Scenes From a (Group) Marriage |
Labor Day, 1994, a cool Sunday morning in northern New Jersey. John wakes up feeling great. He's thirty-eight years old, a successful lawyer with a busy bankruptcy practice in Newark, a nice house in the suburbs, and two cars and two healthy kids. Lying next to him is his wife, his actual high school sweetheart still there twenty-one years later, with her regal face and lean athletic body and that striking mass of coiled copper curls—and her formidable personality with its disconcerting mixtures, clear-eyed and dreamy, controlling bitch and hedonistic pleasure queen. John reaches for her and she rolls to him and the old fire lights again. That night he writes in his blue composition book: Great sex in the morning. Roland and Mary and their children came over later. Sat in the yard and had a fun time, BBQ, drinks, kids. . . . I told Nan I was the luckiest man in the world. Three weeks later, they drive into Manhattan with the same couple, Mary* and Roland.* (*These names have been changed.) They met, of all places, at the school their kids attended. Mary is blond, fleshy, excitable. She sits up front with her husband and John sits with Nan in the back. They chat comfortably, with a giddy energy. They've become quick friends, the way couples sometimes do when there is a touch of mutual attraction. When they get to the pier, they climb aboard the boat and find seats next to the bandstand. A blues band churns up the night. The music pulls at John, who once wanted to be a musician himself and spent a year playing in coffeehouses between college and law school. They make a toast, pass around a joint, dance and switch partners, and Roland and John go up to the bow and watch the waves together and by the time they get back they're all pretty stoned and the band is playing and this time when John and Mary start to dance, she's really assertive—rubs against him and gives him that deep hungry look we all know from dreams. And John's getting turned on. It's been ages since he's been turned on by anybody but Nan. And Nan's watching and it's all pretty obvious, but she's not worried. They're not the kind of people who would get uptight about something like this. Roland's whispering in her car how beautiful and fascinating she is. At the worst it'll be a hoot, something to talk about later, in bed. |
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| The Best Books of 2022 (So Far) |
Congratulations, dear reader: we've made it to another great season in books. Whether you read like the wind this summer or fell short of your goals, there's something about back to school season that always inspires a return to reading. Luckily, a new season also means a whole new slate of releases to devour. Whether you're looking to understand our current moment through rigorous nonfiction or escape it through otherworldly plots, 2022's crop of titles offers something for readers of every persuasion. Our favorite books of the year so far run the gamut of genres, from epic fantasy to literary fiction, and tackle a constellation of subjects. If you want to read about spaceships, talking pigs, or supervillains, you've come to the right place. |
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A Hilarious Conversation With the Men Who Made Bros |
Bros begins with Billy Eichner's character, Bobby, mocking a Hollywood exec's outrageous invitation to make a big-studio gay rom-com that appeals to straight men. "Am I gonna get buttf***ed by Jason Momoa while we're both worrying about a volcano?" Bobby asks, his caustic delivery effectively cutting the startled exec down to size. It's the kind of nightmare scenario that the forty-three-year-old Eichner, an openly gay actor for more than two decades, feared he might be in when Nick Stoller, who has directed dude-friendly rom-coms like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors and is notably straight, approached him about making a big-studio gay rom-com. "There's something about being queer in Hollywood," Eichner says from a well-appointed hotel room during an early-summer Zoom call. "It turns you into a fighter." But Stoller and coproducer Judd Apatow didn't want Eichner to warp or water down his vision for anyone. "Nick, to his credit, always said that the main thing was that the movie be honest and truthful," Eichner says. "And that if it was, it would resonate with everyone." |
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Blonde is Garish, Unfair, and No Fun At All |
Blonde, laid out in shifting aspect ratios and film stock, distorted lenses, switching from color to black & white, is a garish expressionistic illustration of what was already in Joyce Carol Oates' novel: claptrap Freudianism, victimization feminism, and the moral shock over the squalidness of Hollywood that, whether it's being sold via scandal sheets or novels with a literary pedigree, never fails to attract people who want to indulge their own sanctimonious voyeurism. Oates, the most morbid of celebrated American writers, has always filtered her tabloid sensibility through a cold high-Gothic approach that affords her literary cache while fending off charges of sensationalism. It's a decidedly anti-sensual approach and particularly unsuited to a figure as sensual as Marilyn Monroe—unless your goal is to depict Marilyn as nothing but a victim trafficked by powerful men and then used up by us, the public who, going to her movies, thrilled by her photo shoots, charmed or turned on or just made happy by the fact of her, were little more than her johns. |
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Behold the Most Gorgeous Vehicles of the Hamptons' Most Exclusive Car Show |
The Bridge is an annual, invite-only car show that takes place on a private golf course in Bridgehampton, New York. The course itself is a stunner with 18 holes that weave between long stretches of winding road. (The design honors the course's former life as the Bridehampton Race Circuit.) This year's show was the largest in The Bridge's six-year history, with 330 cars scattered along the course's greens and fairways, and in some cases, parked in the sand traps. Many of the attendees told me the show was a car lover's dream come true. A B-list actor who is an A-lister in my heart remarked to me that it was more like a golf lover's worst nightmare. As a passionate napper, I was most taken by the Hastens bed, which was set up as a lounge next to the oyster station. (Yes, of course there was an oyster station. Free snacks are the reason I go to events.) Hastens beds can cost anywhere between $30,000 and $500,000, which incidentally is 500,000 times more than my car is worth, but about the average value of the cars on display at The Bridge. But we were not there for the bed or the oysters. We were there for the most ridiculously nice cars on the planet. See for yourself in the photos below. |
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Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid Are Ready For Their Interview |
Gather round, members of the Anne Rice Fan Club. Today, we welcome two new members to the Board of Representatives: Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid, the stars of AMC's sumptuous new adaptation of Interview With the Vampire. Their qualifications, you ask? Well, beyond donning the iconic fangs of Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt, these two superfans have started their own on-set book club, talking about Rice every day as they devour her twelve-volume magnum opus, The Vampire Chronicles. Zooming with Esquire from England and Australia, their reverence for these genre-defining novels is palpable, as is their desire to make inroads with the late author's cultishly devoted fanbase. "I hope that her readers will accept us," Reid confesses. |
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