Fury by Salman Rushdie Page B

with printing photographs of Saskia’s handsome beau, the polo player Bradley Marsalis III, of whom all regular readers knew at least this: that his teammates called him Horse, in honor of the way he was hung.
    A stone from a Lost Boy’s slingshot had felled the beautiful Wendy Bird. Make that birds: for what was said of Sky Schuyler applied equally to Bindy Caudell and Ren Klein. All three were beautiful, all three long and blond and formidably accomplished. If the financial future of their great families rested in the hands of their superlatively confident brothers, then these young women had been reared to take charge of the personae of their clans-their style, their class. Their image. Looking at their stunned menfolk now, it was easy to gauge the size of their loss. We boys can take care of business, said the silent grieving faces of the families, but our girls make us who we are. We are the boat and they are the ocean. We are the vehicle, they’re the motion. Who, now, will tell us how to be? And there was fear too: who’ll be next? Of all the ripe girls given to us to pluck from their branches like the golden apples of the sun, who’s next for the fatal worm?
    A living doll. These young women were born to be trophies, fully accessorized Oscar-Barbies, to use Eleanor Masters Solanka’s phrase. It was obvious that the young men of their class were reacting to the three deaths exactly as if some coveted medallions, some golden bowls or silver cups, had been stolen from their clubhouse plinths. A secret society of gilded young men calling itself the S&M, which stood, it was suggested, for Single & Male, was reportedly planning a midnight gathering to mourn the loss o£ its members’ much-loved main
    squeezes. “Horse” Marsalis, Anders “Stash” Andriessen-the Candell girl’s restaurateur Eurohunk - and Lauren Klein’s good-time guy Keith Medford (“Club”) would lead the mourners. As the S&M was a secret society, all its members flatly denied its existence and refused to verify the rumors that the mourning ceremonies would climax with mixed-sex war-painted naked dancing and skinny-dipping on a private Vineyard beach, at which time candidates for the vacancies in the big guys’ beds would be intimately auditioned.
    All three dead girls, and their living sisters, thus conformed to Eleanor’s definition of Desdemonas. They were property. And now there was a murderous Othello on the loose in this case, perhaps, destroying what he could not possess, because that very non-possession insulted his honor. Not for their infidelity but for their uninterest was he killing them in this Y2K revision of the play. Or perhaps he broke them simply to reveal their lack of humanity, their breakability. Their dollness. For these had been-yes!-android women, dolls of the modern age, mechanized, computerized, not the simple effigies of bygone nurseries but fully realized avatars of human beings.
    In its origin, the doll was not a thing in itself but a representation. Long before the earliest rag dolls and golliwogs, human beings had made dolls as portraits of particular children and adults, too. It was al ways a mistake to let others possess the doll of yourself; who owned your doll owned a crucial piece of you. The extreme expression of this idea was of course the voodoo doll, the doll you could stick pins in to hurt the one it represented, the doll whose neck you could wring to kill a living being, at a distance, as effectively as a Muslim cook deals with a chicken. Then came mass production, and the link between man and doll was broken; dolls became themselves and clones of themselves. They became reproductions, assembly-line versions, characterless, uniform. In the present day, all that was changing again. Solanka’s own bank balance owed everything to the desire of modern people to own dolls with not just personality but individuality. His dolls had tales to tell.
    But now living women wanted to be doll-like, to cross the