The Goddess Effect Act III, part five
In which a fictional tech bro goes Bogart
Welcome back to Act III of The Goddess Effect. Yesterday, my dear friend Jen Betts, founder of a public relations firm as Innovative as its name claims, hosted an event that featured two books, one author, a truck load of makeup and dozens of choice professionals who know how to apply it. Talk about a party!
A few attendees asked what The Goddess Effect was about and I’m ashamed to say it took me a minute to remember. Blame it on the fact that my head is fully immersed in INCIDENTALS. (Don’t ask me why books not yet published go in caps and those on the market are italicized; I don’t make the rules.) As of this morning, I’m 6,814 words into the manuscript and ooh-wee, it’s a ride! There will be downs, for sure, but for now, I’m going to savor the up.
Chapter 22 of the director’s cut of The Goddess Effect finds Stacy and Anita slipping away from the Gig’s day rave for a heart to heart. When they rejoin the party, Anita starts putting the Evolve and Gig pieces together but abruptly stops. Read on to see why. This chapter also contains one of my favorite lines in the book. You’ll have to become a paid subscriber to get the full context, but here’s a taste:
She pictured him at the bar of the resort, an Iranian Humphrey Bogart, watching her sashay through the crowd. “Of all the conferences, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.”
Imagine that coming out of a mouth of a lanyard-wearing bro at the New York Hilton Midtown. Just imagine!
If you’re catching up, might I suggest:
22
It turned out that in the process of shedding light on the Goddess Effect, Anita had led Stacy to a come to Jesus moment of her own. For two years now, ever since seeing a paparazzi photograph of Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift walking arm in arm out of a Goddess Effect class, Stacy had given her all to Venus Von Turnen’s regimen in the hopes that it would better her as a person. The Straight to the Heavens program, the Super Sand, Venus’s special collection with Lululemon, Stacy bought and bought into it all. After class, she sometimes leaned against the white wood cubbies outside the exercise studio and tapped Venus’s mantras into the notes app on her iPhone, or at least, what she could recall of them, given her racing pulse and general wooziness:
Strength knocks let it in
You are not your thoughts your thought is your thought
Bad vibrations duck them (She of course meant “fuck.” No one ever meant to type “duck.”)
To find out that the guru who spouted these self help tropes cared more about helping her own bottom line than the health of her following, to watch Venus crumble like a sheet of roasted seaweed when the going got tough — hadn’t she been prepared for pain to show up to the dinner party, or whatever? — shook Stacy to the degree that she took a long, hard look at herself, the woman she had been, and woman she hoped to become.
Paul ruled her life. His expectations, his moods, his whims — her days revolved around anticipating or reacting to them, or getting out of the way if that seemed like the best course of action, which for the past two years, it had. Holed up in her suite after Venus’s fire pit breakdown, on the bed, hugging her knees, she picked up her phone and with one French tipped fingernail, gingerly Googled, “How do you know if you’re in a bad marriage?” She expected it to work like a magic eight ball. In a way, it did. She scored a 9 out of 10 on Buzzfeed’s “Are you headed for divorce?” quiz which led her to a Goop article about conscious uncoupling which led her to the Goop store where oo, the fascia blaster was on sale, which led her to throw her phone on the floor (knowing it was carpeted, it was her phone, after all) in an attempt to get herself to focus. She couldn’t shop herself happy. Getting distracted by shiny, pretty things had led her here, to a mirage that, twelve years ago, looked like an oasis.
Stability and status had been so important. She never sought out an intellectual and emotional equal in a life partner, just someone to take care of her. And now here she was, almost 40, with closets full of designer clothing and no one to turn to when the house creaked in the middle of the night because her husband thought that paying the credit card bills absolved him of having to actually be with his wife. She couldn’t blame him, really. She had signed on the dotted line.
When he was around, she was at his beck and call. She sometimes felt like one of those little dogs that women carried around in purses, the fluffy white ones whose heads poked out of zippers that could either choke or set them free. Sure, her feet didn’t have to touch the ground, she didn’t have to do anything, really, but she experienced life from below Paul’s elevation, saw what her master wanted her to see, and if she had to choose between being slung over his shoulder or putting her paws on the pavement, roaming wherever she pleased, sniffing whatever butts her little doggie heart desired (and getting hers sniffed too, of course) she would choose the latter and the risks that came with it.
“I mean, I don’t want to get bit by a Doberman Pincher or some rabid weirdo dog, obviously,” Stacy told Anita, perched on Anita’s bed, ankle tucked under thigh. “But I haven’t been single since I was 26. And I’m reading all these articles online about equal partnerships, consent, men who actually like going down on their wives, it’s nuts! Who are these dudes? I want to meet them, like, ‘Hello!’” Stacy mimed shaking an erect penis, and Anita fell backwards, laughing.
“So are you going to get a divorce?”
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