The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

“I stand for women,” Faith said, but while early on this was a good enough answer, later it sometimes wouldn’t be.

  Back then, being this person, this Faith Frank person who elicited strong and perhaps not entirely explicable feelings in many people, she became who she had been meant to be. After her appearance on the talk show opposite Holt Rayburn, Faith rose up, becoming more famous than the magazine of which she was one of several editors. Her books became bestsellers; her TV appearances attracted many viewers. Over time, she deliberately kept herself from thinking too often about Emmett Shrader, though of course she followed the narrative of his rise: how he had begun as a low-level executive at Nabisco but then, using the money of his wife, heiress Madeline Shrader, née Tratt, she of the Tratt metals fortune, he had started his own venture capital firm, ShraderCapital. Everyone knew how that had gone, the phenomenon it was, the billionaire he became.

  But everyone also talked about his unsavoriness, perhaps no worse than anyone else’s at that level, but more disturbing because of his liberal leanings; they spoke of some of the surprising connections he made and shady projects he invested in, one involving a gun-cleaning company touted by the NRA, another a baby food manufacturer that sold its products to the developing world at sharply upticked prices. But all of it appeared to be counterbalanced by good. Business conducted at that level was something that Faith couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

  The Roe v. Wade decision in ’73 had created an antichoice siren call that needed to be responded to and battled, and Faith was committed to it. Three years later, Anne McCauley from Indiana, rising up out of nowhere, it seemed, won a Senate seat based on her outspokenness against abortion. “We will fight Roe every day. We will dismantle it bit by bit over time,” she said into microphones, her voice even and reasonable, her posture uncommonly good.

  Whenever Faith saw Senator McCauley on television, she thought of how easy it would be to tell the truth publicly about her, to simply release a statement to the press saying that eleven years before Senator McCauley became such a strong and vocal opponent of legal abortion, she had in fact undergone an illegal one herself in Las Vegas. That would probably have put a slamming halt to her antichoice influence and political rise. Faith was furious with Annie for what she’d already done, which in practical terms affected the lives of the poorest women more than anyone else, denying them help. She didn’t know what had caused the shift, especially since you might think that Annie’s experience with her illegal abortion could have caused her to see the urgent need for legal abortions. But you never knew what went on inside someone else; how, over time, a thought could become an obsession, and a new shell could form and harden around it. Faith had read that Annie was religious. Had she found religion as a way to manage her thoughts about the abortion? Or maybe it was something else entirely. If Faith could see her now, she would say, “Annie, really?”

  Decades later, the team at Loci repeatedly tried to get Senator McCauley to come speak at a summit. The first time they tried, Faith had said nothing, tensely waiting to see what would happen, what Annie would do. The senator’s office predictably said she would be unable to come. That was probably for the best. Because even if Faith had gotten her alone in a room and said, “Annie, really?” Annie would certainly have replied, “Yes, Faith, really.”

  They both believed what they believed; their convictions filled them fully. But just as Annie would never reveal her own history publicly, Faith wouldn’t reveal it either. It wasn’t her information to give. It was private. I get to decide, the women had sung at that gathering. Despite everything, Faith never told anyone.

  Faith became aware, fairly early on, of her skill at bringing out certain qualities in other women. They wanted to be in her midst, and they wanted more from themselves. She realized that girls and young women actually loved her in ways that were similar to how Lincoln did. They could seem a little lost, or perhaps in need of inspiration. Perhaps the most important thing she gave them, she realized, was permission.

  “Tell me what you want from life, Olive,” she’d said to a shy girl, a high school intern at Bloomer.

  Olive Mitchell looked at her gratefully, as if she’d waited sixteen years to be asked that question. “Aerospace engineering,” she said breathlessly.

  “Excellent. Well, then, pursue that with your whole self. I suspect it’s tough to break into that field, right?” The girl nodded. “So you’ll need to be entirely tenacious and unimpeachable, which I know you already are. I believe you can do it,” she added.

  It had been years since Faith had thought of Olive, but she knew that she had gone on to study aerospace engineering, for she’d written Faith a letter of extreme, nearly poetic thanks, with a photo of her standing in a research lab, smiling with unalloyed happiness. That was so long ago. It was hard to keep track of the young women Faith had met, so many of them shining and shot through with promise.

  Young women came and went through Faith Frank’s door wherever she lived and whatever she did. Inevitably some of them were close at hand, and she wasn’t often severely lonely. Sometimes, over the years, she experienced a very particular desire for the company of a man, and when that happened Faith would arrange to meet up with Will Kelly, a Democratic strategist she’d met at a function in the late 1980s. Handsome, hangdog, bushy-mustached, never married, he had a kind of policy-wonk/beachcomber mix to him that she found seductive. Though he lived in Austin, Texas, Will would fly up to be with Faith; they would have dinner and a night of companionable, somewhat aerobic sex and good conversation. Then it might not happen again for months, and this was fine. Being alone was something that Faith had perfected over the years. When you were alone you didn’t have to worry about every little detail on your body, whether your legs were like prickly pears or whether after a cocktail party you were Brie-breathed. Unlike many people she knew, she often preferred her own company.

  When Bloomer folded in 2010, it was a blow of all kinds. For months Faith felt down, unneeded, and then suddenly that billionaire ghost from her past, Emmett Shrader, telephoned, or anyway his assistant did, and Faith agreed to come to his office for a lunchtime meeting. When she arrived, a table had been set in his enormous British men’s club of an office with the startling views.

  Emmett stood and walked toward her as she entered. She’d seen various photos of him over the years, had watched his hair change from dark to silver. A few times she’d Googled him. From the doorway she saw that he still had no fat on him, but remained lean in the way that a billionaire with a trainer and a butler and a health-conscious cook can do. But when he came closer, Faith became aware of a different feeling. A nostalgia for Emmett’s lost younger self, coupled with a nostalgia for her own lost younger self. Together the two nostalgias combined to create something that was immediately emotional and even very slightly sexual in nature. Standing there, she had the general sensation of want, though she couldn’t immediately determine what it was she wanted.

  Did she want him, or did she want younger him, and along with that, younger her? Did she just want to be young again, period? She recalled the night they had spent in bed, and then its unhappy, crashing postlude. His face was still strong, and a word came to mind, a word associated with power, craggy, though God forbid a female public figure should become craggy. They’d mock her on Twitter, say she’d let herself go and she should put a bag over her head. His body was still tight and impressive, encased in the beautiful clothes of the very wealthy male, the tie hanging like an icicle. Sexual attraction was not an island; it was part of an archipelago that included trappings and context. He was in the context of his ridiculously massive office, and of the years he had lived since they’d seen each other last, racking up his victories like a big-game hunter.

  “Faith,” he said, and his voice was soft, his eyes almost wet. He took her hand, but then let go and put both arms around her. The hug was surprising, so different from the air kisses or the double air k
isses that were ubiquitous on the island of Manhattan. The hug was genuine, and it was a relief. “I am so glad to see you,” Emmett said when they released and pulled back and looked at each other. Then he sat her down on a brown leather couch the size of a buffalo, and he sat across from her. She listened as he spun the tale of a women’s foundation that he wanted his firm to underwrite and that he wanted her to run. “We will hold summits, lectures, huge gatherings around a chosen topic, and invite the public. We won’t solicit outside funding,” he said. “We’ll charge for tickets, but beyond that all the costs will be ours.”

  “Slow down,” Faith finally said when he had spoken uninterrupted for several minutes. In the background, men and women dressed in white prepared the lunch table. “First of all, I want to say I’m very flattered.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said. “People say that when they’re about to say no to something.”

  “Well, before I came in here today, I asked around and tried to get some more context,” Faith said. “You’ve been stellar in so many ways, Emmett, and yet you’ve also been known to take the moral shortcut.”

  “Look, Faith, my firm is involved with many projects,” he said. “I haven’t been sainted, that’s true. We try a lot of things, and not everything works. But we’re doing very well, and if you look at our donation history, I think you’ll be reassured. We give a lot to women’s causes.”

  They looked at each other in silence for a hair-raising amount of time. She wanted to unnerve him, even as she was sitting there. “You care about women’s lives?” she finally asked.

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  “Remember John Hinckley?” she said. “The guy who shot Ronald Reagan? He said he did it to impress Jodie Foster.”

  “You think I’m offering you this to impress you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Even if that were the case, which it’s not, let me assure you that this foundation will involve the maiming of no presidents,” said Emmett. He rubbed his eyes, as if she was exhausting him, and probably she was. Maybe he was wishing he’d never called her in, for she was being such a pain in the ass. But she had to see this through. “Look,” he said, “I only want to do something good.”

  “Something that involves women.”

  “Well, yes.”

  Then, her voice quieter, she added, “Something that involves me.”

  Faith was overexcited at the thought of having access to the kind of money and resources that Emmett was offering. She’d never had any of it before, and she’d never thought to want it. She could hardly imagine what it would be like. Back at Bloomer, they’d had to fight with Cormer Publishing to pay writers even a small amount, or to get two-ply toilet paper in the restroom.

  She wondered if, in accepting the offer, she would be selling out. Shirley Pepper was long dead from coronary artery disease; she couldn’t ask her. Bonnie Dempster, ever since Bloomer folded, had been making a very unpredictable living working for a small, all-women home-decluttering company called, embarrassingly, Stuffragettes. After the meeting in Emmett’s office—she told him she’d have to think about it—Faith called her to get her opinion, and it was Bonnie who said to Faith, “Well, you do tend to be a little gullible, Faith. It’s great that you’re not cynical, but I would be careful. Also, is this something you’d actually love to do? I mean, is it good enough?”

  Faith called Emmett the next morning and said, “You know, I’m not sure we’d really be making a difference. It would be a kind of high-end lecture bureau, and that is not something I’ve had experience with. Or wanted to.” He was quiet. “How would we connect with women?” she asked. “How would we change people’s lives?”

  “I’m telling you, we would. You would.”

  “Thank you,” she said after a long moment. “But I’m going to have to say no.”

  He seemed shocked, and the call quickly ended. Faith went for a long walk in Riverside Park, trudging along, thinking of what she had just turned down. It was hollow to her, what he was offering. What more would she need? What would make it good enough? An hour later she got into a cab and returned to his office without an appointment. He was there, and when she was shown in to his office again, she said, “There would have to be another component.”

  “Tell me,” Emmett said.

  “Every day I hear stories about the plight of women all over the world. I would like to think that in addition to providing speakers, we could also get out there and do something. If we find an emergency situation where we feel we could be of some immediate help, I’d like to have funds made available to take action, so that women could see relief right away.” She looked at him. “Are you already dismissing this?”

  “Of course not.”

  “We could be, say, eighty percent about speakers and summits, but twenty percent about what we could call, I don’t know, ‘special projects.’”

  “Deal,” he said.

  Over time, both arms of Loci, those uneven arms, had been highly productive. Women were forever summiting, endlessly climbing with ropes around the waist, wielding pitons. The summits were about ambitious topics, such as, recently, leadership—leadership being something that everyone now wanted, as if the world could be made up entirely of leaders and no followers, the way children might crave an all-fireman, all-ballerina society. And there had been a good number of those special projects over the years. Loci had paid the salary to employ a community health worker in a rural village in Namibia, and had paid for the defense of a woman on trial for the murder of her husband, who had abused and terrorized her for a decade.

  But by 2014, over four years in now, it had become precipitously harder to get any of the ideas for the special projects that Loci presented past the people upstairs. These projects, you could tell, were a nuisance to them, a money pit. It wasn’t just that ShraderCapital had become stingier since the start of Loci; it had, but there was also outside resistance to some of the work. “Africa doesn’t need your help,” someone wrote in an influential online magazine, and it kept getting reposted elsewhere, replicating endlessly.

  Faith was used to being criticized, and to being hated. There had always been some of that back in the height of the Bloomer years. But on Twitter at the inception of Loci, people wrote #bloodmoney and #FaithlessFrank. And then soon the concern became less about Faith’s collaboration with Emmett Shrader than it was about the foundation itself.

  But by now it was clear not only that Loci hadn’t kept up with all the galloping changes in feminism, but that the way it presented itself was also a reason for vilification. Loci was doing good business, and naturally people were writing things on Twitter like #whiteladyfeminism and #richladies, and the hashtag that for some reason irritated Faith most, #fingersandwichfeminism.

  She understood their complaints, she really did. There was so much waste with these events and receptions at which they were now supposed to seduce other corporations and big donors. People complained, with justification, that they shouldn’t have to give money to a foundation that was backed by a billionaire. And Loci was never supposed to have had to seek outside funding; ShraderCapital had been covering all costs. But that had changed, inexplicably; Emmett had gotten pressure from within.

  So Loci at this moment in time was an uneasy hybrid. She’d adapted to the twenty-first century to a degree, but what she knew how to do best she had learned back in the beginning. The beginning had been the profound place for her, the pit, the root.

  Despite the hazing on Twitter and elsewhere, the summits were doing so well, and the people upstairs had been weighing in more frequently and conducting studies and focus groups. Because of their input, the foundation had been encouraged to go celebrity-heavy; Lincoln had noticed, and so had most people. A shallowness had crept in. Too much of what happened at these events was just frivolous, Faith knew. That had rarely been the case in the beginning.

 
; Some of the team seemed demoralized. Months earlier, like a doctor on grand rounds, Faith had gone around to check in on them, and soon realized morale was dangerously low. When she got to the cubicle of Greer Kadetsky, who’d been at Loci since nearly the start, to her surprise she found Greer with her head down on the surface of her desk, lightly asleep at eleven in the morning. Greer was usually focused and sharp, though lately that was less true. Lately, she could be seen whispering with the others, dissatisfied by the memos that came down from upstairs. Faith had been trying to pretend that the changes at Loci were not close to reaching a point of no return, but she couldn’t keep it up, and she knew she shouldn’t keep it up either.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead,” Faith said softly, remembering that this was the way she had awakened Lincoln for school when he slept through his alarm—there had been cloaked irritation in her words then, as there was now—and Greer was mortified.

  “Faith, I’m so sorry.” She sat up quickly and reached up as if to smooth out her face.

  “Sleeping on the job. That’s not typical. Is it really so bad here now?” Faith asked. “Maybe it is,” she added. Then, “Grab some coffee and come talk to me in my office, Greer.”

  Sitting on the white couch, and squinting in a band of sunlight, Greer said, “I didn’t really have that much going on this morning. At least, not that much that needed my immediate attention. That’s the way it’s gotten for me. It just feels so corporate lately. There’s so much attention to money, now that we’re supposed to solicit funds. I thought ShraderCapital was paying for everything. I miss the way it used to be,” Greer said bluntly. “When it was smaller. I miss writing speeches for those lunch talks.”

  “You did a great job with them. I’m sorry they got phased out. Not my decision.”

  “And I also miss the way those women used to come into the office. And I sat with them with my little tape recorder and I got to know them, and I saw what it was we were doing. I saw it; it was right in front of me. Someone’s life.”