Trading Up (25 page)

“Maybe you could cover it up with something. Like a sweater?” he asked.

“Oh, Selden. Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, coming out of the bathroom as she adjusted the hoop on her ear. “Do you know how stupid a sweater would look over this dress? It would give your friends the impression I was ashamed to wear it.”
I wish you were,
Selden thought, and then immediately felt guilty.

The dress in question was a white plastic vintage mini dress, which Janey had snagged from the designer Michael Kors a few days before. The dress had been designed in the mid-eighties, and there were only five in existence—it was a showpiece really, intended for eventual display in a couture exhibition. But Janey had seen it and had to have it, and against the mild protestations of poor, sweet Michael, had tried it on. The effect was startling—it was as if the dress had been made for 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 135

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her—and naturally, Michael had had no choice but to “lend” it to her, in her mind, permanently.

It was, she thought, gazing at herself admiringly in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe, the perfect weapon with which to batter the other Splatch Verner wives; by wearing it, no one would be able to forget that she was the famously glamorous Janey Wilcox, Victoria’s Secret model. The husbands would drool while the women would gnash their teeth, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing they could do about it.

If only Selden weren’t so uptight, she thought, opening the wardrobe to search for a pair of boots. On the other hand, it
was
amusing . . . Finding the boots underneath a large pile of shoe boxes, she thought about how easy it was to shock him, and how it gave her such pleasure, for it meant she was in the driver’s seat and had control over him.

“What do you think about these?” she asked, holding up a pair of white, patent-leather boots with silver Gucci buckles across the instep. Without waiting for a reply, she sat down on the bed, zipping the boots up the sides of her calves. “I bought them in 1994 . . . I thought they were so expensive back then—they were eight hundred dollars and I had no money—but now I’m happy I bought them . . .

They’re collectors’ items, you know?”

“Are they?” Selden said. He didn’t know what to say, as he’d never had much interest in clothing and that seemed to be all she talked about these days.

She stood up, displaying the complete outfit. With the addition of the patent-leather boots, she really did look like a Sixth Avenue hooker, Selden thought, with mounting irritation. This was the one evening he’d been looking forward to—he wanted to show off his wife and show her the kind of lifestyle they might have—

and once again, she’d somehow managed to inadvertently ruin it. He wished she would wear something a little more normal, something sweet . . . Why did she always put her desires before his? There was a willfulness about her behavior, as if she knew but didn’t care about how her actions might affect him.

Unable to express his thoughts, however, he merely said, “How much did the dress cost?” It was a legitimate question—he’d just paid off his American Express bill and had almost been sick at the amount of money she’d spent in Milan on clothes—nearly $40,000. It was impossible, he thought, that anyone could need that much clothing, and here she had gone and bought another dress.

“Why you
silly,
” she said, playfully chiding him. “If that’s all you’re worried about . . . It was free, as a matter of fact. The designer gave it to me.”

“Oh,” was all he said, thinking that once again, she’d somehow managed to make him look foolish. He had to get out of this mood, he thought. And glancing at his watch, he said, “We should be going . . . the car’s downstairs waiting.” 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 136

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At that moment, she must have suddenly understood that he wasn’t pleased with her, because taking a step forward and cocking her head up at him in a submissive manner, she said, “Why Selden, what’s the matter?” And then changing her tack, asked, “Don’t you want me to look sexy?” in an arch, teasing voice.

“Yes, but . . . ,” he began, thinking that this might be an opening in which he could convince her to change her outfit without tears, but she suddenly knelt down and, with the skilled fingers of an expert, unzipped his pants.

Janey attacked her task with gusto. Ever since she’d left George, she’d been in a buoyant mood. She suddenly realized how much the threat of exposure by Comstock Dibble had been weighing on her; now freed, she saw that life could go on as it should . . .

With a sigh that sounded like pleasure, Selden placed his hands on her head, hoping that the act would be finished quickly so they could make it to the dinner on time. A minute ticked by and he groaned involuntarily: What a fool he was! Nearly every man in America would give his right arm to be in his position—in possession of a wife who was not only an object of desire, but an eager and willing practitioner of sex, who gave satisfaction without being asked.

Mark Macadu and his wife, Dodo Blanchette Macadu, lived in a large, recently built monstrosity known derisively as a McMansion. The house, located on a pricey spit of land that jutted out into Long Island Sound, was built along the lines of what the architect imagined a “Colonial mansion” might look like, if, indeed, such a house had ever existed in history. It had white clapboards and four columns that rose from a stepped, flagstone entryway; inside were four fireplaces, six bedrooms, a conservatory (really, an attached greenhouse containing a couple of overstuffed armchairs), and, at the back of the house, the pièce de résistance: a five-hundred-square-foot state-of-the-art kitchen.

In the middle of this kitchen, surrounded by a mess of bowls, cooking utensils, copper pots, two Cuisinarts, spilled red wine, and a trail of flour that led, mysteriously, from the back door to the sink, Dodo Blanchette stood in front of a large butcher-block island, preparing dinner. Dodo attacked every aspect of her life with the zeal of a determined businesswoman, was a great believer in “improving her skills,” and was a recent graduate of a two-week cooking course at the Culinary Institute of America.

She had specialized in “veal”—and in turning any kitchen into a disaster area.

Standing nearby, with an expression of both horror and admiration on her face, was Sally Stumack, a teenager who lived next door. Sally was a tall girl who somehow managed to appear both gawky and heavy-set at the same time; her hair was long, blond, and frizzy, and she wore glasses with the defiant air of a young girl who is determined not to enter the beauty Olympics. The ever-enterprising Dodo 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 137

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“hired” Sally to help her out at dinner parties, Sally’s best point being that she was meek and Dodo could boss her around.

“Sally, can you get me the whisk?” Dodo demanded. She was making tiny pan-cakes on which she planned to fold up pieces of smoked salmon topped with salmon roe to serve as the first course. “Where is it?” Sally asked, scurrying around the kitchen like a large, ungainly mouse.

“In the sink?” Dodo asked. She poured some milk into a bowl, where it splashed out and landed on the Victoria’s Secret catalog, open to a page of Janey modeling a gold bathing suit. Dodo picked up the catalog and shook the drops of milk into the bowl. “I can’t believe Selden Rose is bringing a Victoria’s Secret model,” she snapped, for the fiftieth time that day.

“But isn’t she his wife?” Sally squeaked. She had just found the whisk in the garbage can and was surreptitiously washing it off. For the past hour, Dodo had been going on and on about Janey Wilcox, and Sally wished she would stop—for her part, she’d never met a Victoria’s Secret model and was looking forward to it.

“The problem is,” Dodo said, taking the whisk from Sally, “this Victoria’s Secret model is going to throw off the whole balance of power. Every man, including my husband, is going to be drooling over her, and I told him if he even so much as looks in her direction, he won’t get a blow job for a month. Men are like dogs, you know,” she said. “They respond to positive and negative reinforcement.”

“I don’t know what you’re worried about,” Sally said. “You’re just as beautiful as she is.”

“That’s exactly what I told Mark,” Dodo said. She stirred furiously for a moment, and then glanced back at the large, round clock above the porcelain double sink. “Sweetie, can you take over for a moment? I’ve got to go upstairs and change.” She wiped her hands on the front of the apron she was wearing, and hurried out of the room.

“But I don’t know what to do,” Sally cried.

“Just stir,” Dodo shouted.

Passing through the dining room, she stopped to stare at her reflection. Ruffling her hair, she said aloud, “You look great!” Although Dodo was, on the surface, a young woman of great confidence, she was not, by any means, a beauty—her squarish face had a masculine quality, and her skin was pale and freckled—but she was so convinced of her own attractiveness that eventually others began to wonder if they were missing something.

In the entrance hall, she met her husband, Mark, who was just coming in. Mark Macadu had a full head of dark curly hair, and had been able to maintain his physique until he was forty, at which point he had gone to fat, dumped his first wife, and, four years later, married Dodo. Mark was dynamic and sensible; everybody 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 138

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thought he was “a really nice guy”; and there were times when he prayed that his wife wasn’t insane.

“Hel-lo,” he said, throwing the
New York Post
onto a side table.

“Hiya big boy,” Dodo said, which was a bit of a stretch, as Mark was only 5'5".

“I’ll be right down—Sally’s in the kitchen.”

She cantered up the stairs and along a carpeted hallway to the master bedroom at the end of the hall. Once inside, she closed the heavy oak door and turned the key in the lock. She grabbed her purse and began riffling through a jumble of old receipts, phone numbers written on napkins, nail glue, four tubes of lipstick, dirty tissues, eyebrow tweezers, pressed powder, two leaking pens, a wallet bursting at the seams, four one-hundred-dollar bills, a black mascara wand, and a hairbrush full of broken bleached-blond strands. In frustration, she dumped the whole mess on the bed, and pawing through it, finally found what she was looking for: a tiny plastic bag filled with white powder.

Inserting her little finger into the bag, she removed a mound of powder on the tip of a long, acrylic fingernail. Like Janey, Dodo was a secret nail-biter, but she would be damned if anyone knew it and had a standing appointment once a week for the application and varnishing of her fake nails. She closed one nostril and inhaled, then, closing the other nostril, repeated the process. Leaving the mess on the bed, she put the plastic bag in her lingerie drawer, then went into the bathroom to check her nose.

Dodo Blanchette considered herself a thoroughly modern young woman. She was thirty-three, and, in her mind, extremely successful; she was unabashedly ambitious, joyfully competitive, and called herself a neofeminist; she believed in women helping other women (hence her hiring of Sally), she was always thinking about how to get ahead in her career, how to take over the world, and how to get her name in the papers. She had tons of girlfriends, and her favorite expression was “Women rule!,” which she accompanied with a high five. Like many young women of her generation, she had no qualms about using sex to get ahead, and had invariably fucked all of her bosses, which was how she’d met Mark.

But the problem was that it was all so exhausting! As the lifestyle reporter for the local CBS affiliate (she covered everything from movie premieres to the best place to get a fake tan to kittens that fell out of apartment windows), she rose every morning at 6 a.m. to go to the gym, then she and Mark took a car at 7:30 for the hourlong ride to the city, during which she read four newspapers, then she had to research her story, then she had her hair and makeup done, then she usually went

“on location,” then she went back to the studio to edit her piece, and then she was
on TV,
and then she had to keep up with her friends, which often included endless cocktails at trendy bars,
then
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of white wine,
or
she had to return home to make dinner for Mark and whomever else they’d invited to their house who might be beneficial to their careers.

She was a big believer in hard work, and in doing a thing well if one was going to do it at all, and she often said that more things happened in her life in one week than happened in most people’s lives in a year. But on top of all that, she had to look good, she had to be skinny, and therefore she was constantly engaged in the struggle to lose ten pounds.

Dodo was, by nature, a rather hefty, athletic girl who had played soccer as a teenager, and had even been All-American at Tufts University. She had large pen-dulous breasts, which she stuffed into push-up bras and with which men had been fascinated her entire life, but that wasn’t enough, and she’d already had liposuction from her waist down to her knees twice. When she was twenty-two and an intern at the
New York Times,
she had discovered both cocaine and the power of her breasts: After six months she was fired, ostensibly because she could never get to work before eleven o’clock, but secretly because she was sleeping with her boss who was married—when his wife found out, she forced him to fire Dodo. Since then, Dodo had kept her cocaine habit under control, but she had never been able to master her sexual addiction to powerful men. She was subconsciously influenced by the depic-tions of beautiful women in advertising and strove to be like them, while at the same time she was horrified by the power bimbos could wield over men.
Beauty:
How Men’s Expectations Have Ruined Women’s Lives
was one of her favorite books, and she was always quoting lines from it, such as “man’s recent obsession with female beauty is at least party responsible for the erosion of the family,” at dinner parties. Nevertheless, she still couldn’t resist the idea of a powerful man being obsessed with her and her beauty . . .