Tabloid Dreams by Robert Olen Butler Page B

psychologist, after all. And it was just conversation at lunch before the taping of Jenny Jones. I guess there was an implicit criticism about what she was saying in her book. You close the loop with yourself and it’s not going to lead to healing. I didn’t say it that way to her, but what else could she conclude? She was sitting across from me and eating red snapper and really enjoying it and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her left hand come up from beneath the table for a while and I could see her vision of things: all the women of the world dining with their hands under their linen napkins and that’s all they would ever need. So it was a mistake to tell her.
    Then yesterday I saw the tabloid headline as I stood in a checkout lane at Gristede’s and I looked at the story. They’d changed my name but every other detail was mine, and I knew I’d been betrayed. I abandoned my grocery cart and called my author. “What have you done?” I demanded. “Isn’t that privileged information or something?”
    â€œNo,” she said. “I’ve only got a master’s degree in psychology.”
    â€œAre you sleeping with the tabloid editor?”
    There was only silence on the other end of the line.
    â€œHypocrite,” I said.
    Then when I saw him last night on the television and when my hand rose before the screen to touch him, I knew what was next. My butt burned for him.
    The offices of Real World Weekly were in a recently gentrified brownstone in the East Village and I showed up this morning in a silk shift and I’d combed my hair out long and put a rose behind my ear. “Who shall I say is here to see him?” his mouse of a secretary said.
    â€œTell him I’m the woman from this week’s front page.”
    She narrowed her eyes at me.
    â€œTell him I saw him on TV and I hear a taxi’s horn blaring in my ears and only he can make it stop.”
    She gulped at this and turned her back to me and spoke low into the intercom.
    He was there moments later, out of breath. He took one look at me and shot me that half smile with the dimple and he led me to his office at the back of the first floor. The room was stacked with newspapers and the clippings were all over his desk, and holding down a pile was a grapefruit-sized rock—dark and pocked—and on another pile was a brass stand with what looked like a shrunken head hanging on it. The little guy actually struck me as pretty cute.
    â€œIt’s real,” he said.
    â€œWho was he?”
    â€œSome Amazonian. He can predict the future. We did a story.”
    â€œAnd the rock?”
    â€œPiece of a meteor.”
    I looked at the editor, and his sea gray eyes were intent on me.
    â€œLike the one hurtling toward the earth?” I asked.
    He smiled and the dimple appeared.
    â€œDon’t move,” I said. “Keep the smile.”
    But he said, “Coming to kill us all,” and the dimple went away.
    â€œThe smile.”
    He looked at me closely. “Are you really her?”
    â€œI edited Touch Yourself, Cure Yourself. ”
    â€œHoly shit.”
    â€œThe smile,” I said.
    â€œAre you here as outraged victim or as . . .” He hesitated.
    â€œAs nympho?”
    â€œAh . . . yes.”
    â€œNympho.”
    That brought the smile back and I reached out and put the tip of my forefinger, just briefly, in that little spot. It was a sweet little soft place, this tuck in the face of a handsome man who was full of irony about the way our world was considering itself at the end of the millennium. That made me run hot for the secrets of his body. But his question was very interesting to me, really. That part of me born in the crosswalk was starting to blur the boundaries the editor was suggesting. Victim or nympho. Rage or lust.
    After I drew my hand back, I said, “Men in the imperial Chinese court bound their women’s feet. Did you know