I was surprised that in our terse exchange of texts Emory agreed to come to our house. I thought if she was willing to see me at all she might insist on neutral territory—a coffee shop, a park. But she might have concluded that an encounter in public would seem artificial, stilted, obliging us to be civil, to keep our voices down, to be mindful of being overheard; if we weren’t going to be candid, meeting up would serve no purpose. It wasn’t as if we were handing off a bag of bills for a ransom exchange or something. Besides, I’d verified at the hospital that I was easily recognized as the bigot who’d let fly with a “shrill, berserk lambaste.” Thanks in part to Emory herself, I couldn’t go anywhere without being accosted.
Since members of my family had yet to have their faces plastered on wanted posters, Wade took the kids to a movie, the better to give Emory and me privacy and to eliminate any impression that she was being ganged up on.
With saddening punctuality, Emory drove up at the exact knell of four p.m. This was the temporal precision that governed appointments with doctors or lawyers, strangers with whom one’s dispassionate relationship is transactional. Parking out front and heading for the side door, she ran a gauntlet of cameras that she had personally helped plant on our sidewalk. They didn’t appear to rattle her. Emory was used to cameras.
Peering from behind the front blinds, I couldn’t help it: I was happy to see her. I was always happy to see her. As habitually, I checked out her garb: black leggings, scoop-necked black sleeveless top, spotlessly white cross-trainers—the nearly weightless kind for maximum agility. It was workout gear. She was dressed to spar.
I’d spent an uncommonly long time deciding what to wear myself. The season was changing, and I went from too cold to too hot and back in an afternoon. Feeling a need to swaddle myself, I’d opted for soft, oft-washed jeans and a plain white T-shirt, topped by a long-sleeved, below-the-knee, solid-red cloak open at the front. Its fabric weighty enough to give it swing and flow, the wrap had always made me feel classy. It was too late to reconsider this regular-shuffle-about-the-house-with-a-dash-of-style ensemble, but I was already sweltering. My pulse was high, my ears were ringing, my palms damp. Which was ridiculous. Emory was my best friend, right? My best friend.
The moment I opened the door it hit me in the face that Emory and I were living in drastically different realities, forming a Venn diagram whose circles didn’t even kiss, much less overlap. In mine, I was aggrieved, and I had a right to be aggrieved. It should have been Emory’s job from the start to assuage that grief, to explain herself—to both mend and make amends. But one glance confirmed that this wasn’t how she saw matters one bit. My initial inkling proved horribly on the money: her expression was untroubled, the picture of innocence. I physically stepped back, as if from a slap.
Yet I was still civilized enough to mind my manners. “Would you like something to drink?” I solicited. “Tea, a beer?”
“I’m plenty hydrated, thanks,” she said lightly, lifting her stainless-steel water flask.
Bad form. The purpose of a drink was not the liquid. To illustrate as much, I grabbed a beer I didn’t necessarily want.
The weather being clement, I’d originally thought we’d talk on the verdant back deck, but it was abruptly clear that those timber-framed loungers would assemble us in an unsuitable attitude of ease. Extending side by side and gazing together at the birds flitting through our backyard bracken would have been painfully reminiscent of the truism that lovers look at each other, while friends look together at something else—and apparently when Emory and I stared at the same thing, I saw a white-breasted nuthatch and she saw a bottle of bleach. Instead, I led us to the living room. We never hung out in the living room.
I slid onto the leather couch, but instead of assuming its other end, Emory chose an upright wingback subtly too far away, putting her several inches higher than I was. Her affect was guileless, expectant, pleasant. Technically I had summoned her, which put the onus on me to initiate proceedings and set the agenda. My head was racing with snippets of the monologues I’d delivered to the bedroom mirror, but I hadn’t prepared an opening play and felt tongue-tied, at sea. Sometimes it’s a mistake to rehearse these things. They never go according to plan.
“I guess you’re not going to apologize,” I said.
“No.” Again, the lightness. The monosyllabic answer conveyed that she wasn’t going to help.
“Can you . . . understand why I might think you should?”
“Narrowly,” she allowed, crossing her legs so that one bright white athletic shoe caught the sun. “But then, I might just as naturally expect an apology from you.”
“How do you figure that?” My astonishment was genuine.
“You put me in an intensely awkward position with that conniption fit of yours. Just enough people are aware we know each other—”
“That we’re acquaintances.”
“That we’re acquainted, yes,” she said evenly. “By spewing all that poison in the vicinity of some thirty phones, you risked splashing some of it on me. In five minutes, you made yourself socially radioactive. You must have read about some of these cases. People have lost livelihoods two or three degrees of separation from an ill-considered remark, never mind a raving meltdown.”
I wanted to put the beer down—alcohol in the presence of asceticism puts one at a disadvantage—but I didn’t want to ring the oak coffee table or rise to fetch a coaster. The only answer was to drink it.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, taking a slug for punctuation. “You can’t see how denouncing me, my morals, my parenting, and my professionalism on television might possibly seem like a teeny-tiny betrayal?”
“On the contrary, I think it’s an act of consummate loyalty to show up here in front of all those cameras after you’ve become Public Enemy Number One. For Pete’s sake, you might at least have given a thought to your family. You’ve branded your partner and all three kids.”
“Please. You’re the one who dragged my children through the mud on CNN.”
“I think Darwin and Zanzibar would be much better off if they got over this notion that they’re endowed with superhero mental powers. That mythology makes them neurotic and alienates them from their peers. However much I may personally like them, to most people it makes them unlikable. If it goes on much longer, their pretense of precocity will destroy their prospects in adulthood.”
“For you to take it upon yourself to drill into my children that they’re drearily unexceptional would be overstepping big-time. Besides, you know full well that their precocity is no pretense.”
“You’ve always made such a point of your middling intellect. But your sense of superiority the last few years—”
“Excuse me. I have a sense of superiority?”
“Your ego is bigger than you pretend. You just reroute your vanity through your kids. ‘I may not be so smart, but my children are smart! Smarter than anybody’s!’ You use them to bolster your intellectual bona fides by association. It borders on child abuse, Pearson.”
“I couldn’t believe you labeled me a ‘eugenicist.’ I know you’re expected to juice this stuff up for effect on TV, but talk about over-the-top—”
“You selected your older kids’ father solely in accordance with his perceived IQ.” (I noted that for Emory the insertion of “perceived” had become a reflex.) “What’s that but eugenics? What else is there to call it?”
“You only know that because I confided it to you as a friend. And then you go and use it against me—”
“You advertise your kids’ parentage to anyone who will listen. Everyone knows that who knows you. What few they number.”
I didn’t flag that last comment, though I should have. “You only knew a whole slew of that stuff because we’re friends. An acquaintance wouldn’t know any of it.”
“I’m a journalist. I gather information wherever I can find it.”
“So all along I should have been aware that anything I told you could end up on TV?”
“All along you should have been mindful of my occupation, sure. And honestly—I don’t regard myself as the center of the universe, and I don’t assume you organize your every behavior around me . . . Still, I’ve had to wonder if on some maybe unconscious level that flamboyant shitfit at VU was intended to damage my reputation. Or if that wasn’t the intention, the blowback for me might at least have seemed a plus. It’s not a conceit on my part but a fact: I have a high profile. You had to have known a Saint Vitus’ dance like that was not only going to hit the internet but in short order would implicate the only person you know who’s recognizable to the wider public.”
“You were the last thing on my mind at the time. I’d simply had it up to the eyeballs and I exploded. For you to imagine I was deliberately trying to take you down with me is conceited. Worse than conceited, it’s bonkers. Why on earth would I have any desire to sabotage your career?”
Emory sighed. So at odds were we in the present that I think she tended to forget I knew her very, very well. Ergo, her extended pause wasn’t indicative of a reluctance to get into this whole subject matter; it was a performance of a reluctance to get into this subject matter, which she was champing at the bit to address.
“In the same way you’ve pretended to regard yourself as not very smart,” she began, maintaining that air of hesitancy a beat or two longer, “you’ve pretended you’re not ambitious. Which has always seemed like sour grapes to me. You’ve got to be disappointed in the way your career has turned out. You’ve never even made it to, like, associate professor or something. As for why, we don’t have time here. Let’s just say you’ve always been self-destructive. All your energy gets plowed into undermining yourself, as if you’re furiously digging a hole under your own feet. Even if we overlook for a moment your spectacular detonation of a suicide vest two days ago, that absurd business with Dostoevsky is a premier example. What good did that do you? Along with a great deal of harm? But me, I’ve applied myself, I’ve worked hard, I’ve honed my skills, and I’ve gotten somewhere. I earned my way up, and I don’t think I scored my current position at CNN through a lucky break; I think I got it because I deserve it. All I’m saying is, it’s natural, maybe even inevitable, when two people have known each other a long time”—Emory had yet to employ the word “friend”—“and one of them excels and the other doesn’t. You can’t help it, but you’re jealous. Good God, look at what I had to broadcast on Thursday to finally get you to watch one of my openers.”
“I haven’t avoided your broadcasts because I’m jealous, but because I find them political anathema.”
“Uh-huh. And why is that?”
“Duh! Because I think Mental Parity is a load of twaddle. I’ve tried to be tolerant while you mouth support for this crap, but if I subjected myself to much of your lucrative propaganda, however insincere it may be, we were likely to get into fights.”
“That’s quite a story you tell yourself. So you’ve been sacrificing for the tranquility of our relationship—suppressing the almost uncontrollable yearning to see me shine in the media just so that we can get along better. It’s a nicer story than being a comparatively unaccomplished English instructor who finds it too painful to confront the celebrity of another woman she grew up alongside who began basically in the same starting place.”
“I wouldn’t say growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness was the same starting place.”
“Thirty years on, can we finally call time on that self-pity?”
“I’ve never said I feel sorry for myself.”
“You didn’t have to.”
After this torrent, we came to a stop. The beer was gone. I was bunched at the far end of the couch, my red wrap pulled tight and terminally wrinkled. Meanwhile, Emory was draped languidly across her wingback, bare arms open, her expression airily quizzical but otherwise unperturbed. It occurred to me then what a shame it was that present mores among the professional class forbade such a horror, because it would have suited Emory Ruth stylistically had she smoked. I was dumbfounded how this woman opposite had just two nights previous betrayed my confidence, imperiled my family, shoved the knife an extra two inches into my career, and assassinated my character on a major cable news channel, yet here I was the one balled into a defensive crouch. I forced myself to uncross my arms and sit up straight, but this body-language folderol is nefarious. I’d no sooner make a deliberate effort to stop looking so guarded than I’d find my arms crossed tightly once again, my tailbone slid forward, my shoulders hunched.
At last, as if benevolently filling the yawning social hole that her hostess was too maladroit to fill herself—in my mind’s eye, beforehand she took a deep drag on one of those long, slender cigarettes marketed to women, and exhaled a thin stream of smoke with a hint of menthol—she noted idly, “And who says my openers are ‘insincere’?”
She finally got me to sit up.
“You believe that stuff?”
“Every word.”
“Since when?”
“I admit I was skeptical at first. Before MP, my father’s academic life revolved around the cognitive hierarchy. Traditionally, lawyers like my mother were members of a cerebral elect. But gradually this new way of thinking began to make sense. Honestly, Pearson, why is it so important to you to be able to impugn other people’s intelligence? To make them feel small and unworthy and inferior?”
“Insult isn’t the point. The point is reality. And out here in reality, everyone is not as smart as everyone else.”
“But why is that idea so important to you?” she reiterated.
“Because it’s not an idea. It’s a fact.”
“According to you.”
“Not according to me. According to the observable world over which our ideas exert no control.”
“Well, that’s all very fancy. But you’re so proud of being a renegade. Does it ever occur to you that maybe you’re isolated and culturally out in the cold because you’re wrong?”
I got up and began to pace. “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”
“You described yourself a few minutes ago as ‘tolerant.’ You’ve been tolerating my advocacy of cognitive justice, which for reasons not altogether obvious you interpret as disingenuous. But every time I come over here, I’m subjected to the kind of crude language and throwback thinking that would get me fired in a millisecond at the studio. Seems to me I’m the one who’s been tolerant. Extremely tolerant. Maybe too. Silence is complicit.”
“I know it is. That’s why I finally blew my stack. I felt almost physically incapable of keeping my mouth shut any longer, because if I didn’t say anything, all this consternation and disgust was going to explode through the top of my head. You act as if the only consequence of this barmy doctrine is that people are at long last being nice to each other. On the contrary, the country is falling apart!”
“I’m so tired of that Chicken Little nonsense,” Emory said with an eye roll. “The sky is still up there.”
“The sky is on the floor. Even your own parents are talking about emigrating.”
“Sound familiar? The end of the world is nigh? Isn’t that the same hysterical apocalypticism you grew up with? Maybe you didn’t shake your religious indoctrination after all. And your pseudo-secular street-corner evangelism channels the same superiority I was talking about. It’s more of the chosen-people guff you supposedly put behind you. You have a special vision. You have special access to the truth. You can see that the country is in tatters, and everyone else, for whom life keeps perking along just fine, is blind to its unfolding ruin. That’s what this misfit iconoclasm of yours is about: clutching your status as uniquely enlightened to your chest like some one-eyed teddy bear.”
“Why does this whole conversation so far concern my character?” I may have started to shout. “What about yours? What about your completely having changed your tune on this stuff, just because it’s socially and professionally convenient? I mean, do you truly believe anything?”
“Yes, of course. I believe in Mental Parity. I seem to recall being crystal-clear on that point only two minutes ago.”
“But you used to think it was hogwash.”
“And what’s wrong with political maturation?”
“What’s wrong is throwing over everything you think, and everything you know, and credulously swallowing whatever crackpot notion your culture has most recently cooked up, just to be liked and to get along and to get ahead. What’s wrong is being so empty, and so incapable of independent thought, that you’ll believe pigs fly, and blue is red, and up is down, just because that’s what they told you to mindlessly regurgitate this week—”
“‘They’?” Emory interjected. “Pearson, you sound unhinged. There is no ‘they.’”
“I thought we’d both been trying just to survive until the country gets a grip, but you’re not surviving. You’re actively propagating this tommyrot! I mean, Jesus Christ, I don’t expect us to agree on everything, but I have no idea who you are anymore! I know you’ve always been out for number one, but I never had you down as a total coward. I never had you down as a fucking idiot!”
“Don’t you dare use that language with me!” Whether Emory was offended by “the I-word” or pretending to be offended was up for grabs, but as she abandoned the chair that had so obligingly featured her shifting poses of nonchalance, she did finally seem a bit exercised. “The sanctimony of just that sort of pious, grandstanding speech, that’s what’s really the limit, Pearson—this unquestioning self-righteousness of yours! It’s relentless! As if deep down inside, you’re still a Jehovah’s Witness after all! Talk about ‘incapable of independent thought’? Well, thinking independently means first and foremost looking at yourself and holding out the possibility, the tiniest possibility, that you yourself might be full of shit. Like, since when are you so good and pure? Starting with the fact that at sixteen you broke your parents’ hearts? And that affair you had with that lunkhead Italian”—lunkhead? she was slipping—“that was flat-out sexual harassment, if not assault—”
“Please. It didn’t go down that way at all. He loved it.”
“You were his teacher, and that was abuse of power, Miss Priss. And getting pregnant on top of that was irresponsible—”
“Come on, I’ve had one abortion, but you’ve had two.”
“And you never told him. What if he’d wanted the kid? Never got a chance to put a word in. Then you got this bizarro notion into your head to get artificially inseminated with some stranger’s supposedly ‘genius’ semen, when you were making no money and had no partner. Wade rescued you, but he can’t anymore because of the accident, and now look what you’ve done: left your family in the lurch, drenched in shame, with no income, just so you could ‘blow your stack.’ Oh, and let’s not forget to throw in that you spurn, disparage, and neglect your own little girl, just because Lucy doesn’t conform to your idea of a whiz kid. I don’t call any of that righteous.”
“You’re doing it again. Twisting everything around so this is all about me. Two nights ago, you sold me downriver, okay? Dearly beloved, that is why we are gathered here today in the sight of God.”
“Okay, let’s talk about me, then.” Placing a middle finger in the center of her forehead, Emory restored an appearance of calm that struck me as ominous. “From the start, I’ve tried to be charitable with you, Pearson. You were so out of the loop and awkward in high school. Yes, I did, I felt sorry for you. I brought you into my home. I’ve kept up with you—”
“What, I’ve just been your little project?”
“But you’ve been incredibly demanding. You’ve continually referred to me as your ‘best friend,’ but ‘best’ implies a bunch of other friends I theoretically stand head and shoulders above. What other friends? I don’t think you have any, and I can’t remember your ever having any. That puts a huge burden on me, Pearson. You’ve sometimes made a point of telling me how important I am to you, but that’s the problem. I’m too important to you. I’m sorry to put it this way, but I don’t know how else to say it: you’re a little . . . clingy. Nuts, the way you wore that red scarf I gave you practically every day. It was just a scarf. A cheap little present. It meant too much to you. You’re— You seem fixated on me, Pearson, and you’ve seemed fixated, unhealthily so, from the beginning. Sometimes I’ve even wondered . . .”
“Wondered what.”
“Your obsession seems almost . . . erotic.”
My hot cheeks would have matched my cloak. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
I must have gone into emotional shock. My paralytic disbelief was a convenience for my guest, as it facilitated the delivery of what I would personally tag a “pious, grandstanding speech” without interruption. I still remember the peroration nearly word for word, and I’ve little doubt that Emory had rehearsed it, much as I had rehearsed the bones I had to pick with her. But I had signally failed to hit the majority of my talking points: I’d allowed my indignation over her public characterization of my older children as outcast fabulists to fall by the wayside; I’d never ridiculed her description of Lucy as “delicate”; I’d forgotten to so much as mention my outrage over her enticing my students to sue; my expression of affront over that “acquaintance” jab had been far too indirect; I’d neglected to pillory her ludicrous scheme to rename our city as ahistorical, Stalinist, and anti-intellectual, if the latter adjective could even function as a criticism anymore. By contrast, Emory managed, I would wager, to render her own practiced homily relatively intact.
“I could almost keep it up,” she began, “even if your attachment to me is a little off-color. I’ve tried to support you and to include you in my family. To keep you company. To listen to your problems at VU and the challenges of raising your kids. And I could even, possibly, try to support you through this latest catastrophe you’ve brought down on your own head, if it weren’t for the content of the catastrophe.
“It would be one thing if you and I didn’t see eye to eye on, you know, the practical economics of recycling plastic. But landing on opposite sides of Mental Parity is too fundamental. It is about character. I’m sorry to sound sappy or preachy, but it’s about primitive right and wrong. MP is about how we treat other people, and how we think about other people, and even how we regard ourselves—about what we think makes us valuable. You don’t only cling to me personally, but you also insist on clinging to an outdated and frankly repulsive way of thinking, and I can’t condone it. I can’t implicitly endorse your regressive prejudice by continuing to see you, keeping quiet and looking the other way while you unashamedly promote sentiments I find atrocious. I can’t keep pretending to laugh at jokes that aren’t remotely funny. It’s too much of a strain, and I go home hating myself.
“It was hard, but I came here because we have known each other a long time, and it would have seemed tacky and, yes, cowardly to send you an email or just stay out of touch until you got the message. So I’m telling you to your face: I can’t do this anymore. It makes me feel like an accomplice. I’m abetting a brace of attitudes that turn my stomach. We’re going to have to part ways. Please tell Wade and the kids I’m sorry and I wish them the best.
“Meanwhile, I hope you get some help. There are any number of terrific books out that might get the scales to fall from your eyes and break down your obtuse resistance to seeing that human brains are all the same. Look at the pictures. Just look at the damned pictures.”
Emory rescued her stainless-steel water flask and saw herself out. That was quite a lesson in learning not to act self-righteous.
I might not be good at math, but I have the emotional intelligence to understand that anger is often a shield or, if you will, a blowtorch, which blasts outward to protect the self from fully inhabiting pain. That’s why I was so surprised at my original reaction to Emory’s scathing CNN broadcast: I’d have expected to be incandescent, then slowly admit to myself that behind the fury lay a deep and abiding sense of injury. Instead, the woundedness came first, and I was defenseless against it. I hadn’t been mad. I’d been sad.
Thus in the days following that conflagration in my living room, I had reason to anticipate a searing self-reckoning: Pearson, face it, you’re hurt. A friendship of many years has been demolished, its past defiled. There’s no alternative to feeling your way through this—through all the humiliation and self-doubt. Particular lines from that conversation are going to circle back and cut you like spirals of razor wire, and you will have to allow them to do so, to lacerate you over and over until they’ve worn off their sharp edge. It’s impossible to tell from this vantage point how many months or even years it will take for the blades to blunt, and there’s no guarantee that recollection of that Saturday afternoon will ever lose its power to flay you. We can only be assured that there’s no shortcut to the other side; as Wade would put it, you have to walk through the middle of the oil slick. You must know your sorrow, and even love your sorrow, to ever be shed of it. In other words, just as the headshrinking hacks would have recommended in relation to my parents’ renunciation at sixteen, I’d have expected to start in on the long, hard work of “processing my grief.”
Yet this drawn-out churn of grueling self-examination and gradual acceptance of loss failed to commence. Instead what gathered was the very anger that in the wake of that broadcast should have hit me up front. The anger was of a particular character, too: calm, steady, calculating, and above all cold. It wasn’t a blowtorch but an ice pick. If there was a grain of truth to Emory’s assertion that I had always been self-destructive, I was calling time on the tendency. I was now primed to destroy someone else.
As for what I did, I’m not asking for applause. I cheerfully concede it was unchristian. In retrospect, I regard my retaliatory play as downright unattractive, though I didn’t care whether it was attractive at the time, and I still don’t. I didn’t give a tinker’s damn whether anyone else agreed that the target had it coming, and that included Wade and the children, who may have been in accord over the gesture’s being warranted but were divided on whether it did “any good.” The point was not to do good. The point was to do harm.
Accordingly, I’ve no interest in forgiveness, from this story’s principals or its purely hypothetical readership. As I told Zanzibar, forgiveness without repentance is meaningless, and I’ve never repented of my gambit, in which I took some pleasure—although that pleasure, even at its most intense, proved subdued. Revenge rarely satisfies, but I knew that going in. As suggested, I’m not an emotional halfwit. In fact, if you’re expecting to be made whole in any way, I strongly advise giving vengeance a miss. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t make whatever you’re avenging not have been inflicted on you in the first place. It seldom instills in your nemesis an iota of regret; it seldom spurs this poor excuse for humanity to acknowledge that the payback was deserved. But I wasn’t intent on provoking regret, and it was of no consequence to me whether a certain someone ever acknowledged even to herself that she’d asked for it. I wasn’t trying to make myself happy. I was trying to make the certain someone unhappy.
The most Old Testament of my children, Zanzibar helped, though the process turned out to be simple enough that I probably could have figured it out on my own. The video was easy to locate, because I’d rewatched it enough times to remember the date: 03/28/2010. Waiting a seemly couple of days after Emory’s histrionic disavowal, I uploaded the file that Monday to YouTube:
“Da whole idea of da dum-dum is doo-doo! Da dum-dum’s gone da way of da dodo!” Emory smashes a rice cracker against her forehead and swirls the crumbs in her hair. “I’m just as smawt as da pwesident! I’m gonna be pwesident! Cawswell Doofus-Doofus told me so!”
While I watched the whole take to confirm the transfer’s success, I kept count—pleased to calculate that Emory had used the word “retarded” even more times than I had in my creative writing class at VU.