Spinster (32 page)

Surely you can imagine my surprise upon learning that America's grande dame had launched her writing career as an expert on draperies and sconces. Her station had influenced my reverence after all—in a fillip of reverse bigotry, I'd mistaken wealth for invulnerability, and I'd forgotten that she, too, was an actual person.

“It took ‘Pussy' Jones a painfully long time to turn into the writer Edith Wharton,” observes her biographer Hermione Lee.

And so I'd found my fourth awakener. Soon enough I was calling her Edith.

Right before leaving for the artists' colony, I'd met a man at a friend's holiday party. D is extremely tall, with a very slight stoop to his shoulders, uncommonly large, navy-blue eyes, and the most disarming sincerity I'd ever encountered. We'd chatted briefly in the kitchen, and later, before he left, he walked over to me and said, “I would very much like to take you to dinner. May I have your contact information?”

Accustomed as I was to the standard vague mumble, usually via e-mail—“Hey, we should hang out sometime”—I was surprised and charmed by this direct approach.

While I was at the artists' colony he'd left me a voice mail message wishing me a happy New Year. Coming as it did amid
my meltdown, I received it ambivalently, but once I was back in New York, ready to be a whole, new, un-miserable, non-writing me, I accepted his invitation.

On our second date, at a French bistro in Tribeca, we couldn't stop laughing—over what, I have no idea. He is very, very funny, and eccentric, a visual person and also an actual visionary (he invents new ways to use preexisting technologies). Talking with him was almost a cross-cultural exchange. I couldn't get enough of how he kept saying things I couldn't comprehend.

At one point he announced, “I'm a provider. All I do is work—I want to work so the woman I marry can do whatever she wants.”

I laughed. “Really? Why do men continue to think they have to be the breadwinner?”

“I don't know,” he said. “It's just how I am.”

From someone else the announcement would have felt boringly male-chauvinistic, but from this obviously gentle and chronically sincere person it seemed okay.

Later that night he asked, “Have you ever considered dating a man who plays video games?”

I hadn't, but now I did.

Not since R had I been so at ease with another person. Our separate fascinations dovetailed into a curiosity cabinet that we filled on epic walks through the city, poking through Japanese toy stores and old archival print shops and the last remaining outdoor flea markets. He brought his camera everywhere and maintained massive digital files of seemingly everything he'd ever seen or done. Like me, he has an archivist's soul.

Too, I liked that he's ambitious and scrappy (he was launching a technology startup from his living room). At this point I was working full-time at the magazine, continuing with a new
Globe
column, and teaching the arts-criticism class at New York University—a genuinely workaholic schedule. I was up each night until one o'clock and awake again at six the next morning, but he
didn't mind. When I was so exhausted I couldn't decide what to eat for dinner, he'd suggest we have breakfast instead, and we'd go to a diner for pancakes.

My friends liked him. My family did, too. It felt nice to be taken care of. And he was so good at it, a born caretaker. One weekend, when I was breaking down over all the work I had to get done, he actually scooped me up like a child and walked in circles around his living room, saying over and over, “One day you were little Katie Bolick in a little town, and then you came to the biggest city in America, and now look at yourself! It's all worked out!” It was so ridiculous and sweet that I couldn't help laughing through my tears.

The man Edith married, Teddy Wharton, said to be the best-looking graduate of Harvard Class of 1873, was from a distinguished Boston family. He was hardly her intellectual equal—he'd made it through college on deep pockets and bonhomie—but he was convivial good company, and he shared her love for travel. He's gone down in the Wharton annals as a royal waste of her time, but at the outset she was genuinely smitten, writing to her governess (and lifelong friend) a few weeks before the wedding, “It seems almost incredible that a man can be so devoted, so generous, so sweet-tempered & unselfish…he is one of the people whose charm makes itself felt at once.”

Teddy didn't have to work, either—his mother gave him an allowance—so the couple spent their early years traveling between family summer houses and then wintering in New York City and Europe. Nearly a decade passed after her first publication in
The Atlantic Monthly
before she published again—between 1889 and 1891 she sold a story and a few poems to
Scribner's Magazine
—and then she fell silent.

She was busy, for sure, traveling and entertaining. Being a society wife was a full-time occupation. She got sick a lot, too, and complained often of fatigue. But what surprised me is how much she struggled with self-confidence. As she confessed in a letter to her editor at
Scribner's
: “I seem to have fallen into a period of groping, & perhaps, after publishing…I might see better what direction I ought to take and acquire more assurance (the quality I feel I most lack)…. I have lost confidence in myself at present.”

When I'd first arrived in New York, I'd been shocked to discover that
The Atlantic Monthly
wasn't a demographic anomaly—the publishing industry is overwhelmingly white, upper middle class, and Ivy League. For a while, I envied the entitlement these people carried so unthinkingly, as if they were simply owed writing assignments and staff positions and didn't have to earn them. I was convinced, as I worked my multiple jobs and scraped to get by, that, unlike me, all those people on easy street were completely free of insecurities.

By now I know better. It's even possible that those of us who move to New York City from the provinces have a somewhat easier time becoming adults than those who grew up here. Natives are blessed with countless enviable advantages, but what they don't have is the swift, firm yank of geographic relocation. Instead, if they are so inclined, they must manufacture their extraction from who they once were by other means, which is invariably much slower and differently painful.

My father likes to say that for change to take place, a person needs “a push and a pull.” Edith had the push (innate talent and drive), no pull (financial necessity or external encouragement), and plenty of reasons not to write: her family's anti-intellectualism; a paternalistic culture that didn't expect women to work, and if they did, rarely took them seriously; the implicit expectation among elites that success is a given, and failure unheard
of—and failure is, of course, integral to risk, without which writing is impossible.

In 1893 Edith took her first tiny step forward: she and Teddy finally bought their own house, in Newport, Rhode Island, the fashionable resort where her family and social circles summered, and she discovered a talent for decorating—at last, a creative outlet that didn't raise eyebrows.

With that, the dam broke. Not content to merely do up her own home, over the next few years she collaborated with a new friend, the architect Ogden Codman Jr., and together they wrote a how-to guide,
The Decoration of Houses
, published in 1897.
*
²
The book sold out immediately and quickly became one of the most influential decorating guides of the era; its ideas about how our homes should look and feel set a template for “good taste” that is venerated to this day. Technically it's an instruction book for the one percent. But really it's a sweeping, deeply informed history of European and American architecture, written with great authority and humor so dry it's almost imperceptible, as well as, if you look closely enough, a primer on the parallels between sociology, psychology, and architecture. “It seems easier to most people to arrange a room like some one else's than to analyze and express their own needs,” reads one such gem. Another:

[But] it must never be forgotten that every one is unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of…dead and gone predecessors, who have an inconvenient way of thrusting their different habits and tastes across the current of later existences. The unsatisfactory relations of some people with their rooms are often to be explained this way.

Might not the same be said about our ideas regarding marriage and family?

We expect our great writers and painters, our shambling intellects and wild-haired Einsteins, to be so beholden to the life of the mind that they hardly notice the chairs on which they sit. That Edith masterfully described chairs—and sofas and rugs and hats and dresses—in her fiction I'd somehow taken for granted, as if she was simply very good at this particular literary device. To discover that her appreciation for surfaces went far deeper than that, and was indeed intellectual and personal, even an expression of something essential to her being, unlocked my own appreciation not only for these very same, so-called superficialities, but for myself.