The Blairs had shared a look. It was Cynthia’s mother who voiced the thought. “I don’t guess it’s any of our business, either. Cindy didn’t seem to think so.”
THE MEAT IN THE MARINADE remained on the kitchen counter. An intrepid cockroach, having traveled from its favored nesting area within the electrical outlet behind the refrigerator, up the side of the cabinet and across the large open plain of the countertop, lay on its back in the marinade, its infinitesimal feet kicking uselessly, the armor of its skin no protection against the saturating juices. It would be dead by midnight.
The rain was falling steadily, a dim roar, a soft, ceaseless shoosh. Droplets bounced off the sill of Megan’s open window, hitting the side of the toaster oven in a fanlike splatter. Crumbs moved erratically in the growing puddle. A rumble of thunder, and the lights in the apartment flickered, then went off altogether, then flickered back on under a minute later. The clocks in the apartment-the clock radio in the kitchen and the bedside clock radio-kicked to their default, blinking 12:00…12:00…12:00…
OUT AT THE HUDSON PIER, Megan was sitting on one of the stone benches, hugging her knees to her chest. Rain dripped off the brim of her NYPD baseball cap onto the backs of her small hands. She was drenched, wearing only a windbreaker and her thick gray sweats, her feet bone-cold in a pair of saturated Converse low-tops. Her head was bent forward, and she was singing softly into the dry space. She hated the song. Insipid, stupid, ridiculous song. Devoid of all meaning, infantile, banal. Vaguely insulting, even. But the tune had her. She was helpless. It sucked the words out of her as if it were a parasite.
Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you…
20
IT HAD BEEN one of those rumors that go around. In the age of instant communication, it spread like a galloping virus.
Marshall Fox trolls the Internet.
The buzz was that, like millions of his fellow citizens, Marshall Fox liked to cloak his identity and go out there and talk dirty. Very dirty. Entire sites had cropped up devoted to alleged “sightings,” lists of anonymous e-mail addresses that may or may not have been those of the popular late-night celebrity. Exchanges between the “willing” and the “alleged” were posted. Some of the postings had the ring of, if not truth, at least possibility. They sounded like Marshall Fox. They employed his jokes, his manner of speaking, key phrases that were associated with him. Of course, anyone with the ability to type and talent for mimicry could handle that. Most people knew well enough that it was largely considered a game. A celebrity impersonation. Cyberchat with a cyber wax figure. Cybersex with a personable fraud.
For a while it had been all the rage. The term “Fox-Trotter” had been coined to refer to the Fox pretenders. Fox himself encouraged the fad. Several nights a week, he would fashion a comic bit around some of the more outrageous postings attributed to him. As he sifted through handfuls of e-mail messages, his eyebrows would rise in mock amazement, the mischievous grin stretching across his face.
“So, apparently, I was in touch last night with an Ingrid and an Olga. Seems they were determined to tell me everything I wanted to know but was afraid to ask about Swedish meatballs.” He milked the laugh and brandished another of the messages. “Look. Here’s one from some fellow named Sven.” Then, in a falsetto voice and a butchered Swedish accent, “De-yer Mr. Fox. Whatever yew dew? Stey awey from Innnngrid and Oooolga?”
NIKKI ROSSMAN LOVED the Internet. She had once heard it referred to as the portal to instant depravity, and she agreed completely. The Internet had opened up for Nikki an entirely new section of the day. Not really day but morning, though for Nikki, it was just an extension of the night before. Nikki lived in Tribeca, lower Manhattan, an area with no shortage of clubs and bars, and she loved to dance. She especially loved to get stoned and dance. She was an excellent dancer; her bones disappeared and she was all fluid movements, either fast and furious in all directions at once or slow, dreamy, undulating. She loved the glow of perspiration. She loved noise, the more deafening the music, the better. In a jam-packed club with the music pounding, a person can let loose with the sort of full-throttle screams and shrieks that at any other place in the city would give someone cause to snatch up the phone and punch 911. Nikki loved to shriek on the dance floor. It was a self-prescribed turn-on. She’d read something somewhere once about chakras; it hadn’t made sense to her except the part that said loosening one could clear the way for loosening the others. Nikki took to the dance floor with a hopped-up vengeance, whooping and shrieking at the top of her tiny lungs, and in time she could feel the release taking place deep below. It made her hungry for sex-not ever much of a problem in most of the clubs. There were places. Dark corners. Bathrooms. If the night was nearly played out anyway and the guy was cute, there was her place, his place, someplace to go for it. The only risk was that the sex might not hit the spot she wanted it to hit; after the music and the dancing and the chakra-shaking shrieking, the guy had better close the fucking deal, that’s all she could say. She even had a name for the kind of sex she wanted it to be. Cataclysmic. It could be hit-or-miss, she knew that. But baby, when it hit-when it was cataclysmic…
A man she once met at the Cat Club had referred to her as “a tight little package.” Nikki loved that description. She thought of it every night as she readied herself to go out, worming her way into her panties, zipping up her baby-doll skirt. Tight little package. Open me first. She’d touch her wrists, the sides of her neck and her cleavage with any of the dozens of scents she lifted regularly from her job at Bloomie’s, imagining that the heat generated on the dance floor would activate the scent and send it out in all directions. Warm blood for the wolves.
Great fun.
Then along came the Internet. It was nothing cataclysmic; it couldn’t be. Hit the mute button and it was quiet as death. No pounding rhythms. No strobing lights. No pulsing sweat machines moving together around a cramped dance floor. It was a whole different thing. Tamer, no question about it. And a lot of the time, pathetically puerile.
Still, it was there, and it was constant. A portal to instant depravity. Four A.M. Ears buzzing. Chakras only partially satisfied. Turning the key and coming into her apartment alone. Nikki found it uncanny, all these freaks sitting out there God knows where, ready at the click of a mouse to climb into her virtual pants. What a riot! Thousands of them. Unseen by the human eye, cyberspace literally crawling with spunk-that was the only way she could put it. What a freak show. She loved it. Yes, you had to wade your way through the lamebrains-or, as her friend Tina called them, “numb nuts”-but like with anything else, a little practice, a little savvy, you could find what worked for you. They were there, the dudes with the moves. Or maybe some of them were chicks in disguise, but what did she really care? You weren’t going to get any safer sex than this. It was a lark, a harmless way to spend some tawdry minutes before climbing into bed alone and kissing the world good night. And some of these guys were good. Nikki liked to think that she was good, too, that she could give as good as she got. Like in the so-called real world. Lord only knows if 90 percent of the people she chatted up would have registered as big fat zeros on her radar if she’d run across them in person. But in her apartment, lit only by the white glow of her computer screen, what difference did it make? None. Nikki’s prompt was always the same: I’m typing with one finger. Tell me what to do with the other nine.