The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Your mom and I thought today would be a good time to discuss something with you,” Lisa said. “We’ve been talking lately about what it might be like if she had more independence.”

  Cory’s mother looked up nervously, nodding, and then she was silent. He realized that it was his turn to speak. “Okay,” he said. “That’s good. Independence is always good. What kind of independence did you mean?”

  “Maybe,” said his mother, “I could live with Aunt Maria and Uncle Joe.”

  “Over in Fall River?”

  “They have room now, since Sab left.”

  In a minor miracle, Cory’s cousin Sab had straightened himself out through the help of Narcotics Anonymous, and had been working as a sous-chef at the Embers in Deerfield. Those hands that had expertly cut and chopped heroin and cocaine were now involved with a serious chiffonade of basil, and a brunoise dice of carrot and celery and onion. Just the idea that Sab knew words like this, French words, was surprising. Sab had his own set of knives that he brought to work, an excellent Wüsthof and a prize Shun, keeping them locked at night in a cabinet at home, as if they were guns. A few months earlier he had married the Embers’ pastry chef, an older, divorced woman with two daughters. That era of heroin-dabbling and various-substance-selling had ended with the last vestiges of his adolescence. Like the sickliest of first mustaches, it had been deforested, and Sab had started over.

  “Your aunt has been talking with your mom about this for a while,” said the social worker. “She knew that your mom had started helping you clean again for her former employer. And that her thoughts are more organized, and the medication is working, and she’s being more responsible for her own self-care. Everything seems to be on an upward swing.”

  “I guess it does,” Cory said, lightly stunned. “So if this were to happen,” he asked, “what about the house?”

  “We could sell it,” said Benedita. “It could command a decent price.”

  He looked sharply at her. “Who taught you that phrase?”

  “Your mother called Century 21,” the social worker explained.

  “Also,” Benedita added shyly, “on Thursday nights at ten p.m. I watch Is There a Buyer in the House?”

  Things were happening all around him, and under him. Sand was churning, moving; Cory remembered the way he had felt when he first snorted heroin with his cousin. The floor had turned soft and dropped, and that was happening again now.

  What about me? he thought.

  Lisa Henry knew what he was thinking. “Cory,” she said, “did you want to come back and see me another time and talk about logistics?”

  He looked to his mother. “I don’t want to intrude here,” he said, but she waved this away. So the following week he returned alone to the office of Lisa Henry, LCSW, where logistics weren’t discussed but his own life was. Lisa Henry’s voice was so gentle that her tone itself nearly brought him to tears.

  “Cory?” she said. “You want to tell me how you’re absorbing the news about your mother’s plans?”

  He was immediately and startlingly angry with her for her softness, her kindness, which made him shaky and suddenly emotional. He didn’t know if she was a mother, if she had young children, or if as a therapist she’d just gotten used to talking to everyone this way—speaking to the children her clients once were. A giant of a man, twenty-six years old and sitting in a too-small chair, Cory was nearly wrecked by feeling.

  “I’m okay.”

  “I imagine you’re in a kind of overload. You readjusted your whole life after the accident, and now maybe you’re thinking you’ll have to readjust it all over again.”

  It wasn’t even what she was saying that screwed tight his throat, but that she was taking the time and care to say it, her head tilted in concern. Calling him Cory like that. He heard her voice from a great distance. Cory, she kept saying. Cory? She was like someone calling his name from three backyards away. He felt suddenly nostalgic about his childhood, which lived like its own distant backyard deep inside him. But then he realized, as the therapist kept speaking to him, that what he missed wasn’t childhood, or being a child, but being close to a woman. That was what he no longer had.

  He recalled the first time he had raked his hand through Greer’s hair when they were both seventeen. He had been astonished at its softness. It was like touching some airy, grassy substance. Girls’ hair must weigh less than boys’ did; there had to be a scientific distinction. Her breasts were supernaturally soft too. Not to mention her skin and mouth. But her softness wasn’t only tangible; there was also the softness of her voice. No matter how loud she spoke, he could speak louder. If they arm-wrestled he would always win, but she wasn’t weak. Girls weren’t weak. They had a softness sometimes, but not all the time. Whatever they had, it was a complement to what he had.

  But it had seemed, when Cory broke up with Greer, that she became like a piece of knotted wire. Where were the qualities he had loved in her? He had taken on some of them himself. Because of course everyone was soft and hard. Skeleton and skin. But women claimed for themselves the province of softness, which men cast off. Maybe it was easier to say you liked it in a woman. But really, maybe you wished you had it yourself.

  Cory pulled tissue after tissue from a box that had been augmented by an overbox made of gold-painted metal. What a sad item this was, designed to disguise tissues, which Lisa Henry’s clients needed all the time. Just being in front of her, they were probably transformed into emotional wrecks. Faced with tenderness, they became tenderized, and it made them cry. Cory blew his nose harshly, as if in an attempt to gain control. The goose honk was anything but gentle.

  “I suspect you’re not used to talking about yourself,” she said.

  “No, I’m not. It’s stopped being a thing for me.”

  “Why is that?”

  He shrugged. “Bad breakup. But it was a long time ago.”

  She closed her eyes and opened them; instantly he was reminded of Slowy, who often did that. Was Slowy thinking hard in those moments, or was he adrift in reptile space-time?

  “I’m not sure time is always a determinant to acceptance,” Lisa said. “You still think about this person?”

  “Yes. Greer.”

  “Greer was someone you talked to about yourself, which means about your feelings. And now you’ve lost that.”

  “Yeah. That and basically everything else.”

  The word lost made him think of SoulFinder. But he would not find Alby, ever. He had lost Greer in a more ordinary way: a breakup. People rarely spoke of a breakup as tragic; instead, breakups were part of life. But when you and the other person broke up, you could look for them everywhere, and maybe you would physically find them, but even if they were the same person, they were not for you; they were not yours. The evaporation of love was like a kind of death. Lisa Henry obviously understood this. She looked at him with an expression that was so compassionate, it was as though she thought he had been pierced with a thousand arrows.

  Time was up. She stood, and then he stood, and they both nodded to each other, and then she opened the door. This one session was enough for him, he realized. Seeing her had been useful, but it was enough. Cory went outside, where the afternoon was fading but seemed as if it had been gently buffed while he was indoors. Boy meets world, he thought, and he headed for his car.

  FOURTEEN

  Daytime, when you didn’t have a job, wasn’t just something to rush through, but to spend time in. Greer, unemployed, found patches of sun and little swirls of wind, and a coffee shop in Brooklyn with a good mix of chatter and quiet. She sat in all these places and read books the way she used to when she was a girl, back when there was nothing else she had to do, nowhere else she had to be, and no one looking out for her. She read with “abandon,” it would probably be called, though when you read a book you didn’t abandon anything; instead, you marshaled it all. After she’d
left Loci and left Faith in such a dramatic way, books were still there. She read Jane Austen and she read Jane Eyre; the two Janes, which Zee had once confused. She read a contemporary French novel in which all the characters were desperate, and there were no quotation marks, only little dashes, which made Greer feel kind of crazy, but also kind of French.

  She sat in the coffee shop taking her time, and she thought about how she’d always wondered who those people were who sat in coffee shops in the middle of the day, and now she knew. Some of them were, like her, the jobless, the lost. She sat there feeling very much unlike herself. She had enough money to last a couple of months, so she didn’t need to rush into another job. Loci was over, and more than that so was Faith Frank. Zee was only half-over; they’d had a series of email exchanges recently in which Greer had tried to prostrate herself again, at first seriously, then wittily, and Zee had written back a few short, amused notes, so it seemed that a thaw was starting.

  One afternoon when she was home, drowsing on her couch, Cory called.

  “Greer,” he said. “It’s Cory Pinto.”

  “As opposed to Cory who?”

  “You might know another one,” he said. “It’s possible. So do you remember you told me I could stay with you if I ever came to New York?”

  “Sure.”

  “Feel free to take it back. But I’m coming down to go see a play. Immersive theater. Our investor wants me to go, and he bought me a ticket. I thought I could stay over for two nights, if it’s convenient.”

  Cory drove down from Macopee and showed up Thursday night with a backpack. They hugged awkwardly in her doorway. Right away she ordered takeout from the Thai place, knowing that food would be a distraction from the strangeness. They sat and ate at the small table in Greer’s living room. In the low light, with the containers of food open all around them, he told her more about the slow, painstaking creation of the video game, his partnership with his friend from Valley Tek, the environmental artists who had been hired, and the investor who was paying for all of this.

  “There’s no guarantee it will become anything,” Cory said. “It’s not mainstream at all, and the market is flooded. But I don’t know, is it obnoxious to say I’m a little hopeful?”

  “No. I think it’s great,” she said.

  “And as for my mom, I didn’t know there could be improvement after such a long time, but there is. I don’t think she needs me in the same way.”

  “That’s so great. And what does that mean for you?”

  “That’s exactly what I asked myself,” Cory said. “I’ll be okay, Greer, you don’t have to worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” she said, but she remembered that she had done nothing but worry about him after Alby died. She had worried so hard that he would lose himself and that she would lose him. But it wasn’t that he had lost himself. He was always going to be the person who stayed and helped. She hadn’t seen that. “I’m sorry about how I was,” she said. “With you.”

  “Well, I am too. How I was, I mean.” He smiled. “If there was ever a more generic and vague conversation, I’ve never heard it.”

  “It’s weird,” she said, “the way sometimes you’re in your life, but other times you’re looking back at it like a spectator. It kind of goes back and forth, back and forth.”

  “And then you die.”

  She laughed a little. “Yes. And then you die.”

  “Hey, I watched your speech,” he suddenly said.

  “You did?” She was shocked, tense; the speech was out there, findable.

  “You were good,” he said. “It’s cool to think of you getting up there in front of everyone.”

  “Me with my outside voice, not my inside one,” she said quickly. Then she added, “Well, that’s over, anyway. The whole Loci thing.”

  What she felt, talking about Loci, above and beyond her anxiety and anger, was a strange and strangled kind of grief. It couldn’t be compared with Cory’s grief, which would’ve blown it away, but still it qualified. Her grief wasn’t for the job—a job could be recovered from. Maybe she would give other speeches someday, wherever she ended up working, even little speeches in a conference room, to twelve people. And there would probably be other jobs with a do-good tang to them; other offices with desks for Greer to sit at, and a minestrone or moo shu smell around the noon hour, and coworkers who had good days and snappish ones. People with coffee on the breath and personal habits that you would learn, as though you were lovers and not just people who worked in the same place.

  The grief, being brought up now, as it often was when she thought about having left her job, was about Faith. Faith, who was barely even a fully realized person to Greer. She felt herself well up, and she thought: Here I go.

  “The thing about Faith Frank?” she said to Cory. “The thing I keep thinking about? She wasn’t my friend, exactly. She was definitely my employer, but that’s not the whole description. What was she? I loved what she stood for. I wanted to stand for those things too. And in the end everything fell apart, and she turned on me. Maybe she was right to behave that way. Maybe, even though she’s Faith Frank, she’s allowed to have a really bad moment too, where she says something not so great to someone else. I just didn’t like being the person she said it to. But I’m not one to talk. I did something really bad to Zee.” Cory looked at her, surprised. “I did,” she went on. “I know, you didn’t expect that. It’s like people can’t help doing things to people. I’ve been working that one through with Zee, slowly. There’s movement there. But Faith . . . When I really think about Faith, I get this terrible sensation in my chest, and I feel like I’ll never recover.”

  “You will,” said Cory. “And I say that with authority.” He yawned right then and, embarrassed, immediately tried to cover it up.

  “You’re tired,” she said.

  “No, it’s fine. We can keep talking.”

  Greer went to the closet and pulled out a towel for him. “Here you go,” she said. “I’ll make up the couch for you.”

  He took his little kit into the bathroom while she placed sheets on the mattress of the small foldout sofa. This was an era in which sofa beds were frequently opened and unfolded; at this age people were still floating, not entirely landed, still needing places to stay the night sometimes. They were doing what they could, crashing in other places, living extemporaneously. Soon enough, the pace would pick up, the solid matter of life would kick in. Soon enough, sofa beds would stay folded.

  Cory came out of the bathroom as Greer was spreading the quilt over the sheets. He wore a different T-shirt, one for bed, and he smelled of some kind of unfamiliar skin lotion or soap; he’d changed his routine, she thought with some unhappiness, as if she should have been alerted to the change. But of course it had been a long time now since they had seen the various products each other used. The private and the mundane, which together became intimacy. Cory went to the opened sofa and lay down on it, his too-tall body needing to be angled in order to fit; she heard the exhausted protest of the springs, and she shut off the light and went to lie down in her own bed across the room.

  With the blinds turned, it was sealed-in dark in the apartment, and neither of them had any more thoughts about their missions. Instead they were intensely self-conscious, and each sound that came from somewhere in the room was too much, could make them jump. Neither of them wanted to scare the other, or do the wrong thing, so they lay quietly and respectfully, as if it were nighttime and they were patients in the same hospital ward.

  “You okay over there?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” said Cory. “Thanks for having me, Space Kadetsky.”

  It was so dark that at first she couldn’t see him across the room, but could just hear him repositioning his limbs and then yawning again, the hinge of his jaw opening, being held open involuntarily, then closing. He was somewhere over there; that was what she knew. For a litt
le while she didn’t see him at all, but then her eyes adjusted, and she did.

  FIFTEEN

  It was one of those parties where you could never find your coat. Which maybe wasn’t the worst thing, because no one wanted to leave and go out into the world, which had changed so stunningly. Even now, years in, no one could get used to it; and conversation at parties still centered around the ways that no one had seen it coming. They just could not believe what had happened to the country. “The big terribleness,” said a tall, spindly, and intense woman, director of online marketing at the publishing house throwing this party. She was leaning against a wall in the hallway, beneath a series of Diane Arbus photos, holding court. “The thing that really gets me,” she said, “is that the worst kind of man, the kind that you would never allow yourself to be alone with, because you would know he was a danger to you, was left alone with all of us.”

  They laughed darkly, this cluster of women and a couple of men, they drank their drinks, and then they were briefly quiet. Indignity after indignity had taken place, constant hammer-strikes against everything they cared about, and they had been marching and organizing and raging, but as a defense they also frequently went into a self-soothing mode, which by now they’d been doing for years. Drinking had become a part of the self-soothing. Celebrating had become essential too, and occasionally even warranted. It seemed, once again, that hopelessness had clarified how valuable the fight had always been. “I assumed there would always be a little progress and then a little slipping, you know? And then a little more progress. But instead the whole idea of progress was taken away, and who knew that could happen, right?” said this vociferous woman.

  Tonight they were celebrating the fact that Greer Kadetsky’s book Outside Voices had just spent one full year on the bestseller list. One full year that seemed to put a thumb in the eye of the big terribleness. The book, certainly not the first of its kind, was a lively and positive-leaning manifesto encouraging women not to be afraid to speak up, but the title also played on ideas of women as outsiders.