One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [148]
On an unusually warm morning on a Tuesday at the end of February, however, James Gooch was also up early. At four-thirty A. M., James got out of bed with a stomach full of nerves. After a night of tossing and turning in anticipation, he had finally fallen asleep only to awaken an hour later, exhausted and hating himself for being exhausted on the most important day of his life.
The pub date for his book had finally arrived. That morning, he had an appearance on the Today show, followed by several radio interviews, and then a book signing in the evening at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. Meanwhile, two hundred thousand copies would be released in bookstores all over the country, and two hundred thousand copies would be placed in iStores, and on Sunday, his book would be featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. The publication was going exactly according to plan, and since nothing in his life had ever gone according to plan, James was seized with an irrational sense of doom.
He showered and made coffee, and then, although he’d promised himself he wouldn’t, he checked his Amazon rating. The number shocked him—twenty-two—and there were still five hours left until it was technically released. How did the world know about his book? he wondered, and decided it was a kind of mysterious miracle, proof that what happened in one’s life was absolutely out of one’s control.
Then, just for the hell of it, he Googled himself. On the bottom of the first page, he came across the following headline: GOOFY BOOMER HOPES TO PROVE LITERATURE IS ALIVE AND WELL. Clicking on it, he was taken to Snarker. Curious, he began reading Thayer Core’s item about him. As he read on, his jaw dropped, and the blood began pounding in his head. Thayer had written about James’s book and his marriage to Mindy, referring to her as “the navel-gazing schoolmarm,” followed by a cruel physical description of James as resembling an extinct species of bird.
Gaping at the item, James was filled with rage. Was this what people really thought of him? “James Gooch is a probable pedophile and word molester,” he read again. Wasn’t this kind of statement illegal? Could he sue?
“Mindy!” he shouted. There was no response, and he went into the bedroom to find Mindy awake but pretending to sleep with a pillow over her head.
“What time is it?” she asked wearily.
“Five.”
“Give me another hour.”
“I need you,” James said. “Now.”
Mindy got out of bed and, following James, stared sleepily at the blog entry on his computer. “Typical,” she said. “Just typical.”
“We have to do something about it,” James said.
“What?” she asked. “That’s life these days. You can’t do anything about anything. You just have to live with it.” She read through the item again. “How’d they find out this stuff about you, anyway?” she asked. “How do they know we live in One Fifth?”
“I have no idea,” James said nervously, realizing that the item could be traced back to him. If he hadn’t run into Lola that day when she was moving, he would have never met Thayer Core.
“Forget about it,” Mindy said. “Only ten thousand people read this stuff, anyway.”
“Only ten thousand?” James said. Then his phone bleeped.
“What is that?” Mindy demanded in annoyance. She stared up at him with her pale, mostly unlined face, the result of years of avoiding the sun. “Why are you getting text messages in the middle of the night?”
“What do you mean?” James asked defensively. “It’s probably the car service from the Today show.” When Mindy left the room, James grabbed his phone and checked the message. As he’d hoped, it was from Lola. “Good luck today,” she’d written. “I’ll be watching!” followed by a smiley-face emoticon.
James left the apartment at six-fifteen. Mindy, unable to help herself, reread the blog item on her and James, and her mood became increasingly foul. Nowadays, anyone who committed the crime of trying to do something with