by Brian Morton
And she was eager to learn more, eager to do more with the learning she had. At a conference about “executive function” in adolescents in San Francisco last year, she found that she knew as much about the literature as some of the people who were lecturing there. The opportunity to work day by day alongside other people who were thinking about these things was finally too good to pass up.
Lev, at first, was like a pleasant background hum. It was a piece of good fortune that the director of the lab was such a nice guy—that’s how it felt at first. That’s all it felt like.
One day in March, though, walking down to the lab with the eagerness that had come to feel customary, she’d found a song going around in her head, one she hadn’t heard or thought about in years. Actually just a line. It was called “The Dresses Song,” and the line was simply “You make me want to wear dresses.”
What she was thinking taught her what she was feeling. It was only when she thought about the song that she understood that as much as she liked the work, it wasn’t just the work that was making her so happy.
21
Lev was already there when she arrived. No matter how early she got to work, Lev, if he was in town, was always already there. Although she hadn’t witnessed this, she knew he was sometimes there at six in the morning.
He was a divorced man whose children were on their own and far away, and he could arrange his life as he pleased. When he wasn’t traveling—giving talks and meeting with funders—he worked long hours during the day and spent the evening at concerts or lectures or in restaurants, with colleagues and students and friends. He had an endless appetite for conversation, conviviality, city life, but his work at the lab came before everything. When he spoke about the place, he looked as if he were speaking about a person he loved.
He was a disheveled, overweight older man, but as someone once said, exuberance is beauty, and in this way, at least, he was beautiful.
“You’re here,” he said when he saw her. “I’m so glad you’re feeling better.”
Whenever she showed up, he made her feel as if the party had finally begun. But he greeted everyone this way. His secretary was a woman in her seventies, and Lev brightened up when he saw her too. The old and the young, the hobbled and the swift: he was an overweight, male, middle-aged Statue of Liberty, shining on all.
“Daniel get in safe?”
“Yes. Yes. He was very safe.”
“I hope I can meet him sometime soon.”
“That would be great,” she said.
His hair, as always, was Einsteinishly uncombed. He was wearing a nice suit, but it was hanging all wrong; it was as if the suit were embarrassed to be seen with him.
“You chose a nice set of clothes to sleep in,” she said.
Lev had been engaged in the same research for thirty years, and he continued to be fascinated by it. Long ago, as a graduate student, he’d been an assistant to Walter Mischel, the psychologist who, researching self-control in children, had come up with the now-famous Marshmallow Test. A child would be told that he could have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later, and would then be left alone in a room with a marshmallow. Some children couldn’t hold out and ate the marshmallow immediately, some devised strategies to help themselves wait. Mischel eventually found that the children who could wait at the age of four or five were doing better ten years later, by a variety of measures, than the children who couldn’t.
Lev had pursued similar questions, and now, in the age of the Internet, when no one seemed to be able to resist its opportunities for distraction, the subject had become hot. Research funds were pouring in; Lev was being profiled in magazines. U.S. News & World Report had run an item in which, citing his work on perseverance and goal-oriented behavior in adolescents, Lev had been dubbed “The Guru of Grit.” He was glad to get the additional funding, but he didn’t seem to care about the profiles. All he seemed to care about was the work.
At the lab, Janine was doing talk therapy with students from Columbia and other colleges in the area, who were also receiving training in “behavior management.” It was part of a study to see if talk therapy plus behavioral therapy was more effective than either of them alone. So she was doing what she’d been doing at home—listening to young people—but learning things that she never would have learned at home.
Today she saw six students, went online to do research for a paper she was writing, and tried to get caught up on her email. If she had just two and a half more hours of free time today, she thought, she could finally get her inbox down to a reasonable level, but she’d been thinking the same thing every day for the last five years.
Normally she enjoyed every moment at the lab, but today she was conscious of a feeling of constraint. Now Daniel was here. She hadn’t done anything she needed to feel guilty about, and yet she felt guilty. She had had a secret little crush, which might be seen as the most commonplace thing in the world, except that she hadn’t had a secret little crush in years.
At 6:30, Lev was at her door. They were going to a retirement party for someone who’d worked at the lab for decades.
She’d asked Daniel if he wanted to come—spouses were welcome—but he had looked up from the TV and said, “Believe me, darling . . .”
It was a reference to a line they’d once read in a review of Dennis Rodman’s autobiography: supposedly, after Madonna gave him detailed instructions about how to pleasure her in bed, Rodman replied, “Believe me, I won’t do that, darling.” Daniel liked to quote the line from time to time.
22
“Are you sure this is okay?” she said to Lev on the way. “I hardly know her.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lev said. “You’re part of the team.”
He was the strangest man in the world to have a crush on. He wasn’t young, he wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t particularly masculine.
What he was, was warm. He was warm, warmer, warmest. When she fantasized about being with him, she rarely fantasized about sex. She fantasized about cuddling. She fantasized about lowering herself slowly into a warm bath of Lev.
The lab—formally the Center for the Study of Motivation—was a distant outpost of the Columbia University Department of Psychology. It took up all five floors of a converted townhouse on Seventy-fourth Street near Central Park West.
The party was in a rented space on Seventy-second Street. When they got there, Janine drank a glass of punch too fast, and it went to her head.
The room was too crowded and the music was too loud. She leaned against a wall watching Lev talk with people, watching him transporting his benevolent portliness around the room. Emily had seen Lev once, just after she got here, and had taken to referring to him as Santa Claus. This wasn’t completely on target, but it wasn’t completely off.
He made a circuit of the room, and then he came back to her.
“People-watching?” he said.
“Not really.”
“Then what? You look like . . .”
“Jim Thorpe?”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“It’s funny,” she said. “Getting used to someone again. Even if you’ve lived with him for twenty years.”
“You mean Daniel?”
She raised her eyebrows, which somehow meant yes.
“I know what you mean,” Lev said. “I used to feel that way sometimes when I was away from Rachel for a week or two. It was like, ‘Who are you again?’”
To what other man could she have said that it felt a little strange to reacclimate herself to Daniel? None. Not because it was too intimate, but because most men wouldn’t know what she meant.
He had a quality of mind that she couldn’t help but think of as womanly. He was tall; he was heterosexual (even if she hadn’t known anything about his life, she would have known this: you can feel these things); but there was something about him that was best described as maternal. And thus, her friendship with him felt dizzyingly genderbenderish. Daniel occupied the masculine space in th
eir relationship so obdurately that she felt as if she had no choice but to occupy the feminine space. With Lev everything seemed to be sliding around. It was the psychosexual equivalent of Twister.
She’d spent all too much time trying to figure out if he was flirting with her. She was still trying. A week ago he’d invited her to attend a conference in Pittsburgh with him later in the summer. Did that mean something? Or did it just mean he thought the panels would interest her? Sometimes a conference is just a conference. She hadn’t said yes and she hadn’t said no; eventually she’d have to say something.
“Why do you even like me?” Janine said. She was perhaps a little drunk.
“Why do I like you?”
“It’s a simple question.”
“It’s a simple question, but there’s not a simple answer.”
“Oh, there must be. I must remind you of someone. I must remind you of your beloved . . . I don’t know . . . some girl you liked in third grade.”
“You don’t remind me of my beloved anybody. Which is the point. You don’t remind me of anyone I’ve ever met.”
This was not what she expected, and she felt herself blush.
“Oh, come on. I’m not even a person.”
“You are a person. But I think I know what you mean. You have an unfinished quality that in a person of your age is an achievement.”
Maybe he was a little drunk too.
“Uh . . . thank you,” she said.
“I know it sounds strange but it’s true. I mean that you’re open to life. You’re open to being surprised. You’re open to being changed by life. Most of us lose that quality in our twenties. I don’t know how you’ve managed to hang on to it, but you have.”
The music was loud, and the people were loud. Even weirder than the fact that he was saying all this was the fact that he was shouting it.
“Oh, that’s just . . . I’m from Seattle. Everybody else you know has New York City armor on.”
“Well, that could be. It could be that I only like you because you’re from Seattle.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
23
She walked back to the apartment instead of taking a bus, because she wanted to spend some time torturing herself about how untrustworthy she was.
The thing is, this had happened before, and it had happened before that.
The first time was with Trotsky. He was the assistant research librarian at the university when she was getting her master’s. She’d thought of him as Trotsky because he was always reading the Russians and because he had an aggressive little goatee. He was a beautiful boy, unkempt, uncombed, uncouth, unguarded, and he was always thinking about matters of great moment, such as who was more right about the soul, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, and he recalled her to a set of questions that she thought she had forgotten, and for a few months she used to enjoy daily fantasies of running off with him and living a life in which they pondered the great mysteries together. One stupid night, at an end-of-the-year party, she and Trotsky had kissed in his car, and one even stupider night not long after that, she’d told Daniel, who hadn’t responded in the amused and unthreatened way that she’d somehow imagined he would. They’d had a series of conversations that had made things worse and worse, and it had taken months for their marriage to heal.
Five years later, there was Chips Ahoy. He was her thesis supervisor when she was getting her Ph.D.; he was a scholar, a thinker of distinction, and a mindfucker: he liked to open you up and climb around inside your head with his psychic flashlight and leave you with the feeling that he was the only person who had ever truly understood you. He liked to get to that part of you that was loyal to nothing and no one, and convince you that that place, where he alone had joined you, was your most sacred chamber. He became Chips Ahoy one night when Janine and Daniel were shopping at Safeway. They ran into him in the snacks and cookies aisle, and she dropped a box of Chips Ahoy! cookies as they were talking, and Daniel took another box off the shelf and handed it to her, and she dropped that one too. Daniel, obviously, realized something was up, and every once in a while after that, he asked her how things were going with Chips Ahoy.
One kiss marred by bad beer and bad breath, and two dropped boxes of cookies, over twenty-three years. It didn’t add up to much in the scale of marital divagations. But this felt different.
24
She found Daniel at the kitchen table, reading a book about the robber barons.
“How’s it going?” he said, barely looking up. “How’s the motivation biz?”
She leaned over and kissed him.
“It’s all very exciting,” she said.
“My God, you smell of cigarettes. Have you been smoking?”
“Of course I haven’t been smoking,” she said, feeling as if she were lying, although she wasn’t.
“Then you’ve been kissing somebody who has.”
They rarely talked about anything serious, with the exception of their children, and yet he was completely tuned in to her. He didn’t really think that she’d been kissing anyone, and yet . . .
“Yes, I have. I’ve been making out with Humphrey Bogart.”
“Well, that’s not so bad. I was afraid you’d been kissing Christopher Hitchens.”
“Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like girls.”
“He likes girls. He just doesn’t think girls have a sense of humor.”
“If you don’t think girls have a sense of humor, you don’t like girls.”
“So that’s why you didn’t kiss him?”
“That was one of the reasons.”
“What were the others?”
“Well, his views.”
“His views on what? Surely it wasn’t his atheism.”
“I don’t mind his atheism.”
“Is it the things he said about Mother Teresa?”
“Only partly. I agree with a lot of what he said about her, actually.”
“So what was it?”
“It isn’t his views I don’t like. It’s his contempt for anyone who doesn’t share them.”
“So you would have kissed Christopher Hitchens if he weren’t so snarky to believers?”
“Yes. In a word, yes.”
“So who did you kiss?”
“Mother Teresa.”
“And she was smoking?”
“I wouldn’t say she was smoking. She had a few puffs on a cigar.”
“Mother Teresa. Who would have guessed she was a smoker?”
“Well, that’s the thing. She considers herself a statistical nonsmoker.”
“What does that mean?”
“If you have just a few puffs.”
“I get it.”
“She smokes pot like a hound, though.”
“Like a hound.”
“Yes. Like a hound.”
“Are you too hot?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re fanning yourself.”
“I just fan myself sometimes. It’s something I do.”
“I’ve never noticed that before.”
“I’ve been fanning myself forever. I was fanning myself the night we met.”
“I do remember, now that you mention it. I found it very appealing.”
“I thought you found it appealing. I noticed.”
“Break it up, you two,” Emily called from the next room.
25
Florence’s new editor wanted to meet her. He volunteered to come to her, on the Upper West Side, which was a display of deference that she appreciated.
But the reason he wanted to meet her, obviously, was to tell her that her literary services would no longer be required. She was fully aware that her books, with an impressive consistency, had lost money; she was fully aware that Edward had kept publishing her work out of personal loyalty, not because it made any business sense. With Edward gone, she knew she was gone as well.
She had tried hard to avoid the dreadful Kevin Cleaver. What was the point of meeting him in o
rder to learn she was being dropped? He probably thought that telling her to her face was the humane thing to do. She didn’t want any part of it—send me an email, was her feeling—but he was intent on meeting her, and after three voice mails she’d decided that it wouldn’t be so bad. She would get to observe a human type that was unfamiliar to her, an experience that was always of interest; and she’d get a free lunch.
They met, at his suggestion, at Gabriel’s, a restaurant she liked but rarely went to, a friendly and relaxed and expensive place on West Sixtieth Street.
“So this is the great Florence Gordon,” he said.
“Florence Gordon,” she said.
She was thinking: Don’t mock me. If you’re going to drop me, just drop me. Don’t humiliate me too.
He was so hip that she didn’t have words to describe him. She couldn’t even describe what he was wearing. He was wearing jeans, of course, but she couldn’t have given a good account of his shirt, or his earring, or his shoes. Especially his shoes. They were hipster shoes, shoes that proved that he was in the know, shoes you could probably purchase only in Williamsburg.
“Why?” she said.
“Why what?”
“Why are we getting together?”
He laughed at this.
“I’ve heard about how direct you are,” he said. “I would have been disappointed if you weren’t.”
“Thank you. So. Why?”