The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  Eventually, as time kept dissolving, in addition to taking care of his mother and cleaning two of the houses she used to clean, he began to teach himself everything he could about computer repair and game design. Cory was a fast learner, and Valley Tek in Northampton had hired him and trained him, and he soon became adept, a natural, learning the weaknesses of the different machines. He was content there with his fellow employees in the safe, minimalist box of the store. At night he went home and cleaned his house and cooked dinner, and then played video games sitting cross-legged on Alby’s bed with Slowy nearby. A few months in, Cory began socializing with the gamers at the store. Logan in particular kept an eye out for him and seemed to feel protective of him. He often encouraged him to come up with an idea for a game, which Logan could design. Cory had been trying.

  At the end of the evening at Logan and Jen’s place, Logan walked him out and said to him on the front porch, “You got something yet?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Okay. I’ll take that as a positive response. I’m working on a game myself,” Logan said. “I really enjoy constructing systems and game mechanics. But you wouldn’t have to worry about that; I’d think it through. Thing is, I found a potential angel investor through some friends. He lives in Newton and he’s driving over Wednesday night to discuss it.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Rich oral surgeon. He’s a gamer, but he says he has no imagination at all and he wants to get in on this. He likes the idea of indie games as art pieces. He thinks that if he makes his money back, it’s a success. I’m meeting him at Hops, the craft beer place on Masonic. You can come pitch him too if you want.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m not ready for that,” said Cory.

  “You have until Wednesday. I have a feeling you can get it together by then.”

  So Cory came home from work and sat down at the table in the living room, with his mother sitting peacefully across from him. In one of Alby’s many notebooks he began to write down some readable notes for the game he’d recently been formulating, but which, really, he’d been formulating for much longer. Then on Wednesday night he entered the lacquered wooden hive of Hops in downtown Northampton. It always made him nervous to go to these trendy establishments, because they reminded him of what he’d once had, even for a little while—the wealth that had enclosed him at Princeton, and then again in Manila, before he had given it all up.

  William Cronish, DDS, was a thirty-five-year-old, tilted-chinned oral and maxillofacial surgeon who wanted very much to look like a nobleman. “I was kind of a Goth when I was a kid, and I was also obsessed with playing offbeat games. But my dad and my granddad were dentists, and when it came time to figure out my life, I allowed myself to get pushed in that direction, because nothing I was interested in could earn me a living. So now I have a great practice, but I still think about that other side of myself. I’d love to be in on the ground floor of some cool game. I’m not going to make my fortune this way; I already do very well. But I’m really eager to hear what you’ve come up with.”

  Logan pitched him first. “Witch Hunt,” he said slowly, letting each word settle. “It’s an RPG. Your avatar is a girl in Salem, 1692. She’s just a regular girl. A teenager in a bonnet.”

  “Does she have to be a girl?” Cronish asked. “Couldn’t she be a villager?”

  “A villager might also be a girl,” Cory pointed out.

  “True,” said Logan. “Okay, let me describe how I would generate environments.”

  Cronish held up a hand. “You know,” he said, “let’s stop here. It seems a little conventional to me. And in fact there have already been a few Salem-related games. And as I told you, I’m looking for art as much as anything else.” The oral surgeon’s gaze shifted to Cory, and he warily asked, “Does your idea seem to fit the bill a little more?”

  Cory didn’t want to upstage Logan, who had shown him such kindness, even if it was of the pitying variety. (“Can’t you help that nice Cory Pinto?” he could imagine Jen asking Logan plaintively in their kitchen, over a locavore dinner.) “Logan and I are in this together,” he began. “The idea was mine and I’ll write it, but he’s the designer and programmer. I know nothing about any of that.”

  Logan said, “I can tell you my plans for it. When you listen to what Cory has to say, you might think, whoa, how can that be done given the number of environments we would need to create, but—”

  “Wait,” said Cronish. “We’ll get to that. Maybe.” To Cory he said, “But first, just tell me how you see it.”

  And so Cory began, speaking about his “idea,” not in the way that he imagined game designers spoke about their own ideas, but just the way he saw it. “What if you were on a quest to find the person you love, who’s died?” Cory said to the two men, his voice low. “And even though you know that the person you love is dead, and that therefore your quest is pointless, you still have to make the quest, because you can’t believe that person no longer exists. I mean, you believe it intellectually, but you don’t really believe it in your heart of hearts. Without even knowing it, you search and search, trying to find the person through dreams, through other people, through an endless cycle of yearning, maybe through drugs, maybe through briefly interesting sex with people you would never have thought to have sex with before. Through whatever means you can find.

  “But it doesn’t work. It never works. How can it? The person you love is dead. Their body has stopped functioning, their heart has stopped beating, their brain has no more blood flow. There is no way they can still exist. But in the game version, in our version, which for the moment I’m calling SoulFinder, you might actually stand a chance of finding them.”

  He paused here, but again neither man stopped him or asked questions or nodded or expressed any reaction at all, and it was impossible to tell whether he was bombing or succeeding. Cory just kept talking, because there was nothing else to do. “It will be really, really hard, though,” he said. “I mean, almost no player can ever achieve it. That will be a part of the appeal. Most people who buy the game won’t actually ever experience what they’re hoping to experience. But every once in a while a few of them will.

  “People will want to know, ‘How did you do that? How did you find your person?’ But there isn’t going to be an easy answer. It’s got to be a very . . . emotionally and intuitively minded game. But counterintuitive as well. The people who are able to find their dead will become famous in the gaming world, because everyone will know that it can somehow be done. It’s just that you have to try hard enough and long enough to find the person you lost, and eventually you just might be able to transform that longing into skill. Of course, most of the individual games won’t even possess the software capability to locate the dead. But some of them will, and if you get one it’ll be like holding one of Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets. You won’t know it until you test it over months and months of gameplay. But even if you’ve got one, you still need to do everything right in order to find the dead person.”

  “What made you come up with this?” asked Cronish, his voice noncommittal.

  Cory hadn’t planned to get into this, but now he said stiffly, “My little brother died. He was run over by a car and it was the worst thing that ever happened in my family. One thing I’ve never forgotten since then,” Cory said, speaking quickly and not allowing for the moment in which the other person usually said, I’m sorry for your loss, “is that anything can happen at any time. And this isn’t a bad philosophy to live by if you’re trying to design video games. The whole point of a lot of games, at least the ones that Logan and I have been playing, is surprise, right? The falling boulder. The lightning strike. The ambush. They prepare you for all the real falling boulders and lightning strikes and ambushes that are . . . the decorative flourishes of being alive.”

  Where were these words coming from? Right away he knew. They were coming from slick Armitage & Rist, and hi
s short stint there. But then there had been a bend in the road. A deep, serious turn, and he had finally emerged in a different form. No consultant now. No partner in a microfinance startup ever.

  “When a person dies we say that we lost them,” said Cory. “We lost Alby. It feels that way to me; like they’ve got to be somewhere, right? They can’t just be nowhere. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Cory reached into his backpack and carefully extracted Alby’s notebook, placing it on the table, worrying a little that the surface was damp. “I’ve made a lot of notes,” he said. “You could look at this while we’re here, but I can’t lend it to you or anything, because it belonged to my brother.” Cronish began leafing through the pages, as if studying the X-rays of someone’s jaw. He was quiet for a long stretch. So much time passed that Logan stood up and went over to the darts corner and began to throw.

  Cory joined him, whispering, “Personally, I thought Witch Hunt sounded great. I’d play your game.”

  “Don’t worry about it, man,” said Logan, a large man whose entire concentration and energy were now lodged in the pincer formation of his fingers.

  At some point Cronish came over to them, Alby’s notebook in hand. “I get it,” he said to Cory. “My granddad died of a massive stroke when I was nineteen, and it broke my heart. I would do anything to find him, to show him who I’ve become.” His eyes looked bright with excitement.

  They sat back down at their booth and discussed it a little more, getting into further detail. Each player would be able to customize a “lost soul.” There would be many options for that lost person, not only gender, race, and age, but special add-ons for personality and interests. And there would be a scene, the first time the game was played, in which the player interacts with that beloved person, who at this point in the gameplay has not yet died.

  “So basically the game splits into ‘before’ and ‘after’ the death,” said Cronish. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  Cory nodded. “We don’t show the death scene, because that would become the point, and I don’t want it to be the point. Plus, it would make the game really conventional, not to mention gratuitously graphic. The player gets to be immersed in memories, which can be returned to with the Scrapbook function at any time, but mostly the game is about the search for the so-called lost soul. The search will take you all over the world, if that’s where you choose to look. Or you can just focus on one geographical region that you have a hunch about. Or even, you know, someone’s attic.”

  “This is a very weird concept,” said Cronish. “But also ambitious.”

  That word, ambitious, hadn’t been applied to anything Cory had done in a very long time, but it was a word that he used to hear constantly, applied to him and Greer; they’d also often used it to describe themselves.

  “The thing is, of course,” said Cronish, “and now we finally get to you, Logan—is it actually doable?”

  Logan put down his beer glass and said, “Let me describe it in simple terms. We would bring in an environmental artist, or maybe two. I’m confident that we can make a large number of environments out of a comparatively small number of building blocks. I’m really interested in generating systems that teach the computer to make cool things. I think this could be like that. Cory would write a metatext, and it could be adapted for different players. It would include some gnomic messages, but they could be read differently depending on who’s doing the reading.”

  “It sounds like it would have an immersive-theater quality to it,” said Cronish. “Which interests me a lot. In fact, would you consider coming down to New York sometime to go to one of those immersive-theater productions? They’re doing The Magic Mountain on Roosevelt Island, and I heard the production values are excellent.”

  Immediately Cory remembered Greer’s recent invitation. “You could stay with me,” she’d said, and he felt a pulse of pleasure at the idea. But maybe he would feel too sad, being at her place in Brooklyn, where he was meant to live and where he’d actually never been over all these years.

  Even though there was now apparently going to be an angel investor, it didn’t mean Cory would have future “success,” a term that had such different meaning depending on context. Were you a success if someone invested in your video game, or only if lots of people actually played it? And exactly how many people needed to play the game for it to be a success? Were you a success to the people who thought video games were a stupid waste of time, or, worse, partly responsible for the death of reading and the collapse of civilization?

  It didn’t really matter to Cory whether he was a success or not. Yet as his life became absorbed with designing the game, there were other changes too. One night at Logan and Jen’s, his coworker Halley Beatty looked at him and smiled in a new way.

  “Want to come over later?” she whispered. Halley was uncommonly pale and freckled; there were even freckles on her eyelids, he noticed in bed with her in the farmhouse she rented in Greenfield.

  There was no hostility here, as there had been between him and Kristin Vells. No sense of time wasting, a ticking clock in the room getting louder. After Alby died, Cory had reverted to a cavalcade of porn, which he hadn’t done with such intensity since he was young. Porn, which always had a familiar feel to it, as gratifying and available and gross as a warm bag of lunch from the drive-up window at Wendy’s.

  Jerking off secretly in his room, with his mother nearby, as if Cory were a teenager again, he would watch an image on his laptop, all the while knowing and actively thinking: This woman is not into me. This porn star has no interest in me, but probably mild contempt. Not that that stopped him. He’d had few hookups in his life. The first ones—Clove Wilberson, then Kristin—had made him dislike himself; the more recent one, Halley, had made him feel limber, more awake, reminding him that this collection of parts he carried around still added up to a young man’s body.

  One Thursday morning when Cory was about to head out to clean Professor Elaine Newman’s house, his mother met him in the kitchen, fully dressed. “Can I come?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can I come to the professor’s house? It’s been a long time. Maybe I could help.”

  Cory didn’t want to make a show of his surprise. Though she had stopped picking at her arms and saying that she saw Alby, it had been years since his mother had wanted to go anywhere or do anything, and he hadn’t expected there would ever be a significant change. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve got all the supplies over there.” They drove together in silence, and when he let them into the Newman house his mother stood looking around, surveying the rooms. She ran a finger along the surface of the bench in the front hall, and when it came away clean she looked at him with approval.

  “Nice,” she said. “You use Pledge, not the cheap brand?” He nodded. “Good. It works better.” After she revisited the rooms that she had cleaned in her previous life, he took the supply bucket from the hall closet and handed his mother a pair of rubber gloves, and they set to work.

  He had not seen Benedita show an interest or make decisions or be fully distracted from her grief in such a long time; he hadn’t seen her do anything physical in so long either. But here she was on her hands and knees in Professor Newman’s kitchen, cleaning the tile that she used to clean every week. You could say that cleaning someone else’s house was a shit job. That it was disgusting to be entangled in someone else’s habits and ways, finding nail clippings—finger and toe—and little fluffy hair nests and partly squeezed tubes of cortisone cream or even lube, all of it evidence of a life you really didn’t want to think about.

  But you could also just say that it was work. And that work was admirable, even if it was hard or unappealing or undersung, or often maddeningly underpaid if you were female, as Greer used to remind him. His mother wasn’t above this work. She may not have liked it once, but she was relieved and revived by it now. Throughout the morning sh
e showed him tricks: How to use white vinegar in a number of clever ways. How to fold a fitted sheet so it could go neatly on a shelf in a linen closet. They pushed up the windows of the house and let the air circulate.

  “You are very good at this,” she remarked.

  That was the day that his mother started to become well. He knew it at the time, and he knew it with more confidence later on, looking back. Work was a tonic for everyone, but a special vitamin drink for his mother. At the very least, because she had stopped being able to work after Alby died, work was now a measurement of her recovery. If you could work again, regardless of what kind of work it was, you were getting better.

  She wanted to come with him the next time, and the next. Working quietly side by side, dusting Elaine Newman’s art history books and cleaning her floors with Bona wood cleaner, the artificial smells all over both of them, Cory watched as his mother climbed up out of a well. He didn’t want to rush her; he didn’t even ask her each week if she wanted to come with him. But soon she was simply waiting when it was time to go there, wearing the clothes she used to wear for cleaning houses: an old shirt and sweatpants and sneakers.

  Cory came to like those trips with her—the peaceful car ride, and then the hours together in the Victorian house, turning on the high-end stereo and playing whatever was closest at hand. The Newmans favored Sondheim. He thought, when he heard the lines “Isn’t it rich / Are we a pair?” that yes, they were a pair, Cory and Benedita Pinto. The child of immigrants was meant to grow up and surpass his parents, but instead he was level with his mother: truly, a pair.

  She got better and better, and became scrupulous about taking her medication. One day, when Cory was sitting in the car waiting for his mother to leave the office of her social worker, she came to the door and waved him in. Cory, surprised, went and sat down in the tiny home office of Lisa Henry, the large and patient person who had been taking care of Benedita over the years.