CHAPTER ONE On a Thursday night in late December, I stood in my friend Indrani Dressler's living room, flirting with a man I had just met. "Oh, come on," Mick, the Englishman I was talking to, was saying, "business acumen and a finger on the zeitgeist are not the same as innovation or originality. She's a clever parasite." "I heard one of her songs the other day in a deli," I said. "It brought back that feeling of being young and wild and idiotic. You just can't take her too seriously." "She's got a fake accent," Mick said, his mouth gleaming with mirth and wine, firm and half-sneering. His breath smelled like corn. "She irons her hair and she's had too much plastic surgery and she's pasty. She looks like an emaciated Wife of Bath." "She's got the body of a thirteen-year-old gymnast and she's almost fifty," I said. "She's a maggot," he said. He was not much taller than I, but broad in the shoulders and solid. His head was large, his face half ugly, half handsome, more French-looking than English, nose too big, eyes narrow, chin jutting forward. We were talking as if the words themselves didn't matter. I had forgotten this feeling. "A maggot," I repeated, laughing, egging him on. "Tunneling her way through personas till they're totally rotten and riddled with holes, then moving on to the next one. She went from soft white larva to shriveled maggot in twenty-odd years." "Obviously," I said with mild triumph, "you're obsessed with her." "I'm writing an opera about her," he told me in a way that made it impossible to tell whether he was kidding or serious. "Back before she made it. Back when she was young and soft and nasty. I'm calling it Madonna of Loisaida. Madonna when she was a newborn vampire, a baby whore." I realized with a shock of surprise who he was. About a year ago, one of my clients, a pale, severely chic young concert violinist named Alison Fisher, had precipitously quit therapy after five years and moved to Canada to take care of her dying aunt. She had spent many sessions complaining eloquently and, I'd thought, with very good reason, about her boyfriend, Mick Logan; he was British, he wrote avant-garde operas that told melodramatic fictional stories about famous people, and he made Alison feel clumsy and plain and dull with his devastatingly sharp but subtle put-downs. With much guidance and feedback on my part, she had finally managed to get rid of him. According to what Alison had told me, he was in his mid-thirties, about ten years younger than I was; he was very bad news. She'd said once that breaking up with Mick felt like being let out of jail. And now, here he was at a Christmas party, bantering with me, leading me into a sexually charged, ultimately nonsensical argument that seemed to be rapidly leading somewhere I knew I couldn't go, somewhere I hadn't even thought of going in a very, very long time. Just then, I caught sight of a reflection of a woman in the tilted gilt-edged mirror across the room. She was dressed similarly to me, so I tilted my head to get a better look at her. As I did so, the woman tilted her head to match the movement of mine. I raised my wineglass; she raised hers along with me. It was then, in that instant, that I knew that my marriage was over. My heart stopped beating. I almost heard it squeak as it constricted with fear, and then it resumed its steady rhythm and life went on, as it usually does. "She's not a villainess, though; she's not interesting enough," Mick was saying. "That's the challenge of this opera. She's all too human, just quite vile really." "Vile," I repeated, laughing, mouth open, neck bared, my rib cage pulsing with my hard-beating heart. My laughter had a freaky sound in it, like the yelp of a wild dog. I had to move out Excerpted from Trouble: A Novel by Kate Christensen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
