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said with a frigid calmness. “All you’re saying is that I was good enough to fuck last summer, and this summer I’m not good enough to know you. Well, let me tell you something. I don’t operate that way.”
    “We all know how you operate, Janey,” he said ominously.
    “The difference between you and me is that I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done in the past,” Janey said. This wasn’t entirely true, but she had to admit that it sounded good.
    Comstock, however, wasn’t impressed. “Just keep the fuck away from me,” he said. “I’m warning you. This could be a disaster for both of us.” And with that, he hung up.
    Goddamned Comstock, Janey thought, as she pressed down on the brake. The traffic had come to a standstill and she leaned her head to the side, frowning at the line of cars.
    This was supposed to be her triumphant summer, she thought angrily. Her new commercial, in which she pretended to sing and play a white electric guitar while wearing nothing more than a white silk bra and panties, had begun airing three days ago to great fanfare—and now that she was a famous supermodel, she knew this was the summer to strike. She planned to cultivate the movers and shakers who populated the Hamptons every summer; her dream was to have a “salon” where artists, filmmakers, and writers would gather to discuss intellectual topics. If pressed, she would have to admit that eventually, she wanted to direct . . . But most of all, she was assuming her new supermodel status would mean she didn’t have to deal with assholes like Comstock Dibble anymore, and would enable her to get a much better man. Naturally, she wanted to be in love, but behind every great match, wasn’t there a touch of cynicism? And there was nothing the public loved more than the alliance of two famous people . . .
    But suddenly, Comstock’s phone call made her question all that, and for a moment she wondered nervously if she had, indeed, come as far as she’d imagined.
    All her life, it seemed, she’d been forced to sleep with rich men in order to survive—
    short, paunchy, bald men with hair in their ears and funguses on their toes, men with gaps in their teeth and fur on their backs, men with penises that never quite got erect, men, in short, whom no self-respecting woman would ever have sex with save for the fact that the man had money. She’d vowed that this summer would be different. But that one comment of Comstock’s—“we all know how you operate, Janey”—suddenly made her unsure . . .

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    She gripped the steering wheel, and as she did so, her eyes fell on her bitten nails. She quickly slid one hand between her legs so she wouldn’t have to think about her fingers, and tried to reassure herself that what Comstock had said wasn’t important. After all, he was probably angry that she’d become a famous supermodel and he had let her go . . . But his words were a niggling reminder of everything that was wrong with New York: A man could sleep with as many women as he liked, but when it came to sex, there were still quite a few people in society who clung to the old-fashioned notion that a woman shouldn’t have too many partners. Oh, a woman could certainly have some sex—indeed, it was expected.
    But there seemed to be some unspoken limit as to the number of men a woman could bed, and having passed that limit, a woman was no longer considered “mar-riageable.”
    And it was so unfair! Janey thought furiously. She certainly did seem to have more sex with more men than most of the women she knew, and she knew that, behind her back, people had whispered that she was a slut. But what nobody understood was that every time she did have sex with a man, even if it only entailed giving him a blow job in the bathroom of a restaurant, she was doing it because she thought that maybe he was “the one.”
    Or that was what she always told herself, anyway.
    Her phone