by Heidi Pitlor
After I had signed the contract, I had read that Lana’s advance was in the “high six or low seven figures.” Colin and Lana both had mentioned that she planned to give 2 percent of the book’s proceeds to Planned Parenthood. Maybe I should have pressed Colin harder to ask for more. If anyone could understand the need for women to be paid fairly, it was Lana.
The conversation turned, and she said that her son had just started sixth grade.
“What’s his name?” I asked, chastising myself for not googling this.
“Norton,” she said.
“My son is named Cassidy,” I said.
“He’s adorable,” Colin lied. He had never met Cass.
“Four is a wonderful age,” she said.
The youngish woman returned with four plates of food, dollops of something that resembled mashed potato atop fluffy greens, maybe arugula, with tiny peas scattered about. She refilled our nearly full goblets.
“You could also include suggestions for teaching boys how to navigate our gendered culture,” Colin said. “What if you don’t want to dress your boy in blue or your girl in pink? For a lot of people, competitive sports are the only acceptable activities for their son. They raise their boys to value aggression and achievement instead of health and peace.” An image of Nick’s round face appeared in my mind. “My nephew—he’s ten now? He spends eight hours a day on his computer because—and I quote—‘I’m not a jock and I’m not a bully and my laptop doesn’t make me embarrassed for not knowing about the Yankees.’ Who is telling these boys that it’s okay to feel their feelings or have a good cry once in a while? His mother, my sister-in-law, runs a branch of one of those pyramid companies. Wooden jewelry or something. She tells him—and herself—that she chooses to work from home, even though she couldn’t find a job to save her life after taking off six years when her kids were born. All Ryan has is what he sees—a woman at home tending to his every need and inviting her friends over to buy exorbitantly priced necklaces whose profits go almost entirely to other people.”
The mashed potato was a kind of fish that had been ground with something else, maybe eggplant.
Lana said, “Women who take time off to have kids and then want to go back to work have a hell of a time. Just yesterday, I got asked by the NYCLU to head up a panel on ageism and sexism in the office. I swear, I need to clone myself.” She took a long sip of water. “You know, there are plenty of alternatives to big chain stores, plenty of wonderful shops right here in the city that sell gender-neutral clothes and toys.”
Eager to avoid hearing about Manhattan’s pricey children’s boutiques, I thought to say, “I could write about Free to Be . . . You and Me.”
Colin groaned. “That old thing came out in, what, 1975?”
“1972,” I said, my face turning hot. It was the year I was born. As a kid, I knew almost every word.
“Marlo Thomas is a wonderful woman,” Lana said. “I did a fundraiser with her a few years ago. People still play her album for their kids, you know. She told me it still sells.”
“It’s still relevant,” I said, pleased to have her on my side. “ ‘William’s Doll?’ ‘It’s All Right to Cry’? My son loves those songs.” One day when I was maybe seven or eight, my overplayed Free to Be album disappeared and was replaced by Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. My mother had read that classical music could stimulate children’s brains.
“Just look who the Republicans nominated,” Colin said. “And look who’s backing him: out-of-work coal miners, men in manufacturing who’ve lost their jobs. And they’re blaming immigrants for stealing them. They’re demonizing Hillary Clinton. They’re essentially feeling emasculated by women in power. Who’s to say that if they had gotten a good education in empathy and equality and respect, things might be different for them?”
Lana furrowed her brow.
“You really think one book has that much power?” I had to ask him.
Gin gave me a look.
“What if their mothers, or their fathers, had read a book like the one we are going to publish?” Colin said. “What if they really understood feminist parenting? And what if, as a culture, we finally accepted real male emotion? I think we have a chance at creating the holy grail here—a bestseller with a heart. And a brain, and a soul.”
I had a hard time imagining even one emasculated man buying this book to learn how to raise his son. “You don’t need to convince us,” I said.
“No, you do not. Can we talk logistics?” Lana said and flicked her bangs from her forehead. “Should the book cover Norton’s birth until, what, until now?”
“I think you should structure it chronologically,” Gin said. “Start with pregnancy, and you can talk about self-esteem, body changes, all that. Each chapter should cover one period of time in Norton’s childhood—his birth and infancy and then toddlerhood. I’d keep the focus on your life as a mother just trying to raise a good, sensitive son. Allie, you can send me a few chapters once you’ve got them, okay?”
I nodded.
Lana gazed down at her right hand for a moment. My eyes met Colin’s. The earth seemed to stop. It was an odd sight, her statement hair color alongside her simple tailored white blouse and silver chain necklace. For the first time that I had seen, she wore matching earrings. Two small silver birds dangled just a half inch from her lobes.
“All right,” she said at last, and fixed her glance on me. “I guess you and I can work one chapter at a time. I do want to include some information about the teenage years—you know, technology and everything, maybe in an afterword since we won’t get there with Norton.” She said she would email me soon with some thoughts about the first chapter, and that again, she wanted to approve each one before moving on to the next. “Email is good for you?”
“Sure,” I said. Typically, after my client sent me the raw material for a book, I worked on my own for a time. I pictured Lana and me becoming friends: getting in touch regularly, working in tandem, confiding in each other about our frustrations with patriarchy.
“You could come over here after you’ve finished each chapter, and we could go through it together, make sure it’s what it really needs to be. Gloria could even watch your son if you need to bring him.”
Who was Gloria? I was about to tell Lana that I did not live in New York when I heard the brief strumming of an electronic harp. She reached for her iPhone beside her plate and rose to take the call.
Colin said, “Need to use the restroom,” and he followed her out of the room.
Gin reached for her own phone and began texting.
Alone with my food, I glanced out the bay window at the lush greenery of Central Park. I thought of Robert Benchley’s comment about this place, “the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn’t got.”
I had read that Harding White, Lana’s father-in-law’s pharmaceuticals company, had been the firm to develop Acclivia, a Viagra-like medication with fewer side effects, and Fortia, made for male pattern baldness. Now they were working on a treatment for male infertility. It seemed noteworthy that Lana’s wealth was attributable in large part to male anxiety, so prevalent as to afford Norton his grandiose front yard.
I pictured my own Ikea kitchen table, and its view of my patchy front yard. At that moment, Cass was probably in my living room, coloring or watching The Octonauts, now that Doc McStuffins had been sullied during our vacation. I thought ahead to tomorrow, when Bertie would watch him again while I began work on Lana’s book; she babysat three days a week. She had long ago retired from running a home daycare. Her beloved husband died just after she had retired, and she had a son living in Wichita, a pompous-sounding guy with an unpleasant wife and two grandkids whom she rarely saw. Lately, Bertie did not remember everything, and I waffled between fretting about and denying this fact.
Next to Bertie lived Jimmy, borderline obese and alone. His wife had left him years ago, and his two kids were grown and gone. He owned and rented out a handful of small houses like mine in var
ious conditions of disrepair in Lee and Pittsfield. His shepherd mix, Bruin, had diabetes. Last week, as I lugged a trash bag to the end of my driveway, Jimmy drove past in his Buick Encore and called out, “Hey! Town left your recycling box and a mess of cans all over my lawn last week.” This was how he saw his whole life: Someone left me a mess and nobody knows. Nobody cares.
Out the window at Lana’s, I saw an unusually tall, thin man walking alongside a woman across the street. The man jabbed at the screen of his phone. He stopped and threw his head back in what looked like anguish. She recoiled. Another man tossed a cigarette butt onto the sidewalk, and a third man gave him the finger behind his back. Sometimes I wondered if men were less capable of finding happiness. I did worry for Cass.
As his mother, I would read Lana’s book even if I’d had no part in writing it. More than once I had been dismayed to overhear the term “little girl” used as an insult. I had seen boys at the playground wrestle with each other like tiger cubs jacked up on steroids. Cass was what some would call a “mama’s boy,” and in my heart, I savored this fact, but living it was another matter. He could be a little clingy, and I could imagine him getting teased one day.
In that first conversation about Lana’s book, Colin had described what they wanted: “You’re supposed to try to broaden her audience, and make her seem more relatable and appealing to whoever might not know her yet. Try to make her seem less edgy and severe, more warm and fuzzy, and a little less foreign, too, I guess. Make her seem more feminine. Shirley’s words, not mine. Shirley’s a consultant, I think, or manager. She asked all about you—she was glad to hear that you were a mom of a boy, too. She wants you to write about Lana coming home from court and changing into mom clothes, running a bath for her son, you know, singing him lullabies, kissing his head, playing catch with a baseball, sharing a hotdog or some other American-seeming stuff. Basically add some ‘good old American mom’ to the mix. This should be easy for you.”
I was used to these candid directives. He had once asked me to dumb down a supermodel’s memoir: “People want to know what kind of makeup she wears, not her opinions on Nehru and the independence of India.” I had challenged him at the time, but he would not back down. He claimed that he was only passing along another manager’s suggestions.
“All right,” I said over the phone. “More mom, less edge. You think of me as feminine?” I immediately regretted it. We used to talk this way, but had not in years.
“Yeah. No. I mean, I don’t know,” Colin said. His voice changed to that of my friend: “I think of you as a hot mess. But a cute hot mess of, like, Chapstick hetty and stoner hippie MILF.”
“MILF?” I was flattered, despite myself. “Chapstick—what does that mean?”
“Whatever,” he said, returning to his employer’s voice. “Who cares what I think of you?”
My thoughts returned to my new client. “God, Lana Breban is everywhere you look lately,” I said, overjoyed at the idea of working with her.
“You can send a signed copy of this book to Nick Felles when you’re done.”
I laughed bitterly. “Hey, Col. Would you have given me Lana’s book if it weren’t for that whole mess?”
“Yes. Gin asked for you. She wanted a mom for this.”
“Why didn’t she get someone who does more high-brow stuff, like Polly McCardle? Wasn’t she going to write that new one for Sheryl Sandberg? I heard Polly was the one who did the poetry collection for the ambassador to Denmark.” I had found it kind of weird and dishonest, ghostwritten poems. Polly lived on her own in a one-bedroom in Boerum Hill. When we met once through Colin, she made it clear that she was uninterested in any kind of work-related friendship. Maybe it was my admission that I had never heard of the fashion designer who was seated at the next table in our café—or, embarrassingly, Patrick Modiano, who had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
“For starters, she just took a full-time job at New York Now. Either way, we wouldn’t have gone to her for this one,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get you something better for a while. You remember when you and I first met?”
“The pool hall night?”
“The pool hall night. You were griping about your job at that equity firm? You told me some awful stories about some college professor and that guy dumping you in San Fran. And your father dying when you were a baby. You’d had a tough road. We both had.”
“I told you all that? I don’t remember.”
“I do,” he said.
That night, a couple of guys had approached me and my friend after we sat down at the bar, bought us daiquiris and challenged us to a game of Six Pocket. Back then, Colin had a mop of black hair, paper-white skin, and translucent eyes and, like us, had just gone to the Joni Mitchell tribute. We had bonded over our love of Joan Didion and Mary Gaitskill.
“You’ve always felt like you owed me something,” I said.
“Could be.”
Although I did not recall confiding in him, I would not forget ending up at his decaying but huge loft on the Lower East Side. With the intensity of two people about to finally leave behind their youth, we went at it in his shower and then in front of the window overlooking a Judaica shop. Although Colin stood several inches taller than me, he was slight and pale. His wrists and fingers were the size of my own. His movements were sharp and precise, correct and responsive in a way that I had never known. Patti Smith played; his hair smelled of beaches; I must have come ten times.
Early the next morning, he got a call from his father with the news that his mother had just died of ovarian cancer. After he hung up, we lay side by side in bed, Colin silent.
I had no idea what to do with my body. He did not cry. “Should I leave?” I asked him, but he said no.
We got dressed and wandered around his neighborhood, the garbage trucks clambering like mammoths down the street, the sun brightening the asphalt sky, Colin eventually teary and contrite about not having seen his mother in over three months. He explained that they had never been close. Originally from Ireland, she had been devoutly Catholic and had, he’d thought, favored his older brother. We walked to a diner and talked some more. We went to Duane Reade. To the East River Park. To a newsstand. He seemed to want only to keep walking—until he did not. We headed back to his place and he crawled into bed. I followed and lay next to him until he drifted off, and then got up and tidied his loft and brewed a pot of coffee.
Sometimes you find yourself without warning at another person’s critical juncture. A week later, he came out.
Gin sighed and continued texting. Lana returned and took her seat. We smiled at each other and resumed eating. I had the urge to admit to her that I had watched two seasons of The Real Housewives of Orange County and was currently unable to get past page one of To The Lighthouse, that I had lost contact with Cass’s father, and that for the past six months I had been sleeping with a semi-vagabond who did not pay his fair share of anything. That I had named my son after a Grateful Dead song and that beneath my rayon Target blouse, across my lower back and right side, I had gotten the lyrics of this song tattooed by an old high school classmate and had, the whole time, apologized again and again for the small but notable bulge of flesh that he had to press flat in order to finish the tattoo. I had the urge to lay my entire imperfect, mostly-feminist-but-not-always self before this woman and ask if she approved of me before we continued on together, the two of us issuing forth in one voice. I hated the thought of something slipping out later, when it might be perceived as a lie of omission or even betrayal, some fact that might erode her confidence in me.
“I love your op-eds,” I said.
“That’s kind of you.”
Once I had finished my food, I set down my fork, and massaged one hand with the other. “The work that you’re doing is so important. I think I’m more excited for your book than I’ve been for any other jobs. This one feels more necessary, I mean, given the state of this country right now.”
“Oh. Well, good,”
she said, looking surprised and maybe taken aback by my mention of other projects. “I should tell you I’ve been getting push-back lately. I have to be pretty forceful to get my message across, and this can seem threatening to some people, even if I don’t mean it to be. Growing up under Ceaușescu, I was not raised to just sit quietly and do nothing. Americans might not know much about true Communism. In fact, it seeks to liberate women from domestic life, which is not to say good old Nicolae really liberated anyone in the end. But my mother was—and still is—a powerful woman. She taught me the importance of fighting for what is right.” I could have sworn I had heard her say these sentences verbatim to some interviewer. “But Shirley, my adviser—and I—have decided that I need to deepen my image and that I need to be ‘warmed up.’ More people will respond to my message if I appear a little more, well, vulnerable. I hate to call it ‘feminine.’ You know?”
I nodded enthusiastically. “Why should warmth and vulnerability equal femininity?”
“Exactly right.”
I flushed with pleasure at the validation. “I’m no expert, but from what I’ve seen and read, you already seem really effective out there.”
She thanked me.
“Are you thinking of running for office?” I asked. I could not help myself. The congresswoman had also been eager to “deepen” her image. Maybe they’d had the same adviser.
“No. I mean, not right now,” Lana said. She folded her napkin and placed it at the center of her plate. “Let me ask you a question. I assume you have help with your son?”
This may have been a test. “Some, well, not every day.”
“But you know what it’s like to take care of him at home?”
I nodded.
Gin finally set down her phone.
Lana went on. “So, hypothetically, say I wasn’t the one to potty train Norton—I mean not the only one and not every day. Say I was no good at breastfeeding. In this book, you might be able to expand on some topics like that, you know, fill in if I needed it?”