A few weeks after I sold my first book, Rose got pregnant. By a painter who’d taken an interest in her on a Saturday night, in a rambling, crumbling farmhouse up the Hudson. I sensed there was some slime at the bottom of his glassy pond, but a little bit of slime did not deter Rose. Like mold on cheese, she’d say. If you’re hungry enough, or bored enough, you’re just going to cut it off and get to the parts you can swallow.
Several hours later, she came to tell me she was going to spend the night with the painter, who lived in a shed on the property.
Come pick me up in the morning? she said. Her face made radiant by the joy of conquest.
But I didn’t leave the party. I fell asleep, after a long conversation that I was hoping would end in sex, along with about fifteen other people, in the parlor, at around three in the morning, wrapped in a Pepto-pink acrylic afghan that did not smell too strongly of basement. Four hours later I woke to a room filled with gray light and the sound of a woman shouting outside the house. I wrapped myself in the afghan, crept over a few bodies, and looked through a window.
Out on the lawn Rose stood naked, arms crossed around her breasts, hunched over just a little, and shivering, because it was the last week of April and spring was still unsure of itself. Behind her, on the narrow strip of blacktop that separated the yard from a cornfield, a red flatbed truck sped by, honking its horn. Twenty feet away from her stood a woman who did not look American: short, tan, very slender, hair in a bun with a fringe of bangs across her forehead, and the white button-down and the jeans she’d tucked the shirt into were crisper and cleaner than most. It looked like Rose had been discovered in a bed she should not have been sleeping in and had been, with great force, routed from it. The woman started shouting again. Her accent was French, and now a chill ran through me: one of our worst nightmares involved being appraised and found wanting by the French, whom we venerated even as we sometimes suspected they were not relentlessly uncompromising but merely insane.
This is what people who are not free do, said the woman. They take from others because they have no courage.
I am free! said Rose.
Yes, yes, because you said it out loud in public. The woman threw up her hands and shrugged. Yes, fine, you’re free!
I tiptoed over two more bodies and out the front door. Rose saw me on the porch and her face fell. The woman turned to see what Rose had seen and then turned back to Rose. The front door opened and I could tell that at least one other person was now out on the porch with me. I walked across the cold wet lawn and handed Rose the pink afghan. She ripped it out of my hands and, as she wrapped it around herself and ferociously tied two corners of it in a knot above her breasts, shouted, If you were really free you wouldn’t care who he fucked!
No, the woman said, I’m free because I know what I want and I never lose sight of it. Then she walked, calmly, toward the porch. The group of people standing there moved out of her way as she strode toward the door to the house.
If you hadn’t seen that, Rose said in the car on the way back to the city, I don’t think I would ever have told you about it.
I would have told you, I said.
I know, she said. Because you’re so fucking honest. You’re so—and here she stretched that one syllable out to mock me and my high, high horse—perfect.
Fuck you, I said. I’d never said that to anyone in my life.
I’m sorry, she said. I’m not—
Go find some assholes to be friends with, if you think I’m such a fucking drag.
I didn’t say—
Fuck you, I said. You’re lucky I think there’s nobody on earth like you. I sounded just like my mother, and it killed me.
I’m sorry, she said. I’m sorry. She began to sob, and hunched over in her seat and cried so loudly my ears started to ring. In the five years we’d been friends, I’d never heard Rose cry. It broke my heart and wiped all my hurt feelings away. I pulled into a Taco Bell parking lot that looked out over a traffic circle that looked out over strip malls slung as low as the rain clouds starting to move in.
I’m a mess, she sobbed. I’m such a fucking mess. What is wrong with me? All of it sounded like an argument she had been having with herself since she was small.
Rose! I said. You are not a mess. You’re a poem!
She cried harder. I sat there with my hand on her back, looking away from her and out at the strip malls so that she could have a little bit of privacy as she cried, filling with rage at all the women who knew their own mind and had no pity for those who had mistaken the insistent voice of desire for a needle on a compass.
When the tears came to a stop she sat up, slowly. After staring through the windshield for a bit, she said:
What if deep down we’re really just good girls?
I did not know how to answer that question. It was one of my deepest fears, too.
Say something, said Rose.
When I finally spoke I said: Why do we think that’s the worst thing we could possibly be?
I could feel Rose thinking beside me. Kathy Acker, she said, and I laughed, really loud, almost cackled, and she laughed, too. Or the patriarchy. Or Kathy Acker was brought to us by the patriarchy.
We may never know, I said, and started the car.
I’ll eat Taco Bell for breakfast if you will, Rose said, and I pulled up to the drive-through window.
And then her period was late. It was not the first time in her life she’d gotten pregnant when she did not intend to, and she was more pissed than anything else—pissed at herself, pissed at the guy, pissed at his wife, pissed that the doctor who’d administered her last abortion was no longer practicing. Pissed at me for asking why they didn’t use a condom. What really bothered her, she said, what really made her feel sorry for herself, was that she didn’t have the money to pay for it: a few articles killed, too many paychecks tied up in back offices, and not enough pitches accepted to make up for it. That’s what she said was making her pissed, and I took her at her word. I immediately offered to pay for the abortion. Rose refused, but it was the obligatory refusal of the proud and cornered, and I signed that check for $650 like I was signing the Declaration of Independence. To this day it remains the most politically useful act of my life. I still believe that, even though Rose later told me that it had cost only $350.
Rose, asleep on the couch in the days after, napping profusely, while I cooked and wrote and worried about her. About the both of us, and maybe I worried a little bit more for myself than I did for Rose. It hadn’t just been Rose standing naked on a stranger’s lawn as another woman scolded her for reaching too low when Rose thought she had been reaching as high as she could—that was me standing there, too, and the longer Rose slept, the longer I thought about how I’d bailed her out twice now, and how I’d been the one to try for steadier work when she was the one flailing, about how she didn’t seem to feel moved, at all, to get steadier work in the wake of her flailing, no, that was me, and some feelings of superiority began to make themselves known, which I did not like, at all. I told myself that I did not have to be Rose if I could help it. And I could help it, by looking for a teaching job: regular pay, summers off. I’d been a TA in graduate school and liked it, had even been told I was good at it, and it no longer seemed wise, if it ever had, to depend on my writing to pay the rent or get me out of a sexually induced jam.
A woman can be stupid, Rose said from the couch, one Saturday afternoon while I typed at my desk, and a woman can be broke, but she can’t be both at the same time.
Where’d you get that from? I turned to look at her. Your grandmother?
Here, she said, tapping her forehead.
I’m writing that down so you don’t forget you said it.
The next morning when Rose came into the kitchen for coffee I told her I’d had an idea: she should get a proposal together for a book full of sayings from her grandmother—well, a book that she could posit as a collection of sayings from her grandmother, but one that in reality she would fill up with stuff that just sounded like it could be utterances from someone who had begun life swaddled in a dresser drawer on the Lower East Side and ended it in a plot in the Locust Valley Cemetery on the North Shore of Long Island. She ran out of the kitchen, brought her laptop back to the table, sat down, flipped it open, and said, What was that thing I said last night?
She spent a week drafting a proposal. Sometimes she’d ask me to help and then my own grandmother found her way into the pages. The line Rose had thrown out on the couch became the book’s first sentence, and a friend put her in a touch with an agent and she sold it, the book would be paperback only, not hardcover, for enough money to move out into her own apartment—five blocks away—and pay me back for the abortion.
To celebrate I made a reservation for dinner at the Gramercy Tavern. Rose and I had a fondness—a weakness?—for the kind of room that flattered your good taste by never becoming smug or uptight about its own, and we thought this one was the apex of the genre. We’d been taken there for drinks by men in the twilight of their prime and agents at the dawn of their ascent, and whenever we sat at the bar we felt as if we’d been asked to sit for a portrait that would one day prove legendarily bewitching. Cosseted by all that dark wood and warm light, the city flowing like a river past the abundance of glass that lined Twentieth Street, the city at its most becalmed and amiable, a person might be forgiven for thinking all New York really wanted to do was to reach out and bless you, or otherwise caress you. But Rose did not feel like rising to the occasion that night. We’d just been brought the first of what I assumed were going to be several glasses of champagne when she said:
This place is too good for the book I just sold.
Rose. But I knew what she meant. The book had been written not for love but for money.
It’s a check, and I needed it, but your book’s going to be a real book.
We’ll see about that, I said, pretending not to sound as guilty as I felt. I thought of something else to say, something I thought I wouldn’t have to work too hard to believe. I will never tell you that you have to feel grateful for selling it.
Good, she said. I don’t.
Her immediate and unrepentant refusal to pay any respect to her good fortune—to even pretend to pay any respect to it—made an immediate and cranky liar out of me.
Okay, I said, maybe try just a little bit harder to act like you’re at least relieved that you’re not totally broke anymore.
So which is it? she said. Are you going to let me feel how I feel or are you going to lecture me? Would you want your name on this book?
Come on, I said. But I had already insulted her by not answering the question.
Okay, I’m asking again. Would you want your name on this book?
No, I said. Fine. But—
But nothing. So don’t lecture me.
Don’t get mad at me because you didn’t have any better ideas. That’s not my fault.
I could tell—the ire in her eyes clouded over—that she knew I was right. But she had to say something.
You know what’s incredibly annoying? she said. The way you spend three days dicking around with one paragraph and wringing your hands over it when you know it’s better than anything I could write or anybody else could write. Fuck you. What a fucking waste of time.
Whatever makes me spend three days on a paragraph, I said, must be the same thing that keeps me from getting pregnant by assholes.
I stood up from my chair and walked out. We didn’t speak for a week. Don’t ever leave me, she said, the night she finally called. Instead of Hello. Instead of I’m sorry. I didn’t apologize either.