The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  Over the weeks that followed, his father was only in occasional touch. Cory took scrupulous care of Slowy, making sure his box was clean and that he had ample water and food, and taking him out on the carpet in Alby’s room, beside the bed where Cory now slept at night, because there was actually some consolation to be found in lying on superhero sheets in a bed that his grown body filled from stern to bow. In the mornings he made breakfast for himself and his mother; he suspected if he didn’t feed her, she wouldn’t eat at all. He made sure she took the medications she’d been prescribed; he checked her arms for scratches; he did the grocery shopping at the Big Y; he drove her to see Lisa Henry, the social worker she’d been assigned; he kept her company; he played the Portuguese card game Bisca with her at the kitchen table and usually let her win.

  One evening when they were playing cards the phone rang and a voice said, “Hello, this is Elaine Newman. Is Benedita there?”

  “I’m sorry, she can’t come to the phone,” Cory said, for his mother never wanted to talk on the phone anymore.

  “Are you her husband?”

  “I’m her son.”

  “Ah. You have such a deep voice. Your mother cleans house for me,” the woman explained. “I teach at Amherst College. My family and I were in Antwerp during my sabbatical year and now we’re back. I told your mother I’d be in touch when I returned. I hope,” she said with a worried little laugh, “she held Thursday mornings for me, like she said she would. I should warn her, though: the place is a mess.”

  It really was. Cory arrived at the house that Thursday at nine a.m. After all, they did need the money. The Filipina housecleaner Jae would have been shocked to see Mr. Cory in pink rubber gloves, scrubbing a toilet, he who had never learned how to clean up after himself at all. He spent a lot of time savagely working on the Newmans’ toilet and the mineral stains in their tub and the grove of dust beneath their enormous four-poster bed, whose nightstands held two different kinds of books. Professor Newman’s side had a thick hardcover on it called Van Eyck and the Netherlandish Aesthetic. Her husband’s side had a paperback mystery with raised letters and a bloody knife on the cover, called The Mice Will Play. People’s marriages were like two-person religious cults, impossible to understand. By the time Cory had finished the entire house, and collected the cash that had been left for him on the Caesarstone counter beside the Sub-Zero, whose surface he had carefully wiped down with Weiman stainless-steel cleaner, he felt flushed with industry.

  “You take after your mom,” said Professor Newman with admiration when she called that night.

  The job was his now, every Thursday morning, and he took surprising pride in the simple act of cleaning up, something he had never really thought to do before, because it had been done for him by his mother his whole life, and then, briefly, by Jae. Once in a while, when Greer had come over during high school or later on during college vacations, she’d automatically picked up the gym socks that Cory had left around, or his sports drink empties. He’d had a lifetime of being catered to and cleaned up after by women, but he only now realized this.

  Sometimes when he was vacuuming Professor Newman’s Persian rugs or ripping an old ratty Princeton T-shirt into strips to use for dusting, he thought about Jae Matapang, and felt unaccountably sorry that he had barely spoken to her in Manila, she who had touched all his intimate things, who had braved his filth. Once he had tried to have an extended conversation with her, but it had been extremely awkward. As she bent over the toilet in the shared bathroom, scrubbing away the pinkish-brown halo left by the urine and shit of all of them plus the vomit that had flown out of McBride one night after they all stayed out too late doing shots with clients at the Long Bar at the Raffles Makati, Cory approached her and said, “Uh, Jae?”

  She looked up at him, startled, lifting the dripping loop of a scrub brush. “Yes, Mr. Cory. What is it?” Jae was tiny and game-hen bony in the grayish windbreaker that she wore all the time, her hair pulled back with a net like someone working a fast-food fryer.

  He flushed. “Oh, I was just seeing if everything is good.”

  She gazed up at him. Finally she said, “No. Some things are not good. Some things are evil. Some people. The terrorists in Mindanao.”

  She had taken his question literally, having never heard the colloquial question about whether everything was “good.” He just nodded in awkward acknowledgment, then she swiveled her focus back to her task, plunging the brush again into the toilet in this apartment that Cory and Loffler and McBride kept like this in part because they were so busy, and in part because they could.

  At home each day now in the house where he’d grown up, Cory learned to clean up the place the same way he did for Elaine Newman. He cooked dinner for his mother every night too. Not only had he never cleaned up after himself before; he had also never cooked a real, full dinner in his life either, unless it was a box of Ronzoni spaghetti and a jar of Ragú. Every day he began to look through his mother’s Portuguese-language recipe cards, which at first were as incomprehensible as Alby’s “scientific” notes. Soon he’d cracked this code as well. “OL” was óleo, “oil”; “UP” was um pouco, “a little”; and on and on. Cory was pleased with his code-breaking abilities, and the food came out surprisingly tasty. He was now a housecleaner, companion, and cook. He was bringing in a small salary, the house was in good shape, and there was decent food to eat. His mother might never really recover, but she ate and she lived.

  Sometimes Cory’s aunt and uncle came to visit from Fall River, and occasionally they dragged his cousin Sab along. The cousins had disliked each other ever since their teenaged fissure over porn. Sab was still known in the family as a hopeless case, but also a bad influence. The little kids were kept away from him. The situation was delicate; whenever family gatherings were held at Aunt Maria and Uncle Joe’s house, Sab was usually on the premises, and the other parents took notice. “Leave Cousin Sab alone,” was the repeated refrain to the little cousins. Or, “Cousin Sab is tired.” Or, “Cousin Sab’s room is off-limits.” By nineteen, Sab and his friends had been reputed to be using and selling cocaine and Xanax. His parents, anguished, kicked him out, then took him back in again, and there he lurked.

  Home on winter break from Princeton each year, Cory had seen Sab looking more and more broken; the only mitigating factor was that he no longer seemed mean, just ruined, barely filling out his shirt collars, his head bopping forward to an internal beat, a wavy smile always in half play. “Hey, Cousin Cory,” Sab said whenever the families were together. “Give me a hug, college man.”

  “What’s up, Sab,” Cory would say wearily, putting his arms around his Ichabod Crane–looking first cousin.

  “Not much, not much. Getting into the Christmas spirit, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  But now, once again back at the Pereira household in Fall River for Sunday dinner, two months after Alby’s death, hoping the visit would somehow force a little bit of life into his depressed and dazed mother, Cory deposited her into the blobby arms of a recliner in the den, with the aunts nearby and a couple of little cousins running around. Then he climbed the stairs to the second floor and banged on the door that he hadn’t approached in years.

  “S’open!” Sab called, and Cory entered the fetid room where his cousin sprawled on a heavy carved teak bed, smoking a green bong. Sab held up a finger, let the smoke roll from his mouth, and then said, “I am truly surprised to see you here. You must be desperate for friends, living at home and all.”

  “Something like that.”

  “That whole time you were away at your Ivy League college, did you feel better than all of us in the family? Be honest.”

  “All of you? No, just you.”

  Sab tipped his head up and laughed; he was uncharacteristically friendly in response to Cory’s visit to his room. “You got me there, and I deserved it. Sit down already.”

  Cory sat in an armchair and t
ook a hit from the bong; the column of old water burbled like a Roman fountain. Soon the room wasn’t as grotty, and his cousin not as awful. Cory was feeling fairly relaxed when Sab pulled out a tiny glassine envelope from his dresser and said, “And now, the main attraction. Better than Beaverama.”

  It was heroin—“snorting heroin, see, like drinking chocolate,” Sab explained. “Designed to be snorted and never injected. A mellow feel,” he went on like a sommelier. “What do you say? Want a bump?”

  Cory, stoned, said, “Okay.”

  “Well, this is a big day in Fall River.” Sab chopped a little brown powder onto glass. “Cory the Great snorts H with his fucked-up loser cousin.”

  “Cory the Great, that’s a good one.”

  “Well, you’ll feel great in a minute anyway,” said Sab, handing him the square of glass and a short piece of plastic straw. Cory remembered drinking Strawberry Quik with Sab through this same kind of straw. Circus Straws, the name on the box had read; he didn’t know why he remembered this, but the memory arrived in an image of tremendous sadness and regret: a box of straws that bore a picture of an elephant trapped behind bars in a car of a circus train, and two boys sitting together with pink milk mustaches.

  Now the powder went into his nostril as easily as if it were coke, which had sometimes been in evidence at parties at Princeton, where so many people had money. There was an MSG taste in Cory’s throat from the heroin—part fish and part brine, chemical and fake but intriguing. Yet almost immediately his brain was seasoned with a vigorous and lacerating flurry of poison salt that seemed to stream from the holes of some hidden shaker. He seized forward and vomited a straight column of amber onto his cousin’s carpet.

  “Oh my God, I’m sorry, Sab,” he said, clapping a hand to his mouth, and then he vomited some more through the spaces between his fingers. At first he felt only this sick feeling, nothing more, and it seemed as if the drug wasn’t going to work on him. In his grief he must have been drug-resistant, like one of the newer forms of bacteria caused by overuse of hand sanitizer. But then he thought that that was a strange thought to be having right now, so maybe the heroin was starting to work after all. Cory lifted his head a little, and the room buckled and sank as if the whole house had been built on a sand pit. Cory sank down with it, falling on his side onto the shag carpet, bracing himself with one arm.

  He stayed there with his eyes shut for a long time, until he heard a reedy-voiced version of Sab distantly saying to him, “You can open them now.” He licked his lips and took a moment to try to remember what those words meant. What was he supposed to open? Presents?

  No, not presents, eyes.

  Open your eyes, Cory. So he did.

  Incredibly, the world had been cleansed, rinsed off, made softer and ineffably better. Sab was smiling gently from what appeared to be a patch of sunlight on the bed, and Cory smiled up at him, two beneficent cousins finally reunited in the love they had once felt when they used to kick a soccer ball around the street, and look at porn with their teeny tiny Q-tip boners, imagining the way the world would one day take shape for them both.

  They should drink glasses of Strawberry Quik together again now, he thought. They should ride a circus train throughout the land, their arms thrown around the neck of the sweet lumbering elephant that patiently looked out from behind the bars. Cory remembered that Alby was still dead, but he also knew that he didn’t have to wrestle with that thought every hour of every day.

  Right now was one of those times when Alby’s death simply wasn’t relevant. He hummed to himself as liquid pleasures rolled across him from a chemical tidal pool. He wanted to tell Sab how relieved he felt, but he had entirely lost the ability to talk, and his tongue was just a wet fish lying in his mouth. So instead of talking, Cory closed his eyes again and was grateful for quiet and immobility.

  The two cousins stayed that way for hours, barricading themselves in the bedroom and ignoring the bangs on the door of family members who called to them, “The lamb is on the table! The Sunday lamb!” and then, “The lamb is getting cold!” and then finally, “Cory, your mom wants to leave right now.”

  By the time he made it downstairs the sky was dark, the little-kid cousins had all fallen asleep and been carried out to the cars in their fathers’ arms, and his mother was dozing in the same easy chair she’d been placed in that morning. Aunt Maria was scraping lamb bones into the garbage and loading the dishwasher, and Uncle Joe was already in bed for the night.

  “What were you boys doing up there? You missed my entire meal,” Aunt Maria said, looking them over with a suspicious eye. “Were you drinking?” she asked.

  “Sorry, Mama,” Sab said, though of course neither of them smelled of alcohol.

  “Drinking will get you nowhere. You’ll turn into a bum.”

  “I know. It won’t happen again.”

  Outside under the street lamp Cory helped his mother into the car. Through a miracle, driving twenty-five miles per hour in the breakdown lane and forcing himself to stay awake and alert, he safely got them home, although it took a long time.

  The next afternoon, having slept for thirteen hours, Cory awakened to a cracking headache that seemed at the cerebral-hemorrhage level, and then he remembered the dirtlike powder that his cousin had chopped on a piece of glass and handed him. The headache was the least he might have expected as an aftereffect, never having snorted heroin in his life. There was a text from Sab, who said, “u want to hang later? More bumps in store for us.” As if they were friends now and could return to their early days back in Fall River without any mention of the intervening schism. Cory ignored the message. But when Greer called he made the mistake of picking up.

  She was in one of those outstandingly articulate moods she’d been in sometimes lately when she called from New York. She would usually spend the beginning of the conversation asking him how he was doing, using the hushed and joyless voice that people used when speaking to someone who had experienced a terrible loss. But he didn’t want to talk about that with her anymore; he had other concerns these days: namely, taking care of his mother and the house, and also taking care of Elaine Newman’s house. Treating it all with the seriousness with which he had treated a client’s presentation during his brief career at Armitage & Rist.

  Then, when Cory wasn’t particularly responsive, Greer would tell him about herself and her own life, which was what she was doing on the phone now, as if everything were normal between them. “Faith gave a special sermon at All Souls. You know, the Unitarian church on the Upper East Side,” she was saying. “It was all about sexism in everyday life. She can speak to anyone about anything. A reporter from the New York Times came; she’s doing a profile. She said this is a great moment for this kind of piece. What with Fem Fatale, and those newer websites, and Opus still being so visible, and now, amazingly, us. Loci. ‘The place where women come together to talk about what matters,’ is how she put it. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but I guess now we’d better make it accurate.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say, Greer.”

  “You sound peculiar; are you okay?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Me too, actually. Very tired. I’m working a lot,” she went on. “Even though the first summit’s over, it now starts all over again for the second one. Listen,” she said after a moment. “I have some news.” When he didn’t say anything, she said, “Do you even want to hear it?”

  “Of course I do,” he said, but having been questioned, he thought: Do I want to hear it? He realized that he was exhausted at the prospect of hearing it. He was already pre-exhausted by whatever it was she was going to say.

  “You know that multimedia event we’re going to do?”

  “No.”

  “The one about girls and safe schools around the world.”

  “Y
eah.” He remembered nothing of such an event, but suddenly he saw girls in burqas and saris and kilts and rags, swinging satchels, riding shaky thin bicycles, heading down sunbaked dirt roads toward distant, low school buildings. The image was so vivid that he wondered if it was the product of a few last misguided opiate-addled neurons firing into the weeds.

  “We’re actually going to need to hire a consultant,” Greer said. “I know that’s your area of expertise, and I can tell you more about it if you’re interested.” They were both silent, him taking this in and her letting him take it in. He didn’t say anything, so she quietly said, “What do you think?”

  “No. Thanks, but no.”

  “Are you sure? You answered so quickly.”

  “Sorry. There’s no way I could do something like that.”

  “But why not? You’ve been home for a couple of months now, Cory. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about your life again. Even just a little. Would that be the worst thing? It wouldn’t take away from your mother.”

  “This is my life.”

  “Well, yes, a temporary version.”

  “I don’t differentiate,” said Cory, his voice tight. “It’s all temporary, obviously. Everything is. My brother died, Greer, my dad left, my mom collapsed. That’s the order of things. The world doesn’t need my consulting skills, believe me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “There are plenty of people who can take my job at Armitage and do it just as well or much, much better. I’m sure they already have. I was a fake in a suit and tie in Asia, that’s all. It’s easy to take a recent college graduate and say, ‘Okay, come be a consultant,’ and I’m sure there’s real merit to that. But at some point that recent college graduate is going to need to figure out the world a little, beyond consulting. The noncorporate parts. The human parts. The corners, you know?”