Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  He’d had affairs all through their courtship, and she knew that he’d continue to have affairs after they were married. In a display of frankness that in retrospect she sometimes counted as her first act of feminist self-assertion, she told him that she didn’t give a damn about what he did in his free time as long as he didn’t embarrass her and as long as the children didn’t find out. (At first she’d planned on having more than one.)

  That seemed like an unbelievably good deal to him.

  What it came down to was that she’d wanted children, but she’d never really wanted to be a wife. And despite all his foolishness and running around, despite all the behavior that led everyone who knew them to consider her the injured party, she now believed that, in some not quite conscious way, she had used him all along.

  She had divorced him in the mid-seventies, when Daniel was still a boy. It had seemed like a good time to leave him. Saul was thriving: he had a comfortable job at Adelphi University; he was writing regularly for The Nation and Dissent and the New Leader and the New American Review. And when she left him, he didn’t seem to mind. Still an incorrigible philanderer, he’d been seeing someone, an editor named Camille, for more than a year.

  But then Camille was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died with an astonishing quickness, and a few years later he lost his job at Adelphi because of a mess of his own making. (He had fallen in love with a student, who reciprocated his interest for a while and then drew back, and after she drew back he went a little nuts. Florence had viewed it with a kind of detached sympathy: true, he’d made a fool of himself, but he’d been crazy about the girl. And probably there was an element of delayed reaction to Camille’s death.)

  After that, it had been thirty years, no comebacks. He’d never gotten a comparable job—instead he taught for a year here, a semester there, and worked horribly long hours as a freelance copy editor. He’d moved to increasingly shabby neighborhoods as his income declined, finally moving all the way to Brooklyn, which was the ultimate insult to his ego. (For an intellectual of his generation, the great heroic journey was the journey out of Brooklyn into Manhattan; it was devastating to have to make the journey in reverse.) And although he claimed to be writing, and was forever telling her about publishing companies that were panting to see his work, he hadn’t published anything in almost twenty years.

  Even his name, his first name, was a burden. When he was a young man, he was proud to be named Saul: his name had been an inducement to greatness, because he had no doubt that he’d unseat Saul Bellow as the premier Jewish writer of the age. It hadn’t quite happened that way, and now his name seemed to mock him. It was like being a mediocre ballplayer who happened to be named Michael Jordan.

  Florence had been looking forward to a Saul-free middle age, but she found out that things don’t work that way. When everything in his life fell apart, she felt she had to prop him up. She didn’t respect him, didn’t trust him, didn’t even like him, but she was going to have to look out for him, as best she could, probably for the rest of her life.

  “So how come you never showed up for the big family dinner that night?” she said.

  “I had a cold.”

  “You couldn’t call?”

  “I thought I left you a message. How’s Dan?”

  “Daniel’s good. They’re all good. They’re thinking about moving here, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. That would be heartwarming. I’ve always wanted to get to know my son better.”

  That was a joke. Saul seemed to have no interest in his son.

  They chatted for another twenty minutes, but Saul seemed restless. He’d wanted to see her so he could ask her for the favor, and now that that was done he wanted to leave.

  “Well, I’m going home to take a nap. I was thinking I’d give myself a treat tonight and jerk off, and I gotta rest up for it.”

  “Thanks for letting me know that, Saul.”

  “I’m not saying it’s a sure thing. It’s more a hope than a plan. You reach a certain age, you’ve got to pop a couple of Viagra even if all you want to do is jack off.”

  “That’s also good to know.”

  He talked too much about his sex life, when he was having one, and his lack of one, when he wasn’t.

  A year ago, Saul had been seeing someone, and he was always laying down heavy hints about the alleged excellence of his sex life. Florence didn’t believe him—when someone keeps telling you how good his sex life is, you can be sure that it isn’t—but even if it was as dandy as he claimed, it didn’t matter to her. There was no residual hurt here, and no jealousy, and no wish to have a physical life comparable to that which he claimed to be having.

  Florence still experienced sexual desire, of course, but it had been a long time since she’d actually wanted to have sex. Sex was too messy, too unsettling, too inarticulate, too revealing, too disappointing. She didn’t miss those faintly comic exertions. The thought of paunchy, boiled-faced Saul having sex—she couldn’t imagine it as anything but comic.

  He took a long drink of water, and then he had a coughing fit, which went on for so long that it worried her. When it was done, it seemed to have aged him. As she looked across the table at him, with his forever-affronted face, the face of a man who believed that life had played a trick on him, she had an image of his heart giving out while he was laboring atop some doughy sex worker, and she imagined the sex worker taking the bills from his wallet, slipping out of the hotel room (why was this fantasy taking place in a hotel room?), and leaving poor Saul there all alone.

  She had the silly notion that she could see his fate. Someday Saul’s corpse would lie abandoned in a cheap hotel. She could see it clearly. And despite everything, for a moment she felt an infinite tenderness toward him, and toward the sad failed project of his life.

  38

  Florence’s doctor pressed a button on the sanitizer, spritzed some into his palm, and rubbed his hands together, gazing reverently at her all the while, as if he were in the presence of greatness.

  She had called him to tell him about her sprained ankle, and during the course of the conversation she’d worked her way around to the things she really wanted to talk about—her frantic fingers and her flappy foot, which were starting to worry her a little—and he’d asked her to come in so he could have a look.

  “Florence Gordon,” he said. “My hero. My heroine.”

  “You always seem amused when you see me, Noah. Do all your patients amuse you?”

  “My patients don’t amuse me. You don’t amuse me. What you’re mistaking for a smile of amusement is a smile of admiration.”

  “And do you admire all your patients? Why do you admire me?”

  “I admire your accomplishments.”

  “About which you know nothing. Have you read even one of my books? Even one essay?”

  “I have read your work. I read that article of yours. The one we talked about. I liked it very much.”

  “That article. You read that article fifteen years ago.”

  “No. Has it been that long?”

  While they were talking he was listening to her body with his stethoscope, testing her reflexes, pressing on her lymph nodes. He had a knack of making you feel as if you were spending twenty minutes doing nothing but joking with him, even while he was examining you scrupulously.

  He obviously hadn’t seen the review; if he had, he would have been talking about it.

  The world, for her, was now divided into two groups: people who’d read the review and people who hadn’t. She trusted that this state was temporary.

  “But your accomplishments aren’t the only thing about you that I admire,” he said.

  “What else?”

  “I treat a lot of writers. You know that, right?”

  “I didn’t, really. I knew you treated some.”

  “A lot. A lot of very good, very established writers. And they’re all very different, of course—they’re all rugged individualists—but there’s one thing they ha
ve in common. Every writer I’ve ever had as a patient, every one, has been a hypochondriac. Except you.”

  “I was going to say—”

  “You’re the only one. You’re not cavalier about your health; when something is bothering you, you come in and see me. As you should. But you’re not a hypochondriac. And I find that remarkable.”

  He was shining a light into her eyes as he spoke.

  “And that’s why, when you come to me with a concern, I know it’s real. I know enough to take it seriously. You’re not the Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

  “I think you mean Chicken Little.”

  “I mean the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But if you want me to say Chicken Little, I’ll say Chicken Little. You’re not Chicken Little either. You know what I’m trying to say. You’re not somebody who comes in to see the doctor for no reason.”

  She mentioned her ankle again, as if it were the reason for her visit, and he said her ankle was healing perfectly. He said it almost dismissively, as if a mere sprained ankle wasn’t distinguished enough for either of them to be concerned with.

  He asked her for fuller descriptions of the other things she’d been experiencing. He made her walk in a straight line; he made her follow the beam of his flashlight with her eyes as he moved it back and forth a few inches from her face. Then he took a look at both hands and both feet, testing their range of motion very gently—her left ankle was the one she’d sprained, and he somehow manipulated her left foot without bringing any more pain to the ankle.

  He took his stethoscope off. He always turned it into a dramatic act.

  “Okay. Suit up and meet me in my office.”

  That was part of the ritual of seeing Noah. After he examined you, he asked you to put your street clothes back on and join him in his office, and you talked like two real people, not like a doctor and a poor, defenseless patient in a paper gown.

  When she got to his office he was furiously emailing away, but he closed the lid of his computer when she sat down.

  “These little complaints you have. They’re interesting.”

  “I’m glad to be able to interest you, Noah. It’s been a dream of mine.”

  “No, they are. When my star Stoic comes in to tell me she feels a little weird, it gets my attention.” His phone started vibrating and he slapped it and it quieted down.

  “Now, there are about a thousand things that this might be, and the huge majority are nothing. So the first piece of medical advice I have for you is this: don’t go on the Internet. If you go on the Internet, you can make yourself crazy. You’re free to spend your time that way, if that’s your thing, but I have a feeling you have better ways to spend your time. All the bad things that it might be are very exotic and very unlikely. You may have heard this before, but if a good doctor hears hoofbeats, he thinks it’s probably a horse. He doesn’t think it’s probably a zebra. We’re going to have you do some tests—some blood tests, an MRI, maybe an EMG, maybe a nerve conduction test—and we’re going to have you see a very good neurologist, and we’ll find out what kind of a horse it is. Okay?”

  He picked up his stethoscope and put it back around his neck and came out from behind his desk. He was ready for his next appointment.

  “And listen,” he said. “You live, what, ten blocks away? You shouldn’t be a stranger.”

  He patted her on the knee.

  “That’s a reassuring nonsexual pat, by the way. Don’t sue me.”

  “I won’t sue you, Noah. My family’ll sue you, though, if this turns out to be a zebra and you keep looking for horses and fuck this up.”

  “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I haven’t fucked anything up yet.”

  “That’s what I like to hear from a doctor,” Florence said.

  39

  During the two months that Emily had spent alone with her mother in New York, they’d seen Florence twice, at her birthday party and after the Town Hall event. Now that Daniel had joined them, they were seeing her almost every week.

  Emily had the impression that Florence didn’t enjoy these visits, but there was something about Daniel’s commitment to family life that made it impossible to say no to him, even for Florence Gordon, the master of the art of saying no.

  Whenever they got together, of course, Florence held center stage. Tonight, in the living room at West Ninety-fourth Street, she was complaining a lot—about her students, who, even in the summer, wouldn’t let her alone; about her sprained ankle, which still hurt, and still left her dependent on her cane; about her success, which was preventing her from concentrating on her work.

  “For the first time in my life, I can’t take care of everything I need to take care of. I’m behind on my emails, my apartment is a mess, I have books overdue at the library. I have research I need to do but it’s a hassle to get down there to do it. I need a wife.”

  “You don’t need a wife,” Emily said. “You just need a trusty assistant.”

  “Are you nominating yourself?” Janine said.

  Emily expected Florence to quash the idea, but Florence didn’t say anything.

  Emily had time on her hands—she was taking a literature class at Barnard two evenings a week, but other than that she was free. And it would be nice to earn some money.

  “I guess I am,” she said.

  Florence had been looking nowhere in particular; now she looked at Emily. The look lasted only an instant, but Emily felt as if she’d been scanned, searched, and sorted. She was sure that neither of her parents had registered anything at all, but Emily felt . . . it was absurd to think anything like this, but it was as if she’d been treated roughly.

  “Excuse me a minute,” she said, and left the room.

  40

  Florence’s first thought: Thank God it was Emily who’d volunteered and not Janine. It would be just like Janine to thrust herself forward at a moment like that (“I have free time! I can help you!”), which would have meant that Florence would have had to say no, which would have been awkward all around.

  Her next thought: Is there any way Emily might end up being a Trojan Horse for Janine? Not that Emily was intending anything like that, obviously. But if I let open the door to Emily, will her mother barge through?

  Her next thought: Is Emily intelligent enough?

  She took a look at the girl. She wasn’t sure she’d ever looked at her closely before.

  Over the years, Florence had had many assistants, and the main thing she’d learned was that people were stunningly inept. It wasn’t just that they didn’t know how to research anything competently; they couldn’t even use a Xerox machine. It was amazing how few of them would fail to fuck up even that. They’d copy the pages out of order; they’d press the book down so weakly against the screen that the images ended up blurry and smudged; if they were students of hers at NYU, they’d be too lazy to go to the Duplicating Office to use the machines that were kept in good repair, instead using the crappy old machines in the library. Often enough Florence stopped asking her assistants to do anything more challenging than pick up her mail at the faculty mailbox. So she wasn’t sure she could trust Emily to do the work. She seemed smart enough, but you could never be sure. If Emily fucked it up it would be painful. It would be painful to have to fire her, but damned if Florence was going to keep her on the payroll for the rest of the summer just to be nice.

  Emily was leaving the room. Where the hell was she going?

  When she came back, she was holding an iPhone or BlackBerry or some kind of smartphone—what a stupid term, Florence thought—and peering down at it. Infuriating.

  “I can give you a week of work,” Florence said. “After that, we’ll see.”

  We’ll see whether you’re an idiot, she thought. If you’re not, I’ll keep you on. A week should be enough time to find out.

  41

  “Cool,” Emily said, making an effort to sound as unenthusiastic as possible. “When do I start?”

  She said this without looking up from her Android. There was
nothing she needed it for; she just wanted to annoy the old battle-ax.

  Idly she went to Google and typed into the search bar: What have I gotten myself into?

  42

  Emily spent the next few afternoons in the Tamiment Library’s feminism and women’s history collection, on the second floor of NYU’s Bobst Library on Washington Square. A trove of material from the dawn of the contemporary women’s movement was housed there, including documents and recordings that couldn’t be found online. The idea that there were documents and recordings that couldn’t be found online had never really occurred to her before.

  Emily’s first task was to read through a collection of periodicals and pamphlets from the late sixties and early seventies—Redstockings, Off Our Backs, the Female State—looking for references to a few key women and a few key events. Her second was to dive into the oral history collection, which included dozens of interviews with women activists. Some of them had been transcribed, but most of them were still available only on tape.

  Emily liked going to Bobst. It was vast and quiet and humming with the thoughts of everyone who was studying there; and it had every book you could imagine wanting. She liked getting comfortable with obscure tools of research. Cassette tapes! Microfilm! She felt like a votary of ancient knowledge. She felt as if the experience were preparing her for going back to college, not that she’d be having any contact with microfilm and cassette tapes when she did.

  She took more time in the archives than she needed to, because, in addition to doing the research Florence had asked her to do, she couldn’t stop herself from doing research on Florence. If, next to an article that Florence had asked her to summarize, she found an article by Florence herself, she always took the time to read it. These were things that she was pretty sure had never been collected in Florence’s books. Many of the articles were more personal than she would have expected. Sometimes she felt almost as if she were leafing through her grandmother’s old diaries.