Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  “Chicken soup? Cool!” says Dan, when I bring the container to him instead. I explain its origins: The Mystery Magnolias, Caravaggio’s Cold. (Two totally decent, alliterative titles for Nancy Drew books, in retrospect.) Dan says, hmm, that seems a little odd. He’s protective of me. Of all of his friends, really. No, I say. He’s just sick. No biggie. Dan smiles and gives me a hug. “Welcome to the Church for Wayward Hearts! Wait, I want you to take a photo of Megan and me on the moon.” Megan is the winsome, loving actress to whom he’s committed himself since the sad Roches Christmas concert when we both bawled. She plays an FBI agent on a network TV show and will give birth to Dan’s child a year later, which is the thing he’s wanted more than anything since I’ve known him: to be a father.

  She’s sitting on the edge of a giant cardboard moon he’s set up and illuminated in his otherwise pitch-black photo studio. He sits down on the moon and melts into her. Watching them interact, I suddenly feel like I’m shooting a musical. Or a dream. She’s stunning. They’re stunning together. It’s impossible to take a bad photo of these two, with all the love ricocheting between them. Dan’s heart, now full, seems suddenly out of place at his own Church for Wayward Hearts. Soon, he will tear down the whole house to the studs and rebuild his punk playground into a family home.

  Megan and Dan, February 14, 2015, © Deborah Copaken

  “You two give me hope,” I say, hugging them.

  My heart, on the other hand, still feels wayward, on both the health and love fronts. I’ve been put on a beta-blocker to calm my panic attacks, but by lowering my already low blood pressure, the medication turns me into a fainting machine. Once I stop taking it, the blackouts decrease, but then the palpitations come back. Sometimes they get so intense, I feel as if I’m having a heart attack. As for Gio, I’m…confused. A single hand-drawn heart tells me nothing. Magnolias tell me nothing. The Nancy Drew in me is stumped and fresh out of clues.

  Does he love me? I ask the Magic 8-Ball I buy for my son in the toy aisle of our local drugstore, but really the ball’s for me. $10 to know the future? A bargain. “Ask again later,” the ball responds. Have I reverted to a fifth grader? “It is decidedly so.”

  Post magnolias, Gio and I step gingerly back into each other’s lives. That is to say we write novela-long emails, argue about inane things as stand-ins for bigger issues, make up, and share a meal now and then. But my assumption of the flowers as lover’s olive branch is wrong. “Friends first,” he says, drawing a strict boundary, which in his mind means still holding hands when we go out for dinner, spooning in front of his fireplace, fêting me on my birthday with our kids, and giving me both epic foot rubs and the kind of generous gifts you’d give a lover, but the rest, he says, is off the table for now. Which seems like an odd line to draw in the sand with my bare foot in his hands or my back cradled up against the warmth of his stomach, all of which feel equally if not in some ways more intimate to me than the clinical definition of sexual intimacy.

  I finally lose it in an email, utterly baffled, after hearing the radio interview with the other woman. Why did he send me those Valentine’s flowers if he was with her that night?

  He insists he and the other woman are just friends. His plumber and his mom also sent him Valentines, if that helps. Once again, I’m just reading into things and making false assumptions. He sends me a link to a new Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell song, “The Traveling Kind,” and I comb through its lyrics in search of new clues. We were born to brave this tilted world, with our hearts laid on the line…Well, yes. That’s the only way that love happens. Through vulnerability. Ripping one’s chest open. Exposing the contents. For the next week, I listen to the song on autorepeat, mining it for hidden meaning like a moony twelve-year-old. A few weeks later, he sends me a link to “The Lion’s Roar,” by First Aid Kit, and once again I put on my Nancy Drew hat and sift it for clues: And I’m a goddamn fool, but then again so are you, and the lion’s roar, the lion’s roar has me seeking out and searching for you…

  “I’m right here!” I shout, when I hear the song for the third time. “You don’t need to search!”

  Meanwhile, the cockroach situation in my apartment becomes so untenable, I finally go against building rules and call an outside exterminator to deal with the infestation. That night, my son and I walk into a massacre, with thousands of exoskeleton husks crunching underfoot, and a noxious odor so intense, it’s impossible to stay inside the apartment. My son screams at the sight of cockroach Antietam. Then he starts to cry. “We can’t stay here tonight!” he says. He’s right. Even the dog is hovering in the corner of the living room, shaking. It’s 6:30 p.m. I can’t afford a hotel room. I can’t cook us dinner in a kitchen littered with dead roaches on every surface. And I don’t have the mental capacity, after a day at work, to deal with this right now.

  Gio, whom my son adores, offers to feed and house us when I text him a photo of the stomach-churning husks. He fixes up his guest room for the two of us, and we take the hour-long subway ride downtown to his apartment. “I like it here,” my son says, looking around at the whimsical yet cozy bedroom, as I read him a bedtime story. “Does he have roaches?”

  “No,” I say. “No roaches. Maybe a few mice. But he’s getting two cats to deal with that.”

  “Good,” he says. “I like cats.” This was spoken as if they might one day be his cats, too. He has asked me, several times, if Gio and I are getting married. Gio’s daughter is a sophomore in high school, and he worships her. He has let it be known that he would be open to having her as a stepsister.

  I love this young woman as well. One day, after I shoot her portrait, she tells me she’s interested in writing, so I suggest she write an essay for me to edit, and I’ll see if The Mid (the rebranded name for Cafe) wants to publish it. Within a few days, she produces a story that does so well on our site, it gets republished by PBS.

  Soon thereafter, author, psychotherapist, editor, and fellow single mother Lori Gottlieb reaches out over Facebook to offer me an assignment in Paris during my son’s spring break in April. “You up for being my photo assistant…in Paris??!!!” I say to my son.

  “Oh my god, yes!” he says. Croissants and crepes? His favorite food group.

  Gio and his daughter will be in Paris over spring break as well, in a hotel across the Seine from my son and me. We are staying with my friend Marion at her apartment in the tenth, but she works during the day, so Gio and his daughter volunteer to babysit my son on the afternoon I’m scheduled to shoot the Musée de l’érotisme: not the best place to take an eight-year-old, with its six-foot-tall wooden dildos sprouting up from a planter, and vintage porn.

  The four of us meet up for lunch at Le Meurice, Alain Ducasse’s Versailles-modeled restaurant on the Rue de Rivoli: the kind of place that gives women menus without prices on them, which we all find appalling, but the butter is molded into the shape of a nipple and tastes—oh my god—like heaven, so we suck it down along with our righteous indignation. Plus Gio has insisted on paying, and he’d rather we not know the prices anyway. After the meal, I stand up to take a souvenir photo before heading off to shoot the sex museum, and the three of them suddenly burst out laughing. Apparently, my fly is open. And they have noticed this simultaneously. The stuffy French waiters are none too pleased with our loud American peals of mirth, but the resulting shot of the three of them is as joyful as any family photo I’ve ever taken.

  I am aching, as much as my son, for the family in this photo to be real enough to frame.

  Later that spring, I help Caravaggio plant a green roof atop his art studio in a Brooklyn neighborhood that was once designated a Superfund site until cleanup began in 2013, sparking a near total transformation. They even have a Whole Foods now. A gourmet pie shop. Restaurants. Coffee shops. “Beautiful!” he says, when I finish wrapping fairy lights around a discarded toilet I’ve transformed into a marigold planter. “I love it.”
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  “I love you,” I blurt out, looking down at the glowing toilet, my dirt-caked nails, the oasis we’ve created out of old trash and new blooms.

  “Love you, too,” he says, after a too-long pause, giving me a platonic squeeze.

  It’s easy now, in retrospect, as I sit here and catalogue the non-trajectory of this non-relationship, to be ashamed of my part in my own debasement. Not only did I not run, I was the one leading the charge, begging for crumbs. And that’s on me. Time spent on Planet Caravaggio felt so magical and hypercharged, my heart kept shushing my brain.

  Eventually, however, the truth becomes unavoidable. Even to me, who takes twice as long as most to see it. The public parade of the various other women on his dance card starts to scroll by on social media, that wretched picture book without context, speaking louder than any of Gio’s frequent silences between texts. Nearly all of these other women start following me, one by one, on social media, seemingly out of the blue, until I see Gio show up in their feeds and think, oh. Got it. Another one.

  As each subsequent photo of him and a new her scrolls by, my chest starts to feel more and more like the hay-filled target in my childhood archery class, after our instructor had shot all six arrows into its center. “You have to ease them out slowly, between two fingers,” he said. “Otherwise, the face will tear.” It will be years before I manage to slowly yank out all of Gio’s arrows from my own hay, and not without significant tearing.

  At one point, mid-yank, I notice Gio has started liking all of the photos posted by Maya, my ex-brother-in-law’s ex-partner: my former sister-in-law, in other words, with whom I’d shared six years of holidays, family meals, and weekend sleepovers. “How do you know him?” I ask Maya.

  She went out on a blind date with him, she says.

  “Same,” I say, and Maya gasps. What?!

  “I had no idea, Deb,” she says, when we meet up at a lecture at Columbia University a week later, for the paperback launch of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me.

  “Don’t worry! Neither did I.” The lights in the lecture hall dim. “Clearly,” I whisper, “at least one man explains nothing to any of us.” My ex-husband and Maya’s ex-partner are identical twins. Neither of us can stop laughing.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Lunch with Ken

  JUNE 2015

  Ken Kurson—the editor of the Observer who’d originally contacted me in the wake of my viral Container Store story—reaches out at the end of my contract at Cafe, as promised, and invites me to lunch to discuss jumping ship and coming to work for him. My basic expenses are still greater than my income, so I’m anxious to hear what terms of employment he has to offer.

  At this point, Cafe has become The Mid (a site specifically geared toward middle-aged women), before purchasing Scary Mommy, which already has a large, readymade audience of middle-aged female eyeballs. I’m now on staff at The Mid with an at will contract. “At will” means you can be fired at any time, without cause or severance. This is both a uniquely American idiosyncrasy of labor law as well as a highly controversial one. With roots stretching back to an 1884 Tennessee Supreme Court doctrine, “at will” employment puts all of the eggs of the employer/employee relationship into the employer’s basket. “The assumption is that the employee is only a supplier of labor who has no legal interest or stake in the enterprise other than the right to be paid for labor performed,” writes labor lawyer Clyde W. Summers. “The law, by giving total dominance to the employer, endows the employer with the divine right to rule the working lives of its subject employees.”

  Conservative American scholars love at will employment. It allows corporations to expand and grow unimpeded by financial responsibility to their employees, which creates more value for shareholders. Legal scholars and economists more sympathetic to human rights and to the dignity of workers, however, see at will contracts exactly for the power imbalance they are: codified modern monarchical masochism, with the corporation as king/sadist and the worker as serf/masochist. “It is employment at will and its fundamental assumption which is the major barrier to establishing a system of collective bargaining,” writes Summers. “In American labor law, the monarchy still survives.”

  Vinit Bharara, the CEO who hired me at Cafe, installs Scary Mommy as editor, and the axes begin to fall. First Peter is fired. Then Michelle, our new editor. Both of them have been doing excellent work and did not deserve to be fired, but at will contracts are indifferent to good work.

  Scary Mommy makes clear from the moment we meet that she does not like me. Or my writing about the pains, pleasures, and humiliations of both dating and solo motherhood after a long marriage.

  I try ingratiating myself with her in the company of some of our co-workers, after all of us ordered boxed lunches from a nearby food truck in Madison Square Park. “I love the Brussels sprouts here!” I say.

  “Of course you do,” she says with an eye roll.

  One day, as I’m biking home from the office, Scary Mommy calls my cellphone, and into my earbuds, as I’m huffing and puffing, delivers the following message: “You know, Deb, everyone here seems to love you, and I’m sure if we got to know one another I would, too, but I have to say: Every time I read one of your stories, I just want to dumb it down and make it shorter. And that doesn’t seem like a good place for us to start if we’re going to work together.”

  I want to hop off the bike and have this conversation on the side of the road, but I’m already late to pick up my son at aftercare, so I continue to pedal the rest of the thirteen miles home, panting from both the effort and from mortal fear of losing yet another job. I remind her that nearly all of my online stories have gone viral. And that one of them, “The ABCs of Adulthood,” has just sold as a three-book deal to a publisher. Vinit has been happy with my work, I tell her, increasing my salary twice in six months. She reminds me that she’s the boss now, and what she says goes: shorter, dumber, or I’m out. Most of her mommy bloggers on Scary Mommy write for free anyway. I should feel grateful I’m getting paid at all.

  “Get off your bike!” my agent, Lisa, yells at me, when I call her next. “Just sit on a bench and breathe.” I’m crying so hard at this point, I can barely see straight.

  “I can’t!” I yell back, hyperventilating. If anything, I have to pedal twice as fast to get to my son’s school by 6.

  I choke back the tears and splash my face with the dregs of my office water bottle before I pick up my son. My entire goal and ethos as a parent has always been to be the Not-Scary Mommy. And that means holding it together, as best I can, when I’m falling apart. Not that I always live up to these ambitions—far from it—but I try.

  A few days later, I meet Ken Kurson for lunch on an unusual scorcher of a late-spring day, so I’m wearing a sundress to cope with the heat. I squeeze into a crowded banquette. He takes the chair opposite me inside Mercato, a small, cozy Italian joint around the corner from the Observer. Almost immediately, our conversation takes a turn for the cringey. “So,” he says, “how’s the breast? Were you able to finally get that MRI? Is the cancer still gone?” He stares straight at my chest.

  This line of questioning is illegal in a job interview, but never mind. The story of mine that prompted this lunch was about the combination of having a breast lump and no health insurance, so I decide to give him a pass. It’s understandable, if unfortunate.

  I tell him I’m fine and give him the vaguest denouement details of my stage 0 breast lump story, trying to steer the conversation away from my former illness and toward the present job offer, his eyes away from my chest and toward my face.

  “Wow,” he says, “it’s so weird—here we are talking about your story about your breast cancer while I’m staring at your breasts.” He cracks himself up, inappropriately.

  Every woman has a creepy man meter in the basement of her soul. The questions we ask ourselves, when its dial zooms past ten to trigger th
e alarm, must be answered both instantaneously and calmly. Am I in danger? (No.) Am I alone with him? (No, we are surrounded by other diners on either side.) Is he married? (Check, wedding ring on the left hand. Not always a good indicator of safety, but sometimes.) Is he a psychopath or just awkward? (Just awkward, I think?) Is the harm he’s inflicting with his words or actions intentional or unintentional? (Unintentional? Again, it’s unclear.) Is this a job interview, a date, or a conversation with a stranger who suddenly appears out of nowhere? (Job interview.) Should I remain stonily composed or throw my iced tea in his face? (It’s a toss-up.)

  I take a sip of my tea, ignore his new comment, and ask, once again, about his job offer.

  After talking about his close relationships with both the Observer’s owner, Jared Kushner, and their mutual best bud Rudy Giuliani, he asks about Vinit; about the funding for the website; about Vinit’s brother, Preet, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York; about proprietary information about the company I don’t feel comfortable sharing because not only do I not know enough to speak with any authority on any of this, it’s not relevant to our discussion. So I tell him instead about Scary Mommy’s comment about dumbing down my writing and making it shorter, about the Brussels sprouts eye roll, about how she doesn’t seem to like me no matter how hard I try. That’s why I agreed to meet with him today, I remind him: to talk seriously about his job offer.

  “Is she fat?” he says. He grew up fat, he says, so he knows all about what it’s like to hate thin people, so it could just be that: Of course a thin person would love Brussels sprouts. Or maybe she actually has a shitty marriage, he says, and the fact that I escaped mine could feel like an affront to her. People in bad marriages have to hate those who escape their own. It’s practically a rule. He wants to know what it’s really like dating after a long marriage, not just the stuff I write about. His wife hates him right now and has told him she wants a divorce, but he doesn’t want a divorce, so they’re trying to work it out, you know, although he thinks the whole postmarital dating thing might be fun, is it?