Spinster (34 page)

Well, I was seven years old.

The purpose of the writing retreat was to encourage and support one another, so everyone nodded meaningfully—presumably as perplexed by the vapidity of the memory as I was—and then one woman burst out with, “The 1980s! That cranberry color is just so '80s!” And everyone laughed, myself included, though I actually didn't get what the 1980s had to do with it.

De Wolfe was far cannier than I. As an adult, she recognized that the wallpaper she found so offensive was designed by William Morris, whose work she frequently and enthusiastically derided in her syndicated newspaper column. Like Edith, she'd been mounting her own public attack against the overuse of ornament
and fabric, the stultifying atmospheres that made living rooms feel more like tombs. In other words, she loathed the Victorian aesthetic because it evoked her own unhappy childhood.

Edith, too, was highly sensitized to her environment as a child. In her memoir she confides, “My photographic memory of rooms and houses—even those seen briefly, or at long intervals—was from my earliest years a source of inarticulate mystery, for I was always vaguely frightened by ugliness.” Like de Wolfe's, her aversion to Victorianism was forged early on: “One of the most depressing impressions of my childhood is my recollection of the intolerable ugliness of New York City, of its untended streets and the narrow houses so lacking in external dignity, so crammed with smug and suffocating upholstery.”

Until Edith and de Wolfe—and a whole raft of other women now known as the Lady Decorators—entered the field, architects were exclusively men, who designed houses inside and out, from the blueprint to the arrangement of the furniture. The publication of Edith's design manual wasn't a radical act exactly (and, of course, she shared credit with a male coauthor), but it did open the door for her peers to enter the public realm as professional tastemakers, even establishing their own decorating businesses.

One unintended result of this development was the gendering of the design world. Until only very recently, architecture and industrial design were considered male pursuits, as if all those slide rules and heavy metals were too tricky for the fairer sex, who were confined to the soft, fabric-filled realm of decorating. (Even today, only 19 percent of licensed architects are female.)

Consequently, the world of interiors has been denied the true respect it deserves, to actual, negative effect. My own initial scorn for home décor is the best testimony to this I know—and a variation on the kind of internalized sexism that is so often hard to detect. As the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker writes in
The Blank Slate
, “The belief that human tastes are reversible cultural preferences has led social planners to write off people's enjoyment of ornament, natural light, and human scale and force millions of people to live in drab cement boxes.” Ignoring our primal cravings comes at a cost.

Not until the turn of this current century did scientists begin paying attention to our unconscious relationships with our physical environments, confirming what Edith and de Wolfe and others like them had known all along. Studies suggest that high ceilings encourage creative thinking; that smooth, literally cool materials such as chrome and glass connote a sense of psychological coldness, possibly because they remind us of ice, whereas wood, which has a higher resting temperature than metal, evokes a feeling of warmth; that the angular forms common to highmodernist furniture pose the same threat to our animal brains as does a sharp rock or tree branch—something to be on the alert for, not relax into. Rooms painted red, a color we automatically associate with danger, make us better at paying attention to details (such as catching spelling errors), while those painted blue, a color we associate with wide-open vistas such as the sky and ocean, encourage creative problem solving.

In other words, with her bedroom suite, Edith created the perfect environment for her work: in the boudoir, her imagination turned inward; in the bedroom, it took flight.

And so I began to enjoy my job at the magazine. The office itself was a standard maze of gray cubicles, but the atmosphere was so far removed from the actual world that stepping off the elevator onto the eighteenth floor was like slipping into
I Dream of Jeannie
's pink-and-purple bottle. Here, carpets and cushions,
not politicians or bankers or filmmakers or novelists, were paramount. Days passed in a froth of silks and Belgian linens; the tiniest tassel was treated with gravity. It wasn't that life beyond receded; rather, it was remodeled, renovated, everyday emotions transmuted into material goods. When the stock market was soaring, our hallways burst with joyous excess destined for photo shoots: mountains of costly, hand-embroidered throw pillows; $400 golden wastebaskets. When it tanked, the tides of luxury receded, leaving behind an uptick in DIY resourcefulness and an enthusiasm for glue guns.

Happy at work, and with D, for the first time in several years I actually felt like celebrating my birthday; that summer, when I turned thirty-four, I threw a party on the roof of D's (very nice) apartment building in Tribeca, complete with hired bartenders, custom cocktails, and catered hors d'oeuvres.

I began to think that maybe, finally, I was growing up.

But at my brother's wedding the following month, I blew any semblance of maturity. I ruined the toast I was to make to the newlyweds. I'd been working on it for months. I was so proud of Christopher—as proud as a mother, almost—and felt so strongly that I must be for him both his mother and his sister that when I say “working on” the toast, what I really mean is constantly panicking, writing and rewriting, trashing, and procrastinating, so that by the day of the wedding I hadn't finished and was still scribbling at the reception, and when I stood up and delivered it, it was horrible. I made no sense. I rambled. I forgot to mention his bride.

I didn't then and still don't want to think that I was subconsciously sabotaging my (and their) experience because I couldn't bear to be the only one left without a family of my own, but that may be so.

The following month I went to Paris for the first time, with D and his parents and two brothers, all of whom I adored, and
traipsed happily behind them from one museum to the next. They're incredibly open, generous people, funny and warm.
What wonderful in-laws they'd be
, I thought to myself.

And yet something was off. I'd been working so much, I hadn't even had time to think about or plan for this trip; I simply showed up and followed, which wasn't entirely stupid—D's parents know the city as well as their own house—but underscored my complete lack of agency. I still wasn't living my own life. All I did was stay late at the office, go out for dinner with D or a friend, drink one glass of wine too many, and afterward lie on the sofa, an empty husk. I'd been privately fretting over this fatigue. Sure, work was demanding, but there was something aggressive about how tired I'd become, almost as if I'd been drugged; I'd sleep through whole weekends if I could.

When, in Paris, I started stealing sleep like an addict—begging off breakfast so I could stay in bed, sneaking out for a five-minute nap in the lobby while everyone finished lunch—I could no longer deny that I'd been this way once before, also with a boyfriend, my first year of college; after six or so months together, when in his presence I'd be blindsided by the overwhelming urge to sleep. As soon as we broke up, the malaise vanished. Lesson learned, clean and simple: I'd been bored. Not because the boyfriend himself was boring, but because I was still too young and intellectually unformed to understand how much I craved a particular sort of probing, analytical conversation we didn't have together.

Not long after D and I returned to New York, I met up with some new friends at a bar after work, writers all, without him. As the night progressed, and our conversation gained momentum—among the four of us it seemed we'd read every book ever published—I felt a forgotten energy fizz up and down my arms and legs, like goose bumps, as well as a guilty awareness that I didn't want to call D and invite him to join us. I hardly knew these people, and yet the immediacy with which
we shared references and ideas made me feel at home in a way that being with D never had. I didn't know if I'd ever gain entry to Edith's “Land of Letters,” but I yearned to, and at the very least, I realized, I wanted someone who wanted to travel there with me.

For Thanksgiving, I flew to visit my old friend from college, Michael, now an English professor in Toronto. Wheeling my little roller suitcase through the airport I felt as light as Mary Poppins
*
³
and her magically bottomless carpetbag, as if I hadn't been on a plane at all but blown in by a breeze. All weekend I soared—as awake as I'd ever been—gusting from coffee shop to dinner party, energized by the nonstop talk that has characterized our friendship since our freshman year in college. The boyfriends come and go, but Michael is there whenever I need him. Of course I could not stop analyzing my predicament incessantly.

“I am beginning to think that D thinks marriage is next. Maybe I think marriage is next. Is marriage next? Do I marry him?” I said, probably multiple times.

“You absolutely do not have to marry anyone,” he said.

“But I'm thirty-four,” I said.

“Who cares?” he said.

“Wait,” I said. “I'm asking the wrong question. What I mean is: How am I here again in this same place, just as I was with R?”

“You have no choice,” he said. “Men think you're marriage material.”

“That's a little self-congratulatory,” I said. “Every man I get
involved with does not want to marry me. I'm not even sure D does. What I mean is, how have I once again put myself in a situation where marriage seems the implicit next step, one I'm ambivalent about taking?”

We were in his kitchen, putting on our shoes to go take his dog for a walk. “Or wait,” I added. “Maybe ‘marriage material' is kind of an insult! Who wants to be
marriage material
?”