The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Ah. My occasional visitor,” said Faith.

  The deer had one leg tipped up as though it had been making its way across the grass when suddenly it became lost in thought, maybe thinking about berries, or leaves, or about the curious figures of the older woman and the younger one who stood framed inside a small window. Faith moved slightly, and the deer startled, then dashed away.

  * * *

  • • •

  A little later, after Greer had recovered and was being treated by everyone as if she were a minor heroine, the grill was lit and the question of the steaks came up again. “I assume that no one has a problem with meat?” Faith said. “If you do, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  “Your piece of tempeh, you mean,” said Iffat.

  Greer was about to mention her vegetarianism, which everyone else knew anyway, after all those times when they’d ordered lunch, but none of them looked expectantly toward her now. Apparently people never really paid as much attention to you as you thought they did. Having so recently had that moment of intimacy with Faith at the sink, she thought about Faith’s apparently mildly disappointing son, and somehow she felt sure that turning down Faith’s meat would also be a disappointment to Faith. Greer fervently did not want to disappoint her, so she didn’t say anything.

  “All right,” said Faith. “Even though it’s a little brisk out there, I’m still up for firing up the grill. Everyone likes it rare, I hope?”

  “Yes!” came the chorus, including Greer, who surprised herself.

  Through the window Greer saw Ben and Marcella mime a quick, flirty sword fight with grill implements. Tonight probably they would share a bed, and maybe their lovemaking would even be heard through the walls, to everyone’s general embarrassment and awe. The grill smoked and sputtered and began to give off the smell of meals once cooked and now half-conjured.

  At the table, a steak was speared up by a long fork and dropped with a thud onto Greer’s plate by Faith herself. “Voilà,” said Faith. “These came out well, I think. Hope they’re not too bloody.”

  “Bloody good,” said Tad.

  Greer glanced with a fixed smile at the enormous slab of steak, which was already pooling in blood, as if it were the head of a person who’d just jumped off a roof. Faith deposited a lump of herb butter on top of Greer’s steak, and it immediately spread its arterial death over the stingray-sized surface.

  “Dig in, Greer, even with your war injury,” said Faith.

  “Yes, my stump,” said Greer.

  “And please, none of you wait for me.” Faith went to tend to the next person.

  Greer picked up the fork with her injured hand and clumsily held it; she sat with fork and knife at the ready, wondering how she could possibly eat this steak. It was a dark reddish blue inside, unnatural, even perverse. Cool, she had heard that was called.

  All around her, people were eating and exclaiming. “Oh my God,” Marcella moaned quietly, and Greer imagined her in bed with Ben. “This is amazing, Faith.”

  “Best fucking steak I’ve ever had,” said Tad.

  “You know, Faith, if the foundation doesn’t work out,” said Helen, “you could open a restaurant and call it Faith Frank’s Feminist Steakhouse. Every steak would come with roast potatoes, creamed spinach, and the promise of equality.”

  Greer was the only one who hadn’t praised Faith’s meat; she soon became self-conscious about her silence and felt she had to contribute something. “And every steak at the feminist steakhouse also comes with access to the salad bar!” she added. Faith, recognizing this was meant to be funny, smiled at her.

  Greer got busy cutting a perfect cube and then spearing it. Glancing at it in the light, she was reminded of one of those drawings of a cross-section of a piece of human tissue. To eat meat when you hated it and when you hadn’t eaten it for four years was an aberration, nearly a form of cannibalism. But also, she told herself, it was an act of love. In eating this, she was being someone Faith would want to continue to confide in and listen to and rely on; someone she would want to cook meat for. Greer deposited the piece onto her tongue, hoping it would somehow dissolve there like a sugar cube, but finding instead that it obstinately retained its shape, its integrity, not ceding any muscle or fat. The inside of her mouth was like a slaughterhouse in miniature, with a hint of cedar closet. It was disgusting.

  Do not be sick, she thought sternly. Do not be sick.

  Greer tried to reframe the idea of eating meat; was it really all that different from, say, what took place in sex? In the beginning with Cory, Greer had been both excited and afraid. But soon she was less afraid. Other people, she learned, were not so bad. Cory was just another person, a soul inside a long membrane. He was an animal she deeply loved. Just as this, now, this cubic inch of lost and mournful cow, wasn’t so bad either.

  Goodbye, cow, she thought, picturing the distant green blur of a meadow. I hope your short life was at least sweet. She swallowed hard and forced herself not to cough it up. The steak went down and stayed down.

  “Yum,” Greer said.

  * * *

  • • •

  On the train platform on Sunday morning, waiting for the 10:04 to take them back to the city and the final days before the first summit, everyone turned on their cell phones again and watched them stutter into service. The phones lit up, the apples popped in, and the Loci team peered with great interest at what they had missed in their absence. They turned away from one another and stalked the platform, listening to voicemails and reading messages.

  Greer saw with confusion that she’d received thirty-four voicemails and eighteen texts since she’d arrived at Faith Frank’s house. It made no sense, but there it was, an extravagant cascade of urgency, almost all of it coming from Manila.

  SIX

  The Ninoy Aquino International Airport at sunrise had an impossibly long line outside the entrance, leading up to the metal detectors through which every person had to pass, not just those who were flying today. Cory Pinto, crying for the past couple of hours in spasmodic waves, shuffled in along with everyone else, his eyes burned into little embers. He was trying to keep it together, as people said, but it wasn’t working very well.

  Once he was through the detectors, a voice on a loudspeaker whispered something about flight 102, and Cory knew he had to move fast. He pushed through the people standing in bunches ahead of him, saying to them, “Excuse me! Makikiraan po!” but nobody moved. People stood seven or twelve deep, clutching luggage or backpacks, or in some cases a loose congregation of boxes bound with tape.

  Cory had no luggage; he’d forgotten to bring anything. All rational planning had fled from him after the news arrived in the middle of the night. He’d gotten the call, and then he’d stood in the living room of his apartment and said to McBride, his roommate, “I have to go.”

  McBride, whom he had known slightly at Princeton, though they were in different social groups and would never have been friends, looked up from where he’d been half conked out on the leather sofa with its rounded arms and cold slippery surface, replaying old missions of Red Dead Redemption on the Xbox that he’d had shipped there from his parents’ house when he’d first been hired by Armitage & Rist.

  “What?” McBride said. “It’s three in the fucking morning. Where you gonna go, man?” Music came from his butt-ugly speakers, which always reminded Cory of a housefly’s eyes, each one with a round black convex circle at the center. Pugnayshus’s silly rap lyrics played:

  I saw you sittin’ there at the Korean foot spa

  I saw you sittin’ there with all’a your chutzpah

  Their third roommate, Loffler, fresh from a finance degree at the Wharton School, was asleep in his room, which always reeked of the cheap weed that he had purchased on a trip to Sagada and riskily brought back for all the roommates to partake of. They were all earning so much money, and while they didn’t want to t
hrow it around and expose themselves to danger, they didn’t want to be miserly either. They lived in this cushy high-rise in the Makati district, away from the crowded streets, letting themselves rest in the deep, silk-lined pocket where the expats lived and worked and played and spent their money.

  “Something happened,” Cory said flatly.

  “That’s about as nonspecific as you can get,” said McBride. “You want me to guess?” Cory began to cry again, his face corrugating in pain, and of course McBride didn’t know what to do. “Help me out here,” said McBride. “Somebody die back home?”

  Cory nodded his miserable face.

  “Like your grandma or something?”

  He shook his head no.

  When his cell phone had rung in the night, Cory had sat up in bed and seen his parents’ number. It irritated him that they had trouble remembering the time difference between the East Coast of the US and Manila. Now his entire night’s sleep had been wrecked by the ringing phone. He spoke into it in a tight, unfriendly voice, wanting to convey to his parents that he was grown now, that he had responsibilities and needed his sleep. But his father was crying and saying the most insane thing in Portuguese, “Sua mãe matou seu irmão!”

  “What?” He must have translated it wrong. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your mother killed your brother.”

  His father’s voice came out in frightening anguish as he told how Cory’s mother, backing out of the driveway, had accidentally run over Alby, who had been playing there, unseen. Alby’s back had been crushed, a bone breaking off and entering a pulmonary artery. He’d held on for a while, but in the OR in Springfield he had died.

  “What? Are you sure?” Cory asked pathetically, raking his hair in the dark, then rubbing his face, trying to find something to do with his now flapping, now flying-away hand.

  “Yes. She did this,” his father said. “I can’t look at her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Sedated. They gave her a shot.”

  “All right. All right,” Cory said, trying to think. “Maybe you need to be sedated too. I’m going to the airport now. I’ll try to fly out in the morning. It’s night here. It’ll take me a whole day.” Even as he said this, he couldn’t imagine looking at his mother again either. Cory pressed his phone between his hands and then called the airline, sitting and listening to a scratchy brass instrumental version of “The Strong Ones” that ran in a loop. After he made a reservation he called Greer, who he needed now in a new, adult way. It was as if he actually thought she could do something. But the call went straight to voicemail. “Where are you?” he said into the phone. “I need you.” He had never said those words to her. Love, all the time, but need, never.

  Frantically he kept calling back and speaking in a louder and louder voice to her recorded voice, then hanging up. He texted her multiple times too, saying, “Call me,” but got no reply. There was no way he could leave the news about Alby in a recorded message, no way he could say the words into empty air. He needed Greer to be listening in real time as he spoke them, so that as he exhaled the facts she would inhale them in a kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “Call me, please,” he whispered, as if maybe modulation would somehow get her attention. “No matter what time. Something really, really bad happened.”

  When there was still no answer, he remembered that she’d told him she was going away to Faith Frank’s house for the weekend, and that she would be out of cell phone range. Faith Frank, who was like a superhero to her. You would think someone as powerful as Faith Frank would be able to get a signal at her house. He paced the small room, which was a stew of his belongings, the wastebasket frothing over with papers, and empty bottles of San Mig Strong Ice standing together on the bureau. The whole place was overcome by a general sense of disorder and reek, all of which would be dispensed with by the housekeeper, Jae Matapang, who cleaned up after the three high- paid young Americans who could not take care of themselves. “Boys,” she sometimes said, shaking her head when she showed up and looked around the apartment. “Always make such a mess.” Yet she never seemed displeased.

  In the darkness, his stomach cramping, Cory slipped out of the drawstring bottoms he’d bought at the Greenbelt Mall and dug into a drawer to find some boxers. Jae took their laundry to a room in the basement that none of the men had ever seen. “Hey, Jae,” the three guys always said, handing her their things, and she silently accepted it all, washing their pee- and semen-dashed underclothes and ironing their shirts so they could show up looking impressive and confident at Armitage & Rist’s office in the Rufino Pacific Tower, the tallest steel-framed building in the Philippines.

  Cory thought it was entirely likely that he would become a mad person at age twenty-three, and would wander the streets of Manila. Jae would see him out there and would feel bad, thinking, One of the messy boys has become insane. The tall one!

  Because he had no time to look for anything else, Cory slipped into a pair of black dress pants that were heaped on his desk chair, and then he jammed his passport into the front pocket of his pants and headed out the door. Riding to the airport in the back of a cab with a broken seat belt that lay uselessly across his lap like a flail arm, he watched as the sedate burble and glitter of Makati receded.

  He hadn’t gotten used to life here yet. From the start it had been unfamiliar. As he traveled to the Philippines on Cathay Pacific not long after college ended, the flight attendants had welcomed him like a long-lost friend. He lay down and found that he did not seem out of place, or like an impostor. Not only that, but his long self seemed not too long for that sky bed, which was like a cradle that rocked him as they crossed the ocean.

  So Cory Pinto, from Macopee, Massachusetts, ate various pieces of dim sum as well as a minute steak; he ate without worrying about how much he was eating. Life at Princeton had set him up for his new life, which had even started to seem earned, though at other moments he knew that he had earned nothing. Distantly behind him came the moans and discontents of economy class.

  In Manila, an apartment had been found for him and the others. The building had an absurd name, the Continental Arches. Makati was a wealthy, cushy zone, but once he stepped outside the district he was in fast-moving Manila, which was its own trip. Most of the people Cory encountered there spoke excellent English, but still he tried to learn Tagalog, because many locals didn’t speak English well, and he wanted to not be a snob when he went outside of his little hive; he wanted to make an effort. Once in a while he and his roommates would go out on the town drinking in local bars and eating cheap meals in dives in a particular area that the orientation materials from Armitage & Rist had specifically warned them to avoid.

  They rode on jeepneys, those half-bus-half-jeeps painted wild, bright colors and sprayed with graffiti; sometimes they featured illustrations of devils or eagles and were accompanied by words or phrases like MONSTER-MOBILE, or JESUS LOVES ME SO HARD, or MISS ROSA AND HER BROTHERS. Inside, passengers sat on two long benches facing each other, knee to knee, and were taken on a shockless, bouncing ride wherever they wanted to go in the city. “Bayad po,” Cory said nervously the first time he rode one, passing his money forward. Later on, it all became easy and almost natural.

  Manila had impressed itself upon Cory in light and heavy ways: the wealth that was concentrated in Makati; the K-9 teams that sniffed around the cars entering the driveways of the top hotels, trunks popped so security guards could look inside with flashlights; the exotica and the twisting extravagance of the foliage; the fish stands and the fruit stands; the fragrant food at even the tiniest little joint; the beautiful children running everywhere; the shocking poverty; and the malls, God, the malls, where so much activity took place because they were air-conditioned and the air outside was air-conditioning’s opposite. Manila could be a kiln, and they all baked in it together.

  But now, after months of being there making money and eati
ng adobo and crispy pata and staying out late partying with clients, far from Greer, who was waiting for him while she lived her own life in another city, here he was in a state of unmanageable grief, roaring in a taxi with a broken seat belt toward the Manila airport to fly home to be with his family because his brother was dead. He was glad there was no seat belt; he didn’t even want one. “You can crash this car if you want,” he said to the driver. “I don’t give a shit.”

  “What do you say?” said the driver, looking in the rearview mirror to assess the situation.

  “You can drive straight off the road. I want to be dead. I want to die.”

  “But I don’t want to die,” said the driver. “I think you’re a crazy man,” he added with a tense laugh. But his curiosity bested him, and in a milder voice he asked, “Why do you want to die?”

  “My brother was run over by a car and killed. My mother was driving.”

  “I am sorry,” said the taxi driver reflexively. “Your brother. A little boy or a man?”

  “A little boy.” Cory recalled his brother’s intelligent, animated face, knowing it would de-animate and recede over time. It would have to.

  “Oh, that is terrible.” Then, without a word, the driver pulled onto the shoulder of the highway. The sky held a smudge of incipient sunlight. They sat together in the unmoving car and the driver pulled out a pack of Jackpot menthols and tipped out one to Cory, who took it from the slot in the plastic partition. The driver slid him a lighter, then took it back and lit one for himself too. In silent misery they smoked.

  The night turned to morning, accompanied by the taste of a proffered menthol Jackpot cigarette that still stayed on his tongue as he moved through the airport terminal to travel home. This time, no business class seat was available, and the firm probably wouldn’t have paid for it anyway. He would have no bed to cradle his tall and suddenly fragile self. Cory sat in the only seat he could get, in the very last row by the toilet, a middle seat where he was squeezed between a big meaty man and a big meaty woman. He was wedged there, crying and watching a Filipino movie without the subtitles, because he figured it would fill his head with words he couldn’t follow, and fill his eyes with brightly moving colors and flashes of flesh.