Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  I walked the eight blocks home from the post office, breastfed my baby, changed his diaper, gathered my various IDs, my son’s birth certificate, and my marriage license, and trudged back to the post office just in time for the lunchtime rush. This time I waited long enough that I had to whip out my boob again, right there in line, and change my baby’s diaper on the post office floor. Finally in possession of the package, three and a half hours after having originally left the apartment to do so, I opened it up, shoved the gift—a tiny new onesie, all this for that—into the diaper bag, and took my new miniature human and all of my various forms of ID straight down to the Social Security Administration to change my last name to his, both of us cranky.

  Had I known that two decades later I would need my ex-husband’s signed and notarized permission to change my name back—more desk-clerk law, not real law—I might have thought twice about this seemingly rash but tactically rational act. But postpartum hormones are strong, and my imagination for the kind of further clerical barriers I might one day face down the line was weak. Being a woman in a country where only the men are created equal feels a lot like playing an RPG videogame in which every door between your avatar and the pot of gold has a lock, a chain, bricks, a desk, another door, several more doors, quicksand, sharks, and a fire-breathing dragon lurking behind it, while the only barriers blocking the male avatars’ doors are knobs.

  One can hardly blame them for getting upset when their knobs get stuck. “There is a chance,” Ken’s “private and personal” email began, “—a small chance, thank G-d, but a bigger chance than there was before the summer—that my wife is going to dump me,” he wrote, followed by much throat clearing and then by what journalists call the nut graf, in which he wondered what his “chances” would be “on the open market.” His guy friends, he went on (and on and on and on), “all seem to go through this embarrassing pussy chase,” and he didn’t want that.

  Then his email took a turn for the wildly inappropriate, considering I’d met him only once for a job interview and a second time to pick up a copy of the paper from his office with my son. He wanted to know if it was realistic for him, “given what you know about my finances, appearance, mental state…” (Nothing! I know nothing about your finances or mental state, why would I? Ugh!) for someone with his “pilgrim soul” to “find someone suitable (must be Jewish)” or did I consider him a “fat and disgusting misanthrope” who needed to lower his expectations?

  I felt nauseated over his word choices—open market, pussy chase, pilgrim soul—but I nevertheless tried to answer vaguely, with both compassion for a man having trouble turning his knob on the door of life and with the precaution of a giant moat around my own castle. It was not my job, as a freelance writer he’d contacted via social media to write for his paper, to pump up this man’s ego and to tell him how wonderful he was or how great a commodity he might be on the “open market.” For one, I hardly knew him. For another, he held the keys to one of my doors of life with the pot of gold behind it.

  “The short answer is you’ll be fine,” I wrote. “The longer answer is don’t get divorced if you can possibly avoid it.” Then, because I couldn’t help myself, I addressed his use of the phrase pussy chase, which had stuck in my craw. “The ‘pussy chase’ of which you speak is actually important dating,” I wrote. “I know it’s been a long time since you’ve been single, so let me spell it out: Anyone who is unattached at our age—whether having never married or going through a divorce—is damaged in some way. Hurt. Angry. Struggling. Sad. And all those awful feelings in between. So there’s a lot of dating. It’s part of the process.”

  For my own part, after breaking up with Durkheim and realizing that, with my increased workload and unremitting parenting responsibilities, I was in no position to be a good partner to anyone, I made a deliberate decision to stop looking for a forever love and to start looking for love in the here and now. The conditional logic of this choice, once made, seemed obvious enough: Given that we’re all going to die, and we don’t know when; given that the chances of my finding a new partner at my age were statistically slim and growing slimmer by the year; given that I found celibacy untenable and pleasure pleasurable, I would therefore choose to enjoy, without apology, whatever stolen opportunities for physical affection I had left. A sex life, to me, is nonnegotiable. My body needs touch and release in the same way it needs air, water, sunlight, food.

  So that fall, after turning forty-nine, I decided to widen my opportunities for imbibing this particular elixir by lowering the age parameters on my dating apps from a minimum of forty-five to a minimum of thirty. I also rewrote my profile: “Two years separated from a long-term marriage. Open to whatever comes along. Still believe in love, despite everything.” Once I’d opened up the playing field to “whatever comes along” while leaving the door open for love, a team of players actually showed up in my dating app messages, and I could suddenly be a lot pickier about whom I’d choose to meet in person.

  It turns out that many men in their thirties are either not ready for committed relationships; or they’re recovering from broken ones; or they see an increasingly stagnant economy and lack of wage opportunities for men of their generation as barriers to getting married and having kids, so they feel stuck in an endless economic limbo. These younger men—“All the Young Dudes,” I would later dub them, in an Observer essay—liked dating women in their late forties and early fifties in the same way older war journalists, back in my war photographer years, had once provided comfort in foreign cities under siege to an adamantly single, twentysomething me. Our sexual needs aligned. The end.

  Would I ever refer to my new dating protocol as a “cock chase”? Jesus. No. Never. The male language of domination and conquest—of notches in belts, subjugation, commodified acquisition—had nothing to do with what these men and I shared together, with emphasis on the word shared. In fact, once I stopped looking for a new forever partner and accepted that I might never find one, I started to let go and to really enjoy myself: to explore what I liked; to ask, in great detail, for what I needed; and to try new things with those patient enough to take their time.

  Yes, yes, app dating still sucked, and for every successful date I endured ten bad ones. Or men who canceled at the last minute. Or ghosted me. Or became weirdly verbally abusive when I turned them down for sex: “I had friends in from out of town! I could have gone out with them tonight instead of trudging all the way up here to Inwood to have drinks with you!” yelled one sock entrepreneur, eight shots of tequila in. Or they sent unsolicited photos of their penises, butts, chests. Or they were pathological liars. Or had three weeks of dishes piled high in their sink. Or they would text “your cute” (you’re you’re you’re! I’d want to text back—scream, really). Or in one case I was simply stood up on Manhattanhenge, on one of the most gorgeous spring nights of the year, and wound up weeping, alone, on a bench in Washington Square Park, from which I observed seemingly everyone else walking hand in hand with their partners into the perfectly grid-aligned sunset. And yet all of this bad behavior and bad grammar notwithstanding, I suddenly felt grateful to find myself single and game at the precise moment in history when seeking out the occasional partner for sex became as easy as ordering up a dish of pad thai.

  Ken never responded to my answer to his “pussy chase” email. I sent him several new story pitches. No response. A new essay. No response. Another new essay. No response. Finally, Lorraine, my day-to-day editor, wrote to say that the paper could not take any more of my essays in 2015, even though Ken had asked me to produce a column every two weeks. They’d run out of budget for the year, she said. Also, from now on Ken and I would have to discuss the topic of my essay before publishing, which was not only not part of the deal we’d originally struck, it was an impossible protocol to follow, given that he’d stopped answering my emails.

  I send Ken another email: “I don’t actually have time to spend a week writing a s
tory that doesn’t get published. I was under the impression that you needed me to write a lot, not that we had to discuss and approve ideas prior to writing them. I need to understand the parameters here, thanks.”

  Twenty-six more days go by. No response.

  Then, the week my Modern Love is published, Ken finally responds: “I can’t believe a writer of your skill and elegance is insecure but this job has taught be [sic] that ALL writers are insecure when they don’t hear back promptly.” Once again, the email is long, rambling, and inappropriately personal. “You know I am not quite myself lately,” he writes (No. Why would I know that? I do not know you), “as the emotional and financial blows are rained on me like Joe Frazier taking out Muhammad Ali in their first fight at the Garden…I’ll be back to myself soon enough. I’m destroyed right now, but already glimpsing that better days are ahead.”

  His sadism, I finally realize, is both real and lacks subtlety. He publishes the two essays he claimed not to want to publish, but then says he can’t pay me for them. He keeps dangling the possibility of a full-time job in front of my face—“You are such a nice writer,” he writes in one email, “I wish I could afford you on a full-time basis”—but then in the next email, when I tell him I’m still interested in a full-time job with adequate pay, he yanks it away with a backhanded compliment—“If you were a tech writer with tons of sources, you’d be making $150k. But a brilliant essayist with a huge heart and silky prose? It’s rough.” He also keeps crossing boundaries. When I land a two-week gig in L.A. as a consultant in the writers’ room for Younger, and Ken finds out, he sends an unsolicited email both to me and to the author of the book upon which the series is based, though she is not a writer on the show, and I never asked him to introduce us. “Pam, meet Debbie,” reads the subject header, followed by: “You’re both Observer contributors and both my friends, despite your weird refusal to fix me up with your hot single Jewish friends.”

  I tell Sharky, my boss at the PR firm, that I’ll be taking my two weeks of vacation all at once, to work on Younger. Darren wants me for four weeks, but oh, well. Because I’m a new employee, two weeks is all I have.

  TWENTY-SIX

  On-ramp

  MARCH 2016

  By March, my ex has moved back to New York, so I can now actually travel for work again without organizing sleepovers for my son or paying for extra babysitting. I have Wednesday and Thursday nights to myself, to see friends or go on dates or take myself out to the movies. I have every other weekend alone now as well to work on other projects or to just sit and think and stare into space: the kind of lost, formless time that had wholly disappeared when my marriage ended.

  “You’re not leaving us, I hope,” Sharky says, when I tell him I’m taking my two weeks of vacation to work on Younger, and I not only promise him that I’m not, I reiterate how grateful I am to have my job.

  Then, in preparation for my trip to L.A. to work on Younger, I hit a roadblock: my lack of a credit card, due to my involvement with Freedom Debt Relief.

  When I travel for the PR company, I use the company American Express, but because I haven’t been able to afford a real vacation in four years, booking travel without a credit card had not previously reared its head as an issue. I end up having to call Darren to explain that I, a newly minted fifty-year-old, have neither the credit nor the cash to book my own travel.

  Darren has been a Hollywood wunderkind since he arrived in L.A., struggling for only a short span of time, while living in an apartment complex that would later serve as the inspiration for Melrose Place. He created the smash hit Beverly Hills, 90210 while still in his twenties. 90210 was based, in part, on the dynamics and subtle class differences in the large suburban public high school we both attended, albeit five years apart.* Darren’s father was an orthodontist, his mother was a journalist—unusual, in that era and suburb, for a mother to work—and he grew up in Camotop (yes, that’s Potomac spelled backward), which was the newer, wealthier side of town with the substantially larger houses. In 90210 parlance, Darren would have been the Jewish, gay Brandon Walsh while I would have been Andrea Zuckerman.

  Darren always insists on paying for dinner whenever we go out, except that one time I argued that he can’t always be the one to pay, and he let me pick up the tab. He understands I’ve been going through rough times, because he’s my friend and because he reads what I write and publish, but it’s one thing to have a vague understanding of a friend’s struggles and quite another to be told, “Look, I just paid my ex’s $12,000 tax bill, because we’re still married, so it’s suddenly and quite unexpectedly my tax bill, too. So now I have less than an $800 cushion in the bank and no credit cards, so I can’t pay for my hotel, car, or meals with my ATM.”

  He seems both shocked at this state of affairs and also compassionate. “No problem,” he says, he’ll make it happen.

  My shame over this runs deep, but it also echoes the financial struggles of Liza, the protagonist in Younger played by Sutton Foster, who finds out, after separating from her husband, that his gambling addiction has bankrupted their family. Which is one of the reasons she ends up moving into her artist friend Maggie’s loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the first place and has to pretend to be a twenty-seven-year-old ingenue to land an entry-level job as an assistant to the head of marketing at a publishing house, after trying in vain to land a more senior job commensurate with her skill set as a former book editor.

  Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett has studied this phenomenon of the brick wall middle-aged women hit after taking time off from the corporate world, which she calls off-ramping and on-ramping. Of those women who off-ramp from a full-time corporate job to care for ailing parents or children, only 74 percent of those who want to rejoin the workforce manage to on-ramp back into it. But that number is also deceiving, because of those 74 percent who manage to find jobs, only 40 percent find full-time, professional employment. The rest are relegated to permalance, freelance, part-time, or self-employment. “The implication is clear,” Hewlett writes in the Harvard Business Review. “Off-ramps are around every curve in the road, but once a woman has taken one, on-ramps are few and far between—and extremely costly.”

  Before heading to L.A. to work on Younger, I’d been having frequent dinners with Darren in New York, now that he’s bicoastal. He became fascinated with the twists and turns of my dating life. Of my refusal to give up at my age and throw in the towel. “You’re like a gay man!” he said, proudly, as he mined me for material, and we dissected each paramour or almost-paramour as if we were Derrida deconstructing Heidegger.

  There was the conceptual artist who told me, before heading off to live in a spinning wheel for several days, that he’d just ended a long relationship in Berlin and was still a little raw. “What was she like?” I said.

  “They,” he said. “I was the third in a throuple.”

  There was the widower who admitted that he wasn’t all that upset to have lost his wife; the divorcé who wasn’t actually divorced.

  There was the twenty-seven-year-old who pretended to be forty, until I happened to mention that I’d covered the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, and he accidentally revealed his lie: “Awesome! I was born on that day!”

  There was the miniatures artist who created intricate dioramas depicting his favorite movie scenes. It took me a Where’s Waldo while to notice, in the photos he texted, the round hole cut out in the bottom of each one for his erect penis. Which he would dress up as one of the characters. “Wanna bring your camera over and come help me shoot my latest creation?” he texted. “I just have to find a miniature Princess Leia wig for the tip of my cock.”

  “Um…no, thanks!” I wrote back. “But good luck with that.”

  There was Juan, the Spanish banker from London, deep in the early throes of marital implosion, whom I met and befriended at the tail end of my friend Josh’s fiftieth birthday. When Juan found out I’d written The Red Boo
k, he smiled slyly and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I actually have that book on my nightstand right now.” Which I thought was one of the lamest pick-up lines I’d ever heard and told him so. He insisted we walk a few blocks away to confirm it. Lo and behold, there was my novel, right there on his nightstand, at the top of the pile.

  “No way,” said Darren.

  “Way!” I said, laughing.

  “So what happened next?”

  “We talked. About love. About marriage. About the end of love and the end of marriage. About my father’s death. About death in general. About books. About art. About what it means to be a good human. He’s really brilliant. And funny. And age appropriate. And handsome. And a gifted lover, good lord.” I sighed. “I really liked him. A lot.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s it, the whole three-act arc in one night. And it’s all it ever can or will be because of circumstance.” Juan and I had each taken note of the alchemy in that room, spoken of it out loud in ways that sounded both absurd and like treacle, even to our own ears. And yet we both cried, too, both from the surprising joy of those eight hours and from our concomitant understanding, even while they were happening, of their loss. “The next morning, we went out for breakfast and coffee, I came back to my shithole in Inwood, he went back to his flat in London, and now I’m back to marketing pills to help opioid addicts poop. He sends me adorable emails with poems attached. Poems, Darren! Poems I actually like!”