The Game

promise,” she said.
    “The fun is over. You’ve made your point.”
    “Okay,” she said. “I’m done.”
    “Pinky swear?”
    We locked pinkies.
    I should have made her swear on something more serious.
    Seduction was easy compared to this. Even if people were just programs designed by evolution, as Mystery believed, they were apparently too complicated for any of us to truly understand. All we had figured out were a few simple cause and effect relationships. If you lower a woman’s selfesteem, she will seek validation from you. If you make a woman jealous, she will become more attracted to you. But beyond attraction and lust, there were deeper feelings that few of us felt and none of us had mastered. And these feelings—for which the heart and the word love are just metaphorswere tearing Project Hollywood, a house already divided, further apart.
    And so it came to pass that Mystery scared everyone out of the houseand he started talking about killing himself and I got him a Xanax from Katya and I put him in my car and I took him to the Hollywood Mental Health Center and he tried to run away twice and he wanted to hit on the therapist but couldn’t.
    Six hours later, he left the clinic with a package of Seroquel pills in his hand and another Xanax in his system. I’d never heard of Seroquel before, so when we returned the house I looked at the pamphlet that came with it.
    “For the treatment of schizophrenia,” it read.
    Mystery took the pamphlet from my hands and looked it over. “They’re just sleeping pills,” he said. “They’ll help me get to sleep.”
    “Right,” I told him. “Sleeping pills.”

WHAT IS SEXUAL IS WHAT
GIVES A MAN AN ERECTION …I F
THERE IS NO INEQUALITY, NO
VIOLATION, NO DOMINANCE, NO
FORCE, THERE IS NO SEXUAL
AROUSAL .

    —C ATHARINE M AC K INNON ,
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

It was lemonade day at Project Hollywood. At least, that’s what Courtney Love had decided. Mystery was recovering, Katya was in New Orleans for six weeks, and there were good vibes to be spread.
    Cigarette hanging from her mouth, dropping ash onto her Betsey Johnson T-shirt, Courtney grabbed a giant mixing bowl from the cabinet. She opened the refrigerator and scanned for liquids, snatching two halfgallon cartons of lemonade and a quart of orange juice. She emptied them into the mixing bowl and, when that overflowed, several pots. Then she grabbed a handful of ice cubes from the freezer and dropped them into her brew. Finally, she plunged her black-charred fingers into each vessel and stirred. Juice sloshed onto the counter as ashes from the cigarette in her mouth fluttered into the mixing bowl.
    Stubbing her cigarette out on the yellow tile countertop, she looked around frantically until she noticed an overhead cabinet. She swung the doors open and thrust her hands inside, sticking her fingers into four glasses and squeezing them together to pull them out. One by one, she dipped the glasses into the bowl and filled them. Then she grabbed the rest of the glasses, any clean coffee mugs she could find, and a Pyrex measuring cup, and sloshed lemonade into all of them.
    In the living room, Mystery sat cross-legged on a couch, leading his first pickup seminar since returning from the mental-health center three weeks earlier. He wore a T-shirt and denim overalls. His feet were bare. Patches of unshaven hair dappled his chin, and his eyelids drooped lazily over unfocused eyes. He’d been taking the Seroquel regularly and sleeping out his depression. He was beginning to break through to the other side.
    “There are three phases to a relationship,” he told his students, speaking in a torpor. “There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. And I’m going through the end right now. I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve cried three times in the last week.”
    His six students glanced at each other, confused. They were there tolearn to get laid. But for Mystery this wasn’t just a seminar; it was therapy. He’d been telling them about Katya for two hours now.
    “This is what you’re building up to, and it can be difficult,” he went on. “My plan for the next girl is to have a fake marriage again. The mistake I made last time was letting Katya and her mother know it was a joke. Next time, I’ll have the wedding in the backyard. I’ll have an actor be the preacher, and everyone except her and her parents will know we’re not really getting married.”
    One of the students, a