My Brooklyn Writer Friend says he’s through with angry women, and I say what about me, and he says, You’re not so angry, how else could I even tell you such a thing? I wouldn’t risk making you angrier if you already were sufficiently angry, he says. I’m not stupid. I don’t want to create angry women. Only in my fiction, he laughs.
My Brooklyn writer friend is not a good writer, because a good writer could see that I am an angry woman. The subtle hints, what they are I’m not so aware of, would leap out, but I suppose I should be happy I’m not labeled an angry woman. I might be very unhappy if I was, though I am angry and very goddamn unhappy about it.
Four years ago, I slept with my Brooklyn writer friend. We were watching a movie in my apartment. He had insisted on an action movie because he was better able to clear his creative head watching these. When it ended, he put one of his feet on my thigh. I thought only women did things like that, but I was wrong and a little angry about it. I tried to ignore his foot—a soiled, off-white sock saved my skin from his. I went into the implications, not of his foot, but of me being wrong. And I wondered why I had lived my life without ever having come across a man playing footsie. I had been to risqué parties, I had been with a man who called me Bubbie, yet no foot did he lay on his Bubbie. If only my Brooklyn writer friend knew what was brewing, what was afoot—but I said, Oh, and then he used both feet and I grew ever angrier until he pulled me over and we started what was supposed to feel good.
Four years later my Brooklyn writer friend is no closer to publishing his novel. Two years ago, he told me his regular revisions had progressed into heavy revisions and that was the last I heard. What my Brooklyn writer friend does instead of writing is go out with women and then tell me what they were like. Though I’m unclear if these descriptions are more first impressions or haggard judgments after they’ve had sex.
Despite living in Brooklyn, my Brooklyn writer friend is not smart. He doesn’t know that he increasingly increases the anger of an already angry woman who talks to pantyhose, and even if I were relatively lighthearted, the freewheeling and often maligned accounts of his notable affairs would create an angry woman from scratch. Additionally, his descriptions of the women he sees are poor. Amy has long hair. Lydia acts wild. Any good writer would know an audience, especially a female audience, would like to know the color of Amy’s long hair, how Amy wears it, what Amy does to get it that way, and what, in the end, Amy’s hair resembles. And describing how Lydia acted wild would be appropriate and even welcomed. Does Lydia swear at cashiers, does Lydia throw little kiddy balls to her beloved when visiting Walgreens? Maybe the name of the store is unnecessary. How about Lydia’s height and weight? Astrological sign? No wonder these women are angry.
His latest is Kaylee. Kaylee’s from Arkansas, he says, but this time he adds a little more. My Brooklyn writer friend is mad because she doesn’t know who Kafka is, and Kaylee’s upset because he didn’t tell her he had a son—that he waited three weeks before speaking up. A son is an important matter, I tell him. My son is very far away and that’s how his mother wants it, he says, glaring around my dark living room. You didn’t seem to care.
When I go to bed I imagine my Brooklyn writer friend in a sea of angry women. We don’t know one another, but we share a gargantuan hatred for this man who continues to live his life in our presence. We sit on him is what we do, not letting him free to infect with his angelic face and unadorned language. I feel a little better watching him squirm, but my anger remains.