Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  “Sorry if I’ve been badgering you. But I’ve been badgering you for two reasons. First, I wanted to meet you. Second, I read the beginning of your memoir the weekend before last, and I wanted to tell you how beautiful it is.”

  Edward must have passed it on before he left.

  She waited for the next sentence, which would inevitably start with “But . . .” But it isn’t really marketable. But we’re looking for a different kind of thing right now. But we’re not the best publisher to do justice to your work.

  “It’s just wonderful. It’s everything I hoped it would be and more.”

  It took a while for his words to reach her. He seemed to be speaking with a five-second delay.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” she said.

  She was still waiting for the “But.”

  “Those were my two reasons, as of last week. But as of yesterday, there’s a third reason.”

  He produced two pieces of paper and slid them across the table. A blurry fax. A blurry faxed copy of the front page of the New York Times Book Review. With a review of How to Look at a Woman.

  “Is this a prank?”

  “If it is, it’s a prank that’s about to be perpetrated on a few million people.”

  It was real. It was a copy of the book review section that would come out two Sundays from now.

  “Read it.”

  She read it. She was having trouble focusing—maybe I’m having a stroke, she thought—but it contained phrases like “a national treasure” and “an unsung heroine of American intellectual life.”

  The review was by Martha Nussbaum, the University of Chicago philosopher, an author of books on every subject from Greek tragedy to disability theory to educational reform to the idea of religious tolerance in American life to—well, to everything else. Nothing human was alien to her.

  She seemed to have read everything Florence had ever written. From the review you might have thought she’d spent her life doing nothing but meditating on Florence’s work.

  “Jesus,” she said. “When did you get this?”

  “Got it yesterday. I’m sorry I waited, but I got greedy. I wanted to show you in person. I wanted to see your face.”

  “Did you get your money’s worth?”

  “You seem remarkably calm, actually.”

  “Well. Maybe not.”

  “Maybe this is the way you look when you’re elated.”

  She thought of Edward, poor dear Edward. He had been so loyal to her for so long. It was unfair that it wasn’t he who was giving her this news. She’d called him twice since their breakfast, but he hadn’t felt well enough to come to the phone.

  She looked at the review again. It went on and on and on and on. Martha Nussbaum had always been a woman with a lot to say, and now she had a lot to say about Florence.

  “It’s going to take some time to sink in. I can’t really understand it. I mean, why?”

  “Depends on how you want to look at it. You could say it was long overdue. Or you could say you got lucky. Sometimes the Times likes to throw everybody a curve. Whatever the reason, it’s going to change your life. You’ve been declared a national treasure.”

  He took out his iPhone or whatever the hell it was and read a few messages, and then wrote a few messages. It was remarkable, the way people interrupted their conversations with you to do this sort of thing, without a word of apology. It had become as natural as taking a sip of water.

  “So now can we talk about your memoir?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  She made an effort to get the review out of her mind. Wasn’t sure she was going to be able to do it.

  “The main thing I have to say is that it’s brilliant. I think this could turn out to be the best thing you’ve ever done.”

  She reached for a poppy-seed roll. The floor was tilting. They were onboard a ship, and the ship was listing. The national treasure reached for a poppy-seed roll.

  “Why?” she said. “Why do you like it?”

  “You’re not hearing me. I don’t like it. I love it. I’m sure you’ve needed to write it for your own personal reasons. You’re writing it for yourself, and you have no idea what it will mean to other people. You’ve been thinking you’re writing a memoir, but what you’re writing is the story of your generation.”

  The story of her generation. Of course she’d been telling herself much the same thing, hoping other people would see it that way, but now that he was saying it, it sounded glib and superficial.

  “You thought you were someone who’d made a home for herself in the cozy little ghetto of feminist literature. But it turned out that wasn’t your destiny. It turned out that your destiny was to write the inner history of your age.”

  She had always found it curious, the way that even sophisticated younger people liked to speak of “destiny,” liked to tell themselves that “there’s a reason for everything.” The way they married a quirky individuality with a passive acceptance of things as they are.

  Why am I so hostile to this man? He’s bringing nothing but good tidings, and he’s saying nothing but nice things.

  Am I, she thought, one of those dreary people who won’t join any club that will have them for a member? She hoped she wasn’t.

  “This has been quite a meal,” she said. “I walked in here thinking I was going to have to find a new publisher, and I walk out of here . . .”

  “You walk out of here an American classic.”

  She made a face.

  “That’s what you are,” he said. “Get used to it.”

  26

  After she said goodbye to Kevin Cleaver, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She wanted to tell her friends, of course, but not yet.

  She wandered over to West End Avenue and walked north. At first she thought she wasn’t headed anywhere in particular, but by the time she passed Seventy-ninth Street she realized that she’d walked this way for a reason. Soon she was standing outside the building of a woman whom she’d known a long time ago.

  Her name was Simone. She had been Florence’s French teacher at the Bronx High School of Science. She was the first woman who’d taken a special interest in her. Florence remembered Simone once telling her that she thought she was going to have an interesting life.

  Florence and Simone had stayed in touch after Florence went to college, but Florence had withdrawn from her sometime after that. During the decade in which Florence had been little more than her husband’s helpmate, she’d been too embarrassed to stay in contact with Simone. She felt too much as if she’d let her down.

  Simone had died before Florence started on her writing career; she’d never had the opportunity to be proud of her student’s successes.

  Florence stood outside Simone’s building for another minute or two, looking up at what used to be her window.

  Thank you.

  Then she started back home.

  27

  “This is a little different,” Janine said.

  “All of a sudden my mother is a legend,” Daniel said.

  “It’s damned strange,” Florence said. “I’m not really sure I like it.”

  “Trust me,” Daniel said. “You like it.”

  Florence had come to their apartment. It was Sunday afternoon. The review was still a week away, but word had begun to trickle out. A woman from Time Out New York had called to arrange an interview. O magazine had asked for an essay. Florence had been booked for something on NPR, and her literary agent had been in conversation with someone at Charlie Rose.

  Emily, on the couch, was watching everyone, or trying to. It was like watching a game where the action is taking place on three parts of the field.

  Florence seemed different, but in a way Emily couldn’t define.

  Or maybe she wasn’t different at all. Maybe it was just that Emily was seeing her differently, now that she was a national treasure.

  Emily’s grandmother might or might not seem different, but her mother definitely did. She seemed k
ind of shellshocked. But why should she be shellshocked by Florence’s success?

  Her father seemed the way he always did.

  He was astonishingly statuelike. What the hell was he? She was convinced that nothing would really change him, ever. If you slipped E into his coffee, she believed, he wouldn’t act any differently. No matter what was going on inside his mind, he would remain unperturbed, unswayable, undiverted, doing his duty to the last.

  It was clear that he was happy for his mother, in his low-key way. Among the three grown-ups, he was the only one who did seem simply happy.

  “They want to send me on a book tour,” Florence said.

  “Do you like going on book tours?” Emily said.

  “I’ll let you know after I’ve been on one.”

  “You’ve never been on one before?”

  “When I did the history of struggle, they got a car and drove me around to different bookstores in the city. They took me all the way to Park Slope. That was my book tour.”

  “Where do they want to take you now?”

  “All the major markets.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Of course you know what it means,” Daniel said. “It means Los Angeles, San Francisco, maybe Boston, maybe Chicago. Where the hell else is there?”

  “Seattle, maybe, Dad?” Emily said. “Portland?”

  “New Yorkers don’t know Seattle and Portland exist,” Daniel said.

  “That’s not true,” Emily said. “They’re big book-buying markets.”

  “How do you know this?” Daniel said.

  “Your daughter knows a lot of things,” Janine said.

  “I do. Anyway, the point is that Grandma is a literary lion now. You know what this means, don’t you, Grandma? It means you’re going to have to start tweeting.”

  “My publisher has already broached the idea.”

  Because her mother seemed oddly immobile, Emily went to the kitchen and got some snacks and brought them back into the living room. Nobody seemed to have moved.

  “Will success change Florence Gordon?” Daniel said.

  Emily was surprised when it seemed that Florence was taking the question seriously.

  “If you make a big splash at her age,” Florence said, looking at Emily, “then it changes you. I’m too old to change.”

  “I don’t know, Grandma,” Emily said. “I don’t think it would have changed you even if you’d been my age.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I think you’re made of iron.”

  “I’m glad you think of me that way.”

  “Are you going to do anything differently now?” Emily said.

  “What should I do differently?”

  “My dad said you said the review got everything right. Right?”

  “I have nothing to complain about.”

  “So now you can rest assured that people understand you. So I was wondering if there were other things you might want to say, now that you know you’ve said your piece and people have understood you. Maybe it’s a chance to change your life.”

  “I never had any doubt that people understood me. And I didn’t need Martha Nussbaum to come along and help people understand my meaning. I think I’ve managed to make it plain enough myself.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I have no need of a chance to change my life. My life is just fine as it is.”

  “She wasn’t trying to offend you, Mom,” Daniel said. “Don’t jump down the girl’s throat, for God’s sake.”

  “She wasn’t jumping down my throat.”

  “Exactly,” Florence said. “I wasn’t jumping down her throat. And you stay out of this.”

  Emily couldn’t quite tell whether her grandmother had been jumping down her throat. Florence always made you feel as if you’d just said something dumb. It was impossible to tell whether she was more irritated than usual.

  28

  Janine felt oddly . . . what was the word? Not exonerated, but something like exonerated. Passed over? Let off the hook? She was usually the object of Florence’s scrutiny, but life was coming at the old lady so fast now that she didn’t have any spare energy to conduct her usual inquisition.

  But this didn’t leave Janine feeling relieved. She was infected with a spirit of restlessness. She couldn’t wait for Florence to leave, but when Florence did leave, Janine felt lonely, even though her husband and daughter were still there.

  In the evening, she and Daniel went to the movies downtown. After that, he wanted to walk around in the East Village, where both of them used to live.

  She’d visited New York often enough in the years since they’d moved to Seattle, but she hadn’t gone back to the East Village. She hadn’t set foot here in more than twenty years. By the time they got to Cooper Square, she felt like a ghost, haunting her own life.

  Here was the street where she’d spent her first summer in New York, just before she started at NYU. Here was the bar where she met that sad, sweet boy she’d once thought she was destined to spend the rest of her life with. What was his name? Here was the bench where she’d kissed that girl with the purple hair. She’d thought of herself as such a daring soul back then.

  Here was the spot where she made that desperate and humiliating phone call to that boy she had a crush on in her sophomore year. The phone booth, of course, was gone. Here was the club where she used to listen to her friend Spider play guitar. It was a shoe store now. And here was the spot where she met Daniel.

  “What do you think?” she said to Daniel.

  “That was the place, right?”

  “That was the place.”

  Each of them had been traveling with friends that night. Some of her friends knew some of his friends. They’d met on the street corner, and while their friends were talking about what to do that night, the two of them launched into an argument about the country versus the city. Pure flirtation. He, who had grown up in the city, was denouncing it as prisonlike; she, who’d come from a suburb, couldn’t understand how anyone could ever be unhappy or bored here. She had pointed to some random apartment building and said, “Every brick in that wall is alive with human intention!” Later he had told her that when she’d said that, he’d decided that he wanted to go out with her.

  They went out for a year, broke up after they graduated, and got together again a few years later.

  “I wonder what we would have turned into if we’d stayed here,” she said.

  “You would have become exactly what you are. Questing, self-questioning, deeply involved in your work. And I would have remained a snot-nosed would-be poet.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m not sure I would have had the guts to give up.”

  29

  The young man finding the courage to live the life of an artist: that’s an oft-told story, a story people are fond of. For Daniel, it had been a question of finding the courage not to. During his childhood, living with two obsessed parents, the background music was a duet for typewriters, and he took it for granted that he’d become a writer himself. In high school he’d seen himself as Byronically romantic; during one spring, besotted with poetry and marijuana, he strode around in a cape. In college he studied literature and writing. During the week before commencement, his poetry teacher, an ex-marine who wrote poetry marked by a sort of burly anguish and who seemed to regard the academic world with a genial contempt, asked Daniel what he planned to do next, and when Daniel said he didn’t know, the teacher suggested that instead of bumming around aimlessly, he should spend a few years in the military and see how the other half lived.

  Normally, this was the kind of suggestion Daniel would have laughed off—his teacher probably expected him to—but it came at a time when he was feeling rigorously critical of both of his parents, and within a few weeks he went to a recruiting office and signed up. When he looked back on this decision in later years, his only question was whether he had done it to spite them or mere
ly to baffle them. He served for two years, and although he saw no action and never even left the States—he was posted to Fort Lewis, Washington, where, having been recognized immediately as a bookish type, he was assigned the job of editing a veterans’ newsletter—by the time he got out, he felt thoroughly liberated from his parents. Not just from his parents: he was liberated, also, from their world.

  Florence and Saul, long divorced by then, were united only in this: neither of them could understand why the hell he’d done what he’d done. They were comfortably cloistered in the worldview of the Upper West Side; they wouldn’t have called themselves pacifists, but they’d been against every war the United States had waged in their adult lifetimes. If he’d joined a revolutionary organization dedicated to overthrowing the government by force, that might have made a little sense to them; joining the U.S. Army made no sense to them at all.

  Later, when he became a cop, one thing he felt clear about, and felt good about, was that he hadn’t become a cop to spite them. He’d known that it would leave them both aghast, but that wasn’t why he did it.

  He’d hated most of the things he encountered in the army. He hated the rigidity, he hated the hostility to thought, he hated the way you get turned into a machine programmed to inflict harm. But the thing that he loved about it was that it gave him his first real experience of democracy. The institution as a whole was hierarchical, but the enlisted men lived in a condition of stripped-down equality: nothing from your past, nothing that you’d been or done or had, meant anything now. The only thing that meant anything to the people you bunked with was not being an asshole, not doing your job so poorly that it made everybody else look bad, and not doing your job so well that it made everybody else look bad.

  When he joined the police force, his parents thought that he’d rejected them twice. What they failed to understand was that under his unfamiliar aspect, he was not very different from the person he’d been all his life. He still had the same social conscience that had led him to make posters for an Upper West Side anti-littering campaign when he was eight and to go door-to-door for Jimmy Carter when he was fourteen. He still wished to be of use.