Lucky Dogs

The paths of two women on opposite ends of a high-profile sexual abuse scandal set them on a devastating collision course. "Part thriller, part Hollywood satire, On a sultry summer night in Paris, two women meet in line at an ice cream kiosk on the;Ile de la Cité. One is tall, fair, striking, with an indeterminate accent. The other, a troubled American TV star, is hiding her beauty and identity under a shapeless sweatshirt, wearing sunglasses even in the darkness. When leering male tourists hassle the pair, the blonde pulls out a knife and a sisterhood is born. Both women have been victims of male violence, and both are warriors--one trained and calculating, one instinctually ferocious. They each think they know who they are dealing with. But both are very, very wrong. In a story that unfolds with unexpected humor and the pace of a thriller, acclaimed novelist Helen Schulman lays bare what happens to women--no matter how fortunate they may appear to be on the surface--whose lives have been warped by brutality and misogyny. The issues are universal, but the core of the story is intimate: a passionate exploration of love, betrayal, and survival. <Lucky Dogs <asks and answers a shattering question: How could one woman so utterly betray another?

Autorentext

Helen Schulman

Leseprobe
Part

One

To say I was lonely the summer I turned twenty-­four was like saying Donald Trump’s hair was the precise color of Cheetos dust; there was nothing original about it. Most kids crowding close to quarter life feel old, used up, and fucking stuck. Childhood dreams die painful deaths, jobs are boring as shit, and finally it dawns: there is no such thing as love, and most sex sucks. In France, where I was staying, the chic postmenopausal grandmamas sitting outside at the cafés on Boulevard Saint-­Germain sipping their coupes de champagne in their leopard-­print jeans and cold-­shoulder shirts were exultant with the confidence that comes from being sexy without being prey. They seemed to know more about contentment than anyone I ever hung with (be they derelicts or movie stars), as if the volume of the balloon of happiness one was born with was proportionately inverse to the time left to enjoy it.

This was true even for lucky dogs like me: a fugitive in Paris, cursed by beauty, no crap nine-­to-­fiver, no factory or phone bank to head home from; all I’d had to do to get out of California was point a gun to my manager’s head, rob my own bank, and run. But I’m not sure that even the most resolutely miserable twentysomething’s everyday existential angst was as empty and ceaseless as the black hole I swam in. My isolation was a bright neon-­orange warning, like the Trumpster’s shellacked awning. It permeated my skeleton.

Still, I did my best to conceal it. When I was not sitting at home in front of my computer, I walked the damp, dark streets at night, the cobblestones perpetually steaming. To preserve my anonymity, I made my face as blank and expressionless as I could, the way an executioner wears a long black hood. To hide his shame. What shame? To hide his identity! Sometimes, in those medieval fantasy epics, in an effort to stir things up, it’s the condemned to die who wears the shroud. Audiences love a firing squad. Gallows and kicking feet. Victims and criminals. Draaaama. It’s what my limited series on AMC was all about, even though it took place in a present-­day overpriced hothouse coastal community, all of us banging some other Barbie’s husband. I was the preacher’s daughter—­except this man of God was the trusted head of an exclusive private day school. Newly separated, I taught art sweetly to spoiled children and blew cute, rich fathers in pool houses during fundraisers, while trying to outrun my checkered past. It was typecasting. The TV critic at the LA Times described me as having “an embryonic allure.” My eyes are bigger than big and so widely set apart they look like a bug’s; their violet color I got legit from my mother. Lashes batting, they have been the subject of far too many close-­ups.

On those berserk, blood-­soaked shows—­not mine, the gothic ones—­maybe some sad traitor slips the sack over the wronged woman’s head, maybe he’s her erstwhile lover, maybe he’s already fucked her. He’s just following orders. He drops that long black bag over his prisoner’s face so he can’t see her terror or how well she knows him, or her humiliation when the platform drops, when she shits herself and swings. I wore my flat expression in Paris like a lead apron, so no one could see the radioactivity inside.

If I was living in one of the places where I grew up, be it trailer park, or motel room, or the little wooden house with the chipping green paint we had for three and a half years outside of Winthrop, Washington—­a western-­themed time capsule that the few tourists who bothered to come that far north couldn’t resist—­there would be Sunday church, or potluck suppers, or a local dive where you could drink beers and dance on the bar, “community” my daddy’s gal pal back then called it. But I’m sure even there I’d find some way to get canceled. I’ve been run out of town, or should I say towns, so many times . . . It’s almost impossible for me not to speak my mind. My craftsman, weed-­selling, anarchist father was what you might euphemistically have called “itinerant.” We moved around a lot, up into Canada sometimes and then back down into Idaho; for a while we lived out of his pickup, so with zero to lose I usually was too stupid to hold back. All’s to say, I have one big fucking mouth.

Paris, France, was not my problem. At twenty-­four, I was lonely everywhere I went. I was lonely all the time.

Winthrop was what Daddy called the “most Mayberry” of all our base camps. I rode to school there on a yellow bus like kids do on TV, and skipped two grades because my vocabulary was so damn genius (I read a lot, there never was much else to do), and had numerous, at the time, not-­so-­sucky semi-­siblings, one of whom got shot at the community college in ’15, Tommy, but on FB I saw he made it out alive, just a flesh wound to the shoulder, a post I’d made certain to “like.” I also had a pet guinea pig, Carmel, her fur a light, creamy amber, but we couldn’t call her that because that was my father’s girlfriend’s name. Humanoid Amber worked at Mercy Medical. That lady felt certain she could diagnose us all, even though she was only a physician’s assistant; my daddy was “immature with a learning disability,” and Tommy was ADHD (his jumpiness saved him: he dived out of one of the second-­story classroom windows as the shooter began to fire), and I was manic depressive, up and down, up and down. “You’re on the seesaw of life, Meredith,” Amber liked to say—­sitting at the kitchen table, drinking her evening beer, untying her white shoes and ditching her support hose, rubbing the dirt out from between her toes, making me want to puke—­which sounds just about right. Plus, she said I had oppositional defiant disorder, which is definitely true and was one of the reasons she finally asked us to leave. That and Daddy sleeping with her sister, Topaz—­Topaz and Amber, my hand to God.

I was sad to go, but Daddy wasn’t. He said, “Merry, you’ve never seen the Rockies; the sun shines three hundred days a year, cliffs get so red at dusk they look like steak cooked rare, everyone is rich as Croesus and wants nothing more than to ski and buy handcrafted tables.” We moved to …