Florence Gordon (9 page)

“Sounds like McCloud made it work,” she said.

“Well, he did. But I’m not sure I have his talents. You should see the way he could ride a horse. The bad guys would jump into a getaway car, but McCloud . . .”

She didn’t listen to the rest. She took his arm and they continued their ramble.

“You must be hating all this,” Vanessa said.

“Why?” Florence said.

“It must be upsetting all your routines. It must be hard for you to clear out your inbox every day.”

Florence grunted. She was vain about the tidiness of her inbox.

“Seriously,” Vanessa said. “Is it overwhelming? Or is life pretty much back to normal now?”

Florence was having dinner with five friends whom she’d known for more than forty years. Three of them were in her study group; they’d been meeting once a month to talk about books and politics since the seventies. (Back then they used to call it a consciousness-raising group, but none of them had used the term in years.) Tonight her friends had taken her out to celebrate what Vanessa had called her “coronation.”

“It never stopped being normal. You know that. You get a few phone calls, you get a few emails. Life goes on.”

“I don’t know about that,” Vanessa said. “Success can make you crazy.”

Vanessa was a psychotherapist who worked with people in the arts. She proceeded to give a few examples. A painter who, after selling one of his works to the Whitney, began to speak of himself in the third person. A writer who’d so long suppressed her desire for fame, so long suppressed the narcissism near the root of every creative life, that when she finally achieved a bit of recognition, all her hunger for it had come bursting out—a ferocity of hunger that no degree of success could satisfy—and she was plunged into a depression from which it took her months to recover. Another writer, a woman who’d always seemed a model of tolerance and tact, who, after finally writing a book that brought her a degree of acclaim, felt nothing but anger toward all the people who were celebrating her. Late recognition, Vanessa said, was the stage for the return of the repressed.

Alexandra too believed that success could make you crazy, and she too had a theory. Buried deep in the psyche, she thought, is a sort of lump, a creature that craves nothing except stability, and as far as the lump is concerned, change for the better is just as bad as change for the worse.

The conversation wandered away from its starting point, the revolution in Florence’s fortunes. And Florence was thankful for that. Her experience had been very different from the kind of thing they were talking about, and she was glad to be relieved of the necessity to explain this or to pretend otherwise.

For Florence, this moment in the limelight hadn’t been disorienting in the least. It hadn’t been disappointing, or vexing, or complicated in any way. It had been that rare thing: an unmixed pleasure.

Ever since the voluble philosopher had anointed her, Florence had been enjoying herself. She felt as if she’d been preparing for this all her life: preparing to be appreciated. She hadn’t been hungering for it; she’d never really felt the need for anyone’s applause. But now that she was getting it, it was a delight.

But flaunting your happiness is no less vulgar than flaunting your wealth, so she was happy to avoid the subject of how she was feeling these days.

The conversation meandered further, and she grew more and more relaxed. She was more comfortable with these women than with anyone else in the world. Their lives had gone in different directions over the years; some of them had seemed to go from success to success, some through decades of bad choices and bad luck. But when they were together, none of this seemed to matter. What mattered wasn’t what any of them had achieved or had not achieved. They knew one another well enough to see beneath the vicissitudes of the moment.

Their get-together lasted for hours, and the subject of Florence’s success came up only once or twice more, and that was only when her friends teased her about it.

She enjoyed being teased, by these women. These were the people she trusted. This was her tribe.

It was strange, though, that your close friends are rarely the people who ask the questions that mean the most to you.

Florence was still turning over the questions that her granddaughter had asked her: “Are you going to do anything differently now? Isn’t this a chance to change your life?”

None of her friends would have ever thought of asking her questions like this.

Maybe they’d never ask because they knew her so well. They knew she wasn’t interested in changing.

Or maybe they’d never ask because our ideas about our friends and loved ones congeal over time. We see them in a fixed and limited way, so we come to imagine that they themselves are fixed and limited.

When Emily had asked, Florence had hardly even bothered answering. She wanted to make it clear that the line of inquiry was beneath her.

But the questions had kept scratching at her.

She could see what Emily meant. Nussbaum’s article had summed up her life’s work sympathetically and clearly. Florence didn’t need to repeat herself, because it had all been understood. So maybe it was time to say something new.

But what?

A few days after her little exchange with her granddaughter, Florence had taken out a box of old notes. Years ago, she’d flirted with the idea of embarking on a grand project, a synthesis of feminism and radical social theory—
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
meets
Das Kapital.
She’d imagined writing a volume that would be gnarled, daunting, exhaustive; it would be filled with footnotes and thick as a canned ham. Now she unearthed the notes she’d made, to see if she might want to revisit the project, and spent a few days looking through them.

It was a clarifying experience, because it helped her understand why she’d put the project aside in the first place. More than that, it helped her understand who she was. She had put it aside because she wasn’t a grand system builder. She wasn’t, and she didn’t want to be. She was a guerrilla fighter, a saboteur, a master of the sneak attack. Her métier was the long essay. Of the books she’d written, most had been essay collections, and even the ones that weren’t essay collections were essay collections in disguise.

After a few days of looking over the old notes, she threw them, with a tremendous feeling of satisfaction, away.

Emily’s question had been important because it helped Florence remind herself what she wanted. She didn’t want to do anything differently. She didn’t want to change her life. She wanted to keep going. Maybe the shot of public approbation would help her become more reckless, more slashing, more licensed to assault and insult and offend. But probably not. She felt free to assault and insult and offend already.

All I want to do, she thought, is to keep doing what I’m doing, as long as I can.

At the age of seventy-five, Florence embarked on her first book tour. It had been thrown together hastily, and it didn’t take her to all the major markets, but it still felt lavish to her. She visited Miami, D.C., Philadelphia, and Boston, stayed in nice hotels, and spoke in one bookstore and three synagogues. Kevin had explained to her that this was what a book tour was. “Jewish women,” he said, “are all that stand between us and the death of the publishing industry.”

Florence’s friends expected her to be curmudgeonly about her book tour, but she enjoyed it. You travel around and you talk to women who’ve never been part of any social movement of any kind, women for whom the word “organizing” probably refers to nothing more radical than redoing their closets, and you find that not only have they felt the stirrings of feminism throughout their lives, they’ve often acted upon them, struggling out of hostile and constricting circumstances in the effort to breathe a freer air.

What delighted her most was that women in their twenties were showing up. A new online magazine, the
New Inquiry,
run by a circle of feminists just out of college, seemed to have adopted Florence as an honorary grandmother—they’d run an interview with her and a review of her work in the same week—and in both D.C. and Philadelphia, confident and well-read young women showed up, most of whom said that they’d first heard of her because of the
New Inquiry.
It might not have been true, as Vanessa would have it, that Florence was a hero to the young, but this kind of attention from the young was more than she’d had in a long time, and it was flattering.

The last stop of her tour was Hartford, Connecticut, where she was going to speak at another synagogue. She took a train from Boston, where a summer storm had limited the audience at Newtonville Books to four or five old friends and email acquaintances. She was tired, and the weirdness in her hand and foot was flaring up again—her fingers wanted to jump around and her foot wanted to scrape against the pavement—and all she wanted, the whole woman as distinct from her parts, was to be back home.

She was met at the train station by a young woman—was she young? Florence couldn’t tell. Everyone seemed young to her now—named Dolly.

Dolly had organized this event. “I’ll be your chaperone, your bodyguard, your guardian angel, and your groupie, all mixed in one,” she said.

Dolly’s car was not what Florence would have expected, had it occurred to her to expect anything. Most of the people who picked her up for this kind of engagement had cars that were professionally spotless. You could have eaten off the floors. But this one was redolent of a large and—somehow Florence sensed this—not particularly happy family.

A family, she quickly realized, with dogs. The car was doggish. It was the car a dog would own if a dog could own a car. Dog hair on the seats, the smell of dog food, the smell of dog breath, the smell of rain-soaked dog fur locked in by airless heat.

It was also filled with the detritus of childhood: boxes of apple juice, wrappers from cheese sticks, potato-chip bags. After a minute in the car Florence thought she knew this woman and her family too well.

“I thought you might like to read this while we’re driving,” Dolly said. She handed Florence a stapled brochure, which turned out to be this week’s edition of the synagogue newsletter. There was an article about Florence’s talk that night, by someone named Alice Tyler. Florence looked through it quickly.

“It’s amazing how they can never get a damned thing right. If this chucklehead didn’t feel like putting down a dime to make a phone call, you’d at least think she’d go on the Internet to check her facts. I wasn’t born in 1937; I never got a doctorate; I’m not retired.”

“I wrote that, actually,” Dolly said. “That’s my pen name.”

“That’s you? It’s a good thing you have a pen name, so nobody finds out what a terrible writer you are. You need to get your facts right. You also need to get your grammar right. ‘A New Yorker whom I think is one of the savviest thinkers around . . .’? It’s ‘who,’ not ‘whom.’ ‘Whom’ is phony elegance, and it’s grammatically incorrect. ‘She’s not adverse to calling herself a democratic socialist.’ It’s ‘averse.’ You might try finding out what a word means before committing it to print. This is appalling.”

Dolly had a beatific smile on her face. “This is just so awesome. To get insulted by Florence Gordon on our first encounter. Within, what, five minutes of picking you up. I feel like I made it to the big leagues.”

“You don’t make it to the big leagues by writing with such bad grammar that it makes Florence Gordon want to insult you.”

“I know, I know, I know. It’s just that I’m so stressed lately. My husband—he’s the associate dean of students at Trinity—my husband has back problems and he hasn’t been able to help me at all around the house. He can’t even get comfortable on the couch. Sometimes he’ll come home at night and turn on the TV and lie on the floor.”

“Sounds like the assistant dean of students has a nice thing going for himself.”

“No, Ronald would never—you’re teasing. And both of my kids are in a gifted and talented program, and the amount of homework they get every day is whack. I swear, I spend three hours a night doing homework with them.”

“If you’re doing their grammar homework, God help them.”

Dolly let out a loud, horsey laugh. She seemed unoffendable. There was something appealing about her resilience, at least, or her ability not to take herself too seriously.

As they drove, Florence took in the passing streets. Domino’s pizza, Starbucks, Subway. Everything here was the same as everything everywhere else. This was something that Florence felt she was supposed to deplore, but she found it comforting. These were all businesses you could find on the Upper West Side.

She’d once spent a week in the country, during a brief relationship with a nature-lover, and it had been the most horrifying week of her life.

“Why a pen name?”

“Excuse me?” Dolly said.

“Why do you use a pen name? Do you have something to hide?”

“I do have something to hide. Myself. I have to hide myself from my mother.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a mountain. My mother the mountain. She terrifies me. She looms over my life.”

“That must be difficult for you.”

“It
is
difficult. It’s very difficult. Even though I can recognize irony, and I understand that you don’t really give a damn, it’s nice to talk about it anyway. I’m writing a memoir of my family life, actually. I’m not sure if I should try to publish it now under Alice, or wait until my mom is gone and do it under Dolly. I’d rather publish it now, but when I go on TV, that would be the end of my secret identity.”

“When you go on TV?”

“I have a lot to say. I’d expect it would be a hit. I don’t know if they’d want me on
Charlie Rose
or anything, but I’m sure some of the morning talk shows would be interested. I’ve really got a fascinating story.”

“How old is your mother?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“You might have to wait a while.”

“I know.”

Dolly kept glancing over at her, smiling shyly.

“What is it?”