We wrote. Rose assumed the position of freelance journalist and I was—well, I was something between freelance journalist and critic, and my beat was the long-dead or overlooked female genius. None of what we wrote mattered, in the end. What mattered was the fact that we were just about able to live off our freelancing.
When I wasn’t conducting what I called séances in print, or writing what my editors called critical essays with a dash of the personal, I interviewed musicians, writers, filmmakers, and artists for websites that no longer exist. Rose wrote cover profiles and trend stories for women’s magazines. If women were pole dancing in the name of empowerment, or taking up any other overtly feminine art or wile that had previously been disowned or frowned upon by feminists, but was now being reclaimed by feminists, or the feminist-adjacent, in what the editors wanted everybody to think were vast hordes, Rose was there. This being just before and just after the year 2000, there was a lot of that kind of thing going on—partially, Rose and I used to think, a return-of-the-repressed situation brought on by the decades we’d just spent having to prove how much like men we were, how desireless and rational we were, in order to be taken seriously.
I couldn’t write what Rose wrote—couldn’t handle being strong-armed and sworn at by publicists, or being rung up by irate women in Florida and Wisconsin who claimed they’d never said what had been printed when they most certainly had and there was tape to prove it—but Rose could. Actually, as Rose liked to point out, it wasn’t that I couldn’t, it was that I refused, and she was right. I used to tell her that being raised by women who showed their love purely through shouting did more for her career than if she had gone to Yale.
Famous people loved her. Once in L.A. an actress asked her if she could stay over for a few days in her Malibu house because, as the actress said, Rose’s eyes didn’t ask her to be anything other than the child of God she knew she really was. Another time, in another Malibu house, a queen of rock in the middle of her mudslide toward obsolescence stole Rose’s stretched-out, clearance-rack, sad black cardigan from Loehmann’s while Rose was in the bathroom and then tried to make up for it by pushing a blood-stained designer slip dress on her in exchange. A legendary pirate of an actor wanted to fly her out for a weekend in Tahoe, told her he’d arranged for one ticket to be left at the United counter at JFK, and she went. Bought expensive underwear, got her blond hair polished to a platinum, got a pedicure, but he spent the whole time talking about the actress who’d just dumped him. It was like Holden Caulfield with the prostitute, Rose said, not without amusement, from the hotel room she had evacuated herself to.
I was monologuing to you in my head the whole time, she used to say, whenever she came back from these assignments, and I loved nothing more than to sit with her in her apartment, or my apartment, or some bar, some restaurant, listening to her unpack these absurd souvenirs from Los Angeles, London, or the Lower East Side. The singer in the band who called her whenever he came to town. The actor who wanted to spend all day with her looking at records after his interview ended. The screenwriter who wanted to spend all day with her looking at records after his interview ended. The married director who found himself calling Rose in the town car from the airport to talk about that week’s New York Review of Books.
None of this stuff is real, Rose would sometimes say of these interactions. While she liked the attention from these men, she was under no illusion that any of her stories meant anything more than diversion, flattery, amusement, or more evidence of the varieties of human experience.
When she started talking like this, I would say, Well, do you want to be married?
Oh God no, she’d reply.
Neither did it make me jealous that she could leave a bar at nine o’clock at night, go home to bang out something in three hours, and then sleep like a baby where I might still stay up all night obsessing—I knew that’s what it was—over a handful of sentences. It didn’t make me jealous that editors called her up to write and my phone never rang. It didn’t make me jealous that she appeared on panels and even showed up occasionally on television—getting in fights with famous conservative pundits about breastfeeding in public, or with famous second-wave feminists about the legitimacy of Madonna as an icon of female empowerment. Or that all of this came to her because she cared more about getting the work out there and less about the objective worth of the work.
No, I rooted for Rose like she was the Mets. I rooted for Rose because it meant our team was winning. No men and no parents with money to help us, and we were winning.
If Rose hadn’t been Rose, and we hadn’t been friends, this never would have happened: Waking up naked and alone on a Sunday in Palm Springs, in a house that some band had filled with coke and a cast of thousands one weekend, crawling around on my hands and knees in a beige-carpeted, already-sweltering bedroom in the early morning before everyone else was up, looking for my clothes, and when I stopped for a second to try to think where else they might be, Rose hissed my name from underneath the bed, and I screamed, but everyone was still so passed out they didn’t hear me, and they didn’t hear her either, cackling, as she squirmed her way out from under it, still fully clothed, platforms still on, and told me the story of how she got there, which told me how I’d gotten there: Rose was tired and drunk and wanted to hide from the drummer who had not taken any of her hints, some of which were outright insults, and the singer, who kept telling everyone I reminded him of the girl who copied Standing on a Beach for him onto a ninety-minute Maxell tape in 1987, wanted to get away from the drummer, who earlier that night had told him he’d never be as good as Prince, and the singer and I ended up in a room that appeared to be unoccupied, but then I kicked him out into the long desert of a hallway and locked the door behind him because I was naked and drunk and all he wanted to do was talk about how much it killed him that he’d never be as good as Prince. He might have actually started crying; I can no longer actually remember. Rose told me that at one point she heard me tell him Yeah, well, okay, that’s fine, I’ll never be Jane Austen either, so why don’t we just get down to business?
Rose used to call that her favorite Charlotte story.
Because I was not yet Jane Austen, I started reporting on what Rose and I used to call female trouble for one of the women’s magazines she wrote for—birth control, hormones, depression, anxiety, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, Pap smears, pregnancy, breastfeeding, in vitro fertilization. It seemed not to matter that I didn’t want children or that I wasn’t really sure where my clitoris was. I figured out how to read a scientific study and how to get what I needed out of doctors and researchers in one phone call. Although it was technically Margaret Byrne who wrote those pieces. That was the byline I used—my father’s mother’s maiden name. It was also the byline I told editors to use when I submitted copy to the fancy travel magazine a friend had put me in touch with. The irony: in the last ten years of her life, my grandmother never once left the house. Was it irony, or was it a Mass said in memory of her reclusive soul? I loved being able to call Rose up and say Pack your bags, we’re going to Berlin! Or Buenos Aires or Glasgow or Miami. Poland, the Czech Republic, Japan. Mexico, the South of France. While I really did love traveling—another form of levitation from real life—there was something dutiful in my march, and Rose used to make fun of my underlined and dog-eared Rough Guides, which I read at night like novels.
I took any assignment anyone gave me because I was haunted by Rose’s story about the TA and the Snickers bar. I thought about that Snickers bar a lot. As a consequence I spent more time trying not to be broke than writing the kinds of pieces I believed I was capable of. It worried me until I received a note from an eighty-five-year-old critic whose work I’d grown up admiring. It said:
In lieu of “mentoring” you—patronizing to you and exhausting for me—I enclose the following command. You must do nothing but write.
Somewhere in this period I moved, for the first time, into an apartment by myself. A junior one bedroom between Fourth and Fifth Avenues in Park Slope. To be able to live alone, in such a quiet, light-filled, tree-shaded trio of rooms, for $850 a month—I felt incredibly lucky. I woke up to birds. So many birds, in the spring, it was as if the tree outside my front windows held one hundred nine-year-old girls on a Skittles high. I could hear myself think. Standing in my kitchen, drinking coffee from a percolator that my father’s mother had given me when she learned I was moving to the city, I could stare at the tomatoes and roses out back grown by my landlady’s mother, whom I lived above, and didn’t care that they were not mine to touch. I could stare at the backs of buildings and raise my eyes to miles of blue sky.
When I dropped off one of my first rent checks, Mrs. Rivera, whose husband had moved their family to Park Slope from Puerto Rico in 1959, and who had raised five children in the house where she now sat, due to MS, in a wheelchair, grasped my hand, stared into my eyes, and said I like you. You’re quiet, like me, and you don’t smoke.
I like you, too, I said, surprised. Happy, too, and grateful that she approved of me. Thank you for letting me live here.
She closed her eyes and waved the hand that was not holding mine, as if to say Please, it’s nothing.
And when my mind was not ticking away productively in the quiet, it crackled with anxiety as I lay in bed or rode the subway trying to calculate which checks from which assignment would go toward what bill, what beans, what dentist’s appointment.
None of this stuff is real, I would sometimes say of the articles I published. I couldn’t pretend that my writing was going to get me where I needed it to. It would not get me the PhD I’d abandoned. It would not get me confused for Elizabeth Hardwick no matter how hard I tried. I had nothing, really, to say—only the compulsion to say something and get paid for it. The furiously highlighted and underlined books sitting out on my desk, books ruffled with brightly colored Post-its, looking like a sky full of birds exploding in midair, were nothing but a symptom.
Whenever I said things like this, Rose would give me a look and pointedly change the subject.
Meanwhile, we tore through men like they were shitty six-packs. As if someone had told us it was our job. We thought we were having it all. We might have been taking revenge against all the young men at the publications of record. Such as the one sitting on the lower rungs of a storied masthead who told me they already had one moderately talented girl writing about her feelings. The one who said he hoped I understood but he had to go with the writer with name recognition who’d pitched the same story. That happened a lot. The one who told Rose the same thing. The other one who told Rose the same thing. The one who told Rose she shouldn’t write so much for women’s magazines. The one who told Rose she wasn’t a journalist, she was a therapist. The one who told Rose she needed to write some stories with statistics before he assigned her anything. The one who said he couldn’t see me writing about the fight over a stadium that might go up in my backyard in Brooklyn, but he could see me writing about this porn site he’d heard about that was run by women for women. The one who liked to rewrite my book reviews without telling me and then put his name on it if he estimated that only about a quarter of my original sentences remained. And his cubicle mate, who at yet another party said he could assign us a threesome.
Has that line ever worked for you? I asked him, as Rose walked off, back to us, middle finger thrown up like a punch.
Once, he said. It’s a numbers game.
It was funny enough, so I slept with him. To prove he didn’t bother me. That none of them did.
Rose and I never talked about the actual sex as much as we talked about the people we had it with. The sex, frequently, was not much to talk about, what with everyone drunk and tired and holding their cards close to their chest, and it could pale in comparison to the moment you realized that both your mind and your body had yet again proved irresistible, and you were going to sleep with them—the fires that climbed, the electricity that blazed, in the elevators, in the cabs, in the bars, on the street, in the corner of party after party. That feeling of, as Rose used to say, Game on, motherfucker. Of knowing you had closed yet another deal.
Tell me everything, she’d say. Start at the beginning, and don’t skimp on the details. Where did you meet him, what did he smell like, and where did he grow up? What did he order, how much does he hate his father while also knowing that he already is his father, that kind of thing, and all of it. And I obliged, was happy to oblige, was almost giddy while obliging as I told her about the band managers, booking agents, publicists, adjunct professors, many adjunct professors, and many former graduate students who’d turned their backs on academia before it could turn its back on them.
Sometimes, I said, it’s just like eating a bag of Cheetos. No more, no less.
Rose laughed. You’re hungry, you’re bored, you go out to the kitchen, to a bar, a party, whatever, and think to yourself, what’s in the cupboard?
Exactly! So then sometimes I wonder why even bother. You go out to a party, it’s all the same stuff, in the same fridge.
They’re Cheetos, she said. They taste good.
Sometimes these stories involved married men. I never once worried about their wives. I never once imagined any of them would fall in love with me so hard they’d have to worry about their wives. And I was shocked to find myself so undisturbed by what I might have once called my amorality. Not so shocked that I did anything about it, however.
I don’t feel bad, I told Rose. At all.
Why should you? said Rose. You could even be doing their marriage a favor.
I gave her a look.
You know I’d tell you if I thought you were doing something wrong, she said.
We were twenty-nine. We felt absolutely free. And in this way we felt stupidly rich.
Until Rose received a letter from the children of the owner of the brownstone she lived in. She’d been living above an aging matriarch as well, an Italian woman whose family had owned a coffee-roasting business that had been in the neighborhood since 1946 and was barely hanging on, and in the wake of their mother’s recent death, they wrote, they had decided to sell the building, and would put it on the market at the end of the month. She called me in a panic. She had no savings and the grandmother, who loved Rose, and in fact sometimes confused Rose with her daughter, had been waiving her rent.
What? I said. Loudly. As if she’d told me she’d been arrested for embezzlement. Why didn’t you tell me?
Stop shrieking, said Rose.
Oh really?
Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I’m just—would you have told me if you were in the same position?
No, I said, I probably wouldn’t. Which was a lie. I definitely would have, but that was beside the point. It wasn’t the time to ask her where the money went, either—who knows where the money goes in New York, especially if you have better things to do than to follow every bounce of a quarter down into the gutter? It wasn’t the time to ask if the shoes, and the coats, and the handbags were actually bought on sale. It was an opportunity to show Rose—really, to show myself, because on many days I was desperately afraid that my heart was a defective piece of machinery—that I was strong enough, responsible enough, and generous, loyal, and forgiving enough to lean on. That I was a true sister. A mother, even: throwing open the door and asking no questions.
I told her that, pending approval from Mr. Rivera, my landlord, she could stay with me, rent-free, so she could save up some money, if she didn’t mind that it was not a huge place. Rose, hyperventilating, said Thankyouthankyouthankyou. I hung up on her fourth Thankyou and called Mr. Rivera, who said it was fine by him, the two of us was nothing, he’d had a woman living with her two kids up there in the years before I came along, but I needed to ask his mother. Concepción. She’s the boss, he said.
Las chicas. That’s what Mrs. Rivera called us, whenever we went to Key Food to get her groceries because her home health care aide had a migraine, or swept the stoop or shoveled snow off the stoop, or presented her with red tulips just because it was spring and they looked so beautiful blooming in plastic buckets outside the bodega and we felt lucky that she liked us. Las chicas.
Rose and I took turns sleeping on a pullout couch I bought from the classified ads in the Voice, and while I wrote at my desk, she wrote at the kitchen table—a red-edged Formica number, inherited from Tracy, that stood on spindly chrome legs freckled with rust. Rose typing: a continuous, insistent clatter, the keyboard beaten up like a forty-eight-hole Whac-a-Mole. Charlotte typing: shooting off intermittent gunfire every two minutes, occasionally broken up by a testy punching of the delete key. Typing Monday to Friday, or through Saturday and Sunday if Thursday had been too festive, and drinking too much Café Bustelo with cinnamon, which is how Mrs. Rivera took her coffee, or so I deduced from the bright yellow cans I saw in the recycling bags and the scent that rose up from her basement kitchen every morning since I’d moved in.
After Rose and I married, both our homes smelled frequently, if not primarily, of coffee and cinnamon, and I sometimes wonder if the houses that Rose’s daughters preside over will smell the same.
At the time, we were incredibly pleased with ourselves. We thought we were outwitting someone or something and further planting our flag on some battlement in the process. So I ignored the expensive makeup and moisturizers that started showing up in the bathroom cabinet. It made me sad, not angry, to watch these open secrets pop up above and around the sink like a little forest of mushrooms. What my mother’s mother used to call the devil must have been lurking around Rose’s premises if she thought she needed all this armor now, when we were still a couple of honeydew melons. If she thought so little of her future that she’d rather blow her money than save it. But how could I tell Rose what to do with her money? I was not a parent or a spouse or the IRS. I could not tell Rose what to do with her money, but I could be even more responsible with mine.
A website I wrote for needed someone to fill in for an editor who was on maternity leave. Nine to five, technically, and five days a week, but probably way more than that. Did I want to come help out? asked the man who edited me. The executive editor. Yes, I told him.
Just rewrite them, the executive editor told me as I sat in his office fuming, my first week, over the lazy rambling copy people who sat at home writing in their pajamas routinely turned in. I’d sat at home, too, doing the same thing, but never ever in pajamas and never once with this level of blithe apathy. They know that’s what you’re going to do, and they know we’ll pay them anyway. That’s why they turn in piles of shit.
I enjoyed the feeling of omnipotence it gave me, translating someone else’s incoherence into five thousand or two thousand or five hundred words suitable to print, and I would stay there late, entranced, until I made the text say the thing everyone thought it would say when it was pitched, and in the voice of the writer who’d pitched it. Everyone was happy, and if the writer wasn’t, I didn’t care because it was their laziness and entitlement, more often than not, that had led us to this place. Your fault, not mine, I sang to myself as I wrote them firm and chipper emails.
Rose liked to come by the office at the end of the day, which was sometimes nine o’clock, and go through the advance copies and advance CDs piling up on the free table. The free table being the top of a large gray filing cabinet sitting outside my office where the editors dumped all the unwanted books and records they’d been sent by publicists in the hopes that they would be mentioned on the site. Part landfill, part Portobello Road. This way to Crap Mountain, the executive editor’s assistant wrote on the back of a piece of letterhead, in black Sharpie, and taped above the pile. Whenever a therapist has tried to convince me that it’s an achievement to have published any book at all, I always think about that pile of galleys outside that office, and the flood of advance copies sent to Rose and myself at the apartment, and how dozens, maybe hundreds, of those galleys ended up in blue plastic recycling bags out on my street, Rose swearing when we had to heave those heavy bags out to the curb, and how it all amounted to a copious pile of evidence pointing to the fact that actually, anybody could publish any damn thing at all.
You’re a mountain lion, remember, said Rose, as she sat in a folding chair in my office, waiting for me to finish composing an email to a writer who liked to throw fits over minuscule word changes. Don’t let them turn you into a house cat.
One of my jobs was editing the book critic, and the first time I called her up with questions and edits we ended up on the phone for an hour talking about The Virgin Suicides and Destiny’s Child and Christa Wolf and Monica Lewinsky and Britney Spears. You’re fun to talk to, she said at the end of our first conversation on the phone. How old are you again? Lynn. Irish, from Omaha, who escaped to New York in 1970 to be free, and, because she was what she called pretty enough and talented enough, she’d been able to finagle her way into writing for all the places she’d set her sights on, and had been able to end up in bed with most of the men she set her sights on. Men whose bylines still showed up regularly everywhere while Lynn’s showed up only on the website. She also taught at NYU. But the articles for the site and the teaching weren’t enough money, so she worked for a transcription service on the weekends. She’d been a Kelly Girl in college and could type eighty words a minute.
On a night when the executive editor and I and the vacuum were the only noises left in the office, he stood in my doorway telling me that he and Lynn and the editor-in-chief used to work at Rolling Stone together, and that he thought the editor-in-chief felt some need to protect her, that maybe she owed Lynn a favor, or something bigger than that, and so she hired Lynn and the rule here was that no one could mess with Lynn’s copy.
No one mentioned that to me. I had definitely been messing with Lynn’s copy, and was somewhat mortified.
I knew she’d take you seriously, he said, and walked away. The executive editor, who wore button-down shirts tucked into his jeans to assert and solidify his authority. Graying, tall, impassive, laconic, like a farmer who’d for centuries watched crops wither and watched crops flourish, and knew that if there were gods watching over the harvest, they would certainly not be moved by hysterics. He would sometimes leave a packet of peanut M&M’s on my desk in the late afternoon. Unsigned, but I knew they’d come from him. Everyone else in that office was too busy trying to get a job at the Times.
Lynn read a piece of mine online and was so impressed by it she mentioned it to the editor-in-chief. This one’s a real writer is what she said. Over the phone Lynn and I discovered that we both loved a big old wedding cake of a department store, as well as the very particular feeling of calm that could be conjured by standing in a sea of glittering cosmetic counters or gazing out over a field of matronly bras and nude-colored briefs, your anxieties muted through the soothing puzzle offered by limitless choice. So I took her out for lunch every week, at either Saks or Lord & Taylor. We’d order Cobb salads the size of potholes and a bottle of the cheapest white wine on the list, and when I signed the check I felt a competence and omnipotence similar to what I felt when I rewrote a lazy paragraph, even though it was my own debit card I was using to pay the bill. The managing editor told me I couldn’t expense these lunches because I wasn’t a real editor, so I wrote them off on my taxes instead. Lynn told me I should.
Every time we met she showed up in black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt under a Vivienne Westwood trench coat. Penny loafers, no socks, or cowboy boots. Lynn’s signature scent: one cigarette smoked outside in the cold and Annick Goutal’s Ce Soir ou Jamais. She was my height, exactly, skinny, with thick auburn hair pulled back in a bun. She wore no makeup on her face but her nails gleamed dark red. An excommunicated mother superior; Madame X incognito in exile was how I described her to Rose. The oracle of Lower Broadway is what Rose, who demanded a dramatic reenactment of every conversation I had with Lynn, called her. Rose thought she was crazy. I worried that myself, but I thought it was my feminist duty to refuse to imagine that inside each highly intelligent unmarried woman of a certain age lived a Bertha Rochester three missed periods away from setting the house on fire.
The first thing Lynn said to me, that first lunch, after we ordered: If you want to keep on writing you need to marry a lawyer. Don’t give me that look! It won’t make you any less of a feminist. We’ve been able to turn stripping into a feminist act, so why can’t it be feminist to marry a lawyer to get your own work done?
I was too pure to marry a lawyer. Don’t be too pure for too long.
Never get involved with anyone who never got the love he needed from his mother. Don’t even get into bed with them.
Grunge always sounded like whining to me.
Philip Roth? I will go to my grave having never read a word of him, and I suggest you do the same.
Always make sure you have fuck-you money—that’s what someone once told me and I’m passing it on to you. I mean a stash of cash that’ll let you take off should you ever need to get out of a situation you once thought was Camelot.
I now recognize Lynn’s style of conversing—the style you arrive at when you spend too much time by yourself, so much so that you forget that other people’s thoughts don’t go about that naked in public.
Lynn lived with her mother in a loft in SoHo. A painter bought the loft for her in the eighties when he learned he’d gotten her pregnant at the precise moment he’d proposed to the daughter of an even more famous painter. Rose and I used to love talking about whether this meant he loved Lynn more. Did Hamlet love Ophelia?
No, you don’t get to know who the painter was, Lynn told me, when I asked. It won’t tell you anything about me that you can’t learn from my writing.
After these lunches, I’d stand outside the entrance to whatever store we’d been perched in and, once I saw that she’d been definitively swallowed up by the crowds on Fifth or Madison, write down everything she’d said in the back blank pages of whatever book was currently in my bag, or as much as I could on the insides of my hands, if I had nothing to write on. I might not have been as discreet as I thought.
The last thing Lynn said to me, over the phone: I’m going to ask the executive editor to handle my copy from now on. No, no arguing. It’s nothing personal. Purely archetypical. You can always use my name like a credit card anywhere, if you think they’ll accept it. I just can’t look at your face anymore. You listen too closely.
This isn’t your fault, the executive editor told me. Lynn had given a daughter up for adoption back in Nebraska, and this wasn’t the first time she’d taken a young woman under her wing only to fly off after getting too close. This is my fault, he said. I forgot this could happen.
The woman I was hired to replace had decided to stay at home with her newborn, and the editor-in-chief called me into her office to offer me the job. A big glass desk; bookshelves loaded and stretching to the ceiling. She paid me several concise and sincere-seeming compliments on my writing. One piece, in particular, she said, had her thinking of David Foster Wallace.
You can’t be serious, I thought to myself, and then Don’t mind if I do and Is there more where that came from? I paid her wordy but sincere compliments on the depth and verve of the writing on the site.
I just want to make sure you want to do this. What about time for your writing?
Oh, I said, trying to sound dismissive. Trying to give the impression of someone who could take it or leave it, who knew that things came and they went, who knew that money mattered more than art, who could embody breeziness and detachment when she was actually single-minded and a bit obsessed. And because I felt we were speaking honestly, and because I thought I should experiment further with this breeziness, I got the idea that I should be clear about what I might need from the position, like all the women’s magazines said you should.
So I said: How possible would it be for a person to take a kind of maternity leave if they happened to get a book deal while on staff?
I don’t think you could argue that a book has the same social value as having a child, she said. Impersonally, offhandedly, as if she had not been conversing with someone who wrote. As if we were not sitting in a city that had been sold to us as a crucible for liberation and self-invention.
Then what are you doing with an office full of them? I said.
She appeared amused.
You shouldn’t take this job, she said. Let someone with less ambition have it. She might have been affirming me in my quixotic pursuit; she might have been telling me to get the hell out of her office. I thanked her for her time and rose from my seat.
That night, I spent many hours in a bar in Brooklyn listening to Rose and our friends decrying the editor’s words. Our friends, who, like us, had grown up believing that work would allow us to be free, and keep us that way, talked of Susan Sontag and her notion of being freelance—of being an intellectual entity unencumbered by allegiances that could hamper our intellectual production. No one could say that they owned us. Could the editor, shackled to her blowouts and her big glass desk, say that? They talked about William James and his notion of the unbribed soul, because we prided ourselves on being women who owed nothing to no person or entity, to no man or corporation, and they pitied the editor for her laughably retrograde view. What year are we in? I heard someone say.
Tell them that insane thing Lynn said about marrying a lawyer, said Rose.
You tell them, I said.