by Ariel Levy
When our house had gone up in 1918, it was three rooms, covered in shake shingles, with pine plank floors and eyebrow windows in the attic. Later, the kitchen was added on the back, along with the bedroom that became ours, from which we could see a sliver of creek from our window. There were two guest rooms in front with old crystal doorknobs, and a beat-up bathroom in between them where we glued postcards and photographs all over the walls. We put an offer on the house the day we saw it, the first time Lucy had ever set foot on Shelter Island.
She loved everything about the place: the town dump, where you had to go because there was no garbage pickup; the post office, where you got your mail because there was no delivery service. Tasks that were obsolete in the city brought you together with your neighbors on the island in a kind of benign intimacy that reminded Lucy of her childhood, and me of a book I’d loved about an extended family of bears living harmoniously in treehouses in the forest. People didn’t lock their doors. A placard on the wall behind the bar at the Chequit inn read SOMEHOW, THIS STRONG SMALL ISLAND WILL SURVIVE.
Finally there was a place—for everything! Lucy’s garage-sale golf clubs. The quilt with yellow stars from my stepmother. Books that we’d read, that we hadn’t yet read, that we’d never read, all on shelves. The things that for years had remained in our parents’ homes while we went about our young adulthoods inhabiting small spaces in big cities we brought to that house, and they comforted us. We were home.
During the mornings, I would write at my desk, looking out the window at the hydrangeas, and Lucy would sit at the kitchen counter on one of the tall orange stools, making calls and working on her computer. As I wrote I would hear the rattle of the cubes in her iced coffee and listen to her talking to people on the phone: “We’ve had a lot of success with that kind of application.” She would explain how the solar panels worked; how long it would take for the energy savings to amortize the installation costs. She sounded confident and sharp. Sometimes it scared me that she’d invested her life savings in a company she’d cooked up out of nothing. Other times it seemed like the beginning of a life perfected.
I was thirty-two—which really seemed like the tail end of my twenties, still. I felt as young as spring. When my mother was that age, she had already had me, after trying for five years. But it was different now. None of my good friends had babies. Not Emma, my second self, who had moved to Los Angeles to become an actress and live surrounded by otherworldly foliage in a little apartment on Whitley Avenue. Not Matt and Jesse, my friends since childhood; they had day jobs at websites and played in a band at bars on the Lower East Side at night. All of us still drank too much. All of us assumed we still had time for reinvention.
The dream of the dubious tooth baby could stay safely in the future. The important thing was to be married, and that I had already accomplished on my own smug, nontraditional terms. It was unseemly how successful I felt.
Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism—a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us. Writers may be particularly susceptible to this outlook, because we are accustomed to the power of authorship. (Even if you write nonfiction, you still control how the story unfolds.) Life was complying with my story.
There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows.
8
“Jesus,” said my father, when I called to tell him I’d been hired to write for The New Yorker. “Well, nowhere to go but down.”
Nobody could quite believe it. My new boss sent me a bouquet of exotic tropical flowers—birds-of-paradise and mysterious spikes—with a card that read, “Welcome to the Secret Treehouse. As ever, David Remnick.” I read it out loud to Lucy, who said, “Are you sure it doesn’t say, ‘As if’?”
It happened fast. I met Remnick at a book party for an anthology of essays I’d contributed to about Hillary Clinton, who had not yet lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama. But to me, Remnick was the president. He was the keeper of a realm so rarefied I’d barely aspired to enter it. “What’s your deal?” he asked when we were introduced. “Can you write something for us?”
I understood that he meant a single article, an audition. But I would have had to quit my job at New York magazine to give him that, which was of course out of the question. “Well, you could hire me,” I heard myself say. “But we’re not going to have a quickie.”
As soon as it came out of my mouth I wanted to vanish. But Remnick smirked.
We went for lunch at a sushi restaurant near his office a few weeks later. I was so nervous I started sweating profusely, like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News—so much that when the waiter came by with hot towels, Remnick said, “Get those away from her!”
He asked me what I thought The New Yorker needed, and I said, “The New Yorker is perfect.”
Remnick rolled his eyes.
So I told him I thought that if aliens had only The New Yorker to go by, they would conclude that human beings didn’t care that much about sex, which they actually do. I was about to eat some seaweed when something else—something true, even—occurred to me: I write about sexuality and gender. I do stories about women who are too much. The notion of him hiring me suddenly seemed almost reasonable.
I told Remnick about a profile I wanted to write about a woman named Lamar Van Dyke. At the peak of the women’s movement in the seventies, she had been the leader of a gang of lesbian separatists—a van gang—a pack of women who decided to live out of their VW buses, cruising the highways of North America, stopping only on “womyn’s land” where men were banned. There were plenty of separatist groups with encampments at that time: the Gutter Dykes, in Berkeley; the Gorgons, in Seattle; the Furies, in Washington, D.C.; the Radicalesbians, in New York City—along with my personal favorite, the New York Lesbian Food Conspiracy. All of them had the same basic notion: Why capitulate, why compromise, when you could separate? Live in a world of your own invention, according to whatever rules you chose.
The Van Dykes had determined that America was suffering from “testosterone poisoning,” and vowed that they would speak to men only if they were waiters or mechanics. They refused to go by the last names that had been handed down to them by their husbands and fathers. Instead, they would all change their names to Van Dyke and ride forward into a glorious and liberated tomorrow. It was perfect: “Van Dyke” was accurate and tough-sounding and proclaimed to all the world, “I am a real, live lesbian.” They had a dream that someday, somewhere, a maître d’ would call out, “Van Dyke, party of four?” and dozens of lesbians would stand up, to the horror of the assembled heterosexuals. (Possibly the least realistic aspect of their fantasy was the notion that at any given restaurant, at any given moment, there are dozens of lesbians waiting for a table.)
It was the first story I worked on after I was hired. I went to Seattle and spent days listening to Lamar’s stories in the crazy little house where she settled after she stopped living on the road: She had decorated it with bowling balls, a vintage barber’s chair, purple crystals, and massive paintings of bright, sinister bird people. She was six feet tall with a haircut that reminded me of Johnny Cash and tattoos winding up and down both arms, many of which she had done herself. Lamar was the baddest, butchest dyke I’d ever met, a great big pirate of a woman. As she put it, “If you look at me, there’s no question about it: I’m a dyke. I am gay. If you don’t think so, there is something really wrong with you.” But she wasn’t just tough, she was fun, “the Merry Prankster of the women’s movement,” as one of her ex-husbands described her (there were three of them before she discovered lesbianism).
It was a story about the way the counterculture of the sixties and seventies promised a life of radical rebellion, and about what happened after the romance of revolution burned off. “Gay marriage and gays in the military? That’s what you guys have come up with?” Lamar asked me at one poi
nt, incredulous, disheartened. “Your generation wants to fit in,” she charged (not, I felt, unfairly). “I want to be just like you—that’s your deal. That’s the last thing I want.” She shook her head. “We didn’t sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. We didn’t sit around looking at screens. We didn’t wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something: We were off doing whatever we wanted.”
I felt abashed, because of course I was gay married. I did want to fit in. And I didn’t have any tattoos. But I was also pleased that this insurrectionist’s story would be told not in a women’s studies textbook or on a website about queer history, but in The New Yorker, where it would be read by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who might be surprised to find it there.
—
IF I ADMIRED THE BADASS Van Dyke way of life, I also craved something they had categorically renounced: money. For a girl from Larchmont, I had a peculiar sense of urgency about insulating myself from a kind of privation I’d only read about in books and heard about from my blintz-making Russian grandmother, Tanya. For as long as I can remember, I have felt the shtetl nipping at my heels.
My grandmother’s family fled Russia for Cuba in the hull of a ship. Tanya often talks about her childhood in Havana, running across the rooftops, the soft sounds of Spanish rising up from the street below. Her family moved again, to Chicago in 1932, and when she was nineteen she married my grandfather, Albert—Big Al—a golden-skinned Sephardic man whose parents had immigrated to America from Turkey and Greece.
Grandpa Albert saw himself as cunning, street-smart: He liked to see what he could get away with. “Heads or tails?” he’d ask his children, and then flip them for their allowance, double or nothing. Opportunity, he believed, was always lurking. Once a man he did business with in Chicago gave Al tickets to a baseball game: The man encouraged Al to borrow his good suit and his Cadillac for the occasion. Al was shot at as he drove away from the ballpark dressed in the other man’s clothes, behind the wheel of the other man’s car.
After he had children, Albert opened a variety store on Main Street in Racine, Wisconsin, called Premium Sales. He could never resist a truckload of ill-gotten tomatoes or a cache of transistor radios of dubious origin; Premium Sales stocked a baffling variety of merchandise as a result. There were ornamental braids of fake garlic, gold coins and jewelry, trick carnations that spewed water, placemats printed with the flags of many nations, Madame Alexander dolls, which my mother coveted as a child. Albert’s mistress, Dolly, worked at the store. My mother remembers Albert taking her with him to Dolly’s house on Christmas morning to deliver presents.
Like the man my mother would select years later for her own adultery, Grandpa Albert was shady, but he was charismatic, and he could be lavish: When we came to visit, if he was flush, he took us out for lobster tails and filet mignon. He had a toilet seat in his bathroom made of clear Lucite embedded with nickels, quarters, and silver dollars. Tanya was sure she had left poverty far behind when Big Al was at the peak of his Premium Sales heyday: She had silk dresses and Estée Lauder perfume; at one point, she even had a fur.
But Al was not the savvy businessman he imagined himself to be. After he filed for bankruptcy, agents came to collect their valuables for resale, and Tanya found herself hiding jewelry in her brassiere, as her mother had taught her to when they left Cuba, the posts of pearl earrings pricking at her breasts once again. She took what she could and they downsized from their ranch house in Racine to an apartment in Chicago, until eventually that, too, was out of reach.
Albert died bankrupt but content, his regrets and longings erased by Alzheimer’s. Tanya has lived ever since off the largesse of the three most solvent of her five children, in a nursing home near my mother’s house on Cape Cod. She is surrounded by Irish Catholic old ladies who grew up and then raised families of their own in the area, some of them never venturing outside of New England. Tanya is bored and feels isolated, despite my mother’s best efforts to keep her entertained. My grandmother had hoped to grow old in Chicago, in a like-minded community of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, and Romania—speakers of Yiddish with whom she could go to the theater or kibitz on the bus to Marshall Field. Instead, she has returned to the sense of scarcity she knew as a child. In her ninety-fourth year of life, Tanya still talks about her late husband with rancid disgust.
“Look at Grandma,” my mother would say. “You never want to be dependent on a man.” The fear of ending up like Tanya, cutting coupons in a one-room efficiency surrounded by strangers, made me vigilant like my parents, anxious that the poverty of our ancestors was always just one wrong move away.
—
LUCY WANTED TO BE WEALTHY, too. She grew up as I did, with her own bedroom, in a house with a garden and a green lawn, but with a sense that ruin was at a safe distance. Now she wanted to regain the privileges of her childhood, to play golf at a country club and go skiing with her brothers in the wintertime. “But mostly I just want the experience of success again,” she told me. “I want to feel how I felt as an athlete.” She was the star of her high school basketball team. They had won the state championship, and Lucy was recruited to play for an Ivy League university. When she was cut from the team during her freshman year, it had devastated her. She had tears in her eyes when she told me about it.
She wanted to redeem herself with her business. “Imagine if there were solar panels on all the rooftops of Manhattan,” she said, “then Los Angeles, and eventually every city in the country.” The world would be a slightly better place, she’d sell her business, and we’d be rich.
Clearly, it was necessary for me and Lucy to transition out of a drunken youth of whiskey shots at three in the morning into a sophisticated adulthood of a little wine with dinner. We had to do this to progress along our time line, I argued, in order to hit our marks. She would never be able to dominate the world of green business with a hangover. I had a job at The New Yorker now, for crying out loud—nowhere to go but down.
But that wasn’t even the main thing. What if I want a child? For this to be an option, we had to stop getting hammered.
I was full of strategies: Let’s drink only on weekends. Let’s have a two-drink maximum. Let’s never drink at home. Let’s only drink at home. Let’s never drink hard liquor. It irritated me that Lucy seemed less committed—uncommitted, in fact—to my project. It irritated her that I was making rules, and changing them, and not always following them myself.
—
MY SECOND ASSIGNMENT FOR The New Yorker was in Paris. I had been there once before, and all of my research and preparation had proved worthless on that trip: I’d arrived at Charles de Gaulle and immediately gotten on the wrong bus, ended up on the wrong side of the Seine, and gotten in a taxi that took me to the wrong hotel and cost all of my cash. Then I’d burst into tears on a park bench just before a French pigeon shat on my head. So I was disproportionately pleased when Lucy’s old friend DJ told me a few days before I left for my story that he had the time and the frequent-flier miles to accompany me to France—he had just broken up with his boyfriend and he was dying for distraction.
This time, the weather was luminous. The map made sense. We stayed in a tiny room in the elegant Hôtel Montalembert in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where the magazine had put me up. There was a bottle of Champagne on ice by the bed when we arrived—I insisted that it was complimentary, but DJ wouldn’t let us drink it. “Don’t touch that,” he told me. “It’s one of their Vichy tricks.”
We loved being mistaken for a married couple by the hotel staff. “Be a good wife,” DJ would say at breakfast, “and fetch me another saucisson.” Whenever I wasn’t reporting, DJ and I walked the streets and sat in the parks, talking about art and sex and the differences between men and women, the gay and the straight, the coupled and the promiscuous.
ME
I think you’re idealizing being in a relationship. It’s not going to solve all your problems.
>
DJ
Do I have a lot of problems?
ME
Oh, please. But so do Lucy and I. They’re just different problems. John Updike wrote that marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.
DJ
I think my penis just fell off.
ME
No, it’s fine. I don’t have to tell you how great Lucy is. We’re just in a hell of our own making half the time.
DJ
So that’s marriage.
ME
If you’re lucky.
We looked up his friend Sacha, who made us dinner in his bleak, modern apartment near Montmartre, which delighted us to no end because it meant we were seeing the real Paris. And I liked how unabashedly Sacha flirted with me. It made me feel pretty and potent.
SACHA
My girlfriend is driving me crazy. You don’t understand how it is between men and women, DJ.
DJ
Whatever, Sacha. I’m completely alone in the world except for my fake wife here.
SACHA
I wish she were my fake wife.
ME
I’m already Lucy’s fake wife.