The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “That sounds great,” said Greer, though she couldn’t imagine what any of this really meant except in some blurry way that involved a line of strong women standing under a rain shower of funding. She wanted to be in that line. Despite often being so quiet and uneasy, she wanted to seem like an appropriate and inevitable choice: Greer Kadetsky, the young woman with the hot face, who works as fiercely as that hot face would suggest.

  I will work so fucking hard for you, Faith Frank, she wished she could say.

  “We’ve already started doing this. I recently got Emmett to release funds to an organization focused on improving the health and well-being of women of color living in the rural South. By the way, we’re calling ourselves Loci,” said Faith.

  “Excuse me?” said Greer.

  “I know. I had the same reaction. But it grows on you. Loci, as in the plural of locus. Because there are so many issues to focus on, concerning women, and so many places to put our energy. It’s not the greatest name in the world, but we reached the deadline and didn’t have anything better. People see the word on the page, spelled L-O-C-I, and they think: Oh God, how am I supposed to pronounce this? Is it Lo-kee? Lo-kye? Lo-sigh? The dictionary gives you all three options. Me, I’m firmly in the sigh camp.”

  “Then so am I!” said Greer.

  “Emmett wants me to complete my team very quickly. I’ve already brought several people in, and they’ve started working. He rented this enormous space for us here. God, it’s so different from what I’m used to. You saw the Bloomer office. I’m used to places where three people share a desk, and the elevator always breaks. That’s what sisterhood means to me. But now we’ve hit the big time. ShraderCapital wants us close by, and they’re right upstairs on twenty-seven.” She glanced upward in illustration, then laced her hands and looked directly at Greer. “So what do you think?” she asked.

  “I think it sounds amazing.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? Does it fit into your master plan?” Faith asked.

  “Not sure I have one.”

  “Really? I thought everyone did at your age. Mine was to get as far away from my parents as I could.”

  Greer became self-conscious. “I’d like to work here. That’s my plan. And at night I’d like to do some writing. Maybe I could even become a writer someday, but for now I want a job that will kind of put me in the world, I guess, and help me . . . make meaning. That’s what you said when I met you. Anyway, I think this job could be that.”

  Faith nodded seriously. “Okay. I’ll be blunt with you, Greer. I’m not interviewing you because of your brilliant intellect. I know you’re smart—your grades are great, and frankly you’re a good, instinctive writer, and I think you’ll have some real luck with that. But you’re, what, twenty-two? When I was twenty-two I knew nothing about anything, and I went skipping off into the world.”

  “To be a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas,” Greer said, remembering.

  “Yes, exactly. No, I’m interviewing you primarily because I think you’re promising. And hey, you also brought me a frying pan today, which was witty. So if you’re willing, I’d like to bring you on board.”

  “Oh, Faith, thank you,” Greer said, flushing. “I’m definitely willing.”

  “The job will of course be entry-level. Much of it will probably feel boring and repetitive.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “No, it’s true, hear me out. You’ll be one of our bookers. Eventually you’ll be much more involved with a variety of things here. It’s up to you how quickly that happens.”

  Greer could barely stay seated as Faith described the specifics of the job to her. She wanted to crouch down on the floor like a weight lifter and raise the long white length of sofa into the air with Faith Frank still on it, just to show her that she could.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two weeks later, Zee helped Greer move into a studio apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. She could never have lived in such a place by herself if Emmett Shrader hadn’t been unusually generous with all salaries at Loci. The apartment was a simple, grimy box in a small building, and it needed a deep clean that neither Greer nor Zee was willing to give it, but it also possessed original moldings and pressed tin ceilings, and the lease was hers. Through friends Greer had found a bed, which had been placed in one part of the L-shaped studio; she also bought a compact little sofa, lightly used, that could open into a place to sleep if a friend stayed over, and this she wedged tightly into a corner across the room. The walls held only a few generic prints, for now. There was a flower-slash-vagina painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. “Not the original, in case you were wondering,” she’d said to Cory when she gave him a Skype home tour, carrying her laptop around the room.

  While Zee assembled an IKEA chair for her, Greer continued the tour for Cory outside alone with her phone, providing audio narration, describing the farmer’s market within walking distance, and Grand Army Plaza, and the park, and the Brooklyn Public Library with its big gold doors. Nearby, she said, hulked the Brooklyn Museum and also the Botanic Garden, and along Washington and Franklin were Caribbean beef patty emporiums—“Not that I will ever set foot in them, but you will, soon enough”—and check-cashing stores and taxi dispatchers.

  Late that first afternoon, with the place unpacked and set up enough to be functional, Greer and Zee sat on the front stoop. “I love your street,” Zee kept saying as it got chilly out there.

  “Me too,” Greer said. “But it feels so strange.” She looked at Zee. “You okay up there in Scarsdale? Not too lonely?”

  “I’ll manage. One nice thing is the refrigerator with the ice maker. And the heated toilet seats and all that.”

  “Come stay with me as much as you want,” said Greer. “Really. You can just show up. I’ll give you a key.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I really appreciate everything,” Greer said. “Today would’ve been so much harder. Just getting set up. I mean, you are the best, Zee. You always are. I just want to say that.” She felt the potential for tears now, with a mixed cause. Friendship; fear.

  “It’s nothing,” said Zee. They sat together a little longer, neither of them wanting to end the day. “Well, I should catch Metro-North back,” Zee finally said. “Judge Wendy says she’s making a special lasagna tonight, and my presence at the table is requested. I’m sure you want to be alone here anyway.”

  Greer wanted to say, Don’t leave yet. She hadn’t meant to live alone. She couldn’t stop thinking that Cory was supposed to be there, the two of them setting up house in a sweet early-twenties way that was so hopeful. Zee took off, and later that night, lonely but also excited, Greer brought in a boxed and bagged dinner from a place several blocks away called Yum Cottage Thai. This will be my neighborhood place, she thought, and then she realized: I have a neighborhood place. Greer stood over the small kitchen sink eating vegetable pad thai with efficient, feral automaticity. She smacked her lips loudly, just because she was alone and could, and wiped orange oil and a trace of peanut dust from her face with the side of her arm.

  Later, when she was getting ready for bed, thumps and clicks emanated from the apartment upstairs, and a sound of something being dragged. She had no idea what any of those sounds were, but she imagined that if Cory lived with her they would be discussing it right now. “It’s like they’re bowling up there,” she would say to him, and together in bed they would fashion a scenario that involved the upstairs neighbors and their in-home bowling alley. “What’s the name of their league?” she would ask him. Cory would come up with something quickly, like, “The Gentrifickettes.” And then, of course, Greer and Cory would make their own various private sounds.

  Work would start in three days. When she’d first gotten the job at Loci, he’d asked her, “Did you look into everything about ShraderCapital, and Shrader himself?”

  “To a certain extent,” she said.
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  “You should read up. It’s what anyone would do.”

  She saw that a great deal had been published about Emmett Shrader; some of it focused on morally problematic companies he’d been involved with, and some of it focused on his philanthropy. Because Greer knew nothing about venture capital—“VC,” people sometimes called it—or what the business dealings of a billionaire might be like, she couldn’t make too much sense of it except to understand that he had a mixed record, which didn’t seem unusual. But Faith liked Shrader and had described him as “an old friend,” and that was obviously significant.

  On the night before Greer’s job was to begin, Zee met her for a drink in Brooklyn. She too had work in the morning, having begun a paralegal job at the law firm of Schenck, DeVillers. They sat on unsteady stools drinking beers and crunching wasabi peas in the low, honeyed light. “So it’s all starting for you,” said Zee. “Remember this moment. Take a snapshot of it in your brain.”

  “What moment is that?”

  “The moment before it all begins. The moment before you start, you know, your life.”

  “I don’t know if it’ll be my life. Maybe I won’t even be good at it.”

  “You’ll learn to be good. You’re good at a lot of things, Greer. Writing. Reading literature. Love.”

  “That is a weird skill set to mention.”

  “You are amazingly competent,” said Zee. “You got hired by Faith fucking Frank’s foundation. A peck of pickled peppers. I bow down before you.”

  “And I bow down before you,” said Greer. “You got me to Faith Frank. You made me go to that lecture. I probably would’ve stayed in my dorm room with my note cards. And then none of this would be happening.” She paused. “You get me to do a lot. Or at least to think about things differently.”

  “Awww.”

  “Anyway, we have Ryland College to thank for our friendship. We will leave them all our money.”

  “They aren’t getting a cent,” Zee said. “When I see the alumni magazine I’m like, really? Why would I want to read this? Stupidy Stupid, class of ’81, now works in strategic planning.”

  “Along with his wife, Sally Stupid,” said Greer.

  “But they could write about you in the class notes,” Zee said. “Greer Kadetsky, class of 2010, now works for Faith Frank.”

  “That does sound good,” said Greer. Then, suddenly realizing the conversation was only about her, she said, “Things will fall into place for you too, Zee. I’m sure they will.”

  “Listen,” Zee said, more quietly now. “I have something.”

  She reached into her jacket pocket, and Greer imagined that she was going to take out a small, sentimental gift, beautifully wrapped. Inside would be some sort of amulet that Greer could carry or wear around her neck as she began her first real job.

  But Zee had no gift box in her hand, no charm on a chain. Instead, she had an envelope. Was it an emotional letter about how much their friendship meant to her? That would be very touching. Women were allowed to tell each other what they felt without holding back. Women could now say, “I love you,” without any hesitation or discomfort or a sense that there were sexual overtones between them, even if one of them was gay.

  “Oh,” said Greer, reaching out to take it. “Thank you, Zee.”

  “It’s for Faith, actually.”

  Now the letter was an uncertain object, something Greer wasn’t sure she wanted. It was as if she’d been tricked, cleverly served a summons without knowing it. “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” said Zee, “last night in my bedroom in my parents’ house, I stayed up really late and made one of those lists in my head that you’re supposed to make so that you know what you should do with your life.”

  “That’s what this is? A list?”

  “No, no, wait. Anyway, for this list, first you’re supposed to think of the things you definitely don’t want your life to include. And I realized how much I don’t want to be a paralegal—it doesn’t excite me—and I know how much I don’t want to be a lawyer, at least not the corporate kind. I see these young associates, the ones who work really late and do corporate law, and they’re on call like doctors, except their work isn’t in the service of humanity, unless it’s the pro bono stuff they’re allowed to do once in a while. I mean, they’re like the opposite of Doctors Without Borders. Lawyers Without Souls, I think of them. But the firm gives them a great salary, and in the beginning, to excite them and kind of confuse them, they take them out to baseball games and dinner, and they give them tickets to see Cirque du Soleil—which in my opinion is a punishment, not a gift—all those people in tights, with diamond shapes painted on their faces. Is there anything worse than a harlequin? But it all takes too much away from you, and doesn’t give you fortification. Or a good feeling. Or a sense that you’re actually doing something decent during your two seconds on earth. And you know what? I don’t want it.”

  “So what do you want instead?”

  “Well, actually, I’d love to work for Faith Frank’s foundation too,” Zee said gently. “If she’ll hire me.”

  Greer couldn’t think of what to say, but she was shocked.

  Zee traced her finger in worried little swirls on the bar. “I know you’re surprised that I’m suddenly saying this. Because I’ve never said it before. My parents have really pushed me to do something that could be a career. But what you’re doing—it actually could be a career. And I thought maybe I’d be an asset to Faith. I’ve been an activist, sort of. I always thought that in my fantasy I would work somewhere young and radical. This isn’t that. But Faith has been this big figure in the feminist movement, and I think I could learn a lot from her. Anyway, it was just a thought.”

  “I see,” said Greer blandly.

  “I want to be able to come in and do something real, wherever I work. Something that I’m really energized about.” Zee’s voice was getting a little thin and choked. “My parents love being judges. They wake up in the morning and they’re like, ‘Rah rah, the sun is shining, let’s go to our chambers, darling.’ And look how excited you are about starting your job. I want that feeling too,” said Zee. “I figure there are a lot of things to do at your foundation, and my parents would approve, because it would actually be a normal job with a paycheck. I could just run around and do whatever Faith Frank needed. I could mill her tea leaves or something; isn’t that a thing? And maybe every once in a while she would impart some amazing piece of older-woman wisdom, and tell us stories from the past, and I’d happen to be in the room and get to hear it.

  “And also, wouldn’t it be a blast if you and I worked at the same place? Because you know how friends drift apart after college. Their lives become so different, and they don’t have a lot to talk about anymore. We could keep that from happening to us.”

  Greer took a sip of beer and tried to keep her voice light and unalarmed as she said, “So what did you write in the letter?”

  “Oh, you know, I explained to her who I am and why I want to be part of what she’s doing. I did the best I could. I warned her of my minimal writing skills. I reminded her that she met me the same night she met you. In the ladies’ room at our college. And then I gave her the Zee Eisenstat saga. The abridged version, don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” Greer said. The feeling of the night had shifted sharply, and Zee apparently didn’t even understand why. She was just sitting there in her usual, steady Zee way, looking at Greer, waiting for encouragement. Instead, Greer wanted Zee’s letter to disappear, which of course it wouldn’t, and she knew she would dutifully give it to Faith. Greer toyed with it now and leaned it against her beer bottle. The envelope was opaque, so she couldn’t see what Zee had written. “She’s your closest friend, Greer,” Faith would say after she’d read it. “What do you think, should I bring her aboard?” And Greer would say, “Absolutely.”

  The letter, slanted agains
t brown glass, seemed to emit its own light. Greer lifted her bottle, and the letter dropped onto the surface of the bar as if it had been felled.

  “So,” Zee said, “what time do you have to be at work tomorrow?”

  FIVE

  The light fixtures at the Loci Foundation had been outfitted with special energy-saving coils that were still in beta, and were not quite bright enough for the tasks at hand, causing everyone who worked there to strain a little too hard, as though squinting over a medieval manuscript. Greer didn’t mind. The pale, nearly celery-colored light over her cubicle up on the twenty-sixth floor burned with its low, unusual hue while she stayed extravagantly and almost piously late, though it took her too long to realize that her eagerness and effort might seem a little extreme. She worked with enthusiasm, but almost immediately she figured out the parameters of the job, and she understood that what she would be doing at Loci wasn’t going to be intensely interesting. Faith had warned her of this during the interview, but it had seemed impossible. And the work wasn’t boring, exactly—that was too harsh a description—because Greer was still in love with the idea of work. The term “the work world” seemed accurate, the office environment like its own planet made up of conference rooms and spring water dispensers and paper recycling bins. But the tasks of this job were mild, repetitive, and seemed removed from the large, grand venture of helping women. She could easily have been working in corporate party-planning, she thought at some point late in her first morning there.

  At her desk Greer was either on the phone or on the computer, hunting down yeses or maybes from potential speakers or their assistants or reps, and setting up travel plans, learning the abbreviations for the world’s airports, some of which made no sense. Why was Newark EWR instead of, say, NWR, or even NWK? And why did Rome have to be the unmemorable FCO? Cory’s brother, Alby, would probably know; this was the sort of information he liked to gather.