Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

At some point I’m telling all of this to an actor friend from college whose roman à clef I helped edit during the weeks after my marriage ended. He kept offering to pay me, but knowing his own financial burdens—a crushingly large alimony, calculated by the courts when he was at the peak of his Hollywood career, but now nearly impossible to keep up with—I kept saying no. Not only was the work saving me from self-pity during those difficult first post-separation weeks before my job began, this is what writers do for one another. We read one another’s work and offer red-pencil guidance. It’s part of the barter economy between underpaid wordsmiths. You throw the karma out there, because good books are a greater good, and it almost always comes back in some welcome and unexpected way.

  Of course, I should also add that I had my first small, post-marital crush on this man, and I thought he might have a small crush on me. And after years of a bad marriage, I was desperate for affection. Like, any affection. And editing, when done well, can be an intimate act. And I suppose I thought if I did a good job editing his novel, maybe it would lead to us talking about our hidden feelings. Which it eventually did, but not in the way I’d assumed. We ended up talking for hours. And chastely hugging. And going on a long walk, hand in hand. And trading stories of our failed marriages. And sitting down for a meal, at which I realized my crush was wholly a fantasy of my own making: the romantic lifeboat I’d mentally conjured out of an old friend, who should really just remain thus, my fellow bobber, drifting along on our own separate currents into uncertain futures. In fact, had we made the leap from friends to lovers, not only would our friendship have most certainly ended, we would have probably killed each other. He was as unreliable as I was in need of constancy, as free to float on the wind as I was shackled to the ground by responsibilities, as certain of his inability to wholly connect as I was certain of my need for connection.

  “I could write about my skin cancer for you?” the actor offers, when I call to complain about the terrible, unpaid prose I spend my days editing for my job. It’s the least he could do, he says, after I edited his novel. (See? Karma.)

  “Oh my god, that would be great,” I say. The actor is not only a good writer, he has more than a hundred thousand Twitter followers plus a hit show. One tweet from him, linking to his story, could not only prove my worth to my company, it could help them see that if we actually pay decent writers for decent work, it will pay off handsomely in organic pageviews. It’s also an excellent public service announcement. Whether we like it or not, we Americans are highly influenced by our celebrities, and an actor on a hit TV show writing a story about the small spot on his forehead that turned out to be life-threatening cancer might be just the kick in the pants others need to get their skin checked.

  The story is a hit, giving me a win at work but still no budget to commission more. In the meantime, I’ve had to come up with other clever ways to barter for better writing. I ask Brittany, our new au pair and hilarious Commune chanteuse, if she’ll write about her Crohn’s disease in exchange for dinner out and a night off from work. Meaning, technically I’ll be paying her out of my own pocket, but public school teachers in this country pay for classroom supplies out of their own pockets all the time, so who am I to complain?* Plus I need to keep my job, by any means necessary. Crohn’s stories, I’m told, are pharmaceutical ad bonanzas.

  “Yes, and…!” says Brittany, always game. Her story, infused with her quirky brand of self-deprecating humor, describes her constant need to know where the nearest bathroom is at all times. It not only cracks me up, it also does well on our site. Next, I work with our video team to produce a story about the benefits of yoga to counterbalance depression: my own, in the wake of my father’s death. The video will also garner many views, which means more eyeballs will see more ads for SSRIs. In other words, things seem to be going well at work, with well being defined as: creating professional-looking, high pageview content to pair with pharmaceutical ads.

  Then I go in for my MRI, and my house of cards begins to collapse.

  I receive the call with the results while I’m sitting at my open-plan desk, with co-workers all around. Seven more masses have been found, I’m told, three of them highly suspicious. I need to come in immediately for more biopsies. Tomorrow, if possible. I don’t handle the news as gracefully as I would have hoped. In fact, I immediately burst into tears at my desk and run downstairs without a coat to regain composure. It’s January of 2014, the middle of the polar vortex, but to retrieve my coat from the staff coat closet would have meant having to pass by a dozen more co-workers with tears streaming down my face. These tears freeze on my cheeks as I pass through the lobby and out onto the street. I take a right on the next block and lean into the frigid wind from the Hudson as I wail, but the cold gets the best of me, and I head back inside. I will myself to stop crying in the elevator back up to my floor. I cannot show weakness.

  The office has become a pressure cooker. We’re going public in less than three months, and those in charge are looking to trim fat to boost our numbers. A crying and newly appointed executive editor, as thin as she might appear right now from stress, will definitely be seen as trimmable fat. In fact, studies have shown that women who cry at work are viewed as less competent in the workplace. Most women don’t need a study to know this is true.

  “Where were you?” says my boss, the editorial director, when I walk back in. I’ve been gone for five minutes. “I need an update on your 30/60/90.”

  A 30/60/90 report is a new concept to me but not, apparently, to everyone else in the corporate world. The idea, as I understand it, is to lay out a clear course of action for the next thirty, sixty, and ninety days, written by the new employee herself, but A) I’ve never written one before; and B) I’m not sure how to fill in the three buckets. My job, as I see it, is to edit bad prose and make sure it’s not poorly spelled malarkey. To figure out how to hire better bloggers without paying them money. To write stories myself with any extra time available. I don’t understand how ninety days later this situation will be any different.

  “Sorry,” I say, “I had to run out for a second. I promise, it won’t happen again.” I sit down and, using my best corporate speak, with terms like leverage, growth, SEO, and KPIs, I try to map out subtle differences between my first, second, and third months on the job. In the ninety-day slot—meaning right after the IPO—I write that I’m hoping by then we’ll find the budget to hire a few good writers to pen personal stories about health, as well as to pay the bloggers we already have, even if it’s a small honorarium tied to pageviews. Some of these bloggers, I note, have crushing doctors’ bills they can’t pay. Or they require expensive home health aids. Or they have terminal cancer and young kids. Nearly every day, one of them writes to ask me whether an accounting system has finally been set up—apparently some of them have been promised this?—to provide a sliding scale payment tied to the number of eyeballs their blogs garner. It feels immoral to keep asking them to work for free; to keep dangling the false carrot of a possibility of future payments without a plan in place to make this happen.

  “Wow,” says the radiologist at my next visit. “There’s a giant party going on in your breasts!” She shows me the films, the masses that concern her and those that don’t. A few days later, I meet with my surgeon. We schedule more biopsies, during which a new radiologist overseeing them says that my MRI films were so unusual, he was hoping, with my permission, to use them later that week at his teaching hospital, as a case study in abnormality. “Your films can really teach us a lot about the variations in disease presentation!” he says with enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  “Sure,” I say, “knock yourself out.” I feel slightly vulnerable and confused with my naked breasts exposed, being poked and prodded with more biopsy needles, wondering who’ll take care of my kids if I die. Will their father move back east? Will they have to move out to California? How will he support them and also make su
re our little one’s fingernails are neat and trimmed? And what does it mean, my breasts “were so unusual” or that the doc’s “never seen anything like them”? After the second needle goes into suspicious new lump number two on my right breast—oh, god, I think, wincing, I’m going to be in serious pain tonight—they try to biopsy the lump on my left, attempting to reach it from two different entry points, but it’s located too far back in the chest wall. It’s also the largest of the three and the most worrisome. They’ll have to cut me open, they say, to yank it out.

  I photograph the aftermath in the changing room—once a war photographer, always a war photographer—and meet my surgeon in her office for a consult.

  After the biopsy, 2013, © Deborah Copaken

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I can’t have surgery this week. I’ve already been out of the office three days in the past two weeks. Things are just too stressful right now.”

  Rick, our COO and my ally, had called me into his office earlier that week to tell me that the young VP with whom I’d met during my interviews—the one who’d promised me a budget to hire writers—was upset that I kept asking for money to pay writers, particularly now that I’d officially written it in my 30/60/90, which others could read. He urged me to suck it up and apologize to her. “I’m sorry,” I said to the VP later that same night, after everyone else had gone home. “I’ll stop asking for money to pay writers or putting it in writing.” As I left her office to head home to the Commune, I could hear my dad’s words echoing in my ear: You have to know where the line is. If you earn your money off the suffering or deaths or exploitation of others, that’s not a moral income. That’s blood money.

  Worried about further angering anyone else, I schedule my lumpectomy for a month later.

  Because all of these doctor visits, tests, and scheduled procedures have been taking place during business hours, I’ve had to level with the editorial director about my situation. Sloan Kettering, I explain, has excellent WiFi, so I can just edit the blog posts during my time in the waiting room between procedures. She’s fine with this, she says, but her eyes speak otherwise. The axe has been falling hard all around us, and her boss, the aforementioned VP, has been put in charge of further wielding it pre-IPO. The talented producer of my yoga and depression video, who’d survived a serious bout with breast cancer and gave me reams of notes and words of encouragement, had recently been told one morning, without any warning, to gather her things and leave. She’d been less than fully productive during her months of treatment, but still: She got her work done eventually, and it was brilliantly executed. “Fuck this place,” I heard her say under her breath. Then she was gone.

  It was dangerous to be unhealthy at Health Today.

  Meanwhile, with exactly one month between now and my surgery, I suddenly have an intense desire both to have my breasts photographed for posterity as well as to put them to good use before they’re disfigured. No one aside from my oncology team has touched them or even glimpsed them in nearly a year.

  This must change.

  Skip Notes

  * A joke. Public school teachers in the wealthiest country on earth should definitely not be paying for classroom supplies out of their own pockets.

  THIRTEEN

  In Flagrante Delicto

  JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2014

  The questionnaires for dating sites such as OkCupid and eharmony are so long and detailed (this is a year before Tinder fully entered the zeitgeist, going from five million swipes a day in December 2013 to over a billion a day the following year) that by the time I’ve done the dinner, bath, and bedtime story hustle, I fall asleep with my laptop open on my stomach, having left most of the questions unanswered. Do I care if my future partner smokes marijuana, yes or no? That’s not a binary question. I wouldn’t want him to smoke every day, but a quick hit now and then before sex, I mean, no? There are no boxes to check for that level of subtlety.

  I have no idea what I’m looking for, what I believe in, or what I want from my next relationship after twenty-three years with the same man. I just know my body needs sex with an aching thrum not unlike hunger and thirst, and I don’t know how, as a middle-aged solo mother, to get it.

  A newly divorced dad in my son’s school who also happens to be a professional photographer has been flirting with me, however, so maybe I can address both the physical and photography desires simultaneously. Or rather, I think he’s been flirting. It’s been so long, who knows?

  Santi and I met manning the photo booth at the school Halloween fundraiser. He’s eight years younger, one foot taller, olive-skinned, and movie-star handsome, with black ringlets framing searing brown eyes and the gentle manner of a shepherd who moonlights as a yoga instructor. An immigrant from Mexico, he arrived in the U.S. as a tourist a decade earlier, fell in love, overstayed his visa, started a family. His ex, also an immigrant, has managed to obtain a green card, but he has not. Instead, he constantly worries about being deported and separated from his children, who, having been born in the U.S., are officially citizens. Because he cannot get hired to shoot for American newspapers or magazines without a Social Security number, even though several editors have expressed interest in tapping into his talents, he shoots private family and individual portraits for cash and takes the odd job now and then to make ends meet.

  In other words, he’s not my usual overconfident college grad with self-esteem issues masked behind thick horn-rims and pointed quips type, but my usual type has gotten me here, so maybe it’s time to reconsider those factory settings. Kindness and empathy, I’ve decided, are the sexiest attributes a man can have. And Santi has both in abundance. I also once caught him sweeping his own floor when I dropped off my son for a playdate: If a greater aphrodisiac exists, I do not know it. So one morning, in front of our kids’ school, lit by the fire of knowing my left boob is about to be sliced up if not at some point maybe even sliced off, I tap into my new improv-trained powers, take a deep breath, and go for it. “I’d like to hire you to shoot nudes of my breasts before my surgery,” I tell him, using the same neutral tone I might have used to ask for his help folding the programs for the second grade play.

  His chestnut eyes widen. His eyebrows arch up. “Wonderful!” he says, smiling. “Let’s do that.”

  We settle on a price and make a date to do the shoot the following Friday after I get home from work. But when Friday rolls around, the brown-and-yellow biopsy bruises on my breasts still look hideous, so we decide to push off the shoot until they heal and go to see a movie instead: An actual first date, I realize, my first in a quarter century. Santi tells me to choose the film, so I pick an early screening of The Great Beauty, an Italian film about a man who emerges from sixty-five years of aimless wandering into a moment of transformational awe: Something I’m hoping will happen to me one day. Before my sixty-fifth birthday.

  In the days leading up to our date, I make sure the Commune will be empty when he drops me off, so we can have some privacy if it goes well. This takes major operational planning. I schedule a sleepover date for my son at his friend’s. I help my daughter find a babysitting gig, which will get her home, she says, just after midnight. I suggest to Hannah that she visit and stay with her mom, since she doesn’t have to get up for school the next morning. George makes a Grindr date. Brittany will head to a rehearsal for her one-woman show. I’ve been joining her on stage for that show from time to time, strumming “Take It Easy” on the guitar while singing it as a duet, once even right after a biopsy.

  The song, because we often rehearse it at night, has become both the Commune’s theme song as well as my earworm: Come on baaaaaaaaby, don’t say maaaaaaaybe, I gotta know if your sweet love is gonna saaaaaaaave me…

  Santi and I arrive back in Harlem after seeing the film and downing tacos and beer at a Mexican joint that reminds him of home. He has not hugged his parents, he tells me, in years. We head to my room and sit face-t
o-face on the love seat across from my bed: an Ikea Klippan, the two-person couch of college co-eds everywhere, which is what I suddenly feel like as we start to chat, awaiting a signal from the other. The moment the tips of his fingers reach out to touch mine, I evaporate into molecules. We start kissing. Which is to say I lose track of where my mouth ends and his begins. It’s a revelation, human touch. I hadn’t exactly forgotten, but I had blocked out my needs for so long, it feels as if I’m learning anew what they are. In the midst of this still-clothed euphoria, I break away to give him fair warning: My daughter will be home sometime after midnight. It’s 10 p.m. He needs to be gone no later than 11 p.m., just to be safe. Understood, he says.

  It’s been thirty years since I’ve had to worry about anyone barging in on me in flagrante delicto. Because my daughter has not been told her dad and I are getting divorced, I have to be just as careful as I’d been back in my teens, if not more so. I can’t even speak freely in front of her about what’s happening. I’d recently called her father to say the situation has become untenable. While he’s living his best life in San Francisco, going out on dates and bringing them home to his bachelor pad unimpeded, I’m trapped in Harlem in his lie of omission. He has to find a way to sit down with me to tell the kids we’re getting divorced, I told him. We have to present a united front. Together. All the books and articles I’ve read on divorce are insistent on this particular point: The way you impart the news to the children is critical for their future emotional health and well-being. Too many close calls have slipped out already, what with friends, my Commune roommates, and all of my family members knowing the marriage is over but forgetting that my children don’t and nearly blurting it out in front of them. Please, I begged. I’m not okay with gaslighting my own children or asking others to do so as well. Let’s sit them down and get this over with.