Read an extract from Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo

Ghost Lover is the electrifying new short story collection from the brilliant mind that brought you Three Women and Joan. In it, behind anonymous screens, an army of cool and beautiful girls manage the dating service Ghost Lover, a forwarding system for text messages that promises to spare you the anguish of trying to stay composed while communicating with your crush.

In these twelve riveting stories, two of which have been awarded the Pushcart Prize, Lisa Taddeo brings to life the fever of obsession, the blindness of love, and the mania of grief. Today, you can read one of them – ‘the future is female’.

Read on …

Lisa Taddeo

the future is female

On the way to the Country Mart, you dial the temperature down to 60, and draw the flow to the max. Within seconds your face is chilled like a tumbler of milk. You used to worry over how much gasoline the air conditioning was using. Now you don’t anymore. When your cheeks are cold, they feel thinner. It has been almost two years now. In two years you have become something utterly different than you were, at least to the wide world. They didn’t know you at all before and now almost everyone does. This is a crazy feeling. Men in Titleist hats and flaccid golf shirts know who you are, because their daughters do. Because your face is all over the place. You are rich. That word! You bought a house in Malibu. On stilts, with one of those driveways, right off the PCH. You used to say, This is not so great. This is Malibu? And Nick would say, You have no idea, the other side. And one day he took you to walk along the other side, over the rocks along the breathing water, and you could see the decks and the real fronts of the houses. The fronts were facing the ocean! The other side, the highway side, that was the back. When you were on the ocean side, you understood how much more these people knew than you, had than you. He held your hand over the sharp rocks. You don’t remember wanting more then, but you must have.

Your house is an A-frame. You lied to your best friend about how much it cost, because you felt bad paying for the place in cash when she was struggling across two jobs to pay the nursing school loans off. There is a terrific white bathroom on the topmost floor. A clawfoot bathtub overlooking the water, with golden spigots. Heaven-white towels on teak rods and a bar of soap on the teak stool. Vetiver with French green clay, still wrapped in its furred paper.

You are on your way to the Country Mart right now, for an iced matcha latte and to buy clothes at the sorts of prices that still beguile you. You can spend over two thousand dollars on a sheer blouse, that yet requires something to go underneath it. The less one’s body is perfect, the more it needs expensive garments, heavy crepes to position themselves like aid workers across the fault lines.

Still, the old ways cling. The soap in your bathroom is an eighteen-dollar bar. You refuse to use it until you have lost at least five pounds.

The idea for Ghost Lover came, sorely, from Nick. Or rather, from the dissolution of Nick and you. There was an insolvency. The opposite of an impalement. You defecated your soul, is how you marked it at the time, in less refined language, across the pages of your journal. You mourned for months and then you sat in coffee shops and strategized. At first you planned to get him back. There was one coffee shop in particular, on La Cienega, a place untouched by him, someplace he never would have noted. It wasn’t precious enough, or clean. There were no whole Arabica beans for sale. There was a fifty-something lady who worked in the kitchen there, and she also came around and tidied up the packets of sugar substitute and hand-swept the milk counter. At first you hated the grunts she made. You hated how shapeless her butt was and how noisy her shoes were. You hated the way she stalked behind you, her toes at your heels like dominos. You were sure that, even though she did not appear to speak English, she was reading the words on your laptop. Your journal entries. Then one day, as she mopped around your chair, she placed her hand on your shoulder. Hallowed, like a mother or a priest. It wholed you. You turned, and her ancient eyes absorbed your depth.

Just like that, everything settled. And you thought, I am fine. I will send him a note. It was his birthday. You wrote, Happy Birthday. Sending the words across the avenues of code, you felt like a queen of love. Seven minutes later he replied, Thx!

A week later, Nick walked into your coffee shop. With a girl. A definitive girl, about a decade younger. You passed gas, when you saw him. The girl turned in the direction of the sound, and found you. Her face bloomed rose with compassion. He didn’t seem to have heard. And she didn’t know who you were; she didn’t know how once Nick ate you out in your mother’s house while Karl, the husband of hers who used to violate you, listened from downstairs.

Importantly, Nick hadn’t noticed you, so you ran out, without your computer and your pile of books. You sweated around a corner until they left, in her car, which was sporty and black. This made you feel sick. Something about him being in a girl’s car. Listening to her young music. When you went back in, the Chinese woman was standing by your table, protecting your stuff with her shadow. She nodded at you. You wanted to cry. You knew you would not come back, would never see her again. These tiny endings are all over the place.

Ghost Lover came easily from there, ideas borne from pain the way moths go to light. You quit your job as the second assistant to a mid-level celebrity. A job you had got only to have a reason to be in LA, with him. You began sleeping during the days, through iced drinks in fraternal sunlight and blondes in bathing suits playing volleyball. You’d go out only at night. Sit in Chez Jay’s, which had been his, but you stole it from him. You felt the greasy luxe of being somewhere you shouldn’t. The creepiness of lying in wait. You listened. Girls with text messages mainly. How to respond to this one or that one. They didn’t know anything. They were young and pointless. But you felt for them, or rather, you felt for the pain in them. Or no. Your pain felt a kinship to their pain, and at the time you had to be wherever your pain was. It was the only thing that was real.

One night there you ran into an old friend of yours from home, pursuing an accelerated MBA in Long Beach and cheating on his girlfriend nearly every weekend. You continued on to drinks at Father’s Office. The sweetness of the burger was pink and wrong on your tongue. You sensed he just wanted a place to sleep over in LA. But he was useful, like many ancillary characters; you didn’t realize how much, until later. He said the only thing you actually learn in business school is Identify a Problem in the Marketplace and Create a Solution.

That night you ingested over twenty-five hundred calories, at the bar and later at home. You took an Ambien and wrote a business plan until the words melted across the screen. You slept with the friend in business school the next weekend. He felt like a soft iron inside you, something plain and graceless. The dumb pain of simple rod sex. You did not come. He ejaculated largely inside your belly button. The fatty pool of it.

Several weeks later, with this friend’s help, you created the application. A forwarding system for text messages so that an expert would respond (or not respond) to a client’s crush. The client would be briefed as needed, would otherwise enjoy holy ignorance. A way for girls, mainly, to be the coolest versions of themselves, inoculated in practice against their desire.

At first the expert was only you. You, thinking of how Nick himself would respond to a text. How the young and beautiful girls he was newly with would respond to the texts of grunting men. Quickly, your team grew. You hired small, stunning girls. You always brought on women you would imagine him wanting. One of the reasons was for the angry throb it drew from your pelvis. Another was so that you would never invite him back into your life. You could not feasibly, because there were too many limbs for you to be jealous of. All that superlative hair, all those surfing thighs.

—Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo (Bloomsbury) is out now.

Ghost Lover

The electrifying short story collection from the bestselling author of Three Women

by Lisa Taddeo

Behind anonymous screens, an army of cool and beautiful girls manage the dating service Ghost Lover, a forwarding system for text messages that promises to spare you the anguish of trying to stay composed while communicating with your crush.

At a star-studded political fundraiser in a Los Angeles mansion, a trio of women compete to win the heart of the slick guest of honor. On a quest to lose her virginity...

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