The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  When Faith arrived at the Cookery that night at seven, he was already waiting at a table deep in the back. Because there was candlelight in this Greenwich Village club and not fluorescence, he appeared softer to her than in the boardroom at Nabisco. He wore a Nehru jacket now, and his dark hair looked silky. “I’m glad you came,” he said as they drank the red sangria he’d ordered before she arrived. Though she thought there was a slight chauvinistic tinge to this, he probably wouldn’t have seen it that way. They knocked their glasses together, each with a small paper umbrella in it. She drank hers quickly, even though sweet alcoholic drinks generally made her feel thick-brained and a little slow. Tonight, though, the wine was just a loosening agent.

  Emmett Shrader lifted the umbrella from his drink, shook it off, and wordlessly dropped it into his jacket pocket. She was going to say to him, “Do you have a paper umbrella collection at home?” but didn’t, because that would have sounded flirtatious, and she wanted to be serious here. When he asked her to tell him her “whole story,” she did, talking about Brooklyn and her parents’ overprotectiveness and her need to get out of there, and he listened in a way that no man had listened to her in her life.

  “Go on,” he kept saying. He said he was interested in all of it, and she took him at his word, telling him how she had gotten passionate about women’s rights. She was prepared for some sort of sparring, because this was what it was often like with men. But what Emmett said was, “I think what you and the other women are doing is essential.” The words were an intoxicant. “But may I add,” he went on, “and please stop me if this is unwarranted—I wish you could dominate a little more. Make us buy ad space. Force us.”

  “That wouldn’t work,” Faith said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because when a man speaks that way, people say he has authority. When a woman does, everyone resents her and thinks she’s their mother. Or their nagging wife.”

  “Ah. I see what you mean,” he said. “Okay, so just be urgent. I’m in advertising, so I know a little bit of what I’m talking about. And also, if I can say one more thing? You ought to be the main person doing the talking; you more than the others. You’ve got something.”

  “Well, thank you,” she said, uncomfortable but pleased. Then, “What about you? What’s your story?”

  “Oh. My story. Let’s see,” Emmett said. “I’ve resigned myself to working at Nabisco, and it can be all right. But mostly there aren’t too many surprises, and that’s a shame, because I like surprises. You’re a surprise,” he added.

  He took her hand then, which was shocking but not; she had expected it, and here it was. He stroked it once, then twice, with his thumb. This was a business dinner, mostly but not entirely. She had planned for the proposition moment and now it was occurring, but she was no longer resolute about turning him down. Sexual desire hadn’t weakened her or made her think with her body. It hadn’t weakened her at all, but instead it had changed her thinking. She felt a strangeness wash over her, the carbonation of arousal. This feeling was always a little sickening at first, before it settled in.

  “Go to bed with me,” he said. “I’d like that more than anything.”

  “More than buying ad space.”

  “Yes.” He kept stroking her hand, and she didn’t move. “We can go to your apartment,” he said. “I know you live nearby. I looked you up in the phone book.”

  She glanced down toward the candlelight, her face growing warm, itself a candle. “I guess that’s your commanding voice,” she said. “And I’m just supposed to fall into line?”

  “Faith, I’m not commanding. I want you to want it too.”

  So then they were in her apartment, a small box of a studio on West Thirteenth Street, in which she had lived alone since Annie Silvestri decamped to the Midwest. As Emmett folded his clothes on the chair, Faith thought of how he was the first businessman she had ever slept with.

  Emmett wore beautiful, formal shoes with little holes in them, she saw as he untied them and began to place them against the wall beside her rose suede boots. “They look like a Nabisco cracker,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Your shoes. The pattern of little holes on top.”

  He looked. “You’re right.” Then he smiled. “The Social Tea biscuit. One of our classic items. By the way, I like your boots,” he said.

  He straightened his shoes out neatly; his shiny dark shoes and her soft, pastel boots were in such contrast that this in itself was somehow exciting. His underwear, she saw, looked as crisp as a sail. His body was gorgeous, almost reptilian but not quite. He wasn’t entirely warm-blooded, but she didn’t care at the moment. He was absurdly attractive to her with his dark longish hair and that citric scent that somehow made him manlier than anyone she had known since her father. But of course he was nothing like her father.

  In bed Emmett smiled lazily, opening his arms and enclosing her. “Come here,” he said, as if she weren’t already right there. But he wanted her even closer, wanted to be inside her at once, an idea that she thought she understood in that moment, because she not only wanted him inside her, she wanted to be inside him in some way too. Maybe even to be him. She wanted to inhabit his confidence, his style, the way he walked through the world, which was so different from the way she did.

  Do this, do that, they said to each other in the imperative ways that people spoke during sex, forgetting manners. He hoisted her on top of him and looked up at her with an expression that was foggy with excitement but topped with worship. “Oh my God,” he said as she was held there above him like a hovering angel. Faith realized that she actually didn’t mind being seen that way: a vision. They paused in the mutual moment, and his eyes almost rolled up into his head, then he regained himself, as if remembering what was happening, and then he pushed into her so deeply that she felt as if she might be cleaved in two. Yet he did no damage.

  When he came, he groaned extravagantly and then said, “Oh, Faith,” and lost all his crispness, all his clean edges. Afterward he quieted down and renewed himself, and then he turned his attention solely to her. Her orgasms, three of them in a row like gunfire, were thrilling to them both, and he quietly said to her, “That was my favorite part.”

  They lay in bed recovering from the trauma of exhilaration. Then, finally, he reached onto the night table and drew his watch back from the surface, clicking the silver clasp into place on his long wrist. “Well. Time to go,” he said.

  “Where? It must be two in the morning.” Faith looked around for the peachy, illuminated face of the Timex clock.

  “Home.”

  There was a long, dreadful silence, and then she said, “You’re married.” Another silence, just as dreadful, and Faith prepared to say something angry. But she wasn’t angry, just sad in a grave way, for she understood that, despite the absence of a wedding ring, she’d already intuited that he was married, and so she’d deliberately not asked him this question before going to bed with him. Had she known the answer for certain, she wouldn’t have been able to do it.

  She had possibly even met his wife, she realized, back in the casino years earlier. She recalled Emmett’s hand on the small of a woman’s back. The proprietary way they were with each other. But even more than that, she also knew he was the father of a child—at least one. That was what had subconsciously registered in the Cookery tonight when Emmett lifted the little paper umbrella from his drink, then shook off the spatters and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

  Who else does that but a father who plans to bring it home to give to his child—probably a daughter—as a gift? Faith couldn’t be furious at Emmett, because she had known it all and had ignored her own knowledge.

  She sat up in her bed and watched as he dressed himself, as he turned each shirt button into its little slit with exactness even in the dark room. At one point he looked up from the buttoning. “You know, I didn’t lie to you,”
he pointed out. “Had you asked, I would’ve told you.”

  “I suppose.”

  “My wife and I aren’t close that way. That’s not what we’re like. You and I could have something completely different. Something spectacular, based on tonight. I mean, what we did together, what we felt—I wasn’t making it up. We could have more of that. We could be that.”

  “I don’t do that,” Faith said, cold now. “At least not knowingly. Not to my sisters.”

  “Sisters?” he asked, confused. “What are you talking about? Oh. Like all women are sisters, you mean; a women’s lib thing. Believe me, my wife is not your sister.”

  “But you get my point. I don’t betray other women.”

  “You mean you’re moral.”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “Duly noted. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “About the ads only,” Emmett said. “Let me talk to the people in the office, and I think with a little persuading we can buy some space in your magazine.”

  “Sure,” she said flatly.

  He did call her the next morning; she was still at home when the call came. “Look, I need to tell you something,” Emmett said, and his voice seemed calm but strained, different. “My wife knows about you.” Faith just listened, shocked. “She confronted me when I got home last night, and she said, ‘Don’t lie to me,’ and I really couldn’t. She wanted me to tell her your name, to tell her everything, and so I did.”

  “God, Emmett, why did you do that?” Faith said.

  “She’s right here and she wants to talk to you,” he continued. “Can I put her on?”

  “Are you insane?”

  “No,” he said, and he sounded sad then, or maybe it was just the distortion of the connection, but for some reason Faith hung on, and then there was the sound of the phone being handed over, and a woman came on the line.

  “Faith Frank, this is Madeline Shrader,” she said, her voice soft and bland. Faith didn’t say anything. “I wanted to say that my husband is not yours for the taking. You may think he is, because he acts that way. But you have to remember that he stood beside me during our wedding ceremony and promised to love and honor me as long as we both shall live. And you know what, Faith Frank? I am not dead yet.”

  Faith couldn’t take another second of this, and she quietly hung up. She pictured Emmett with his wife. She saw the triad of husband, wife, and child—a little girl who was perhaps five years old, and who sat fiddling contentedly with something in her hand: a paper umbrella that had been in her daddy’s drink.

  Faith hated herself ferociously, and then remembered the way the women had spoken to one another at that first women’s gathering. Why are we so hard on ourselves? they’d asked one another.

  Sometimes, she thought now, being hard on yourself was appropriate.

  “There isn’t going to be any ad money from Nabisco,” she told Shirley Pepper at work on Monday, after climbing the stairs because the elevator was broken yet again. She was out of breath, and leaned against a wall.

  “Oh no? Why is that?” Shirley asked. She looked up from where she sat clacking away at an IBM typewriter that was as heavy as a tractor.

  “It’s complicated,” said Faith.

  “All right,” Shirley said evenly. “Look, it’s not a tragedy, Faith. Anyway, I think we have a lead with Dr. Scholl’s. We’ll live to fight another day.”

  The magazine got some attention and lasted, in some modest version or another, for over thirty more years. In the first years of Bloomer the three earliest members of the editorial staff went on occasional talk shows and spoke earnestly and passionately, and did what they had to do. The talk-show hosts were often louts in wide, silvery ties who made jokes at the women’s expense about hairy, angry feminists no one would ever want to date. Shirley, Faith, and Evelyn never laughed along with them, but kept appearing on the shows to say what they felt was important, even if they were ridiculed.

  At some point, Faith separated from the pack. She was so much better at speaking than the others. It wasn’t that she was an ideas person—that was never the case, exactly—and it wasn’t even that she was much more articulate, but it was something else. People had to want to hear you. They had to want to be around you, even when you were saying things that they didn’t really want to hear. This quality was on display in 1975, when Faith appeared on a late-night talk show opposite the novelist Holt Rayburn, who had become very famous with his Vietnam novel Cloud Cover. Rayburn, in a jacket with wide lapels and a paisley tie, his mutton-chop sideburns fencing in a face that always looked like it was itching for a fight, was smoking incessantly, and the set of the TV show had its own low-hanging cloud cover.

  “The thing about women,” he began, and the host, Benedict Loring, leaned in.

  “Yes, yes?” said Loring. “The thing about women? Oh, I love sentences that begin this way, don’t you?” He made a lascivious face, and the audience laughed and clapped.

  “The thing about women,” Holt Rayburn repeated, “is that they want you to do all kinds of things for them—‘Open this jar, I’m helpless. Go to bed with me, I’m incredibly horny. Pay for dinner, I’m saving my money for a rainy day’—but then they go out there on TV and they’ve suddenly turned into these angry women’s libbers who say, ‘We want to do things for ourselves.’ I mean, give me a break. You can’t have it both ways, ladies. Either you’re little girls who need us to take care of you, or you’re steamrolling bitches who can do everything on your own. And if that’s the case, the second version, then fine, go to bed with one another like some of you are already doing, because clearly you don’t need men. And while you’re at it, try to have babies without us too. And pay the rent. Let me know how it works out for you.”

  The audience reaction was huge. More laughter, more clapping, and then everyone calmed down, immediately understanding that Faith was the one to pay attention to now. Faith, who sat across from him. How would she react to this? She was a women’s libber who had been brought onto the show solely to occupy that role. What would she say or do? Faith sat still, her hands in her lap. She realized that she looked like a joyless schoolteacher, and this irritated her. But there was no good way to look when the men in your midst began talking this way about women. You could look prim, or you could look angry, or else you could laugh along with them, which was the worst of all.

  She decided to bypass Holt Rayburn entirely. He was an ass, a well-paid ass of the literary variety. Men like him romped through the world, and it wouldn’t be possible to take away his sense of freedom or security. She ignored him now and looked right at the camera, which confused both him and the host. One of the cameramen waved to her, mouthing, “Look at the men, look at the men,” but she ignored him too.

  “I think men are afraid that if women are doctors and lawyers and the openers of jars,” Faith said, “then the men will have to do so-called women’s work, and God knows that scares them out of their minds. There’s nothing we can’t do, but there’s a lot that they’re afraid to do.”

  The audience was with her now. The same people who had been clapping for Holt Rayburn were clapping for her. “Like throw a children’s birthday party,” she said. “Oh, or give birth.” Whooping ensued. “We’ve always found ways to get things done when men weren’t there to help. We’re resourceful and determined and patient.” Now she turned back to Holt Rayburn, who had let the cigarette between his fingers burn down to an ignored, fragile column of ash. “You, Holt, did mention one legitimate problem. But I think I’ve figured out what to do about it.” Faith smiled her beautiful, calm, and sunny smile, and then she crossed her long legs in their baby-blue suede boots and said, “I have decided that from this day forward, I will never buy food in jars again.”

  That sound bite would be replayed for decades, until finally it was hardly ever played again. A few years after
the show Holt Rayburn, drunk after a book party in the Hamptons and with several DUIs on his record, struck a woman on a dark road, and as a result she had to have a leg amputated. He served a couple of years in jail, and by the time he got out he had written a novel about it, New Fish, which became a bestseller, though a more modest one than Cloud Cover, but by then he was weary and sallow-faced. He died of a stroke that year, a small, sweating man who seemed confused by why things were becoming different in the world, different for women and different for him.

  Being a good and appealing public speaker elevated Faith Frank and made her not just speak more but do more. Faith went to marches for the Equal Rights Amendment. She hung around after meetings, long into the night, to talk to many women. When abortion clinics were targeted, she was one of the people who tried to work with judges to make sure people were safe. Partly she did all of this because of Holt Rayburn and the image of the hard-to-open jar.

  Faith was comfortable around all kinds of women, including lesbians, some of whom she got to know pretty well. One of the most vocal of them, Suki Brock, had kissed Faith once during a rally, and Faith had just smiled, touched her arm, and told her she was flattered.

  “Listen, if you ever swing that way, Faith,” Suki said, “swing over to me first, okay?”

  Faith had said, “Sure thing,” which was code for no. She didn’t want to be kissed by Suki, or any other woman, even the ones who proudly called themselves separatists. Faith had seen a photo of two women farmers, looking like a kind of single-sex American Gothic, one of them wearing overalls and no shirt. Her breasts poked out like parentheses from either side of the overall top. Women these days had begun moving to farms and communes and collectives. Was it a utopia? Living with anyone had its challenges, Faith knew. There was no perfect way to live.

  Faith traveled easily among radical women, among housewives, among students, wanting to learn, as she said. “What do you stand for?” a very young interviewer from a student newspaper once asked her.