8.

A friend had asked me to speak on a panel organized by a literary magazine I’d written for—the question being whether romance and feminism were mutually exclusive. She’d invited an economist, a philosopher, a poet who had become famous for writing a memoir about her dead sister, and me. I was the cultural critic, she said. My name was not as well-known as theirs, and I had not put myself in front of an audience since graduate school, so I spent hours filling a document with passages from thinkers and writers who could speak to that question, hours reading too much and typing too many words that, as I read back over them, seemed to be mostly about the failures of the sexual revolution. I discovered that on paper I sounded like an ambivalent beneficiary.

You sound unconvinced about the inherent value we ascribe to sexual freedom, said Rose, after reading through the notes, but less sure about the value of—I guess the clinical term would be monogamy.

I know, I said. I am that confused. I don’t know what the answer is.

So which side are you on?

Why do I have to pick a side?

To sell the book you’re writing here.

I had not thought of it that way.

And people love to think that any kind of critique of feminism, because that’s essentially what this is, is automatically conservatism.

Yes, I know. I know. Would admitting to my confusion solve the problem?

Rose laughed. Maybe. This is a mess, but you’re definitely making me think harder than I usually do about my own bullshit, so thank you for that.

I spent almost as many hours looking for a new dress to wear. Rose told me to buy the most expensive one, which was of course the only one I wanted: a black shirtdress, button-down, silk, shantung, from the fifties, flared skirt, tiny red roses on tiny green stems, priced at $250. From a vintage clothing store in the East Village that no longer exists—a claustrophobically enchanted forest on East Sixth Street whose Lilly Pulitzer dresses and leather jackets and fur coats and veiled hats and lamé dancing shoes excreted themselves like kudzu from the corners, the floor, and the doubled-up racks along the sea-green walls. The woman who owned it used to be a model in the seventies. Jeannie. She’d grown up in Florida and regularly flew back home for the estate sales that kept her in business. She had the voice of Rosalind Russell doing a Phyllis Diller impression, or the voice of Phyllis Diller doing a Rosalind Russell impression, and Rose and I often went into the store just to listen to her talk people into and out of whatever they were trying on. If I hadn’t liked Jeannie so much I would have asked if she could lower the price.

Spend the money, Rose said, as I stared into the mirror at the front of the store. That dress is definitely going to earn itself out.

Listen to your friend, said Jeannie, who sat on a red wooden stool behind a glass case full of charm bracelets, tie clips, scarf pins, and sunglasses. She’d been sifting through carbon copy receipts and typing on a calculator. Never underestimate the allure of being buttoned up. Men love it. Loooooove it! Makes them feel like it’s Christmas and you’re the only present their drunk bastard father ever sent them.

I bought it.

Did you write that down? said Rose, as we left the store.

I showed her the back of my receipt and the rollerballed scrawl. Then we walked to Veselka and drank coffee and picked at the same plate of pierogies for three hours, talking about how terrible I felt about Lynn and about how infuriated Rose was with the guy she wanted to break up with.

I’m starting to hate them all, she said.

The stage lights blinded me so that I could not see the faces of the crowd, could see only that there was a crowd. I didn’t say much during the discussion, because the other young women sitting next to me were not talking about love as an emotional state, or sex in any way, shape, or form, but instead about the economic and political inequalities that affected, or afflicted, heterosexual romantic partnership: unequal pay, women’s unpaid labor, the ethics of care, abysmal American maternity leave policies, the glorious state-sponsored compassion of European family leave. I knew these statistics, hated this state of things, but could not add, in any productive way, to this conversation. The other panelists were full of numbers and an intimate knowledge of labor law—even the poet, whom I sometimes envied more for her Edwardian mess of curls than her increasing fame. If you had hair like that, I thought, it would all but command you to make yourself seen and heard. I was bored; I was envious. I was also amused: here I sat, the lone doofus who had taken the assignment at face value while they had all, seemingly without planning on it, acted on herd instinct and run in the same direction for safety.

Or, as an agent had said to me earlier that week: Do you really want to be known as a woman who only writes about sex?

She’d taken me for a drink to see if I was someone worth representing, and wanted to know whose careers I envied. One of the writers I’d mentioned provoked that reaction.

Are you saying we get to choose? I said. I think I just want to be known.

Or, as the economist said, with comic exasperation, but also some bitterness, after reporting the number of hours women spent doing housework and then the number spent by men: Is this what we get when we win?

We had not won, I sat there thinking, if it was still much easier for a group of women to talk about numbers and policy than it was to say what they really thought about the energies at play between women and men when they asked too much of each other or asked nothing at all. Much safer. Not even the poet was willing to do it. If we did focus on the romantic and the psychological, they—we—I—could appear to lose sight of the political and economical and expose ourselves as narcissistic, quietist, sentimental, frivolous, adolescent, emotional. Fixated on the narrowest of subjects. They could be accused of getting too personal, and they’d expose their heart of hearts, which people might mock them for, because our heart of hearts might have never caught up to or conformed to our times, and the times, no matter what decade you were talking about, always seemed to demand nihilism and hedonism—or their distant cousin, emotional detachment. Or so it seemed to me, that night in 2003, when I was thirty.

The question and answer period arrived. A young woman, long pale blond hair, glasses, sitting, placidly, next to what was most likely a boyfriend, raised her hand and said, I came here tonight because I thought we were going to talk about love.

So did I, I said, and a few people in the audience laughed, and when I heard the laughter I started talking about why I thought we had all stuck to the facts and avoided the topic of feelings. I felt my mouth moving, felt people listening, felt them leaning into my words, felt them waiting for the next ones. I heard laughter once, and then again, and another time, and the stage lights warmed my face, turned me heliotropic. They drew me up tall and pared away fear. This was what it must be like for all those musicians I’d interviewed who went on and on about feeding off the energy of a crowd, I thought. I’d always rolled my eyes at them, but here was the adrenaline rush I’d heard them talk about, and the faces loved me, I could tell, and it felt a little like being tempted by Satan, to watch as you coaxed an audience into the palm of your hand, because if you were this good right now you knew you could get it all the time if you wanted to. And I wanted to, wanted to, wanted to.

But not badly enough. At some point during my monologue the economist laughed, too, but the poet, immediately to my right, had stiffened a bit and kept crossing and uncrossing her legs. I sensed disapproval, or displeasure, maybe even something you could call fuming, and her reaction was the only frequency I could tune in to. I ground to a halt and broke off midsentence.

I should let someone else talk, I said. I sat there listening to my ears ring and watching other people’s mouths move.

Aren’t you the cutest thing? said the poet to me, as the audience clapped and we stood up from our seats. I thought about the picture of her I’d seen in the Times, lying on her side in a green strapless gown on an antique settee, in someone’s brownstone parlor floor, her hair swirling above her like a meringue, her rhinestoned cat-eye glasses letting her get away with looking much too much like an odalisque in the paper of record. Why should she have everything? No, what I really meant was: Why the fuck should this bitch like herself way more than I like myself?

Aren’t you hostile? I said.

A look of surprise crossed her face. I wasn’t so cute, after all.

I never saw the poet again—she became very famous and I did not—but what she said made a deeper cut than Karl’s I thought it was—sentimental. I could interpret what Karl had said as Change your sentences. In that case I had been charged with a problem to solve, and if I knew how to hide my true self but reveal just enough of it, I could solve it. What she’d said sounded like Who do you think you are? and in that case my true self—its presumption, its shallowness, and its greed for attention and approval—was the problem, and the only way to solve it was by not writing at all. No reviewer of my books would ever be as forceful or perceptive in their praise as she was in her spite, and even though I didn’t respect her, I chose to believe her. I wanted what she had so much of, which meant she must know something I never would, something no one had bothered to teach me, something that had not been spoken of in all the many books I’d read, and for a long time, every time I sat down to write, Aren’t you the cutest thing? would pop up like one of those mechanical corpses coffined in the darkest corners of a boardwalk haunted house, and on very bad days it could make me stop typing altogether.

Why I chose, over and over, to believe my fears rather than believe in what people had called my talent, when I wanted so badly for people to know my name the way they now know the poet’s—I’m still not entirely sure.

The look on that girl’s face was priceless, Rose said, arms linked in mine, as we walked with some friends to a bar. Amazing, she called out to the cold sky over Twenty-Sixth Street. It was like watching a woman watch another woman steal her boyfriend right out from under her.

I stopped walking, unlinked my arm from hers, put my face in my hands, and groaned.

Oh who cares, she said, linking her arm back in mine and dragging me on. You know that catching some hate from another woman is the only reliable way we have of knowing whether we’re winning.

Six months later, the agent and the $250 dress and I sat at a series of conference tables peopled with smiling faces, resounding with compliments, in a series of publishing houses in Midtown. My book, about a group of women artists who lived in New Mexico in the early twentieth century, didn’t sell for much, because of the subject matter, and because the only people who wanted to publish it were other artistic and ambitious young women eating beans for dinner as they hustled to prove to their male bosses how unerring their instincts were. I didn’t care about the money. The money was not the point. Making people know my name was the point. Talking with people and being public was the point, and if you wrote about dead people with fascinating lives, it would get you on NPR, so a few years after the first book came out I published a second, another group portrait of women who were, said the jacket copy, cultural revolutionaries. People loved to talk about women who had replaced marriage with a string of lovers, or had a string of lovers while also being married, or refused to play any of those games and went to live in literal or metaphorical deserts where they could be left alone to pursue an ideal or a vision. We’re all bottomless pits when it comes to the topic of sex, said my agent. But my interest was more practical than prurient. How did these women say no to the world around them? When did they do it? Why did they do it? They couldn’t help it—that often seemed to be the answer, and sometimes these women called their inability to get with the program feminism, and sometimes they vehemently refused to claim their victories for that cause. Why do we marry when we could be doing other things? That was the real question driving these books, and, I sometimes thought, the real question at the back of the minds of all the women interviewing me: Why do we still keep marrying?