The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “All right.”

  “I’ve fallen in love.”

  His first instinct was to smile as if it was a joke, but of course it wasn’t, and then he felt the self-consciousness that the evening called for—his wife’s having made a formal appointment to see him, and see him alone. They had not had dinner alone by themselves in months, nor shared a bedroom in a decade.

  “With who?” he asked, incredulous, too loud. One of the waiters thought he was being summoned and stepped forward, then realized his error and quickly retreated.

  “Marty Santangelo.”

  “Who?”

  “Our contractor. And we want to be together.”

  Emmett sank back against the cushion of the antiquity that served as a dining chair. He took umbrage. He felt wounded in some way that he couldn’t name, despite the aspic chill of their marriage. Maybe it was because Madeline had made everything possible for him in the beginning. Maybe it was because they had been going along like this for so very long that any change—even a potentially welcome one—would have to be initially disturbing when you found out about it.

  Emmett Shrader did not like change unless he initiated it, and he was often initiating it, though in small ways. He knew that people described him behind his back as having ADD, and once, as an elevator closed, he heard someone say, “Give that man some Adderall!” followed by peals of group laughter. Maybe the assessment was accurate, but he was shocked at the idea that Madeline should want change, and sitting in the Gilded Quail with his marriage ending, and having eaten only the second course out of eight courses—six more to get through with his future ex-wife!—he wanted to cry into his fist.

  Madeline moved out soon after that night. In the first days of his sudden, late-life singledom, Emmett was as wildly alone as he’d ever felt, reaching for the Viagra and fucking women all over the city, in their apartments and townhouses, and in his apartment, where the walls were glass and the views were so ostentatious that the women always said “Oh!” and he had to impatiently wait for the moment of wonder to end, and in a suite at the Carlyle Hotel, and then in a ryokan in Kyoto, and once in the private compartment of an Emirates flight to Qatar.

  Once he contracted chlamydia from a pretty young finance blogger, but it was easily treated by azithromycin. Often he tasked Connie with buying Hermès scarves for women afterward, and occasionally even those Birkin bags that women often craved so deeply and weirdly that it seemed like a Darwinian urge.

  And then one morning in that same strange and exhaustingly active year, Emmett saw a very small mention in the New York Times that “Bloomer magazine, which had its moment back in the heyday of the women’s movement but never entirely caught on, yet valiantly kept publishing,” was closing. There were quotes from two of the founding editors at the magazine, and one of them was Faith Frank. Her name on the page seemed to him set in boldface.

  “We got a lot done,” she was quoted saying. Shrader’s throat and chest felt thick as he remembered Faith Frank and their one night. But it wasn’t just sex he remembered. He also remembered how much he had wanted her in his life. There are some people who have such a strong effect on you, even if you’ve spent very little time with them, that they become embossed inside you, and any hint of them, any casual mention, creates a sudden stir in you.

  Because Madeline had put a lot of their money into women’s causes, Shrader had been regarded over time as sympathetic, an advocate for women. Sometimes he felt guilty that he was getting away with it, while actually holding no deep convictions in this arena. But then he thought that by now he did have such convictions; they’d become real. Whichever was true, he had never been allowed to spend any more time with that unequivocally authentic advocate for women, Faith.

  Now the rule about never seeing her was finally lifted, like a curse in a fairy tale. Madeline had her new life with the contractor. It was the middle of the night when he turned on his bedside lamp and asked his butler to get his assistant on the phone at home in Flushing. Connie Peshel answered the phone in a frightened voice. “Mr. Shrader? Is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine, Connie. I want you to call Faith Frank tomorrow.”

  “Who? The feminist? That one?”

  “Yes, that one. Find her contact information and make an appointment for her to come in. Tell her I have a business proposition.”

  Faith had come without asking for any details. She had sat right across from him in his office, and she was still elegant and impeccable and super-smart up close, and Emmett desired this much older version of her all over again, but with a new, churning feeling that reminded him he was no longer that dark-haired young Nabisco exec in a Nehru jacket, and that she had changed too. In her bed in 1973 he had swept his face up and down and to some extent into her body and along the planes of her face with an urgency that must have contained the subconscious knowledge that what they were doing would never happen again. He had eaten her like she was his last meal. They were all over each other; he smelled like Cherchez, she smelled like lime. They were both raw and messed up by the end of it. He, at least, was left besotted.

  Since that long-ago night, Faith had gone out and lived and had an enormous career, just the way he had done, both of them making inroads, digging in, having an effect on many other lives. Now after all these decades of digging they were back together. How amazing life was, with all its surprise endings. Not that this was an ending. Maybe it was a beginning. He didn’t know how this would work, what would happen. He just knew he wanted her near him every day.

  “Why am I here, Emmett?” she asked him the afternoon she came to his office. “Is this our second date?”

  He roared in pleasure. “Yes,” he said. “If you would like.”

  “Well, usually the man takes less than four decades to call the woman again, or vice versa. I think it’s a little late for us.”

  “Are you sure? I could bring you a corsage and a Whitman’s Sampler. Remember those? Each chocolate was labeled. ‘Molasses chew.’ ‘Cherry cordial.’ ‘Cashew cluster.’ You look great, Faith. I like your style. You’re rocking a sort of elegant European stateswoman thing here.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a compliment, coming from you.”

  “It is.”

  “Well, then, thank you, Emmett; you look excellent too.” She crossed and recrossed her long, booted legs, and said, “So let’s move past the fact that once upon a time, you and I had a moment.”

  “A moment of great feeling. Which ended in true sadness. Star-crossed, wouldn’t you say?”

  Faith smiled. “I would. And maybe now you can tell me why I’m here.”

  He laid it all out for her, and he brought in two young associates to show her the prospectus he’d had drawn up for the women’s foundation that he wanted her to run. “Primarily it will function as a platform for the most vibrant speakers on women’s issues,” he said.

  She had immediate misgivings. “I don’t know that I should be in business with a high-flying company like yours, no offense. How would it look?” she asked.

  “It would look shrewd,” he said. “Everyone will be jealous of how you don’t have to beg for scraps all the time, the way you did back at your little magazine. Cormer Publishing were cheapskates. I looked into their numbers and none of their magazines do well. I mean, Figurine Collector. Empty Nester. Who needs these magazines? Give me a break.”

  She had said no, but then she’d come back with a counterbid involving funding some special projects, and they’d agreed. For a while, Loci had mostly done what it was meant to do, but in recent years, others at ShraderCapital had pressured Faith to change the feel of the foundation, to make it sexy, as someone said. They could charge more that way, and get a lot more press. That singer Opus—who had now become a movie star too—was coming to their big bash soon. He knew that Faith hated the reliance on celebrities, and the manicures, and the psychic they hired
, but what could she do?

  At a recent summit, that psychic, Ms. Andromeda, had announced that she saw a woman president in the future. The crowd erupted. But then the psychic, studying her cards or chart or crystal ball or whatever it was she used, apparently said, “I see . . . Indiana.”

  “Oh shit,” said someone else. They were all glumly quiet, imagining a moment in the future in which Senator Anne McCauley, who gave the appearance of a kind, well-spoken grandmother, had won the presidential election and women were forced to undergo back-alley abortions again, and doctors were thrown in jail, and scores of teenage girls delivered babies against their will into this heartless new world.

  The operating budget had appalled his CFO when Emmett first announced his elaborate plan to underwrite a women’s foundation. But damn if it hadn’t worked. It was good for disenfranchised women, on whose lives a spotlight was shined, and look at the donations that now poured in. It was good for ShraderCapital and its image, which was constantly in need of repair, and it was personally good for Emmett, who got to see Faith every single workday, after not seeing her for so very long and missing her with a strange and persistent melancholy.

  There were days, over these four years, when she came up to his office at around five p.m.—or he came to her office—and he luxuriated in having her there across from him. She’d take off her boots and rub her feet, and she would sit there quietly talking, radiating intelligence. She told him about her day, and he told her about his. They drank a good Malbec and were enveloped by long, happy silences. Once in a while they talked about their respective children, Lincoln and Abby, one serious and consistent, and exceptional to his mother because he was hers; the other one stormy and highly successful. Still he thought of Abby as his little girl, and he remembered the exact feeling of her undiluted, Electral love for him: a girl on a father’s lap, all crinoline and hot bottom.

  Sometimes, as he and Faith sat together, he said a few words about some woman or other who he’d slept with recently, and how she’d provided a physical outlet, which was worth a lot these days as he entered the terrifying arena of old age, and Viagra was as important as sunscreen. Faith listened well, not judging, and she sometimes told him a few shreds of detail from her own life, but mostly she was private. They talked about the people they’d known in common in the old days. He unloaded all his rage and frustration.

  And they always laughed a lot. Faith had the greatest laugh. And the greatest throat. She was the whole package, he thought. But now, sitting in her living room, having lost her respect and incited her anger and contempt because of the stupid botched Ecuador mentor project—that was a torment.

  “I find it hard to believe that you allowed us to step deep into lies just because you didn’t pay attention during a meeting,” she said. “You know it’s more than that. Attention is a smokescreen. You have the ability to be attentive; I’ve seen it. You’re attentive toward me.”

  “I should have listened better in that meeting, and I shouldn’t have let them switch out that woman you liked, and I should have shut down the fund and announced the whole thing publicly. Punish me, Faith. Just don’t ice me out.”

  Faith tightened her mouth, and for the briefest moment she looked like every woman in the world who was angry at a man.

  “I’m going to tell you what I’ve decided to do,” Faith said, “and I don’t want you to say anything. I just want you to listen.”

  He nodded, folding his hands in his lap in an exaggeration of listening. This was super-listening, the kind done by higher beings, and he tried to imitate it now.

  “I’m not going to make a stink,” Faith said. “That would imperil the foundation and stop us from doing anything ever again. And while I detest the moral vacuum that apparently exists upstairs at ShraderCapital, I can’t just quietly quit my job, because where else would I go? I’ll continue to take your money, Emmett, but I won’t approve of it. I’ll take it and I’ll use it, and I will watch it closely, because I don’t really have much choice.

  “We were all put on this earth to row the boats we were meant to row,” she said. “I work for women. That’s what I do. And I am going to keep doing it. I have no idea if this Ecuador story will ever leak out of the building. If it does, it will be an embarrassment, and perhaps it will shut us down. But the bottom line is that I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Good.” His relief almost sprang from his forehead. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you’d said you were quitting.”

  “Oh, you’d be fine. You’re the one percent of the one percent.”

  “I was very bored until you came here, Faith,” Emmett said. “Someone once called me a ‘privileged narcissist’ in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I guess it’s true sometimes.” He thought, but didn’t say, that people like him needed someone to remind them not to be privileged narcissists. They needed someone like Faith to do that.

  Emmett impulsively took Faith’s hand, and for a few seconds she didn’t pull away. Then she shifted, and their hands unlinked. “All right then,” she said. “It’s getting late.” She stood up, so he stood up too.

  “No one else knows about this but Greer Kadetsky?” he asked. “And whoever told her this?”

  “I’m not certain.” They sat silently for a moment.

  “Well, Greer won’t say anything, right?” he asked.

  Faith shook her head. “I very much doubt it. But she’s already quit. It was an unpleasant moment. She’s someone I like, and someone I brought along.”

  “Yes, in that way you do. Showing an interest in them.”

  “Showing an interest is only one part,” she said. “You also take them under your wing, if that’s what they seem to want. But then there’s another part, which is that eventually you let them go. Fling! You fling them away. Because otherwise they think that they can’t manage on their own. Sometimes you fling them too hard. You have to be careful.” She stopped. “Anyway, you should try showing an interest too. In the ones upstairs.”

  “I will,” he said, full of feeling; he suddenly thought of two kids, a boy and a girl, both just out of college, who had been hired at the same time at ShraderCapital. They were snappingly smart and eager, with different, distinctive talents. But both were promising.

  “It really takes very little,” said Faith, “and they are very, very grateful. They try to show their gratitude. There’s the proof,” she added, nodding toward something in her sight line.

  Emmett turned to look. On the floor, at the foot of the sofa, was a large, open box that contained various items, some still half-wrapped in festive paper, others unwrapped and opened. “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “Thank-you gifts and sentimental objects and private jokes. Personal connections.”

  “From who?”

  “Oh, from everyone. People I’ve known over the years. Even people I’ve met only once. Sometimes they arrive in the mail, and sometimes they’re handed to me at summits and speeches. Always it’s someone who says I’ve helped them in some capacity, and if it comes in the mail there’s a note attached, and sometimes I have no idea who the person is—the name on the note doesn’t even sound familiar, or it vaguely rings a bell—though the note makes it seem as if we had some kind of important encounter. And I guess we did, because it was significant to them. These things have been sitting here for far too long, gathering dust. This is only one box of several. The tip of the iceberg. Deena is going to help me go through them this week. Objects have a different meaning to me now at seventy-one. I can’t collect more things. It has to be a time of winnowing.”

  Emmett bent and slid the box closer and peered inside, fishing around, looking. Here on top was one of those lacy little pillows that women liked, a sachet. He held it to his nose but it gave off no scent anymore.

  Here was a key chain with a little boot on it, probably meant to symbolize the sexy suede boots that Faith famously w
ore.

  Here were three different jars: one empty; one with some ancient black jam in it, and perhaps some botulism spores; and one containing jelly beans. The one with jelly beans had a note attached that read:

  Faith,

  I know you must get a lot of jars, am I right, because of your famous jar line? I’m sure you can open THIS one! (In fact, I’m sure you can do anything.)

  xxx Wendy Sadler

  And here was a T-shirt with a picture of a lobster, and here was a copy of an old, stupid-looking children’s book called The Bradford Twins’ Summer Surprise. On the cover, a poorly drawn boy and girl flew a kite. He opened it and saw that it was inscribed:

  Dear Faith,

  This book was my favorite when I was a little girl, and I wanted you to have it.

  Love,

  Denise Manguso (from that dinner in Chicago!)

  “So how was that dinner in Chicago?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The inscription. Who is Denise Manguso?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Emmett kept pawing through the box. Here was a bracelet made of hemp and bead. Here was a toy plastic spaceship with the name NASA on the side, and a note with it:

  Dear Faith,

  I work here at NASA now as deputy director for engineering, and if you ever come down to DC, I’d love to show you around. I wouldn’t be here, if not for you.

  Fondly,

  Olive (Mitchell)

  Here was a box of homemade fudge. Emmett opened it and saw that it now had a teeth-cracking, long-ago-baked, igneous surface of sugar and nut, entirely calcified.

  “What year is this from, Faith?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Then what decade?”

  Here was a peacock feather tied with a ribbon, and here a beautiful pen engraved with the strange words THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE PENIS.

  And here, equally strangely, was a frying pan, never used, a label still on it. What did it represent? Another private joke, he assumed, which Faith might or might not remember, even though the gift-giver had had the impulse to go out and purchase it and give it, for it was a sign of love. All of these women had needed a connection with Faith. She was plasma to them. Maybe it was a mommy thing, he thought, but maybe it was also: I want to be you. There were so many of these women, just so many. But there was only one Faith.