The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  This last remark propelled a side conversation that incorporated an even worse word, weavings. God, weavings! There was nothing duller to Emmett Shrader than textiles and fabrics. The thought of entering a fabric store or a crafts store made him delirious with horror.

  “You know, we could keep the first part of the mission but forget about the second. The follow-up,” said Greg.

  “And what about the donations we’ve been receiving for the mentor program?” Monica asked. “We sent out a ton of brochures, and Faith’s people handed them out at the last summit. We’re getting a surprising number of donations, and the money is just sitting there. It’s too late to return any of it. We’d look incompetent.”

  “Well, we can’t do anything else with it, can we?” asked her assistant. “It’s a restricted gift.”

  “We could put it to very good, similar use,” said Doug, “the next time Faith wants to do one of her special projects. We’ll channel these funds over there. It’s not like they’d be used for personal gain. I mean, my God, no one is making a penny out of any of this. The whole thing, our whole support of Loci, is only charitable.”

  “Yes, we’re saints,” said Monica.

  “What is your point?”

  “That it’s also rehabilitative,” she said. “You know very well. It cleans up our act. It hoses us down.”

  Greg folded his arms and said, “I must ask that everything that’s being discussed in here today behaves the way a housefly does.”

  “What do you mean?” Monica said, annoyed.

  “That it never leaves the room.”

  There was mild, self-conscious laughter, and then they had a brief vote and decided they would go ahead with the plans, even in the absence of mentors. Carry out the rescue. Later on, invite one of the Ecuadorian girls to LA, as they were going to do. Continue to accept donations that arrived, earmarking them for next time, and later quietly close the fund and say the program had been a success, but now it was over because they had reached their goal.

  “What about Faith and all of them downstairs?” asked Kim. “What will you tell them?”

  Shrader sat fiddling with the wire sculptures, and then he realized that the whole room was looking at him, waiting. Very reluctantly he let the wire/silver/magnet things drop from his hands in a little waterfall of clicking parts. “I’m going to leave that up to all of you,” he said.

  So the rescue mission had taken place under cover of darkness, and had been a success. The rest of it, the mentor part, was “still not on track,” but anyway the girls were free, and that was what mattered most. No one at ShraderCapital knew what had happened to them since then, though. Emmett Shrader, with his pealike, flealike attention, never followed up on any of this after that meeting, or apprised Faith of the situation—and really, she was out of the loop, since apparently no one had told her in the first place that her contact had been replaced with Paulson’s wife’s contact.

  By now the mission was months in the past, and mostly it had been forgotten. Donations were still coming in, but luckily not too many. After a while everyone had gotten very relaxed about it, and in the run-up to the LA event someone was tasked with inviting one of the rescued girls. The travel agent arranged everything, and Greer Kadetsky introduced the girl at the summit and wrote her speech, and gave an excellent speech herself, and everything was perfectly fine and unremarkable until a couple of days later, according to Faith, when Greer apparently heard from some unnamed person who told her that there had been no mentor program after all.

  “Tell me who it was,” Emmett said, but Faith refused.

  He thought about the early days of the foundation—how exuberant he had been. It was like being young again. It was like having sex with Faith all over again, though without the sex. It was like some kind of full-mind, full-body fuck. That was what it was like when your entire self was engaged. That was what it was like to pay attention.

  When Faith had first signed on with him, he had sent Connie Peshel down to the skeletal space that was then the twenty-sixth floor, to find something suitable for her. “Windows for Ms. Frank everywhere,” he had instructed Connie.

  “I can’t punch through walls, Mr. Shrader,” she had complained. What a sourpuss. She had been with him since he had founded the firm back in the seventies. His wife, Madeline, had liked her, and everyone said it was because Connie Peshel was so frankly ugly: a thick neck that could have had bolts in it, and a face dappled with what once, a million years earlier, had been teenage acne, onto which for some reason she spread a layer of foundation the color of candy circus peanuts.

  But Madeline hadn’t been particularly relieved that Connie was homely. She didn’t even care if Emmett wanted to screw his secretary or not. She had known that he had slept with various different women while they were married. It was the way he was built, and it was part of their unspoken deal. But the deal also tacitly stated that he could screw them only if he didn’t respect and admire them, and that he could not screw them if he did. The equation was simple. This way, there was never any real threat to the marriage, because while Emmett Shrader liked sex with all kinds of women, he wasn’t one of those men who would throw over his whole life for someone intellectually uninteresting.

  Madeline had called all the shots from early on, because she was rich and he was poor. The money that had started ShraderCapital all came from her family. Marrying into the New York Tratt fortune when you were the son of a milkman from Chicago had had its severe stresses. At all Tratt family functions, he was iced out. No one wanted to talk to him or look at him then. Together in the earliest days of their marriage, attempting to show his supposed indifference to her wealth, Emmett worked at a dull job at Nabisco, and Madeline volunteered with charities. They were a bored young couple who occasionally toured Europe, and went out to Vegas to gamble. Only later, when Abby was born, was there a flicker of life in the household. Madeline was a good mother, natural and lively, but because she had been raised with nannies she reflexively hired one for Abby, so her days were still unfilled.

  And Emmett was often unfaithful. This was nothing special; many of the men he knew had frequent dalliances; it recharged their batteries, that was all. But when Emmett returned home on a warm night in 1973 after that single, stupendous sexual encounter with Faith Frank, a young so-called feminist at that new women’s magazine that was trying to get Nabisco to buy ad space, he knew this was different. He was so excited and disturbed by what had transpired that he had sat in the darkness in the living room of the Bronxville house, talking quietly to himself, trying to figure out his next move. The sex with Faith had been snappingly dynamic, revelatory. He had ached for it throughout their dinner at the Cookery and during the cab ride to her little apartment; and then in her bed the ache was furiously resolved, the tip of his long penis touching the depths of her, as momentous to him as if it were fingertip meeting fingertip in The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It wasn’t just sex, it was connection. To be attached by all nerve endings to this person of substance and sympathy. She was independent, which somehow made him want to be dependent on her.

  But then she had said that thing to him, “You’re married,” summarily killing the possibility of his ever seeing her again. So after he left that night he went home and sat in his chair in the dark living room, thinking of Faith’s glorious body, the look and feel and taste and smell of her—Cherchez, she’d said her perfume was called—but it was more than that. Her perfume was mixed with saline, which was mixed with something ineffably specific to Faith. He pictured her brain packing her beautiful head, rendering her inquisitive and sharp and exquisitely attractive.

  He had told her he would call her the next day about the Nabisco ad buy, but he also planned to beg her to see him again. “You have to see me,” he would say when he called. He would plead with her, tell her that he and his wife led separate lives and that his wife wouldn’t really
care, even though there was no world in which that was true.

  Madeline had heard him come in, and she silently entered the living room in her satin dressing gown and took a look at him sitting there in this fraught, stimulated, shattered state, and she knew. How did she possibly know? But somehow she did.

  “Who is she?” Madeline asked.

  “Oh,” was all he said, deflating.

  “For God’s sake, Emmett, just tell me. It’s better that I know.”

  Because he was a bad liar, and because he was still inside the circle of strong feeling that Faith had created, he said, “A woman I met at the office.”

  “Tell me her name.”

  “Faith Frank.”

  “She works at Nabisco?”

  “No. She wanted us to buy ad space in her magazine.”

  “You mean she’s a lady editor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Redbook? McCall’s? Ladies’ Home Journal?”

  “Bloomer.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Women’s lib,” he explained weakly. “You know.”

  His wife was silent, staring at him. “I imagine she’s more beautiful than I am,” she began. “But is she more interesting than me? And is she smarter?”

  “Madeline, don’t do this.”

  “Just tell me, Emmett.”

  He looked down at his clasped hands. “Yes.”

  “Which? More interesting, or smarter?”

  “Both.”

  His wife took this in. She had asked, and now she had to absorb the answer, though it was cruel in a way he hadn’t meant. “She’s someone who’s going places?” she wanted to know.

  “I get that sense, yes.”

  “I see.”

  When he had first met Madeline, he had thought her sexy and witty and bright, but he had realized a few months into their marriage that she possessed a limited repertoire of commentary, and that when held up to scrutiny, the things she said weren’t really all that witty. She had no passions, and her intellect was limited. He was bored with her by now and she knew it, and it was a bad, tight-quartered situation for them both. “I’m very sorry,” Emmett told her. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I wanted her. I wanted something that was . . . exciting to all parts of me. I know it’s rotten. But, Madeline, I feel very held back in my life. The fucking biscuit people. There is no one to talk to there, to spar with.”

  “So that’s what you did with her? You sparred?”

  “In a sense of the word.”

  “I don’t think that sense of the word is in Webster’s Dictionary.” Then Madeline was quiet, thinking hard, trying to find an equitable solution that would save their marriage. Finally she said, “All right. Here’s what I’ve decided. I want you never to see her again.”

  “You’re in luck. She wants that too, actually.”

  “But you were planning to convince her otherwise, weren’t you? To make her see you. And you’re very convincing. You’re bored, Emmett. As long as you’re bored, it’s a danger to me and to us. Tell me, what would make you un-bored? Work?”

  “I work. I work on Oreos and Lorna Doones and Chicken in a Biskit.”

  “I mean work you loved,” she said. “Where the stakes were high.”

  “I can’t even imagine that.”

  “Work that excited you, and challenged you as much as some sexy, interesting woman does, and which involved people you could spar with in the office. Deals you could make. Big ones that you could live or die by. How does that sound? Exciting enough for you?”

  He looked at his wife mildly, noncommittal. “What are you saying?”

  The following week, Madeline released a massive sum of Tratt family money into an account in his name, a gesture that ran contrary to the agreement they’d drawn up before they married, at the insistence of her stuffed-shirt parents. It was as though it was hostage money, ransom money. With it he founded ShraderCapital in 1974. There was no question of not using his own name; he needed “Shrader” to be all over this thing, and not discreetly. It was a way to prove himself to her parents, and to her, and to everyone. Much later on, venture capital firms and hedge funds bore names that were very sword and sheath, very castle keep. The Mansard Fund. Bastion Equity. Split Oak Trust. The goal was to make the firm or the fund sound like a fortress that could resist all invading armies. Eventually these places had proliferated to such a degree that no evocative-sounding words were even left. It was sort of like the way writers had long been pillaging all the good phrases from Shakespeare plays for the titles of their novels, so the only phrases still available meant nothing. Soon, Emmett thought, people would be writing novels called Enter, Guard.

  From the start, Emmett, a fast, impatient learner with a freakish memory, surrounded himself with wise finance men to advise him. Soon ShraderCapital did shockingly well, and over time Emmett made a fortune that was exponentially far greater than Madeline’s family’s. “I can eat the Tratts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he’d often say to his wife, to whom he would forever be grateful. She was pleased, having realized that she sort of hated her parents too. They were very pretentious people. Her father sometimes wore a monocle.

  But before then, there was another thing. The morning after that night of reckoning in the dark living room, when Madeline had provisionally agreed to give Emmett enough money to start his own firm, she’d also said to him, “I’d like you to get her on the phone now. This Faith Frank person.”

  “What?”

  They were at the dining table in the middle of breakfast when she brought this up. The housekeeper was serving grapefruit halves, and Abby was saying to her parents, “Why is it called grapefruit when it doesn’t taste anything like grapes?”

  “I want to talk to her,” Madeline said.

  So he had been forced to go into the den and dial Faith’s number and put his wife on, and sit there, humiliated, while Madeline said something to Faith about how Emmett wasn’t hers for the taking. “He stood beside me during our wedding ceremony,” Madeline hissed, and Emmett thought back to their wedding, and how uncomfortable he’d felt that day, standing there in a boxy suit. Luckily, Faith hung up on Madeline right away, but it had to have been humiliating for her as well. For a long time, Emmett would feel guilty for having allowed Madeline to put Faith through that. It was a weird moment, a perverse one, in which one woman had wanted to prove her dominance over the other one, in front of him, and he had let her. He’d been so weak, and it shamed him.

  Madeline went straight upstairs to the bedroom after the call, and didn’t return to the breakfast table, but Emmett did. Abby was sitting all alone, poking at her food. Emmett suddenly remembered something, and he went and grabbed his jacket, which he’d left last night on a chair by the door. He felt inside the pockets, and then he presented the little paper umbrella to his daughter, saying, “For you.”

  “Oh, I love it, Daddy,” she said. “It’s so tiny. And my doll Veronica Rose will love it too.”

  Sometimes, though not very often, it was possible for him to make a girl happy.

  Emmett Shrader didn’t speak to Faith Frank again in any meaningful way for nearly forty years. He became a large figure in business who appeared on the cover of Fortune, and she became an approachable, sympathetic heroine to women. Once every decade or so they accidentally found themselves in the same enormous, high-ceilinged room, attending the same black-tie event. But invariably he was in that room with Madeline, who over time took on the look of a figurehead on a ship, her hair swirled as if carved of wood, her gowns regal, hiding the now-thick body he had once desired, when it was far less thick.

  Fairly regularly, Emmett slept with women who were not his wife, but as he grew older this was more for the physical exercise than anything else, as though his cock needed an aerobic workout, as well as his heart, oh, his heart. But never were t
he women he slept with all that interesting to him; that was the condition that Madeline had set, and he would honor it forever. Never were they anything like Faith.

  Madeline, as she aged and they grew apart, became ironically more interesting herself, and certainly more compassionate. Her interestingness sprang from that compassion, and she gave large sums of money to progressive causes, which often involved women’s rights. She sat on the boards of museums but also on the boards of women’s clinics in the Bronx and Oklahoma. Even when Emmett wasn’t in attendance, she overlapped with Faith here and there, and the two women once found themselves uncomfortably sitting only three seats away from each other at a dinner devoted to maternal care in Africa. Neither of them said a word to the other. The images projected on-screen, of girls with agonized faces, girls suffering the indignity of fistula—what a horrible word—blocked out any long-ago image of young Faith Frank, and how Emmett had slept with her, and had begun to love her starting that night.

  But then, in the year 2010, Madeline Tratt Shrader, a dynamic and plump major philanthropist, age seventy, asked Emmett’s assistant Connie to schedule a dinner for her and Mr. Shrader at the Gilded Quail, a restaurant in Chelsea that had the ambience of a private railroad car from the nineteenth century. A waiter came bearing plates dotted with examples of molecular gastronomy: horseradish “air,” sous-vide trout with a “root infusion,” a shot glass filled with three layers of intensely flavored soups that went from icy-cold to hot as you threw back your head and drank. Then the waiter retreated with such solemnity that it was as if he had seen a ghost: perhaps the gilded quail itself, in hologram form, eyes glowing gold.

  In the dark and narrow space Emmett looked at his wife across the landscape of a thousand years, in awe of the life they had had, their daughter, Abby, grown now and in finance on the West Coast and the mother of two surfboarding sons who said dude a lot. A cold conch shell with a virtually unreachable pink glazed interior was what the Shrader marriage was now.

  Madeline lifted a fork of gently and purposefully wilted lettuce, studiously chewed it, then said, “Emmett, I have to tell you something.”