Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  “So what’s the problem? I don’t get it. Why not see him again?”

  “He lives between London and Madrid with his kids. I live in Inwood with my kids. He’s from a totally different world of wealth and privilege. His family were patrons of Gaudí, for fuck’s sake. There’s an entire park named after them in Barcelona. He’s either Spanish aristocracy or royalty. I didn’t ask. He didn’t offer.” In fact, he was deliberately vague about his upbringing. It was Danna, Josh’s wife, who later filled me in on his family’s storied background.

  “So what’s wrong with dating a prince?” said Darren.

  I shrugged. “I don’t want to be rescued.” Also men like that, I added, attract gold diggers. I would always be looking over my shoulder.

  One night, I introduced Darren to Zane, thirty-one, a natural blond, blue-eyed guitar player and singer in a band you’ve probably heard of. Although at the time we met on Tinder and planned a guitar lesson instead of a date, I had not. But when I asked my then nine-year-old if he’d heard of the band—which Zane had started with two of his college pals on a lark, and then suddenly there they were on Letterman and Conan, despite his plans to become a journalist—my son tween–rolled his eyes and said, “Duh, Mom. They wrote that song that the fifth graders sang at graduation last year.”

  A few months later, I introduced Darren to Finn, a young Texan entrepreneur who knew his way around both China and its many factories, having lived and worked there for several years, spoke fluent Chinese, and was game for any adventure and then some: naked yoga, shaman visits, forest bike rides, living room tango. “So handsome!” said Darren, when Finn left the table to find the bathroom.

  “Too handsome,” I said. Several times when we were out in the world, people had stopped Finn on the street to ask him to take a selfie with them, mistaking him for Bradley Cooper.

  These latter two, both nineteen years my junior and each cognizant of the other’s existence, are mature, empathic, thoughtful. They don’t play games. They text back. They’re open to anything. They arrive at the meeting place on time and prioritize female pleasure: a welcome change from the many men of my generation who were taught all about putting condoms on bananas but nothing about locating the spadix in a calla lily. Moreover, because there is zero preconception that these relationships are heading down any aisles or must conform to any traditional standards of monogamy, they have freed me to explore the idea of love for love’s sake. Of being present. Of showing up. Of letting go. Of throwing out the standard rule book and writing a new one, with only one basic rule: live and let love.

  It was during one of our date-dissecting dinners, in fact, when Darren admitted he enjoyed hearing about my love life not only because he loves me, but also because no one in the Younger writers’ room was actually a middle-aged divorcée going through these same humiliations and joys. Seeing an opportunity—an on-ramp, let’s call it—I grabbed it. Why don’t I come out to L.A. and share my experiences with the room?

  Skip Notes

  * No, we did not know each other back then, though his younger brother and my cousin were classmates and friends, and therefore his mother and my aunt know each other as well.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Younger

  MARCH–APRIL 2016

  Every single day in the Younger writers’ room is more than just fun. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had at a paid job either before or since. Work starts at the humane hour of 10 or 10:30 a.m., after which people drift into the writers’ room: a sunlit, all-white, large but cozy space on the Paramount lot. We’re each also given our own offices off a winding hallway, and when I walk into mine on my first day, I shut the door, open my window, and tear up. It has been two years since my rejection from the job at The Container Store. Three years since I contemplated throwing myself out my office window in Harlem. Four years since Nora died. My thumb hovers over her name in my iPhone, itching to call her. Or at least to text her a photo of my office and the Hollywood sign, which I can see from my window if I lean out really far: no, not the kind of leaning out born of a death wish. Now that I have this job, all I want to do is live.

  From 10 a.m. until 1 p.m., with a giant pile of snacks between us, a dozen of us take turns telling real stories and pitching fictional ones around a conference table. At the end of the table, Joe, the writers’ assistant, types every word spoken into a daily file and organizes it into narrative threads and themes, while Dottie, one of the showrunners, starts to build a board of index cards with the dramatic beats on them. “What if Liza goes on Tinder and gets stood up?” I say, or “What if Josh decides he wants to have kids?” or “Maybe they should stand there on the street, hand in hand, watching Manhattanhenge.” After a generous break for lunch at 1 p.m., we come back around 2 p.m. and continue batting around ideas until 5 or 5:30 p.m. at the latest, but sometimes we break for the day as early as 4:30. When that happens, I take advantage of the extra hour to drive out to Venice Beach to watch the sun set behind the drum circle. And every morning, when I drive onto the Paramount lot and park my car in my appointed spot, I cannot believe how lucky I am to get paid to do this. There’s real joy and camaraderie in that room: laughter, creativity, a feeling of teamwork and friendship. It’s also fascinating, as someone who normally writes alone in her bed or on an Ikea Poäng chair in her living room, to engage those same areas of the brain as part of a larger community.

  I’m told by the others that this level of everyday laughter, friendship, and mirth is unusual in a comedy writing room but not unheard of. For one, Darren’s rooms have an equal number of men and women, whereas many half-hour comedies can be frat houses. For another, he picks his groups carefully, for optimum collaboration without too many egos stepping over one another.

  Before I leave to head back to New York, I tell Darren that I would be totally open to taking a leave of absence from my PR job, relocating to L.A. with my son for twelve weeks, and joining the writing staff for season three, if he has any openings. “Let me see if I have anyone who leaves,” he says, keeping the door open. But when the door actually does open several months later, and I ask Sharky if I can take a twelve-week unpaid leave, he’ll say no. I’m too valuable to the team. Because my full-time job is too valuable to my kids, I’ll accept his no, mourn the loss of opportunity, and keep my nose to the corporate grindstone, wishing I had the financial wherewithal to say yes to such a rare and possibly life-changing break.

  What’s so often left out of the bootstrap narrative in this country is privilege. White privilege and male privilege no doubt, but also sheer monetary privilege which, as the divide between rich and poor grows ever wider, becomes increasingly crucial. The summer after my sophomore year at college, I applied for and got accepted to an internship at NBC that I ended up having to turn down, not having realized it was unpaid. The money I earned each summer during college was crucial to paying my living expenses during the rest of the year, so I wound up working at a headhunting firm instead, which bored me to tears but provided enough spending money for both semesters. (My job? To help run background checks, in those pre-digital years, on future CEOs of multinational corporations, which meant calling up their college registrars and former places of work. I won’t say all of those men—they were all men—lied on their résumés, but close.) The next summer I was offered an unpaid internship at Magnum Photos, which I decided to take knowing I’d have to spend every night after work as a waitress as well. My days that summer felt endless: 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. at the photo agency; 5 p.m. until midnight at the New Fuji Sushi and Steak house; 1 a.m. until 7 a.m. for sleep. But the contacts I made at Magnum were crucial in getting my photojournalism career off the ground after college.

  Life-changing opportunities are rare, but they cannot actually change your life if you don’t have the wherewithal to take them. I’m not just talking about jobs or degrees. I’m talking about taking any ameliorating step in any better direction whatsoever, b
e it leaving a bad marriage, moving to a new city, or having the time and means to acquire new skills. Even Friedrich Engels, defender of the working class, was the son of a wealthy capitalist who funded his and Karl Marx’s criticisms of the very capitalism that offered them the time and means to speak out against it.

  So many of the people I know who’ve succeeded wildly, particularly in the arts or journalism, have done so because they had an economic cushion, whether from family money or a wealthy spouse. It’s the dirty little secret to which few will admit, with rare exceptions. Novelist Ann Bauer, in an essay in Salon entitled “ ‘Sponsored’ by my husband: Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from,” described a reading at which an audience member asked a well-respected nonfiction writer how he’d been able to spend ten years writing a single book. His answer was hard work and magazine writing, which infuriated Bauer, because his answer left out an important fact: that he is the heir to not just millions but to more millions than his interlocutor could have ever imagined. Many of the young journalists in New York right now, earning journalism’s increasingly meager starting salaries, have their rents, mortgages, and cellphone bills paid in full by Mom and Dad. The book-publishing industry has long been a bastion of young, privileged, white Ivy League grads, whose parents subsidize their early years as they climb up the poorly paid rungs at the bottom of the ladder.

  Sharky’s no to my twelve-week leave of absence to work on the next season of Younger will also cost me more than $12,000 a year in health insurance premiums, as I’ll now have to switch to the PR company’s $1,000-a-month plan instead of paying $150 a quarter for my more comprehensive Writers Guild insurance. It also means a change of in-network doctors. And that I can no longer see my shrink without going bankrupt. Absurd, our healthcare system. Insane, choosing between mental health and food. And no, the irony is not lost on me that my job is to help pharmaceutical companies earn enough lobbying millions to keep this enraging status quo thus.

  The morning I pack up and leave L.A., I head to the check-out desk at the Standard hotel, where I’ve been staying for two weeks, assuming my room has been prepaid by the Younger production company, as previously agreed. Instead, I’m handed a bill totaling more than $6,000 for my two-week stay, parking, and meals. “I thought this was supposed to be prepaid?” I say.

  “Nope, sorry. Just put it on your credit card and work it out with your company later.”

  “I…don’t have a credit card,” I say.

  “Seriously?” he says, a look of imperious horror on his face. “Well, we take debit cards, too.”

  “Yes, but I don’t have an extra six thousand dollars in my account.” I have, in fact, checking my balance online, less than $1,000. I received a nominal income for consulting on the show, plus my vacation pay from the PR firm, but I’ve had to eat out for every meal while I was here, pay for gas and my car rental—without a credit card, they make you pay it up front—and then every month there’s that sinkhole of medical debt, my children’s college housing, tuition, and living expenses, monthly payments to Freedom Debt Relief, etc. It’s been years since I’ve had my head above water.

  I feel once again like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight, only instead of leaving behind an uncomfortable glass slipper and a besotted prince, I’m leaving behind a new spring in my sneakered step and a job with which I’ve fallen in love. I can’t reach anyone in the finance department at the production company, and I need to get to the airport immediately, so I call Jill, my film and TV agent, realizing I will now have to admit to her, too, that I’m an adult without a credit card. Jill graciously volunteers to pay the bill with her own American Express card and get reimbursed by the production company, but I can tell I’ve fallen several notches in her estimation: never a good thing, with an agent, in a profession where appearances are everything. Goodbye, smoke. Goodbye, mirrors. Goodbye, respect and potential. Goodbye, eventually, Jill. I feel not only half shod and in rags, I feel utterly exposed, naked.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ENFP

  APRIL–NOVEMBER 2016

  Stepping back into the pumpkin of my PR job after two weeks of working in the Younger writers’ room feels like heading back into prison after a furlough in Tahiti. The work feels as important as making license plates, if not less so. Worse, our department’s not meeting its budgetary goals, so there’s a new sheriff in town, McKenna, a thirtysomething upper management type who’s worked in marketing and public relations since college, unlike us rabble-rousing journalists, and now sits next to Sharky cracking the whip and speaking in acronyms. “I’ll be OOO on Tuesday, so if you could get those KPI numbers from the AE for that new B2C campaign to put in the RFP, then talk to the guys in UX, see what they’re planning for the rollout. Talk to key stakeholders, decide on a CTA that’s impactful, then run it by their head of comms and circle back when you’re done…” (Obviously not a real quote, but close.) I make the stupid mistake of asking McKenna, in the small talk of our first meeting, whether she and her partner have children. “Oh god, no! Please,” she says, rolling her eyes.

  To say she’s a micromanager would be like saying Jack the Ripper enjoyed a little light shredding. She rewrites my copy, makes it worse, then blames me when the client is unhappy. Her communication set point is somewhere between passive aggressive and Marquis de Sade. During a staff meeting, when it’s my turn to report on the status of my various projects, and I announce I’ve just had a meeting with our company’s CEO about doing more speechwriting and op-ed work, she says, “And your point is…?” One day, when the public undermining starts to feel untenable, I pull her aside and say, “I want to figure out how we could work better together. Are there constructive criticisms you could offer that might help ease the course of our interactions?”

  “We’re just different, you and I,” she says. “Have you ever taken a Myers–Briggs?”

  When I tell her I have not, she plans a mandatory testing day for our entire team. She gets ISTJ—introvert, sensing, thinking, judging—which is the exact opposite of my results, ENFP—extrovert, intuitive, feeling, perceiving.

  But this test is absurd, I think. It asks binary questions requiring binary answers, which I could have answered either way, depending upon mood and circumstance. No one is all extrovert or all introvert, but the test leaves no room for grays. You’re either one or the other, black or white, and then you get sorted by the MBTI sorting hat into sixteen categories, based on your results. Our test coordinator actually had us stand in different corners of the room, depending on our labels, with the mushy loud extroverts at one end of the wall and the buttoned up quiet introverts at the other. At one point, I catch McKenna’s eyes from across the hypotenuse. She half smiles and shrugs: an “I told you so” made visible.

  Psychologist Robert Hogan, in his book Personality and the Fate of Organizations, calls Myers–Briggs nothing more than “an elaborate Chinese fortune cookie,” which leaves academics, who actually study such things using the data analytical tools of science, “baffled and annoyed by [its] astonishing popularity.” Annie Murphy Paul, in her book The Cult of Personality Testing, writes, “As many as three-quarters of test takers achieve a different personality type when tested again, and the sixteen distinctive types described by the Myers–Briggs have no scientific basis whatsoever.”

  “See?” McKenna says, after the test is over. “We’re just different. No hard feelings.”

  One morning, I get a call from my son’s principal, saying there’s been an accident on the school playground. Two boys have pushed my nine-year-old’s face into a metal pole, which has knocked out his adult front tooth, and he’s now bleeding so profusely that the principal has decided to rush him in her arms to the emergency dentist in Inwood herself, is that okay? I tell her yes, yes, please, go! My office is an hour away. I’ll get there as fast as I can. On my sprint out, I stop at McKenna’s desk to say I’m so sorry, I know today i
s an important meeting with a client, but I have to run.

  She says, “Do you have a sitter who can deal with that?”

  I cock my head. Take a deep breath. I need time, I know, to formulate a non-emotional response instead of an angry one. “Um, no,” I finally say. “I mean, I do have a sitter, but she doesn’t show up until 3, when he gets out of school. And this is not something I would actually leave in the hands of a sitter anyway, even if she were available. Plus she’s even farther downtown from my son than I am right now. I’m really sorry. I have to go.”

  McKenna bites her lips, as if literally keeping herself from saying something she’ll regret, raises her eyebrows, and crosses her arms over her chest. “Of course. You do what’s best for you.”

  What’s best for me? It’s all I can do not to scream, Fuck you! My son is bleeding on the fucking playground! Minus his front tooth! This shouldn’t even be a discussion! Instead I say, “Thanks for understanding, McKenna. I really appreciate it,” and run out the door.

  What am I missing by leaving the office? A meeting both McKenna and Sharky will be attending anyway with a giant pharmaceutical company to discuss creating a glossy magazine for the launch of their new eye drops to combat dry eye disease. This is what printing presses now do to stay solvent since the collapse of the magazine industry: They work with deep-pocketed corporations to create what looks like high-art, oversized, Interview-style magazines but are instead guerilla marketing tools with prosaic photography and anodyne articles on company-sanctioned themes: Technology! Innovation! Creativity! Wellness! Or in this case, Visionaries! (Get it? Eye drops/vision?) These magazines are then handed out at conferences and placed in hotel lobbies where conference-goers gather, in order to elevate the company above their competition and to make a statement about who they are: Look at us, aren’t we cool?