Beauty by Louise Mensch Page A

he turned twenty-one.
    Edward Johnson liked pretty women. He was clever – the Columbia place proved it – but he was easily bored, too. Finding cute girls to fuck was his hobby. When everybody you knew was rich, how else could a fellow keep score?
    Edward’s family voted Democrat, like all middle-class New Yorkers, but he was strongly conservative. He believed in social strata. Edward Johnson had been to the right prep school. He worshipped on Sundays at a smart, Presbyterian church. He relished his parents’ social acceptability and their place in the world.
    After all, wouldn’t it be his place too?
    Edward dated occasionally – girls with parents like his, girls he treated with respect, took to dinner, to the private dining clubs in town. But he didn’t want to get married yet; marriage was for a few years down the line. So dating was nothing special. And if those girls slept with him, neither of them talked about it. Edward was respected. The future was looking good.
    No, when he wanted something, he was careful.
    Edward Johnson liked downtown girls – girls he picked up in late-night clubs; girls he could hit on, working checkout at the supermarket; girls from the bridge-and-tunnel crowd; young Jersey chicks with big hair and big tits and too much make-up; girls he could wine, dine and bang once or twice and then drop without a trace.
    ‘Hell, man, you’re a stud.’
    ‘Ed, you are such a player.’
    ‘Jesus! Look at that piece of ass. How does he do it?’
    ‘Watch and learn, boys,’ Edward crowed. ‘Watch and learn.’
    He loved it – the notoriety. They called him a pussy-hound, a babe magnet, a player, the king of clubs.
    And if the girls called him, crying, after he dumped them, so what? Edward cut them off. What the fuck? They gave it up; that was their problem.
    ‘Jesus, honey, give it a rest. I’m not interested.’
    ‘What are you bothering me for, Camilla? We’re done.’
    ‘Mercedes, you were a one-nighter. OK?’
    ‘No, it’s not OK! You bastard! I thought you were different!’
    ‘I don’t see no ring on your finger,’ he said, with an accent, mocking her. Then he’d laugh and hang up.
    Edward felt no guilt. Why should he? The girls were easy – not his problem. They sold themselves for the price of a meal or two in a nice restaurant, some flowers or a bottle of champagne. He was sowing his wild oats, like they used to say, working it out before he got serious. Edward Johnson believed that girls like that – low class, gullible girls – were the natural toys of men like him. They wanted to ride in the fast car with the rich guy, eat at places they could never afford, go to the best clubs in town. And he wanted a lay he could show off to his friends.
    ‘It’s the four F s,’ Edward told the admiring guys who hung around him in the coffee shops as they nursed their hangovers. ‘Find ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em.’
    And they all laughed their heads off.
    Dina settled into the new job. It was steady pay, and she waitressed on the side.
    ‘But you’re a junior manager,’ her boss, Mike, told her. ‘You don’t have to be out front.’
    ‘I need the tips.’ Dina smiled. ‘And besides, that way I can hear what the customers are saying.’
    She did everything she could. Showed up on time, worked hard, smiled, tried to remember the regulars. On the plus side, she was finally making her rent. There were no more night shifts and every couple of weeks, she could afford to take the subway out to Westchester to visit her brother at college. But she was no closer to her dream. With rent and food, she was still tapped out. College seemed a world – galaxies – away.
    And Dina was frustrated. Helping run a coffee house like this was about half of a white-collar job. She did some accountancy, double-checked the takings, wrote up careful reports on what pastries did and didn’t sell. But after she’d supervised staff – getting them to show up on time, be polite,