The oligarch, surely one of the wealthiest—and luckiest—people alive on the planet, was grumbling to my husband about the increase (as he preposterously saw it) of homeless people in the neighborhood.
“But you just have to wonder,” Joe said, “about the circumstances in their lives that led them to where they are.”
The oligarch’s eyes narrowed into little black slits. He was a simple, simple man, the oligarch (oligarchs, you find, often are), not much given to introspection.
“I’ve never thought about them as ‘people’ before,” he said. “I’ve always thought of them as cockroaches.”
I’ve come to understand the most dangerous individuals are always the ones who are completely devoid of issues of the self—they’re the ones who have never had any reason to examine themselves or their own subjectivity. David’s commencement speech “This Is Water” is a rather modest call to live the examined life: try to control your biases about people and try to be lenient when interpreting someone else’s behavior. It’s a fine speech (and is another entry in David’s note-to-self cycle), but it’s come to be regarded as his Walden, albeit an aphoristic, self-help-y version. It is of interest that the speech has resonated as profoundly as it has with people. Have we actually really not given any thought at all to what it might be like to be someone else? And what does this say about the total absence of empathy in our culture?
A MAN SAID TO ME, “I’VE ALWAYS WONDERED WHY IT IS THAT YOUR sisters aren’t better writers.”
A man asked me, when discussing the work of a female author, “Is she a ‘big’ girl?”
A man asked, “Why is there always a scene in every women’s novel with a female character making snow angels?”
A man asked me why it was that women writers seemed to be capable of only two things: sensation on one hand or attitudinizing on the other.
A man told me that he didn’t believe I’d read enough books to be able to do my job effectively.
A man told me that only someone with an M.F.A. should have my job. (The real answer: someone with an M.F.A. definitely should not have had my job.)
A man, someone probably actually lower on the status totem pole at Esquire than I, took a story I had acquired and had already edited—and did his own (very poor) edits to it, returning it to me as if he were some sort of conquering hero.
A man said that no one would take me seriously until I won a National Magazine Award for Fiction.
A man told me that he couldn’t believe the literary editor of Esquire had never read anything by Anna Akhmatova.
A man seemed to believe that he needed to routinely explain my “mission” with regard to the literary section of the magazine: “The stories can’t be perfunctory,” he’d say. This was his trademark word: “perfunctory.” Naturally, my private code name for this guy became Perfunctory Man. And was he ever. As Simone de Beauvoir put it: “The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.” (And, indeed, I was one happy individual when Perfunctory Man was finally fired.)
A man—OK, men were Hobbesianly snaking around, trying to get in their own short-story submissions. There were always men after my job, and I would come to feel as if I were constantly whipping a lit torch around to protect my territory. But had these men ever actually read any of the fiction published in the magazine? Unclear.
A man referred to a woman who worked at the company as a cunt.
A man said to me, “I wish my groupies were of a higher caliber.” Me: “You have groupies?”
A man told me that I should “fucking spit” on a notoriously demanding female media professional.
A man brought a coffee-table book of high-end pornographic art to me at a work lunch.
A man said, at another work lunch, “You’re not so young anymore, you know.” The man was my father’s age. My age: twenty-eight.
A man asked, at the end of a professional drinks appointment, if he could kiss me.
A man asked me, after he’d moved my hand close to his crotch at another professional drinks appointment, if something he’d done had made me seem so close to crying.
A man—one of the most celebrated writers in the country—sexually assaulted me. After a professional drinks appointment, when we were standing together on a sidewalk waiting for a light to change, he put his hands down my pants.
(After that, I pretty much stopped doing professional drinks appointments with men.)
A man rated, in terms of purported attractiveness, the women—the brilliant and judicious women—who read our unsolicited short-story manuscripts.
A man said that “everyone wondered” whom I had slept with to get my job.
It would go like this: I’d find myself at an event, standing or sitting next to some man, illustrious in this or that sphere; another man, unknown to me, and assuming an air of importance, would come up to the first man. I would note how often the second man would look through me, around me, over me, to something much more important. People are ghosts until you actually have to start taking them seriously.
My view: these men were, as Kate Millett wrote of Mailer in her masterwork Sexual Politics, “prisoner[s] of the virility cult,” and their chest-thumping machismo was, more or less, a pose—even if they didn’t know it. It’s always hard to gauge how self-aware other people are, but the overall sense usually seems to be: not very. We are unknown to ourselves. (Recall, in an extreme but useful example, that Mussolini wanted his epitaph to read: “Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the earth.”) So I attempted to take a nuanced view, even when the actions of the men were abhorrent. I tried to approach the behavior with a spirit of irony, leniency, and good humor . . . when good humor was musterable.
The truth: my career had been built around protecting male egos. This was the world I lived in. This was the world I knew, and I never believed this world could, or would, change. It seemed incomprehensible that the system could ever collapse. So I started trying out a new approach. I would change myself. I would become unattackable. I’d train myself not to let other people’s—men’s—opinions of me penetrate. I’d become a fortress to be approached, a Soviet tank of the spirit.
This was a strategy. This was a deeply antisocial strategy, in fact, and philosophically in direct conflict with the central precept of my job. When you’re trying to cultivate appreciation, you have to maintain an open heart.
HAROLD HAYES ONCE SAID THAT NOT ONLY WAS HE APOLITICAL, HE WAS apersonal. His tactic: to keep his distance from his writers. And the English book editor Diana Athill wrote in her classic publishing memoir, Stet, “Very rarely someone from my work moved over into my private life, but generally office and home were far apart.” All of this now made a sort of sense to me. I came to understand that an overly close editor-writer relationship presented all sorts of risks—the editor did not want her personal feelings about the writer to impact her aesthetic and literary judgment on a piece, for example. (And then things could get rather awkward when an editor rejected something a writer friend had submitted. And I had a hard enough time—emotionally, I mean—rejecting submissions anyway.) Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to keep your distance and to become even more of a fortress than you already were.
“WHAT IS THIS?” DAVID WAS ASKING. “THE FUCKING RULES?”
He had been annoyed that I hadn’t come out to visit him—or maybe he was just performing annoyance?—and now it was too late. The questions: How real was anything ever with him? What was a dream, and what was reality? What was true, and what was fake?
“‘Oh, I’ll just let “my man” take care of everything.’ Why are you so passive?” he asked.
Did I actually believe that David was “my man”? I wanted to, but I suppose I couldn’t let myself. I wasn’t sure that was the way I worked. I wasn’t sure that was the way love worked. No one owns anyone. Love isn’t proprietary.
But more to the point: David was used to being fought for. Everyone fought for him, fought
over him. This was not an experience we’d shared.
“David,” I said in a small, sad voice, “I just think you’re the most.”
“Horseshit,” he said. “You think I’m the second most. You think I’m the third most. You don’t even like me.”
I felt it in my throat—I always feel grief first in my throat.
He said, “I have always been extremely clear about this: I cannot move to New York. Living there would eat me alive. And I find it difficult to imagine that you would want to come out here and be my nurse. I find this very hard to imagine.”
Drone was getting sicker—that was a part of it—and I had not provided what David needed. I was good at my job and good at dealing with words on the page, but it was possible that I was otherwise a mess. I had little mastery over my emotions or my tongue, and I didn’t yet understand that the most important thing in the adult world is to keep your cool, keep your mouth shut, stay in your own lane, and state an opinion only when you know which side is winning. I still didn’t understand that most accepted “intelligence” is merely the stock intelligence of popular opinion. I still ate cookies and sliced deli watermelon for dinner. I had too many credit cards. I could barely take care of myself. I was certainly no caregiver, not then, and David needed—David demanded—a caregiver. But I loved him, and that was what I should want, to help him and to take care of him. Maybe I didn’t understand what love was. I was so confused.
But what if I ever needed him? Would he ever take care of me?
I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
“And what do you expect?” David asked. “Practically, how would this work? That we’d have really intense sex a few times a year? I’ve seen how long-distance relationships destroy people. Do you understand?”
“I can come out to Bloomington,” I said.
“Too late,” he said. “Too late, Adrienne. I’ve met someone.”
My stomach churned.
“I feel as if I’ve been betraying you,” he said.
“That’s because you are,” I said.
“But at least it’s not some student. We’re the same age!”
“Wow, congratulations!” I said. “Progress.”
He told me about the woman’s job and background. He said she was not very bright (but, to be fair, I’m certain he said that about me, too) and had never read a book in her life. My response was classist, petty, obnoxious. (Remember that our behavior is rarely equal to our dream of ourselves.)
“Not literary,” I said. “This person is totally inappropriate and you know it.”
“Wow,” he said. He gave a little cough. “That was mean.”
“You are a child,” I said.
But I was a child, too. We were both so very childish and would become even more so. We weren’t through with being children yet.
“Could you do me a favor?” he said. His voice had dropped an octave. “Could you destroy the manuscript of Brief Interviews? Just throw it away right now. I want to hear it go into the wastebasket.”
“You are such a bastard, you know that? Why have you even been bothering me all this time?”
“Oh, Adrienne,” David said, a catch in his voice. “Don’t you understand what we have?” Was this the only kind of intimacy we could have—intimacy at a distance? “You don’t understand. You have never understood what we have. It’s higher than that.”
This was precious—really just so precious—he was breaking up with me because I didn’t understand how important our relationship was. That was good stuff.
“Men just don’t like complicated women,” I said. (I always hoped he forgot this little comment.) “And it’s fine. I understand this now. It’s taken me a while to figure it out, but thank you for finally being the one to explain it to me: it’s just the way it is.”
“Some men don’t like complicated women,” he said quietly. “I do.”
“Yes,” I said. “Obviously. Of course. I’m hanging up on you now.”
“OK, well then fuck you, Adrienne,” David said.
He was crying now. So was I.
When you get thrown back into who you are, you’d better have something there.
In Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel The Long View, a character has the following devastating insight: “there were only two kinds of people—those who live different lives with the same partners, and those who live the same life with different partners.” David, I now understood, with a terrible spasm of recognition, was one of the latter. And I was, and would ever be, I knew, the former.
God, I hated David then. Just loathed him. It had been a mistake, I decided, to think that anything with him had been real—it had been fake intimacy, a fake relationship, and everything I had believed about him or about “us” (whatever that even meant) had been completely self-generated. He was precisely as manipulative as he’d threatened. He’d warned that every woman got thrown onto the pile sooner or later. Should have listened. A woman is a woman is a woman is a woman is a woman, as Gertrude Stein said, or ought to have.
Several days later, David called me at work. He was crying. His dog, his beautiful stray, Drone, had died.
“I loved him with a purity with which I’ve never loved anyone or anything else,” he said.
And I was crying, too, and we were two unhappy people crying together, separated by a distance of nine hundred miles.
ALTHOUGH ONLY THE NOVELIST IS PERMITTED TO ASCRIBE MOTIVATION, I believe it’s fair to say that Dave Eggers was feeling restless at Esquire. He sold his memoir proposal and left the magazine to write the book. At one point when he was working on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (“Terrible title,” I said, “you’ll be destroyed”; though it was better than the title runner-up, A Heartbreaking Work of Stunning Genius), he made the remark to me that he’d always thought he’d be able to fit the entire world into a book and that in a book he’d finally be able to say everything he’d always wanted to say. But he now understood that a single book wasn’t much room at all.
I went with him to help hand-sell the inaugural print issue of McSweeney’s: we visited a few independent bookstores downtown (remember when there were lots of independent bookstores downtown?) and, interestingly, a map store. I made one solo trip, to the late, great St. Mark’s Bookshop, and tried to recite Dave’s sales pitch to the staff at the counter, but I ended up babbling something about these crazy kids today and this hot, new, and super-creative literary journal.
“Just leave the copy with me,” the guy instructed. He told me to check in with him the following week.
Gamely, a week later, I made my return visit.
Number of copies of the first issue of McSweeney’s I was able to convince St. Mark’s Bookshop to take: zero.
On a warm early-fall afternoon, Dave and I sat across from each other on benches in a playground on Mercer Street and read excerpts from the Starr Report in the New York Times. We were both repelled by the existence of the “report” (drafted, as we now know, by a team of bad elves that included everyone’s favorite future Supreme Court justice Brett M. Kavanaugh), and we were both horrified by smarmy Bill Clinton’s grossly exploitative sexual relationship with a young woman our own age. Dave was the only other Monica defender I knew then, and I mean the only one.
“This is pure porn,” said Dave, glancing up from the paper. “But there’s one good thing about it and I’m going to tell you what it is. Are you ready?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Now every president is going to have to have a perfect moral record.”
ALL I’VE EVER REALLY WANTED TO DO WAS TO DISAPPEAR INTO SOME room with great wallpaper (de Gournay if possible), read my little book, listen to Mozart, and be left alone. I’m a quiet, placid, harmony-loving person, and I was unprepared to discover that I had become, for a time, and for reasons of romantic and professional anxiety and control (mostly control), a D. F. Wallace irritation object.
He seemed to want to remind me how irrelevant I was to him but also to remind
me that he still had power over me. Although he had a new girlfriend, we were as emotionally enmeshed as ever. David, of course, was interested in simultaneity, which he explicated in his art and in his life, and everything was always a two-level game with him; there was always a double movement—you had to understand that he was never in one place or the other, and neither were you.
During a call after he returned home from a vacation to the Caribbean with her (the details of which, I recollect with a shudder, I actually had to hear all about), he said, “I’ve been making fun of you to a bunch of people.” I certainly did not want to know what he’d said about me, and I tried to convince myself not to worry too much about it—anyone who knew David surely understood that he was not exactly the most reliable character witness when it came to women. And I’d been trying to train myself not to care about what people thought of me anyway. A Soviet tank of the spirit, a Soviet tank.
When his girlfriend was preparing to move in with him, he asked me, “Can you give me one reason why this shouldn’t happen?” I offered no reply. In a letter he wrote that he’d been feeling “stupefied and irritable as hell—only one of which is a disadvantage when it comes to trying to Live With Somebody.” There was a call during which he uttered the astounding sentence “You may know more words than she does, but she’s better at cleaning my underwear.” He said he wasn’t getting any work done because he was watching TV all the time (the woman brought her giant TV with her). He was in a persistent bad mood, he said. He was unhappy, he said.
Good, I thought. Enjoy your unhappiness.
I started dating a man, also a writer, whom David happened to know. When he learned of my involvement with the other guy, his response was “You slimehead.” And then he hung up on me. He called right back, said, “You manipulative slimehead” (pinching the loaf, as it were), and hung up again. Another time, when I was in mid-answer of some inoffensive question he’d asked about the other guy, he said, as pitiless as an executioner, “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
In the Land of Men Page 25