At nine that same evening, on the top floor of a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, a forty-five-year-old woman finished her second high impact session of ab exercises for the day. Her trunk had the same mottle as a crocodile’s knobby head—most of the vessels, veins, and other lines wiring her stuck out so she resembled a part of the Bodies exhibit. If only she had been around in 1653 and Sir Thomas Browne had performed an anatomy lesson on her, much about the female propensity to adapt and go muscular might have been deciphered without the claptrap of a little over three hundred years of beauty registering as thick skin packed with fatty meat calories.
You’re so cruelllll, she sang unaccompanied against the digital recording as she stepped in front of the bathroom mirror to inspect her bulbous front. Her 1500cc breast implants would never shrink even though her body had contracted at a rapid rate for the four years of her muscle fitness regiment on top of twelve more years of high aerobics, on top of four given to childbearing, on top of nine in high school track and field and collegiate swimming. After a supplement, she took a picture, but remembered she had already posted one after the first session that glorious morning turned cruddy by what a Weather Channel flunky called the final whiskers of Old Man Winter. She didn’t want any of her stalkers or former boyfriends on Fuckface to think she’d fallen too much in love with herself and what she could accomplish, how she could be forty-five with balloon breasts and possibly the best female abs in Brooklyn—not bad for a Seattle girl who married the right man and now had multiple bank accounts, each with well over seven figures. And what about those two sons? The second, Lane Jr., completing his first year at Harvard Business and the first, David Scott, working his way on the crew of the highest-rated contender for the America’s Cup. Such a full life and with no body fat and no guilt the few days a week when she ate six squares of Godiva chocolate. She should reward herself for the new creature she developed into—someone who might freeze menopause and create her own hormonal imbalance—that befitting a blonde woman’s outrageous sex drive, rounded by a clitoris which might have been mistaken for a smallish male proboscis. Her husband could never hope to be enough to please, especially when he worked until after nine most nights, a practice their society took for granted. The man currently in stress at Deutsche Bank really only liked her for photo-ops and the gauche, expensive, sleeveless and backless, and belly-displaying dresses she wiggled around in for her shot at cause célèbre, the envy of all those poor old pumpkins he worked with. Her husband liked fine meats, rich cheeses, and richer desserts, and his beer gut had never nakedly met his wife’s six pack since a few days after September 11th. Rubenesque secretaries at work were his speed, but golf had become more important than fucking, and making more and more money—nothing could break down that yen. Besides, the boys needed their parents to be together, to know mommy loved daddy and daddy loved mommy, and why not? They had invested so much money in them, while sheltering them from the world, shitty as it was for most everyone else. The word spoiled never crossed their palates’ clefts, yet still they admitted the boys retained a childhood type of neediness.
She had her own network of people to absorb her nymphomania, including domineering orgasms, high-wire oral calisthenics (she did tongue yoga), and a penchant for playing the 5’7” Amazon—fuck the height, she had all else, and a husky voice, care of the roids, made to give orders. Young men, old men, African men, but a cop, a painter, and a neurologist were her main buddies currently. She had what she described as a love-like affinity for them all equally, although the painter knew how to be aloof best, hence wetting her the most.
Opening a bottle of mango Yin/Yang, the in energy drink, she sat on their ten thousand dollar couch and began to comb her fingernails over her abs in figure-eight motions, humming a new song by a British pop tart about being lifted by her beau to new all-world ecstasies. Then she scrolled though Fuckface, but nothing important had happened, just a plane crash in Mexico. She sang some more, then thought of her dead mother before cradling her abs. What would they do with the Big Sur house? Or the one in Barcelona? She didn’t like how Spaniards looked at her—like it was her fault they felt the way they did about how her body was—her people were much better at hiding envy. A person has a right to be any way they want to be. That is what she’d learned over her years—you grasp life, you work hard, and there is success. The power to get anything. Hers was so full, look at her body and her boys. She touched herself and then brought out her pump, to make it bigger. Growing it felt so good. She turned on more music in her head and thought, If I videoed this, people would pay to see it.