The Game

good-looking man in his thirties with a crewcut and a jaw like a block of cement, raised his hand. “But didn’t you just get through telling us how the fake marriage was a disaster last time?”
    “I was just field-testing it,” Mystery said. “It’s a great routine.”
    Whenever Mystery returned from his depressions, his mental bearings shifted a little. This time there was an anger lurking beneath the surface, along with a new bitterness toward women.
    Suddenly, Courtney came careening out of the kitchen. “Who wants lemonade?”
    The students looked at her dumbstruck. “Here you go,” she said, forcing a glass on Mystery and another on Cementjaw. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “You’re cute.”
    “I’m a self-defense instructor,” he said. “Mystery is letting me sit in on the workshop in exchange for lessons in Krav Maga.”
    Courtney shot off to the kitchen and came back with two more glasses of lemonade, then two more, and two more, until there were more glasses than people in the room.
    “I think we’re set on lemonade,” Mystery said as she returned with two coffee mugs in her hands.
    “Where’s Herbal?” she asked.
    “I think he’s showering.”
    Courtney dashed to the bathroom and kicked the door. “Herbal? Are you there?” She kicked the door again, harder.
    “I’m showering,” he yelled back.
    “It’s important. I’m coming in.”
    She pushed through the door, ran inside, and ripped the shower curtain open.
    “What’s going on?” Herbal asked, panicked. He stood there naked, his hair streaked white with shampoo. “Is the house on fire?”
    “I made this for you,” Courtney said. She thrust a mug of lemonade in each of Herbal’s wet hands and dashed away. Herbal stood there silently. Ever since he’d promised to stop talking to Katya, he’d been drifting through the house in a forlorn cloud of silence. Though he was too proud to admit it, his heart ached. He loved her.
    As Mystery’s students broke for lunch, Courtney dashed past them and up the stairs to Papa’s room, leaving a trail of lemonade drops on the carpet. She burst through the door. Inside, Papa, Sickboy, Tyler Durden, Playboy, Xaneus, and the mini-Papas were working on individual computers. Extramask was laying on Papa’s unmade bed, reading the Bhagavad Gita. While staying at the house, Extramask had gotten bored and started reading Playboy’s books on eastern religion, which had unexpectedly led him down a path of spiritual self-discovery.
    “Courtney,” Tyler Durden asked as she distributed drinks, “can you get us on the guest list for Joseph’s on Monday?”
    Courtney picked up the phone, walked into the bathroom with Tyler, and dialed Brent Bolthouse, the promoter who threw the Monday night parties at Joseph’s, famed for their tight guest lists and crowds of gorgeous wanna-bes. “Brent,” she said. “My friend Tyler Durden is a professional pickup artist.” Tyler waved his hands frantically in a futile attempt to signal Courtney not to talk about it. “He picks up women for a living. It’s really cool.” Tyler dropped his head into his hands. “Can you put him on the guest list so he can come with some of his pickup artist friends and pick up chicks?”
    Courtney picked a strip of six wrapped condoms off the edge of the sink and wrapped it around her wrist like a bracelet, then began exploring the bathroom. She poked her head inside the two closets—Papa’s infamous guest bedrooms—that were on either side of the toilet.
    “Let me ask you something,” she said as she withdrew from Tyler Durden’s closet, which contained a suitcase, a pile of dirty clothes, and a mattress on the floor. “Do you like women?”
    On the other side of the bathroom’s slotted windows, Cementjaw dragged a sandbag along the brickwork of the patio.
    “I wasn’t a misogynist when I started this,” Tyler replied. “But you get good and you start sleeping with all these women who have boyfriends, and you stop trusting women.”
    A side effect of sarging is that it can lowers one’s opinion of the opposite sex. You see too much betrayal, lying, and infidelity. If a woman has been married three years or more, you come to learn that she’s usually easier to sleep with than a single woman. If a woman has a boyfriend, you learn that you have a better chance of fucking her the night you meet her than getting her to return a phone call later. Women, you eventually realize, are just as bad