Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

When he and Janine took the kids to Disneyland for the first time, Emily, who was five or six, after seeing Cinderella and Snow White, had turned to Janine and said, “So they are real!”

  He remembered this and wished he were back at the apartment. He was glad to be seeing Caroline, but the only thing he wanted at this point in life was to be with his family.

  “Anyway, you already know what it means,” Caroline said. “Why are you asking me?”

  “I don’t know. I just . . . it’s something I don’t really understand.”

  The question of stardom. It had been eating at him for the past few weeks, ever since his mother told them about the review. Everyone was responding as if it were such big news. Janine was acting as if she were no longer worthy to spend time in the same room with her. Saul was acting as if it had somehow put an end to all his hopes. Florence was acting as if she’d been crowned. But what was it, really? It was a book review. It was a good review, but no better than a lot of reviews Florence had received in the past. The main thing that was special about it wasn’t the what but the where. The main thing that was special about it was that it was on the cover of the Times Book Review.

  But, really, why was that a big deal? It wasn’t the New York Times that thought Florence was hot stuff; it was just one lady who’d happened to get the assignment. If she’d been busy that week and they’d given the book to somebody else, they would have gotten a different result. And yet everyone was acting as though the spirit of literary authority had descended from the heavens and wrapped around Florence’s shoulders the mantle of never-dying greatness.

  Yes, he had a fancy internal monologue for a policeman, but look at how he’d grown up.

  He felt as if he lacked some gene or some organ of sense perception. He’d seen an article a while ago about sounds that adults can’t hear; maybe there were concepts that a few of us can’t understand, and being a star was one of them. What was it? Those who wanted to be stars seemed to believe that if enough people knew who you are, then you . . . what? Wouldn’t be unhappy? Wouldn’t die?

  “Maybe it’s just New York,” he said. “Emily needed to find a dentist last month. One kid she knew from college gave her a recommendation, and he told her, ‘He’s a good dentist. He isn’t a star, but he’s a good dentist.’ Can you imagine? Is there anyplace else on earth where somebody’d apologize for sending you to a dentist who wasn’t a star?”

  “I’d never go to a dentist who wasn’t a star,” Caroline said.

  Maybe the yearning for stardom wasn’t like a sound he couldn’t hear but a disease he was immune to. I have greatness in me. Jesus.

  If it was a disease, there was no mystery about why he was immune to it. Both of his parents had spent their lives in its grip, and he’d witnessed its stupidity. He’d lived the effects of it. He was one of its effects.

  “What if it doesn’t work out?” he said. “What’s your backup plan?”

  “That’s what I love about you, Daniel.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re never afraid to be blunt.”

  “So what’s your backup plan?”

  “My backup plan is not to have a backup plan. If you’re making plans about what to do if you fail, aren’t you just planning to fail?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Do you think I’m being childish?”

  Yes, he thought. But then again, what do I know? So he took the optimistic view.

  “I think you’re being brave. You know what you want and you’re going after it. I think you’re doing exactly what you should be doing. Put that away.”

  “Come on. You’re my guest.”

  “You’re a budding artist. I’m a member of the bourgeoisie. My only value in life is to buy lunch for the young.”

  He told himself that he shouldn’t worry for her too much. She was smart and resourceful. And she was beautiful, which wouldn’t hurt. Maybe she’d become what she wanted to become. It sometimes happens, he supposed.

  36

  To get to her office, on the fifth floor of the lab, you took an elevator that had mirrored walls. As it rose slowly, Janine studied herself. She looked critically at her—

  Who the hell cares what I look like? I look good enough.

  Lev had been away for the last week, doing one of his rounds of cross-country fund-raising and conference-going. He was supposed to be returning today, but he wasn’t in the office when she got there.

  Even when he wasn’t there, it felt as if he were. She’d never known a workplace that was as friendly as this one was, and she was sure it was because of his influence.

  She spent the morning talking to college students, most of whom had been on Ritalin so long that she wondered whether it had subtly addled them, and then she reread an article she was writing. Actually, she was helping two other people write it. It was about the brain chemistry of willpower; they knew the science and she knew how to render it in clear language.

  In the late afternoon she drifted out to the living room.

  When the townhouse was converted into an academic building, Lev had retained the living room, wanting to provide a comfortable space where people could talk at their leisure.

  From where she sat, she could see him in the kitchen. He was back. She felt suddenly happier and more alert.

  He was standing at the coffee machine. Hot water was dribbling out of the side of it, bypassing the carafe and pooling on the counter.

  “This damned Mr. Coffee. When we had the old thing . . .”

  She resisted the urge to do the traditional womanly thing and get it working for him.

  “Good luck,” she said, and went back to her office.

  Lev’s smell was a little bit mothball-y. She liked Daniel’s smell, but it had never felt like home to her. This used to make her sad when they were younger. When she was first becoming troubled by her feelings for Lev, she was relieved to note that he didn’t smell like home to her either.

  When she was done for the day she went back to the kitchen, made herself a cup of coffee, and visited him in his office.

  His office was always in a state of cheerful disorder. Papers piled up in his inbox and next to his inbox; books sitting on top of books—on the filing cabinet, on the desk, on the floor. It was as if they were spawning.

  “How did you get it to work?”

  “As well as being a top-flight psychologist,” Janine said, “she makes a fine cup of coffee.”

  “Right,” he said. “Oh, well. Listen—I read the last draft of your article. You’re doing a marvelous job.”

  They talked about the marvelous job she was doing, and his comments made it clear to her that she had another few drafts to go. His criticisms were extensive and specific, but somehow none of them stung.

  “And what about Pittsburgh?” he said. “Are you going to have time?”

  “I think I am, but I’m still not sure. I might have some things I can’t get out of that weekend.”

  “You’ve been saying that for the last two months, but never mind. Just let me know by Wednesday, okay?”

  The lab was empty except for the two of them.

  The peculiar intimacy of the workplace after everyone else is gone. His office door was open; his wide desk was between them; there was nothing untoward about the situation or the setting; but being here with him at five on a Friday evening was somehow more intimate than it would have been to be with him in the darkest bar.

  “I have half an hour,” she said. “What shall we discuss?”

  “What shall we discuss. Let’s see. Well, you can tell me how you got into this.”

  “Into . . . ?”

  “How did you become a psychologist? We’ve been doing nothing but gabbing for months, but you’ve never really told me how you got started.”

  “How did I get into this. I got into this because I just love listening to people. I love listening to people tell their stories. I mean, I could tell you about my mother this and my father that,
and my self-esteem, and my probably culturally conditioned desire to help people, but really that’s pretty much it. I’m never that sure if I am helping anybody, though. Sometimes I feel like all I can do is accompany people through life’s disasters.”

  “Maybe that’s all anybody can do.”

  She knew he didn’t mean this, since his whole approach was practical and quantitative, searching for measurable results to measurable problems. He was just being kind.

  “What about you?” she said. “Why did you get into this?”

  “Self-interest,” Lev said. “I don’t think I was in love with the idea of listening to people or helping people. Not like you. I think I got into it because I wanted to figure myself out.”

  “And how’d that go?”

  She tried to make this sound hipsterishly arch and mocking, but she wanted to know.

  “You know what Mao said when they asked him to sum up the consequences of the French Revolution? ‘It’s too soon to tell.’”

  “No. Really.”

  “It helped. Thirty years thinking about how the brain works, how the mind works—it’s taught me I’m not nearly as different from everyone else as I thought I was. And that’s what I needed to learn. It gave me ‘permission,’ as they say, to accept myself. I think that was what I was after, even if I didn’t know it at the time.”

  He absentmindedly brought his coffee cup to his lips, looked at it, put it down.

  “Do you think less of me?” he said.

  “Why should I think less of you?”

  “Because I didn’t go into it for noble reasons. Because I didn’t go into it to help others.”

  “I do think less of you.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It had to happen eventually,” she said. “I couldn’t go on idealizing you forever.”

  “And yet you’re still here,” he said.

  “And yet I’m still here.”

  They were silent. They looked at each other until she had to look away.

  If I were sitting on a park bench with him, she thought, we’d probably start to kiss now.

  But there was a desk between them, and although it was starting to feel like a kissing situation, it wasn’t a slithering-over-the-desk situation.

  She stood and said goodnight.

  His coffee cup was standing empty on his desktop. She picked up her cup, held it above his, and, slowly, poured.

  Then she turned and left, without looking back.

  37

  Florence got to the coffee shop a few minutes early, but Saul was already there. He didn’t comment on the fact that she was using a cane. When she sat down, he looked at his watch and shook his head, as if she were late.

  It was the first of two meetings that she would have preferred to avoid. Saul had been bugging her about getting together, so she’d scheduled lunch with him on a day when she already had a doctor’s appointment, in order to get both of them over with at once.

  Saul looked unhealthy—but he always looked unhealthy these days. He was wearing a white shirt and a dark sport jacket—everything was clean and respectable—yet somehow he had the air of a man who was going to seed. He was the kind of person who doesn’t smell bad, as far as you can tell, but who looks like he smells bad.

  What was it? She could never quite put her finger on it. There was something shifty and evasive about him; he seemed like a man who was spending his discretionary income on some surly dominatrix in Brooklyn.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “Hail the conquering hero.”

  It begins, she thought.

  “If you were fifty years younger I would have wondered if you’d given somebody a blowjob for that review. But who would want a blowjob from you now?”

  “Maybe I gave a blowjob to someone very old.”

  “A Blowjob for Methuselah. That should be the title of your next book. So is your life any different, now that you’re the queen of bourgeois mediocrity?”

  “Is that what I am?”

  “Of course it is. When you were a young firebrand, or whatever the hell you were, you never would have gotten a review like that. They only give reviews like that to people the establishment considers totally safe. Life is pretty good for you now that you stopped being a radical.”

  “You obviously don’t read my stuff anymore, if you ever did,” she said. “Every word I’ve ever written has been in the service of human liberation, as best as I can imagine it. Every word I’ve ever written has been in the service of feminism, of antiracism, of anticapitalism, of a vision of a world in which people are both equal and free. Nothing I’ve written has ever deviated from that, Saul. Not one line.”

  In her own ears, this sounded stirring. She felt as if she were outside herself, near the ceiling, watching herself with admiration as she delivered this statement of her beliefs.

  Saul scrunched up his face and in a high, mincing, baby-talking voice, said, “Every word I’ve ever written has been in the service of the cervix.”

  A waitress turned up, poker-faced about whether she’d heard this, and they ordered, and the waitress went away.

  “Florence Gordon!” he said. “Everywhere I turn, it’s Florence! Florence! Florence! People who haven’t mentioned your name in years: ‘Have you heard from Florence?’ ‘Aren’t you happy for Florence?’ ‘Florence must not even have any time to talk to you.’ All these people who’re acting like you’ve accomplished something. Just because some lesbian took her clothes off for you in the New York Times.”

  “I don’t think she’s a lesbian, Saul. Not that it matters. And I don’t remember the thing about the clothes.”

  “The New York Fucking Times. These are the bozos who told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. These are the pussies who stopped using the word ‘torture’ and started talking about ‘enhanced interrogation’ because they didn’t want to say anything that would get Dick Fucking Cheney mad at them.”

  She had known that Saul would try to make her pay for her good fortune.

  If a similar review had come Saul’s way, he’d be crowing now about the greatness of the Times; he’d be saying that it was the one newspaper that even the most radical and daring thinkers had always had to take seriously.

  She had known that Saul was going to try to make her pay, and she had known that she was going to take it. Not because she feared him, but because she pitied him. Saul had been growing sadder and more bitter and more desperate for the last twenty years, and on the infrequent occasions when they got together, he invariably started by attacking her, and she never had the heart to fight back.

  After the coffee arrived he took out a vial and shook some pills onto the table. Pills of many different colors and sizes and shapes.

  “I have to take fifteen of these goddamn things a day. Five in the morning, five in the . . . shit.”

  One of the pills had rolled off the table. He bent over in his chair and picked it up and wiped it with his napkin.

  When you and your ex-husband are in your seventies, the advantage normally goes to the man. The man will look maybe not as good as he thinks he looks, but better than you do.

  But with Florence and Saul, fortunately, the facts were otherwise. Bald except for shaggy remnants on the sides of his head, alarmingly red-faced, not fat but puffy and paunchy, Saul was a ruin.

  She herself wasn’t exactly turning heads, but she was presentable.

  “How are things going?” she said. She sensed that the force of his anger was spent, and that they could move on to other things.

  “Great. Things are going great. I’m finishing up two books, if you can believe it, and a couple of publishers are very interested.”

  “That’s wonderful, Saul.”

  Small talk for a while, and then: “The reason I asked you to lunch, actually, is that I thought we could do each other a mutual favor. I heard about the job in the Cultural Criticism Department—the lectureship thing. I was thinking you could recommend me. It would be good for you, a
nd it would be good for me.”

  It would be good for her, in Saul’s reckoning, because his greatness would add luster to NYU. In this, as in many things, he was delusional. Most of the people who’d heard of him were dead.

  It was remarkable, though, that he was presenting this as an occasion when they could do each other a favor. His normal way of talking about something like this would be to represent it purely as a favor that he wanted to do for you. His normal way of approaching this would be to say that it would be a painful bore for him to have a lectureship, but he’d be willing to take one, to help you out.

  “Well, I’ll have to look into it, Saul.”

  “Of course you’ll have to look into it. I know you can’t just slap a contract down on the table. But I’m a great teacher. I’d be perfect for this job. I wouldn’t be bringing it up if I wasn’t.”

  “I know that. But these aren’t decisions I can make on my own. I can only make recommendations.”

  “Right. Of course. Like you recommended Tanya.”

  That had been a misstep on Florence’s part. She’d gotten her friend Tanya a job at NYU a year earlier, pretty much steered her into it. Getting her the job hadn’t been the mistake; the mistake had been telling Saul about it.

  “You’ve been a fucking bureaucrat for so long that you don’t even realize when you’re lying anymore.”

  Control yourself, she thought.

  Saul was one of the few people in the world on whom she didn’t feel free to unleash her aggression. She felt permanently guilty toward Saul. Not because she’d divorced him, but because she’d married him in the first place.

  When she was young, she’d had a future in mind for herself, a future as a scholar and writer. She hadn’t yet conceived of herself as a feminist—this was the early 1960s, and she found her way to feminism only toward the end of the decade. But she’d already known that she didn’t want to be a housewife. And sometimes she thought that she’d married Saul with a touch of bad faith.

  It was hard to remember it now, but at the time Saul had seemed like a winner: ruddy, hardy, healthy, and alive. He’d seemed like someone you could make good children with. And he’d also seemed like someone who wouldn’t detain her. It was as if she’d sensed from the beginning that the ties that bound them wouldn’t be that confining. He seemed easy to marry and easy to leave.