three months, I’m still an asshole.”

“Some things never change,” Selden said.

Craig buried his nose in his drink, and when he came up for air, said, “I’ve got 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 189

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to hand it to you, Rose. I know I shocked the shit out of people when I wrote a best-seller, but I think your marriage trumps it.” Selden smiled, taking a seat in the armchair. “I’ve always been one step ahead of you, Edgers.”

“It’s driving everyone crazy,” Craig said. The alcohol was warming him up to his subject, and he continued: “They’re all talking about it. The men are jealous as hell, and the women are going crazy. They think if Selden Rose can marry a supermodel, so can
their
husbands—and the men agree. I’ve even found myself looking at Lorraine these days, wondering what it would be like to . . .” Selden laughed and took a large sip of his drink. Craig, he thought, was even more odious than he was in college, for he now had the veneer of a dirty old man about him. “Don’t kid yourself,” he said, with a false smile, wondering how quickly he could get rid of him. “You sound like every other slob out there in America: You see these girls on TV, and you think that access is the only reason you’re not with one . . . It’s like a three-hundred-pound man thinking he can ride a racehorse.”

“Don’t give me any ideas,” Craig said bitterly.

“Besides,” Selden continued, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs, “I thought you and Lorraine were doing great. All your interviews refer to your happy six-year marriage . . .”

“We’re fine,” Craig conceded. “As fine as two people who were once madly in love can be. But seriously, who doesn’t think about being with someone else? And especially about being with the girl in the ad. It’s the driving force behind the obsession of the consumer-oriented male: woman as product.”

“I’m sure Lorraine wouldn’t agree,” Selden said, thinking about Craig’s wife.

Lorraine was a short, energetic woman with frizzy blond hair who was militant about controlling all aspects of her life, including which way the toilet paper rolled.

“Only because she couldn’t
be
a product,” Craig snorted.

“Well,” Selden said, unable to disagree with this assessment. “Thank God,
you
can.”

“I’m resisting,” Craig said, his voice laden with sarcasm, as Selden suddenly remembered reading recently that Craig had had offers to buy his book for a movie, but was so far holding out. “I still have some artistic integrity left. Unlike you,” he said. He removed a pack of cigarettes from the tweed overcoat and placed them on the table, as if he intended to stay for a while. “But it seems we’ve both become clichés: I’m a best-selling author who’s trying to hang on to his artistic integrity, and you’re a Hollywood mogul married to a blond bimbo.” Selden was stung. He knew that Craig’s idea of humor was to make the aggressive, cutting remark, but this, he felt, was going too far. It was one thing to insult 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 190

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him,
he thought, but another to insult his wife. Banging his glass down on the coffee table with a derisive laugh, he said, “I’ll admit that
you’re
not quite as bright as Janey, but she’s at least as intelligent as Lorraine.”

“But is she as complicated?” Craig asked, pointing his finger at Selden in triumph, clearly enjoying the effect of his words. “Lorraine might not be a beauty, but at least she has something going on in her head. I mean, you see these girls and you think, ‘I’d like to sleep with that, but I don’t want to have breakfast with it in the morning.’ ”

“A more jealous sentiment has never been better expressed . . .”

“Give me a break, Rose . . .”

“And there comes a time in every man’s life when he begins to understand the value of sweetness . . .”

“Come on,” Craig nearly shouted. “You sound like a perverted old English don.

All I want to know is, do you have anything to talk about? What
do
you talk about?

Or is it completely dull, except for sex . . . ?”

“Dull?” Selden asked. “
Sheila
was dull.” And he gave Craig a look that implied he thought Lorraine was dull as well.

At that moment he heard the key turn in the lock and the door open and shut.

And then there was the sound of Janey’s trilling “Sel-
den
. . . ?” as she entered the foyer. Selden sat up proudly, suddenly reminded of how pleasant her beautifully round, musical voice was, and wondered if Craig had noticed it as well. “My wife’s home,” he said, glancing over at him. Craig was staring straight ahead, like a child who is determined “not to look,” and as he raised his glass to his mouth, Selden saw that his hand was shaking ever so slightly. Why, he’s as nervous as a schoolboy, Selden thought triumphantly, as he called out, “We’re in the living room . . .” She suddenly appeared in the doorway, silhouetted in the bright light from the table lamps, and, with the riveting self-consciousness of an actress entering a room in a play, she paused for a moment, and then slowly removed her fur coat, revealing her perfectly curved figure. He noted with pleasure that she was dressed expensively, with that particular style that’s both sexy and ladylike, and she took a step into the room, her lips pushed out into a question. “We . . . ?” she asked.

“A friend of mine from college.”

“Oh!” she said. She looked taken aback; he knew her well enough to see that she wasn’t quite herself. Her energy seemed scattered; there was a nervousness about her and a chill, almost as if she were undecided about being there. Her face was slightly puffy, and he wondered if she’d been crying. And then she took another step into the room and he thought he spied the cause: The thick strand of gray-black pearls that glowed around her neck. So that was what she’d spent his money on! Even from a distance he could see that they were magnificent, probably worth 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 191

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the price. The poor thing must have been scared to death to tell him, and that’s why she’d been crying . . .

He stood up as she hurried across the room to him. “I’m so sorry,” she said, turning her face up for a kiss. “I’ve had the most ridiculous day. I thought I had a pimple so I went to the dermatologist, and actually agreed to let him do a light peel.

Can you believe that?” She kissed him on the lips, lightly stroking his hair, and then turned to address Craig. “I know it sounds silly, but that’s what it’s like being a model. You become obsessed with the tiniest little flaw—and then you have nothing else to talk about. It’s no wonder people think models are dumb!” And holding out her hand, she said, “I’m Janey Rose, by the way.” It was a charming display, and one not lost on Craig. He stood, and taking her proffered hand, actually bent over and kissed it.

“This is Craig Edgers, my darling. He was my roommate in college. I thought you might like meeting him,” Selden said, thinking it was clever of him to position it that way, rather than telling her that Craig was only there because he wanted to meet a Victoria’s Secret model.