Inside, Dave Dryer’s jaw was throbbing, even as he raked in the post-suicide dough. This was not a new problem. His jaw hurt him all the time, in a recurring, menstrualesque cycle, and it was that time of the month.
He’d never had good teeth. His mom’s were fine, but Dave had gotten his father’s, which at the time of his death had dwindled to a row of rotten stumps concealed by white plastic caps. Dave’s mouth was already lousy with cavities while some of his schoolmates still had their baby teeth; he had four falsies by the time he was 17. And six years ago he had the defining dental experience of his life. The family dentist, a tall, gentle old guy named Read Muschamp, had determined that Dave would need a double root canal. He himself, however, was retiring in a week, and so made Dave an appointment to see another dentist, a Doctor Pine, who would perform the surgery. Pine was abrupt, sweaty, red-faced, with wispy blond hair that appeared to have, over years, been half pulled out by nervous hands. He poked around in Dave’s mouth and told him to come back in two weeks. “Don’t eat for a day and bring something to hold.”
“To hold?”
“Yeah, to grip? You know, in your hand. Trust me.”
The surgery was supposed to take three hours and was scheduled for two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Dave arrived on time at the office, an ill-lit paneled half-basement with brown shag carpeting and nowhere to sit, and was ushered to an examination room by the hygienist, a wheezy woman of about forty whose dirty yellow hands were weighed down by dozens of ornate rings. Pine came in, impatient, annoyed, as if Dave had shown up hours late. He wanted to go with a local, anesthetic-wise. “I don’t do sleep unless you beg,” he said. “Waste of money. You don’t need it. You got your grip thing?”
Dave held up a round stone he’d found in the parking lot.
“Good enough. Okay, let’s go.”
They were the worst three hours of Dave’s life, at least up to that point. The dentist spat and swore, clanking around in Dave’s mouth as if it were the open hood of a busted tractor. The local was all but worthless; Dave cried like an infant. He nearly threw up several times. When five rolled around, the dentist was nowhere near finished. He stuck a tube in Dave’s mouth, lashed it to his face with medical tape, and gave him a wadded-up ball of gauze to clamp to the end. Pine blew his nose and flung the tissue on the floor. “Fuck,” he said. “Be here at seven tomorrow. Don’t move around too much.” He showed Dave the door and walked him to his car. “If it hurts take aspirin.” Dave could only nod in response, his head throbbing with the effort.
In retrospect, he ought to have gone straight to the hospital, or the police. But what did he know? He didn’t sleep that night, instead focusing all his mental energy on remaining alive. The pain was breathtaking—literally, it was an effort to breathe. The aspirins were worthless, and he couldn’t get anything into his mouth anyway. The wound swelled up and his head doubled in size. He was at the dentist’s office at a quarter to seven, and when the hygienist arrived to open the door she dropped her handbag and screamed.
“What the fuck did you do to yourself?” Pine asked him half an hour later. It was only the first of the insults, accusations, and curses Dave would endure over the next six hours. Luckily, he was unconscious for most of them, passed out in the chair. When he woke up he really was in the hospital, and his mother was beside him, weeping. He would spend four days there, what was left of his blood awash in antibiotics. They did try to sue Pine, but by then he and the hygienist had vanished. Dave sometimes doubted whether he was a real dentist at all.
So years later, it still hurt: something in there wasn’t right. Eating sucked, nothing tasted good anymore. And when it hurt, he began to feel insane, like some kind of werewolf—he grappled the bar glasses and bottles of beer with a deadly grip, and hated everybody in sight.
Not that he had ever really liked these college girls, even when they were going to bed with him. He didn’t like their clothes or their high drunken voices, he didn’t like the shit they talked about—their stupid teachers, their stupid boyfriends, their stupid girlfriends. He didn’t even like the way they drank. Real drinkers sat at the bar and got it done. With these girls, it was all knee-slapping beer binges—screaming and singing and vomiting all over his bathroom, then having the nerve to demand he build a second one, just for women. They were all in here tonight, it seemed, blabbing like a murder of crows, saying how much they hated Happy Fucking Masters, a woman they hadn’t even heard of until a couple of days ago.
He liked, however, Janet Ping. A lot. She had been in here last night and downed three glasses of red wine without moving from her seat. Tall, skinny, and not very talkative, she reminded him of his mother. One time last year she had stayed past closing and told him everything he could possibly have wanted to know about her, including how many boys she had slept with (one) and how many girls (two), and that her mom never flushed the toilet, and that she didn’t like music. She said her dad had made the sweater she was wearing and took it off to show him, and her undershirt rode up and he saw her tiny breasts, braless and as freckled as her face. He had been running his hands over them in his mind for five months.
And so it was with some pleasure, and considerable pain (jaw and otherwise) that he discovered them suspended before him, concealed by a white cotton blouse and cardigan, and above them the face they resembled. Janet bestowed upon him the shy smile that always earned her a free drink or at least a more reasonable rate, and when she ordered a round for her friends, he named, apparently at random, some absurdly self-defeating figure that barely made up the overhead. Janet didn’t seem to recognize this, which was part of her charm. She pulled a small leather billfold from a small neat purse and tugged a twenty out of a tidy little row of bills. He accepted it, along with a maddeningly demure glance, and said, “The natives are restless.”
“People are overreacting a little, I think.”
“Maybe,” he said. “You weren’t here when Glenda stopped by looking all wet and crazy. She was like the archangel Gabriel or something.”
“Happy Masters didn’t kill her.”
Dave shrugged. “Like that matters to anybody. Anyway, she didn’t seem like a killer to me.”
Janet’s fingers splayed themselves on the bartop. She looked at him frankly. “She was in here?”
He nodded. “Last week.”
She cast her eyes around the bar, as if Happy Masters might still be around. “What’s she like?”
He felt himself go a little red. “Tough cookie.”
“What’d she drink?”
“Wine,” he said, and deflated her sudden excitement by adding, “white. Chablis I think. With ice.” He poured Janet’s usual cheapo cabernet into a clean glass, wondering what interested her so much about Happy Masters. She watched him mix a cosmopolitan, pour a Wild Turkey, tap some club soda, and uncap a Rolling Rock. He loaded them onto a tray along with a ten and two ones, and pushed it to her.
“What’re you so interested in her for?” he said.
But Janet was back to her old guarded self: she shrugged, and blinked up at him from behind a frond of black hair.
“Just curious,” she said.
Dave watched the night pass by with growing interest: there was a strange intensity to the room tonight, fueled by a sort of opportunistic anger. Everybody was talking about Happy, and Glenda, and the sinister conspiracies that connected them, though he doubted they cared really, he doubted they even knew what they were talking about. It was the anger that fueled the anger, and the drinks he was selling them, and as the bar exceeded its posted capacity, and people spilled out onto the stoop and the sidewalk and the parking lot, he began to worry that things were about to get out of hand. Not the way they usually did, either: there would be no fistfights, or crying jags, or shouting matches. No, things were getting out of hand in a disturbingly organized way. There seemed to be a kind of mass consciousness to this group, a seething sense of collective purpose. When midnight rolled around Dave realized that he was witnessing the formation of a mob.
When it happened, it happened quickly. Through the side window of the bar he saw some drunken farmer stumble to his truck, unlock his toolbox and take out a plastic sack of what appeared to be road flares. He moved to the front stoop, fired one up, and held it over his head.
“Enough for everybody!” he shouted. “Lessgo!”
A cheer went up. The bar emptied in a matter of seconds. Pint glasses clattered to the floor and chairs fell over. Outside, the flares blinked to life and lit the street. The mob had coalesced, and now it began to move.
A part of Dave wanted to join it, but for some reason it didn’t seem like such a good idea. After a moment’s thought, he walked around the bar, gathered up the jackets, handbags, and feed caps that had been left behind, and put them out on the front stoop. Then he locked the door and started cleaning up his bar for the night. It was early, but whatever happened at Happy Masters’ house, he figured he wouldn’t want to see any of those people again tonight.
* * *
The three of them sat crowded around the far end of the big mahogany table, like ants on the end of a popsicle stick. It was dark outside, and the wind shook the windows: September, roaring in like a lawsuit. Behind them a fire crackled and hissed, warming their backs. In front of them three matching laptops hummed. Their eyes ranged over the screens, and their voices spoke in a shorthand.
“A dome,” said Sheila Klam.
“Too future,” said Happy.
“A greenhouse, then,” said Silas Klam.
“Maybe.”
“We will call it a conservatory.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Do we animate the dolls?”
“No,” said Happy.
“Stationary dolls. Dignified. Frozen in time. A moment in the imagination.”
“Exactly. Move them at night.”
“Repeat visitors will see something new each time.”
“They’ll stay at the Inn,” said Silas.
“Our new Inn, of course,” said Sheila.
“Naturally,” said Silas.
“What do you see, Inn-wise?” asked Happy.
“You tell us,” said Silas: the correct response.
Happy twirled a finger in her hair. “A replica of the mansion in Lily and Sally,” she said. “The rooms will have themes, antique doll themes. There will be a Dep room, a Jumeau room. There will be display cases built into the walls. The glass will be thick. There will be special suites inspired by the books. There will be bookshelves filled with books. Not Happy Girls books, period books, depending on the theme. Whatever people read then.”
Inspiration was unfurling in Happy’s chest like a battle flag. She was on a roll. The architect and the designer were furiously typing, bent over their computers like turkey vultures. They were two of the ugliest human beings she had ever seen. She adored them.
“Each room will have activities,” she continued. “Things people might have been doing. Lying half-finished as if they’d just walked out. Knitting, embroidery. On a table. Tatting.”
“Honeymoon suite?” asked the designer.
“Like the one in Gertrude’s Flight. Women who read it when they were thirteen, getting married now. They’ll be like Gertrude, moments after the book ends. Getting laid. Becoming a woman. And of course, the Japanese.”
“The Japanese,” said Silas Klam.
“The Japanese,” said Sheila Klam.
“The Japanese will come. Happy Girls is the new Anne of Green Gables. They’ll spare no expense. They’ll fly into Syracuse. We’ll need a special car to pick them up. The car will stop in Unionville, and then…”
“…they’ll get into…” Silas said, his voice rising.
“…a carriage!” said Sheila.
“Pulled by two horses. If the Amish can do it, so can we. They’ll be delivered to the Inn. Girls in 1830s dresses will usher them inside. Their contact with the modern world will be obliterated. We will need a stable.”
“A stable,” said the architect and designer in unison. They opened a new file, began pointing and clicking. Architecting. Designing. Their hands clawed the keys, their eyes darted back and forth from screen to screen. There was something faintly, revoltingly erotic about them, as if they were watching each other masturbate.
As if interrupted by Happy’s thought, Silas looked up suddenly. “Happy.”
“Silas.”
“Do you own the Inn yet?”
“I do not own the Inn,” Happy said. “It still has to be acquired.”
“Happy,” Silas said.
“Silas.”
“You are presently suffering a public relations problem. What makes you think the present owners—”
“They will sell.”
Sheila stopped typing and looked up. Silas, too, stared.
“They,” Happy said. “Will. Sell.”
She had spent much of today at the police station in Unionville, answering questions about the death of Glenda Parsons. Jims had accompanied her, serving as her lawyer. The police station had obviously once been a bank: the former drive-up window was covered now by half-bleached black construction paper, and housed a little display of second- and third-place hunting trophies. And the cops themselves seemed profoundly uninterested in the investigation: overweight, exhausted, eyes underslung with purple, they seemed only to want to go home. And indeed they did, at five on the dot. “Thanks, Miz Masters,” Chief Giancamilli told her, having accepted her offer of free ice cream once she got around to owning the gas station. “I don’t think we’ll be needing any more of your time.” The old woman had had no living family, no apparent friends, and no reason to live, and so her death would be ruled a suicide.
Where, Happy wanted to know, was the public relations problem?
This was not, however, a question the Klams would have the opportunity to answer—and by the time they did, the question would be moot.
Jims appeared in the dining room doorway, beer in hand, face darkened by boredom and beard stubble. He was going, Happy thought, to have to find something to do for the rest of the week—though perhaps he could spend some of that time fulfilling certain of Happy’s carnal needs. He did indeed look very good. At this moment, though, he also appeared puzzled.
“Uh—you should come see this.”
They rose from the table and went to the side window that Jims had been gazing morosely out all evening. Through it they could see the road flares rising and falling in the dark, and hear, muffled by the glass, the shouts of the villagers, inflected with a dangerous admixture of fury, amusement, and intoxication.
“What is it?” Sheila wondered aloud.
“I believe it’s a torch-bearing mob,” quipped her twin.
“It’s an opportunity,” Happy said, definitively, and the three of them, well acquainted with this tone of voice, looked to her for instructions.
“Silas, Sheila. Clear off this table, light the chandelier. And put on some nice music. Jims, you know how to get to the basement?”
“I think so.”
“There’s some old metal folding chairs down there. Bring ‘em up and clean off the dirt.”
They did as she asked. Hands on her hips, she cast a quick glance around the room. “The stereo is in that cabinet,” she told a fumbling Silas Klam. Then she went to the door to await her mob.
* * *
Ruth had not been at the bar that night. She rarely went there, preferring to drink, and smoke, by herself, at home, over a good book. She liked a book with a discolored ring on the cover, or a corner bent and puffed up by water. She liked a book that had been smoked in, that smelled like other nights spent smoking and reading. She liked the stink of living, of privacy and unhealthy indulgence, and she did not like interacting with other people after five p.m.
But a mob was something that interested her, especially if it was a mob organized to oppose Happy Masters. In the wake of poor Glenda’s suicide—and she could hardly blame the poor thing, for life held little for a childless old woman in a town like this—Ruth had done a bit of research on the internet. (Yes, she admitted, it did have its uses.) She discovered a thing or two about the mogul from New York. She had read excerpts of some of the Happy Girls books, had lurked on a Happy Girls message board, had priced a few Happy Girls dolls on eBay.
What she had found interested her. The Happy Girls empire, it appeared, was based upon a foundation of marketable taste and emotional manipulation. The stories were about the horrors of war, endured through obedience, good manners, and nice clothes. They were about the honor of men and the loyalty of women, about the innocence of children, from which we could all learn a thing or two. They represented a view of life, particularly American life, that was less a philosophy than a highly selective, market-tested sampler of the less unsavory manifestations of human nature. The books, and the web sites, and the whole overweening culture of Happyness, were written in a kind of therapized sociobabble, stressing obedience to the heart over the mind, the personal over the political, and the girl over everything, except of course the man, to whose advances every girl character was expected, once beyond the confines of her respective plotline, to gratefully succumb.
Happy Masters was a militant anti-feminist. An archetype-peddler. A power-mad housewife. A menace.
So, sure, a suicide: Happy Masters didn’t kill the old lady. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t her fault. Ruth remembered what Sartre had said about fascism: it is defined not by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them. Happy Masters was a crypto-fascist, a killer by proxy. She was a passive-aggressive murderer, and she wanted to murder Equinox, New York.
Ruth might not have liked her town very much, but it had left her alone when she wanted to be left alone, and that was enough for her. When the mob passed by along Main Street in a drunken wave, she put down her book and her cigarette and headed for the door, flashlight in hand, eager to know how the mistress of misinformation was going to wiggle out of this one.
* * *
They were clustered on the gravel drive, spreading out into the hostas and rhododendrons. They were underneath her windows, waving their flares, burning figure eights in the air. The villagers, on a trumped-up mission of justice. This was good: it would help her to do what had to be done. Jims and the Klams had got nearly all the chairs from the cellar and were wiping them down with blackened hands. Quiet music—Ligeti? Who in the hell put on the Ligeti?—filled the room like a gentle haze of scented smoke. The chandelier was dim.
They watched her, Silas and Sheila and Jims, their faces half terrified, half delighted, for they knew they were about to see Happy at her best, forging diamonds from coals in her fists. In boardrooms, in courtrooms, on golf courses and at stockholders’ meetings they had seen it. Now they would see it here, in the comfort of home.
But what was this? Her face, that gentle face, was wet with tears! She screwed shut her eyes, and more dripped out, slow as syrup. She met their gazes one by one and said, “How do I look?”
“Sad?” Silas suggested.
“Excellent,” the weeping CEO replied, then she took the doorknob in hand and said, “Showtime!”