Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

“Isn’t that what people usually say at their birthday parties?” Florence said.

  “Those could be your last words,” Emily said. “‘Leave me the hell alone.’”

  “What’ll be your last words?” Florence said.

  “Emily’s?” Janine said. “‘Give me another minute to finish this page.’”

  “So about this memoir,” Emily said. “Are you going to write about my dad?”

  “Maybe in a footnote,” Daniel said.

  “Maybe in a footnote,” Florence said.

  “She’s got a much bigger story to tell,” Daniel said. “She can’t be troubled to write about distractions like her son.”

  “And you just got a medal, right?” Emily said.

  “Right.”

  Florence had received a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters that spring.

  “That must’ve been exciting.”

  “It was,” Florence said. “It’s not that you sit around hoping for that kind of recognition. But it’s nice when it comes.”

  Janine, though she was aware that she analyzed her mother-in-law’s every utterance too eagerly, found something refreshing in this—in what she said and the way she said it. If any other woman Janine knew had been honored in this way, and were asked what she thought about it, she would profess herself unworthy, downplay her own achievements, downplay the honor itself—she would find some way of denigrating herself. She admired the way that Florence simply allowed herself to enjoy it.

  “You’re my mother’s hero,” Emily said, with that frightening way she sometimes had of reading Janine’s thoughts.

  “I hope not.”

  “You are. She thinks you’re the very model of a feminist intellectual. She thinks every woman should be more like you.”

  “That’s enough,” Janine said.

  But after she finished her glass of wine, she couldn’t help herself. She’d been excited to learn that Florence was working on a memoir, and, now that her tongue had been loosened, she couldn’t stop herself from asking about it. Would she write about the Town Hall debate between Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer? Would she write about the year she spent in England in the 1970s? Was it true that she got into a quarrel with Juliet Mitchell? No? Because—

  Florence, who’d been answering in monosyllables, cut her off.

  “What about you?” she said. “How’s your work? I mean, do you feel like you’re a member of a dying species?”

  “Why?”

  “Psychology. Isn’t psychology as we’ve known it pretty much over? Everything comes down to brain chemicals. Doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?”

  “That’s what I keep reading. The talking cure is finished. You can spend thousands of hours on a couch talking about all the terrible things your mommy and daddy did to you, and it won’t help you half as much as taking a pill.”

  Florence, obviously, didn’t have the slightest idea of what Janine’s work was all about. The curiosity that had brought Janine to pursue a fellowship in New York was precisely about the complicated relationship between our intentions and our impulses, between the parts of ourselves that seem to be under our control and the parts of ourselves that don’t. Janine was a believer in the talking cure—in the end she believed that there was probably no substitute for the classical analytic relationship, in which one person talks and another patiently listens—but the entire reason she was in New York was to explore the question of how newer and more scientifically based ways of looking at problems of will and motivation and self-control might supplement the classical approach.

  But Florence wasn’t interested enough to find out about any of this. And if that was the case, Janine didn’t care to enlighten her.

  “You might be right,” Janine said. “It may be that I’m a member of a dying species.”

  “Oh, come on. Aren’t you willing to fight with me? A little?” Florence said.

  “I’ll fight with you,” Emily said.

  “Oh, good.”

  “She might be a member of a dying species, but isn’t the pot calling the kettle black? You’re a writer. You write books.”

  “And?”

  “Who reads books anymore?”

  “Plenty of people. Did I tell you that they’re putting out a Kindle edition of my last one? People will be reading me on Kindle.”

  “Are you going to find out where they live and dunk their Kindles into puddles and stuff?”

  “Not if they’re reading my books.”

  “What are you talking about, nobody reads books?” Daniel said to Emily. “You’re reading—what are you reading?”

  “Middlemarch,” Emily said.

  “Well?” Daniel said.

  “I’m an unusual girl.”

  Janine ordered another glass of wine and stole a look at her watch. Seeing Florence was always unpleasant. The remarkable thing was that it was always unpleasant in a new way. Maybe this was a tribute to Florence’s character. She always found a way to surprise you.

  17

  For hours that night, as she sat at her computer, writing in a state of carpal-tunnel-y churlishness, Florence kept thinking about Daniel and his family. Wondering why she didn’t feel more goodwill toward him. It was as if they weren’t related. There he sat, whenever she saw him, solid and stolid and impenetrable, getting drunk but never showing it, safely moated away from any questions about what the hell he had made of his life.

  And his wife was worse: the eternal ingenue, panting with worshipfulness. Florence, do you write on a computer or a typewriter? Florence, do you write in the mornings or the afternoons? Florence, what did you mean by that colon on page thirty-two of that book you wrote thirty years ago? Why a colon instead of a dash? Really? ’Cause this is what I think it means . . . Florence, did you know Gloria Steinem? Florence, did you know Norman Mailer? Did you ever have an affair with him? I thought all the feminists of your generation had secret affairs with him. Florence, did you meet Emma Goldman? Ulysses S. Grant? Socrates? Jesus? Really, Florence, you never met Jesus? I could’ve sworn he refers to you in the Sermon on the Mount. Not by name, of course, but I thought the reference was pretty obvious. It’s here, on page thirty-two of the New Testament. I mean, why would there be that colon if he wasn’t thinking of you? Have I told you what I think that colon means on page thirty-two of your book?

  The only way to deal with someone like that is to avoid her, and if you can’t avoid her, the only way to deal with her is to attack her. Florence felt slightly bad about going on about brain chemistry—she hadn’t believed a word she was saying—but she needed to do something to wipe that oppressive look of adoration off the woman’s face. The look of bafflement and hurt that replaced it was preferable. Florence always loved to talk to intelligent younger people; she was glad that a lot of younger women had liked her books; but she’d never wanted followers, groupies, acolytes, worshippers, “mentees.” Why did my son have to marry such a suck-up?

  The granddaughter wasn’t so bad. She had a little bit of spirit, at least.

  18

  Florence was having breakfast with her longtime editor.

  “I’m sorry I had to miss your birthday party,” he said.

  “You didn’t miss much.”

  “It sounds like I missed a lot. I heard about your performance. You’re a new species of human being, Florence. The outrageous old fogey.”

  “What’s new about that? There’s nothing new. I’ve become one of those horrible women who goes around saying things like, ‘Now that I am old, I shall wear more purple.’”

  There was a polished silver pot of coffee on the table. Edward poured some into her cup. He was a gentleman of the old school—she didn’t know if she’d ever seen him without a tie and jacket—and, with his courtly formality, he’d always struck her as somehow timeless. He’d always been a reassuring presence in her life.

  “Do you have exciting news for me?” she said.

  She was half joking. She had published a book two month
s earlier, called How to Look at a Woman. A collection of essays about intellectuals and activists from Mary Wollstonecraft to Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Rosa Parks, it was her sixth book, and the fifth that she had done with Edward.

  Her question was a joke because when a book has been out for almost two months, nothing exciting can happen. One of the sad little secrets of the writing life is that it’s become like the movie business, where a movie has to “open big”; if a book hasn’t caught anybody’s interest in the first two weeks of its life, it’s not going to. It was hard to bring herself to walk into a bookstore, because she knew that her book was already about to disappear from the shelves, like milk that has reached its expiration date.

  But it was also not a joke, because you never stop hoping.

  He didn’t even bother to answer.

  They’d planned to meet for lunch two months ago. It was supposed to have been a celebratory lunch, to mark the publication of her book. But Edward had been ill, and then Edward had been busy, and now it was less like a christening than a wake.

  After they ordered, she took a large manila envelope from her bag and slid it across the table.

  “On to the next thing,” she said.

  Weeks ago, he’d asked her to give him whatever she had of her memoir.

  “This’ll be a treat,” he said. “But . . . well, it brings me to what I wanted to tell you about. I’m afraid I’m going to be reading it as a civilian.”

  She didn’t understand.

  “I didn’t want you to hear about it from anyone else, and I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. I’m afraid my condition has returned, and I’m finding it harder and harder to do my job and fight my cancer. I’ve given notice. I’m retiring at the end of next week.”

  “Jesus, Edward. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” he said.

  “How have you been feeling?”

  “I usually have about one good hour a day. Which isn’t that much of a change, really. Before I got this thing I used to have about two good hours a day.”

  “Are you going to do more chemo?”

  “Chemo, radiation, some experimental stuff. They’re going to do everything they can and one or two things they can’t. They’ll be carpet-bombing me. I’ll be North Vietnam.”

  He smiled, as if he’d said something witty, so Florence smiled too, but he hadn’t said anything witty, of course. Carpet-bombing as a figure of speech to describe chemotherapy had been around forever. She had a moment of engulfing sadness about this, about the way that even when we’re living through tragedy, the language we reach for, the only language available to us, is secondhand.

  But it probably wasn’t a moment to be mourning the way we use language.

  “How’s Susan?”

  “Susan is being brave. Susan is being great.”

  Florence had known him, worked with him, in that peculiar intimacy in which a writer and an editor can sometimes work, for twenty years now, but she barely knew his wife, and she had no idea how happy he was in his marriage.

  “Don’t start preparing your eulogy, though. Even if this round of treatments doesn’t stick, they’re telling me I can hope for five more years. I haven’t started pricing funeral plots. I just don’t want to spend the time I’ve got left behind a desk.”

  “What’ll you be doing?”

  “Traveling. Gardening. Visiting my grandchildren. Too many things to count.”

  She nodded, trying to appear as if she were still in the room, still spiritually within his reach, but she wasn’t. She was thinking about herself. She was thinking that he was the only editor in the world who would be interested in publishing her memoir, and now he was going to be gone.

  She needed to get back here, out of her thoughts and into the room. In what was surely a moment of need for Edward, she had it in her power to give him a gift—the gift of her full attention—but she was squandering the moment by getting tangled up in worries about her career.

  She had always felt protected by Edward’s presence in his publishing house. Her books had never sold that much, and there were people in the company who questioned his loyalty to her, but as long as he was there, she’d felt sure that nothing she wrote would be judged solely by its potential to earn a profit, and that everything she wrote would have a fighting chance of being published. And almost as important, she was sure that everything she’d published would stay in print. (Having one of your books go out of print—it’s not like having one of your children die, but it’s the closest that an experience in the world of letters can come.)

  As she struggled to put her worries about him ahead of her worries about herself, she wasn’t condemning herself; she wasn’t wishing that she could be some saintly creature, composed entirely of concern for other people. But at the same time, she wished she could be a little bit better than she was.

  “My writers are already being redistributed,” he said. “They’ve got you lined up with one of our younger editors. He’s eager to meet you. He’s an admirer. He’s read all your stuff.”

  She didn’t quite believe this. She couldn’t quite buy the picture of a young male editor who had read all her stuff.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Kevin. Kevin Cleaver.”

  “Kevin Cleaver. Jesus Christ. You’re kidding, right?”

  “You know him?”

  “No. But the name.”

  “It is a frightening name. But he’s a good editor, and he’s a comer. He’s a good person to have in your corner.”

  Florence already didn’t like him. She was too old to be impressed by comers.

  She saw him as some swaggering cocksman, pulling out his iPhone to check Gawker so he could keep track of who was up and who was down.

  It was hard to believe that Kevin Cleaver, the ninja of the late-night literary scene, the Gawker checker, would give a damn about anything she had to say. Her memoir, which had seemed a solid thing in her mind when she had thought that she would eventually be sending it to Edward, seemed flimsy and ignorable when she imagined it arriving on Kevin Cleaver’s desk.

  It wouldn’t arrive on Kevin Cleaver’s desk, though. She’d have to email it to him. He probably never even looked at his regular mail. Kevin Cleaver, master of the new.

  She asked Edward about his next round of treatments, and when it seemed as if he had said as much as he wanted to say, they talked about Obama—it was his first year in office—and then they talked about Edward’s summer house in Rhinebeck. He and Susan hoped to move there full-time. Florence had no interest in his summer house—hearing about other people’s houses was as boring as hearing about other people’s dreams—and in other circumstances she would have told him so, but today she smiled and nodded as he told her about repainting and finding a roofer and redoing the floors.

  After she left the restaurant, she thought that the struggle she’d been having—the whole internal drama that had been playing out as she’d sat there trying to look as if she were listening to him—was something she could have told him about. He would have understood; he would have offered her the implicit reassurance that this kind of struggle is simply one of the things that come with being human. He might have even been relieved. When you’re facing death, people start to treat you with caution—caution and a kind of superficial reverence. He probably would have gotten a kick out of hearing that she’d been assailed by selfish thoughts. But she could no more have told him than she could have traipsed around in a miniskirt and a nose ring. His illness had sealed him off from normal conversation. It was one sign that illness was taking him away.

  19

  She felt dismantled as she walked to the bus stop. There was something wrong with her balance. Her left foot kept flapping or flopping or something. She briefly wondered if she’d had a stroke—when you’re in your seventies, this is what you think whenever you feel a little strange. But she knew she hadn’t had a stroke. She knew that the world was tilting because she was upset about Edward.

&
nbsp; The nature of time baffled her, just as much as it had on the morning of her ninth birthday, the first occasion on which she’d tried to grasp the fact that the moment she was experiencing would, a moment later, be in the past. Edward was alive; she could turn around and go back and embrace him if she wanted to. But soon he’d be gone.

  When she was nine, and newly reflecting on these matters, she’d earnestly thought that if she could just concentrate hard enough, just cherish the moment strongly enough—this wasn’t the language she had used at the time, but this had been the thought—she could stop time.

  20

  Five days a week, Janine walked twenty blocks from the apartment to her job. She’d been doing it for months now and it hadn’t grown stale.

  Sometimes she thought she was drunk on New York. She’d been in love with the city when she went to college here, and she was even more in love with it now.

  The city was overwhelming, in all the best ways. On a crowded street, you felt as if worlds were hurtling past you: men, women, and children, unknowable, with exaltations and miseries of their own. Each of them looking both battle-hardened and hopeful in that distinctly New York City way.

  She stood on the corner, waiting for the light to change. In New York, even this was an event. She loved the way no one in the city stayed on the sidewalk during a red light. No matter how old or how young, everyone moved out into the street, impatient, looking for an edge.

  It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, the day after Memorial Day, and, as always, she was happy to be going to the lab.

  At first she’d attributed her happiness to the work itself. For years she’d been interested in matters like self-control, willpower, decision making, attention—how we can cultivate those faculties and why it’s so difficult for many of us to cultivate them—but she’d been interested as an amateur. These were things she read about and thought about on her own, but she’d never found a way to integrate any of it into her practice.

  When she learned she could apply for a research fellowship at Columbia, she was excited and hesitant in equal measure. She enjoyed seeing her clients—she worked with students at the University of Washington—and she’d miss them if she took time off. She was nervous about picking up and going to New York, nervous about being without Daniel. But it came at a perfect time. The kids were out of the house—she didn’t yet know that Emily would soon be back. And Daniel had been talking about taking all the vacation days he’d saved up, since the right to take them was unlikely to survive the next municipal budget. So it wasn’t as if she’d be away from him for an entire year.