“But frankly, we don’t anticipate a lot of drop-off,” Thomas said. “Like I said, anyone can do a Website, and who cares? The whole cachet comes in being with our service. I’m not especially interested in Joe Shmoe’s take on life, but if Joe Shmoe is an Ordinary Person, that means we’ve decided his story is worthwhile and we’ve worked with him to give it some definition. That’s going to generate a lot more interest from subscribers and the media than he could possibly get on his own.”
“So Joe Shmoe gets rich from being Joe Shmoe,” I said, beginning finally to grasp not just Thomas’s words, but the strange new world they described. Strange, yet familiar, too. Eerily so.
“Well, I don’t know about rich,” he said. “But he makes some money—more than he’s making in the widget factory, that’s for sure, especially if he’s part-time with no benefits. But to me the beautiful part, the thing you really can’t put a price tag on, is how it’ll feel for Joe to know he has an audience, that people care, that they’re interested. I think guys like Joe feel they’re toiling away so far from the world of glamour and fame; they have no access to it except as consumers—they’re the grunts who pay the bills. I’d put money on the fact that Joe’s life will be enhanced in nonmaterial ways.”
Since Thomas had begun his pitch, virtually all of my mental horse-power had gone into the seemingly simple (yet surprisingly difficult) task of trying to understand what the hell he was saying. Now that the gist was upon me, I felt myself reacting with a visceral throb of recognition, as if I were hearing aloud parts of my own dreams. “So … what stage are you at with this project?” I asked.
“So far, we’ve signed option agreements with about fifty Ordinaries and twenty Extraordinaries,” he said, “meaning we’ll develop PersonalSpaces with all of them and pay them something for their efforts. Then, after they’ve created their material, that’s when we decide if we’ll purchase.”
“If they’re boring, no deal?”
“Well, it’s not really that simple,” Thomas said. “I mean, some people you’d expect to be boring—not boring, but you know what I mean: a brick layer doesn’t have to write sonnets, and if he does, no one expects him to be John Donne. We certainly wouldn’t penalize him for that. But you want variety. Maybe two Ordinaries will sound similar—same fantasies, same family configuration, it happens—and one will have to go. Also, we want to strike a balance, especially with Ordinaries, between having them describe their experiences in ways that’re interesting, but also keeping them representative of their type. That sounds terrible, but you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” I said, feeling a kind of queasiness. “Otherwise they’d be Extraordinary.”
“Exactly,” Thomas said. “Victoria’s our publicist, and I have a partner in L.A. with directing experience”—his voice hitched slightly; with yearning? Envy?—“who’s working with the film community. Hollywood’s drooling for real-life stories, so a subscription with us will be industry standard, no question.”
“It sounds expensive, all this,” I said. “Who pays for it?”
“Well,” he said, reluctantly. “Most of the start-up equity comes from Time Warner and Microsoft. But we’re completely independent, all that means is that they’ll have access to certain kinds of media options before anyone else.”
“I guess it makes sense,” I said. “Between the two of them, don’t they own just about everything?”
Now Thomas looked troubled; I’d hit upon the one aspect of his venture that shamed him. “But really, I see this product as being for people,” he said, a bit plaintively. “I can’t emphasize that enough. I see us contributing to people’s knowledge of one another and connectedness—wearing down that weird divide between folks like us, who deal in intangibles, and folks that’re out there in the trenches, getting their hands dirty.”
A part of me thrilled at Thomas’s proposal. How could I resist the offer of attention and money, the very polestars whose gleaming emanations had navigated my existence to this point? Yet some rogue part of me, some renegade element heretofore unknown, recoiled. Who are you? I queried the source of this rebellion. Do I know you? I felt a sudden need to get out of there, the eager part of me greedy for consummation, the other desperate to escape. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk money.”
I caught a glance between Victoria and Thomas, a tiny dart of elation, and congratulated myself on having managed to conceal the fact that my participation had never been in doubt.
I had nothing left to sell!
Thomas was excited again, and grateful, I think, that I’d seen the worst of it—his frightening sponsorship—and hung in there.
“For Extraordinaries—and you folks get a little more than Ordinaries, for obvious reasons—we offer a ten-thousand-dollar option against a purchase price to be negotiated after you produce your PersonalSpace,” he said. “Our offer will depend, quite frankly, on how excited we are by what you do, how much access you give us to your life.”
The least they had paid to purchase an Extraordinary was $80,000, he said; the most was in the $300,000 range. I would also receive an annual salary of $25,000 to maintain my PersonalSpace and keep it active to their standards. Any additional contracts—TV and film options, book deals, research consultancies, product endorsements—would be on top of that.
“Ten thousand up front?” I asked.
This quaint notion inspired a chuckle from Thomas. “Twenty-five hundred up front, another seventy-five when you deliver a completed first draft to our specifications.”
“I need all ten thousand now.”
“That’s impossible,” he said, the affable smile sitting a little less easily on his affable face. “Think about it—we could give you the ten grand and you could conceivably—not that I’m saying you’d do this—grab the money and head for Aruba.”
I widened my eyes and said nothing. There was a long silence. Thomas glanced at Victoria. Philippe delicately insinuated the microphone into our midst.
“Half up front,” Thomas said. “It’s my final offer.”
“Three-quarters,” I said. “Or you and Time Warner and Microsoft will have to find yourselves another model who’s had reconstructive surgery and is unrecognizable to anyone.”
He grimaced. “Done.”
We shook. Victoria waved for the check. Philippe shut off his tape recorder and stowed it away. One more business deal expelled its gamey essence into the atmosphere at Judson Grill.
“I’ll messenger you the contract tomorrow morning,” Thomas said. “Read it carefully, have your lawyer look it over. We’ll cut you a check on signing.”
A beautiful phrase, cut you a check.
It was Thomas who seized the bill when it came, thus confirming what I had already begun to suspect—that Victoria’s role had been purely to deliver me to him.
“The contract specifies exactly what materials we’ll need from you, and in what time frame,” he said. “I think you get two months to generate the first chunk of text, and if you choose to tape rather than write, we deduct the transcription and editing costs from your last payment. But that’s all in the contract!” Retrieving his credit card, Thomas frowned a moment over the tip. “And frankly,” he said, eking out a round, childish signature as if he were forging it, “I’d invest in a laptop and get on line, if you haven’t already. You’ll need to if we purchase, for your Diary and Dream entries, all the day-to-day stuff, and you’ll get a free subscription, too, so you can check out your fellow Extraordinaries and Ordinaries. We really encourage that. Our hope is that it’ll be a kind of family … I mean, that sounds corny, I know, but so few things really hold people together anymore. Why not this?”
I made a brief, meticulous study of Thomas Keene: his smooth self and his fat shadow self, his olive Armani, his sandy hair and small round eyes. I scrutinized him for one granule of cynicism, a scintilla of evidence that at bottom he didn’t believe a word he was saying. I found nothing. This ex—fat kid with a penchant for crocodile truly bel
ieved he was making the world a better place.
And maybe he was. What did I know?
We stepped from the restaurant into an overcast afternoon. The daylight felt jarring, as if I’d just watched a long movie. Deprived of the Judson Grill’s warm, flattering light, Victoria’s eyes were hard and pale, less blue than before.
Philippe blinked sleepily, as if he were coming to after a long nap. His eyes settled on me. “How did this accident occur?” he asked. His first question of the day.
It was so straightforward, so obvious, so entirely unexpected that I found myself at a loss. “I … well, I …” I looked beseechingly at Thomas, who leapt forward instantly to protect me.
“Wait!” he said. “Don’t say a word. I want it fresh, like you’re telling it for the first time! Sorry, Philippe!”
Philippe ducked his head abjectly. “No problem,” he said. “Today was great for me.”
“Oh, good,” Victoria said with relief, and I sensed that she really was glad—that the Frenchman’s happiness and entertainment weighed on her as one of a great many responsibilities. “Oh, my God, is it three-fifteen? I’m late for a meeting,” she cried.
And with that, they swirled away, Thomas and Victoria bolting ahead, the Frenchman flapping in their wake like a giant crow, leather bag swinging from his shoulder.
I wandered through Midtown, bumped and jostled by people swollen to twice their normal size by winter coats. My mind felt weirdly blank, as if Thomas and Victoria had absconded with my thoughts. In their presence I’d felt buoyed by frothy excitement, a jittery sense that the events they narrated were already in motion, hurtling me inexorably along. But the excitement had turned out to be Thomas’s and Victoria’s, not mine; I wasn’t excited anymore. I was tired. Since jumping off my balcony, I’d been sleeping ten or eleven hours a night.
So here it was: exposure. The very thing I had craved since childhood, perhaps the only thing I had never tired of or ceased to love or changed my mind about—now offered to me inexplicably, unexpectedly, over lunch. A chance to tell who broke me and how. Blab to the world and get paid. Court the audience I had always desired.
Yet I felt cowed. I could hardly read anymore, hardly write. I despised talking about myself. For years I had lied to avoid it, feinting and darting, obfuscating slyly, lying because it was easier, because I felt like it. Lying to erase the truth, though this never seemed to work. I knew I was thirty-five; I’d tried to forget, but the knowledge stayed in me. As a liar, I had failed.
I couldn’t do it. This came to me on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, and the surprise of it made me go still. I stood there, sustaining frisks and jabs from behind, mutters of impatience. “Go around me,” I commanded. I was trying to think. I would sign the contract, cash the seventy-five-hundred-dollar check, and that would be it. Not a bad haul for a two-hour lunch. Another few mortgage payments.
The mirrored room had opened its doors to me finally, after so long! But it was too late, I was too tired. Too accustomed to my exile.
I began walking quickly away from Midtown, away from Thomas and Victoria and Ordinaries and Extraordinaries and Future Plans/Fantasies. As I walked, my exhaustion began to lift, and I was suffused by a sense of lightness, rejuvenation at the thought of spurning the single thing I had always craved.
I headed south on Seventh Avenue, returning instinctively to the land of soot and bricks and faded signs, the land of Anthony Halliday, whom obviously I wouldn’t visit. We had not spoken since our brutal parting in the taxi. I assumed we never would again.
I’m free, I thought, swinging my arms. And I felt the possibility of a different kind of life, a life in which I wanted different things.
There were no more old signs left in Times Square; they’d been obscured by new glass buildings and slick elastic tarps emblazoned with luscious photographs of models. Paint itself had been outmoded. But on a side street a few blocks south of Forty-second, I spotted the remnants of a ghostly typewriter high on a brick wall, a device reminiscent of a theater, its keys arrayed in staggered rows. “Stefani’s Fine Writing Machines” was scrolled above it in faint, elegant script.
Childhood Memory: Pretending with my sister that our lives were a twenty-four-hour movie.
Regret/Missed Opportunity: I’d forgotten every line of “The Eve of St. Agnes.”
Hobby: Looking at old painted blah blah blah.
And I realized, then, with fascination, with horror, that the mercenary part of me was already pacing the confines of my life, taking measurements, briskly surveying the furniture, formatting my thoughts to Thomas Keene’s specifications and calculating their price.
In rebellion, I reviewed the list of other things I could sell: apartment, clothing, sectional couch. They were only things; first one, then another, then another. Then they would all be gone. But a story was invisible, infinite, it had no size or shape. Information. It could fill the world or fit inside a fingernail.
Watershed Experience: Having once come so near to fame that I knew its smell, its taste, the whir of its invisible generator.
Regret: I’d never forgotten it.
Of course I was going to do this thing. And now I was tired once again. Disappointed in myself.
I stopped at a bank to check my balance, an activity I engaged in seldom these days because it depressed me to watch my savings plummet in dizzy response to my high mortgage and one-way cash flow. But I wanted to see how long my new seventy-five-hundred bucks might possibly last. As I pulled out my cash card, Irene Maitlock’s business card, that lost, irretrievable prize, dropped into my palm. I felt a shiver of significance. Irene Maitlock. I conjured her instantly, just looking at the name: her tentativeness and drab hair, her absurd sincerity—I saw her as if she were standing in front of me. She was the inversion of Victoria Knight; Victoria backwards. Victoria inside out. Holding Irene’s card, I felt a jolt of strength.
If I was doing this thing, I was taking the reporter with me. Whether she wanted it or not. And she would, I told myself. She was interested in me.
I walked straight to a pay phone and called her, listening to her flat, slightly nasal voice (“Hi, it’s Irene. Please leave a message?”). Irene Maitlock, journalist. I wanted to see her office, what it looked like. How a journalist lived.
“It’s Charlotte Swenson,” I said. “You tried to interview me about a month ago. Call me,” I said, and left the number. “Call as soon as possible.”
I hailed a taxi, leaned back in the seat and shut my eyes. With Irene’s help, I could perform the tasks of an Extraordinary Person. She could read and write, for one thing. And I trusted her.
In my apartment, I found a message on my machine from Anthony Halliday. I called him back without taking off my coat.
“I’m sorry,” I said, the instant I heard his voice.
“I’m supposed to say that,” he said. And then he did. “I’m worried I hurt you.”
“Impossible.”
“I mean your head. After your acci—”
“Didn’t even feel it.” I’d taken so much Advil in the first days after my encounter with the taxi window that I’d barely felt the clothes on my body.
“Nothing was—broken or anything?”
“The opposite. You worked out a kink in my neck,” came my spirited riposte, but each word was a tiny pain pellet breaking open inside me. “And you?”
“Intact.”
“Still reformed?” I asked, then cringed as the retort I myself would have made, despite your best efforts, jeered at me.
“Knock wood,” was all he said.
“I’m glad.” And I was glad. “Good luck.”
“And to you, Charlotte.”
Still in my coat, I lay down on my couch. Missed Opportunity/ Regret: That I’d wrecked my evening with Anthony Halliday before I’d managed to pull his zipper down, to see and feel him so that at the very least I could remember him now. I imagined it, the sound of the zipper (pulling down my own, meanwhile), reachin
g inside, his inadvertent shiver, like horseflesh. Then ripping off his shirt in the time-honored fashion, making every button pop.
Masturbation: a word with all the sensuality of suitcases tumbling from a closet shelf, another one falling just when you think the noise has stopped. A futile and lonely act, I’d always thought, but I’d missed the boat, I decided now, misunderstood the joys to be had from declining to introduce yet another human being into one’s life. New discoveries at thirty-five, or twenty-eight, whatever the hell I was, pulling that zipper down, the sound, the flinch—
Floating, waiting for my ringing ears to stop, I heard the telephone and reached for it dreamily, assuming it would be Halliday with a telephonic response to the telepathic delights I’d just administered.
“Hi, Charlotte. It’s Irene.”
“Oh!”
“You left me a message?”
“Yes! I did!” Feeling indecent with my pants around my knees, I wriggled to yank them back up and in the process dropped the phone, which bounced under the couch.
“Hello?” I heard her calling into the upholstery. “Charlotte?”
“Here I am!” I shouted. “Right here.” Pulling. Zipping. Smoothing my hair. I dropped to my belly and fished for the phone. “Hello,” I said breathlessly.
“You called me,” Irene said. “I’m calling you back.”
“Yes, I did call. Because I’ve reconsidered. I—I want to work with you on that story for the Post. And I really will cooperate.”
There was a long silence. “Gosh,” she finally said. “I’ve sort of moved on, actually.”
“You found another model?”
“No, I just—let it drop.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, relieved, somehow, that I hadn’t been replaced. “Because actually, there’s something else. But I’d rather explain it in person.”
“Explain what?” She sounded deeply wary.
“Well, it’s complicated,” I said. “Could we just … I’ll come to your office if you want, or you can come here? Or we can meet at a café, or a bar …” I stopped, disliking the begging note that had crawled into my voice.