by Ariel Levy
After my mother settled into life on Cape Cod, she started hosting Thanksgiving and making sensational turkeys that she didn’t eat because she never returned to meat, white or red. Instead, she would pack the leftovers in Tupperware and freeze the gravy in ice cube trays. Then she’d stick all of that in a cooler with ice packs and hand it to me triumphantly when I got in the car to leave. She was victorious on fronts culinary and parental: She had produced a daughter who was an adequate cook and a valiant eater. And who wasn’t dependent on a man.
4
After my story about the obese women’s nightclub was published in New York, people there paid slightly more attention to me. But I remained a lackey and I burned with the desire to rise. I hurled myself up Madison Avenue from the subway station toward our office every morning muttering to myself, obsessed with becoming. I was scrappy and I was greedy, but with an edge of desperation like a hungry cat.
I met an editor named John Homans my first week at the magazine. I went out one morning to what we called the Bat Cave, a fire escape in a dark airshaft off the side of the office, where people went to sneak cigarettes under the dripping hot-water pipes. There was space enough for only two people to stand quite close together, and Homans was already out there, puffing away, looking like Harrison Ford’s younger brother. He was thirty-five; I must have been twenty-one. I told him my name and said that I knew I should know who he was, but I didn’t. “There’s no reason you should know who I am,” he said, which turned out not to be at all true.
He edited all of the best writers at the magazine. If Homans decided to shine his light on you, your byline would appear on the cover, your assignments would be actual stories—interesting, complicated, not the vulgar stuff we sometimes ran about plastic surgeons and real estate in the Hamptons. Much more important, if Homans worked with you, it meant that you were good, or would be by the time he was done with you. It meant you were going to be a real writer.
It took years to ingratiate myself. I would look for excuses to loiter around his office—an imaginary fax that needed sending, a visit to the other underlings who sat outside his door—so I could listen to him yell at his writers on the phone: “When are you going to file that fucking thing?” Or, if they reported a good detail, “Ha! Can you imagine?” As the months inched by, he grew friendlier in his gruff New England way. “It’s a big shit sandwich and everybody has to take a bite,” he’d tell me, when I would complain about having to write blurbs about exterminators or car services.
When I was very little, before we moved to Westchester, my family lived on the second floor of a row house in the Bronx; in my memory, our block looked exactly like Sesame Street. There was a teenage boy across the street named Neil Reardon, whom I worshipped. I wanted to dress like him. I wanted to pee standing up because I somehow knew that he did. My mother and I would sit out on our front stoop, and when I saw him emerge from his house, I would tug on her sleeve so that she would get up and we could move closer to him. It was toddler love: reverential, subordinate, romantic but not strictly sexual. I wanted to impress him and be him. I would stare up at his sixteen-year-old head and swoon at his tall, Gentile dynamism.
That’s how I felt about John Homans. It took me nearly seven years to come up with a story that actually interested him. I noticed that strippers and porn stars and their aesthetic were weirdly and suddenly everywhere. On my way to work in the morning, I passed an enormous billboard picturing Jenna Jameson, the highest-earning porn star in the world at the time, who had a book on the bestseller list. There were pole-dancing classes at my gym. Teenagers were wearing Playboy Bunny T-shirts. Thongs became a thing. And bizarrely, the lingo that went with this look was borrowed from the women’s movement: If you saw a push-up bra, you knew you were seconds away from hearing the word “empowerment.” I would write about this. I would make up a name for it. I would come up with an explanation!
“That’ll be fun for you, Miss Ari,” Homans told me in his usual detached, vaguely ironic tone. But I could tell by the way he was wiggling his fingers in the air, playing an invisible stand-up bass, that I had aroused his enthusiasm.
It took forever to write the thing. Usually, you find out about a story, you go report it, and then you come up with an idea about what you’ve learned, a narrative to organize the information. But this was a story about an idea, and I had to find situations and people that were illustrative. I was very much a beginner. Some of New York’s best stories by the writers I most respected had identified cultural phenomena and given them names they could never shake. (Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.”) But you need confidence and wide-ranging knowledge to write an essay like that, and you need real style to distract your reader through the iffy patches in your argument. I didn’t have any of that.
So I worked by trial and error. I wrote draft after draft and Homans told me what he thought I meant—which tended to be more interesting than what I actually meant—and he showed me the difference between that and what I’d put on the page. When the essay was finished, it was not the masterpiece I’d intended. It wasn’t even a cover story. But it was enough to convince Homans we ought to do another story together, and then another.
Eventually, that essay would become my first book. But securing Homans’s attention was more meaningful to me. A real editor isn’t just someone you work with; he’s your guide. He sees your brain doing its thing and learns its weaknesses and abilities, and if he’s really good, he figures out what you need to hear to compensate for the former and accentuate the latter. He is the person you trust with the most intimate thing you have, your own voice.
Often, that trust infects the entire relationship. There is very little that went on in my life during my twenties and early thirties that I did not tell Homans about; for years he weighed in on every decision I made.
—
I WENT OUT ALMOST every night during that period, trying to figure out who I should be and be with. There was a comedian who had a show on cable about staying out late and going to dive bars across the country after his sets—we went to them together when he was home in New York. Not long after September 11, when the air in the city still stank of scorched plastic and flamed-out fuel, we drank whiskey at the Stoned Crow, a sticky, subterranean place near Washington Square Park with initials and obscenities carved into the walls. It was just a few blocks away from the corner where I had watched with my neighbors as the first tower fell out of the sky.
The day after it happened, there were army tanks all along Fourteenth Street and I remember a group of young men in a pickup truck driving slowly past, holding up American flags and a banner on which they’d written REVENGE. You had to show the police your ID to get onto your street if you lived downtown; anthrax started showing up in the mail, mostly addressed to members of the press. Sikh cabdrivers were getting assaulted because people thought they looked like Osama bin Laden. Hundreds of photos of missing people hung in Grand Central Terminal and along a chain-link fence on Greenwich Street near Saint Vincent’s Hospital, which had mobilized for an influx of victims after the attacks. But the people were gone. The skyscrapers that had been the Southern Cross of Manhattan, gone.
That night at the bar, the comedian told me that this was to be our generation’s test, our Great War. He sounded fleetingly and poignantly heroic—I was used to him kidding about everything. (I loved his jokes, which were vulgar and absurd: “A guy, let’s call him me, was fucking the left eye of a pumpkin. If that pumpkin didn’t want it why was it smiling at me?”) He reminded me of my rough maternal grandfather, a tough Jew. The comedian felt achingly familiar, the brown-eyed husband some part of me always expected to have. It pained me not to be with him but I pushed him away all the same.
Before him, there was a blond boy who looked at me with a covetous lust that elated me. I met him just after my father was diagnosed with cancer. It was the same week I dropped an air conditioner out the window at my friend’s apartment on St. Marks Place. The grimy, wet summer heat was he
avy in her living room, and it was back when we were so unbelievably young that we not only smoked cigarettes, we smoked them indoors. Everyone said to open a window, so I did, but they hadn’t meant that one—obviously—because then the air conditioner was violently sucked out and we heard it smashing against the pavement five flights below.
“Somebody could have been killed!” is what people said when I told the story, but not really; the window was above an airshaft. I was at work at the magazine the next day when my father called. I was about to tell him about the air conditioner when he said that he had cancer, that it was too far along for surgery, and that the prognosis was not good.
I met the blond boy at a party on someone’s rooftop soon afterward. I felt dazed in the soggy, still night. He said that his mother had an extra air conditioner in the basement of her apartment building, and that he would help me get it downtown and up the five flights of stairs into the window I had idiotically opened. He was muscular and determined and he got it done a few days later. Then he slept over.
I had thought he would be very square because he was athletic and always clean but instead he was urgent and uninhibited and said what he wanted and knew, somehow, exactly what I wanted. He left very early the next morning before my father came over on his way to see an oncologist in Midtown.
“If only they had found it sooner,” I said, pleading.
“Yeah,” said my father, “and if only I had two penises I could be in the circus.”
—
WHEN I WAS SMALL—still in my Neil Reardon phase—my father would wash my hair and call me Mrs. Rosenbaum and pretend that his name was Gladys and that we were at a beauty parlor. “We’re just going to touch up your roots, Mrs. Rosenbaum,” he’d say, lathering my head with baby shampoo and speaking in the accent of his own Bronx childhood. “Have you heard about Doris Kaplan? She got a bad perm in Miami. Well you know how Doris is, Mrs. Rosenbaum. With her it’s always something.”
When I was a little older, we would take the train into the city from Larchmont and go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My father liked to sit out on the steps in front before we went inside, so he could watch the people emerging from the museum and see what color entry tags were in use that day. Once he knew, we’d walk up and down the steps looking for discarded tags in the correct color, and he’d be terrifically pleased if we found two to put on before we waltzed inside, past the admission booth, toward the Temple of Dendur.
In the summertime, I went to a hippie sleepaway camp in New Hampshire, where I learned songs by the Weavers and burned myself on the hot glue gun I used to make puppets out of felt and twigs. My father, Robert, sent me letters in the voice of my lisping imaginary little brother, Baby Wobbie: “I got in twubble today faw picking my nose. Mommy said I had to go to my woom but instead I hid in da cwoset and scawed da bejesus out of hew. Pwease come home soon. I miss you a wot.”
—
CANCER. CANCER. AT WORK, at bars, at my friend’s apartment on St. Marks Place, with the incompetent air conditioner the blond boy had hauled up there whirring feebly in the background, I thought, Cancer. Or sometimes, My father is dying. It seemed surreal and made everything else seem surreal, too, because if this was possible, what else was possible?
It was oddly exhilarating—not the prospect of my father dying, but the way things could change, just like that. Had that window faced the street, I could have killed somebody with that air conditioner, and then that would be the truth from then on, forever. Life, so plodding and seemingly circumscribed, was labile, fragile.
And then, just like that, the prognosis changed. He would live! “Most men die with prostate cancer, not of it,” my stepmother said, and now it seemed clear that my father would be among them. The doctors would operate; I went down to Washington for the surgery. It was terrifying to see my father afterward, all blanched and gray in the hospital bed. “Get me out of here,” he said when we were alone in the recovery room. “I mean it. You’re blood. Get me home, now.”
There wasn’t much to it: I told my stepmother (firmly) and the doctor (obsequiously) that my father would not be staying another night in the hospital; we were going to go home, now. But I felt fleetingly and poignantly heroic. My father had his wishes, and I would see to it that they were carried out. I was his only child. I was his dutiful son! I was blood.
Order was restored. The window would always face an airshaft. The grim prognosis would be a mistake. Nothing really bad could happen to me in my movie, because I was the protagonist.
5
We met in the middle of a blackout.
It was searing hot and there wasn’t any running water and New York City had lost its mind. People were sweaty and edgy, thronging the streets, leaking heat and anxiety. Traffic lights dangled dead over the intersections; taxis lurched through the dark. The ATMs didn’t work and bodegas were charging insane amounts for bottled water and I was thirsty, hungover, and almost out of cash. I felt defenseless every time I walked up the ten flights to my apartment, carrying a lit candle in the ghostly stairwell.
I was nearing panic when a friend called and told me he had the water back on in his building down by City Hall, and a grill out on the balcony. As I walked there, on the cobblestone street just north of Washington Square Park, past an intersection where a woman in a sundress was directing traffic, down into the lighting district—window after window teaming with powerless, shimmering chandeliers, the people in the apartments above drinking beer on their fire escapes—the city seemed less like a nightmare and more like a carnival. My friend had said he had a houseguest in town, visiting from California: Lucy. She was golden-skinned and green-eyed in her white shirt, and she smiled with all the openness in the world when I walked in the door. She had the radiant decency of a sunflower.
It felt as if I had conjured her out of the dark. Not just the bewitched darkness of the blackout, but all the nights that had come before then, when I went to bars and parties, searching for someone who wasn’t there. But she was here now.
The sky was soft and humid, up above the steaming sidewalk. Our friend grilled all the meat that had thawed since his freezer had lost power and Lucy told me about the San Francisco Bay Area, where she had lived for twenty years, where I was going soon, by chance, to report a story. I was immediately struck by her wholesomeness—her clean, easy competence. I liked that she was a decade older than I was, that she was an athlete, that she had a real job, as the director of development for an environmental nonprofit, and that she owned her own home. All the girls—and the boys before them—whom I’d dated lived in rentals furnished with dusty junk. I could feel her ambition buzzing away like mine, just under her joie de vivre. I’d never thought it possible to have such a crush on someone so obviously suitable for me in every way. My fantasies about Lucy were extravagantly domestic, almost immediately.
It would have been easy to sleep over that night. I could have said I didn’t want to go back to my hot, dark apartment. I could have stayed on the couch, and Lucy and I could have found a way to kiss, at least. But I walked home, swooning in the summer night. I didn’t want an encounter. I wanted a partner.
Only she lived with another woman—Lucy was wearing a ring when we met. They had a house in Oakland, with a slate patio and leggy nasturtiums in the backyard. Lucy told me about terracing the garden in one of the first emails she wrote to me, about how she’d studied the slope and carefully planned the drainage before she planted Meyer lemons and lavender. I was dazzled: Could there really be someone so wise as to understand drainage?
We started writing each other incessantly. I would rush home from things to check my computer (there were no iPhones yet; I didn’t even have a cell). She told me about the summer she helped build her brother’s log cabin on Orcas Island: “There were only three of us living in tents on the property. We flossed, we hammered, we went swimming in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.” Everything she did sounded upbeat and virtuous.
Lucy grew up in a little town in Wa
shington State, where you could smell wood pulp from the paper mills when the wind blew. Her father, a tall, competent man who had served in MacArthur’s honor guard in the Pacific theater during World War II, was the town doctor for half a century. When Lucy was little, they used to go to a cabin on the Toutle River during the summertime, and her father lifted giant rocks and rearranged them to make her a paddling pool. He would introduce her to people by saying, “My daughter is six years old”—or “seven,” or “thirteen”—“and she’s never done a single thing wrong.”
When she was a child, Lucy asked her parents to call her Joe—which they did, blissfully (or willfully) unaware that it was a harbinger of her homosexuality. She would borrow her brother’s summer-camp uniform to survey the neighborhood, and patrol the perimeter of Lake Sacajawea wearing his coonskin cap. In the fourth grade, she came very close to convincing a new girl in school that she was a boy named Joe, and that they should go steady. Lucy got in trouble when their teacher found out about it, but she hadn’t meant to be duplicitous. To her, it was the truth.
When I went to San Francisco for my story a month after the blackout, I stayed at a guesthouse near Dolores Park. Lucy picked me up in a convertible she had rented for the day, and took me to see Muir Woods. I dressed carefully for the occasion, in a pair of tiny red shorts and the hiking boots I’d bought to go trekking in the Himalayas years before. I told Lucy about that trip as we tramped through the cool shade of the redwoods, the clean smell of forest rot rising around us.
I had traveled across Asia for six months with a backpack when I was twenty-two. My mood on those exotic days in Katmandu and Da Nang alternated between euphoria and lonely terror. I had traveler’s checks that I kept with my passport in a little sack that I wore under my T-shirt at all times, afraid that someone would snatch it and then I would be completely fucked. American Express let you receive mail at their offices then, and the first thing I did whenever I got to a city after a long bus ride was rush to collect a small stack of envelopes and postcards. Then I would read my mail and cry in my tea.