Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  “The quarter after the quarter you’re paid in full,” I’m told, meaning I just need to stay alive in this chess game for six more months: to find health insurance as well as steady income until the script payment hits my bank account, which, my agent says, will take some time: Christmas, at the earliest, but probably later than that.

  The next day, feeling emboldened, I call Bill at Cafe with a few follow-up questions. Had I done something wrong? No, he says. The company doesn’t have the budget to hire someone full-time with my experience. The online job listing was premature. He’s so sorry. There is no editor job anymore. And no, it’s not as if the job has gone to someone else. They’ve just decided to wait until after they launch the website. He feels bad, he says, about wasting my time. I feel worse. But both his email and phone call have left the door open to future employment, and he seems bummed not to have an extra editor helping out with the launch, so I propose a plan: Why not hire me on a six-month contract basis? If I can prove my worth, we can renegotiate my contract at the end of it.

  Sorry, he says. They just don’t have the budget to cover my salary, even for six months.

  What if I were just starting out? I ask, knowing that my TV-writing check will be hitting my bank account within six months to a year. I just need an income and health insurance bridge to get there. “You must be hiring entry-level writers, yes?”

  Well, yes, he says, but you’re hardly an entry-level writer.

  I could be, I say. I can be anything you want me to be for health insurance.

  Darren Star, of Sex and the City fame, has just started shooting a new TV show, Younger, based on the book by Pamela Redmond Satran, about nearly this exact scenario: a middle-aged mother, Liza, played by Sutton Foster, finds herself completely broke after separating from her husband, who lost all the family savings to gambling. Unable to land a job to suit her qualifications and experience, and viewed, by employers, as over-the-hill, she pretends to be twenty-seven years old and lands an entry-level job in publishing instead. I tell Bill I won’t pretend to be twenty-seven, but if I’m hired to write for the website in any capacity, I can land an interview with Star on set as one of my first stories as a staff writer, as he’s a good friend.

  Darren and I met back in 2001, when he bought the film rights to Shutterbabe for Dreamworks. A few months later, the studio sent us to Paris together for research. The trip was supposed to have been a week-long, work-intensive, fact-finding mission, to help Darren write his script. And though we did work hard—meeting with all of the characters of my life as an expat; visiting every location where I’d once lived, loved, or worked in Paris—it didn’t feel like a business trip. At all. “Our Big Fat Gay Honeymoon” I jokingly referred to it from then on.

  O, The Oprah Magazine, “The Last Time She Saw Paris,” August 2002, © Deborah Copaken

  Bill and I go back and forth a few more times until I finally come clean about my desperation for health insurance. Obamacare has now been passed, but because COBRA canceled my coverage more than thirty days beyond the required window for switching, I’m now in health insurance no-woman’s-land until the next quarter. The ACA website won’t even recognize my situation: It’s not in the pull-down menu. Bill, hearing this, speaks to Vinit and comes up with a plan: a six-month staff-writer contract—with that holy grail, benefits—at the equivalent of a $39,000-a-year starting writer salary. Meaning I will be earning $19,500 over the course of the next six months, with the caveat that I must produce a minimum of four stories a week. Plus edit as many as needed, plus recruit freelancers.

  My starting salary at ABC News in 1992, nearly twenty-three years earlier, was $38,000 a year. My most recent executive editor salary, at Health Today, was $160,000 a year. I counter Bill’s offer, since it does not cover my basic living expenses, never mind my son’s college tuition, but the offer is firm, he says, and I have neither counteroffers nor financial runway to stretch out the negotiation. I need this job yesterday. I can freelance on the side, Bill says, to fill in the rest, no problem, as long as it’s not an online publication. Print magazines are fine. Books, too. It can be a semi-nonexclusive contract.

  “Deal!” I say, because this is what you do when you can’t even land a job as a holiday greeter at The Container Store. You’ll not only do anything just to keep your family afloat, including taking a job at a fraction of your worth, you’re actually grateful for the opportunity: Thank you, sir! May I have another?

  Note: This makes me officially employed in the eyes of the U.S. labor statistics, even though I’m not earning enough at this job to survive. Which, in turn, makes me officially a member of the working poor. According to one study during this era, working poor is defined as “full-time workers below 200 percent of poverty.” Why look at 200 percent of poverty instead of just the poverty line itself when defining working poor? Because the poverty line is considered too low to account for metropolitan areas like mine, and it does not take into account how porous that poverty line can be: Millions of families fall in and out of poverty each year in the U.S., and all are at risk of poverty through job loss, medical emergency, or both.

  By this measure, the year I am hired at Cafe at $39,000 a year, an average U.S. family of four considered to be “working poor” has a yearly income of $47,000 or less. And New York City falls far outside that average in terms of the cost of living.

  Luckily, my son’s new school, located in a low-income neighborhood with an average annual income of $22,776 a year, has free aftercare until 6 p.m.—let’s place a hallelujah right here where it belongs—so I won’t need to hire a babysitter. This is the rainbow’s-end lifesaver for a working parent. With an hour commute to my new office, I’ll just have to make sure to leave by 5 p.m. every day. And now that we live three blocks from his school, there won’t be another half hour commute on top of that. We can just walk: hallelujah number two.

  I immediately call Sloan Kettering and schedule my follow-up breast MRI for the week after my health insurance kicks in.

  Skip Notes

  * A list, first compiled in 1887, of the members of American high society—the descendants of robber barons, presidents, and other trust fund WASPs—published semiannually from then on. Joseph Pulitzer was the only Jew on that first list. By 1984, when I first heard of the Social Register, there were a few more Jews sprinkled here and therein, but the list was in its last gasp of social importance. Celebrity would take over as the U.S. societal sorting mechanism by the last decade of the twentieth century.

  SEVENTEEN

  At the Still Point of the Turning World

  OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 2014

  The minute I sign my starting papers at Cafe, my heart starts to relax. Yes, I’m still worried about how I’ll make up the extra income, and I still faint periodically or feel the PVCs rumbling when I check my bank statement or receive a new pile of old medical bills, but knowing I’ll soon have health insurance and the breast MRI has magically given me back my health. I can sit and breathe through the episodes.

  Step by step, I remind myself, as I walk the dog through Inwood forest every morning, watching the sun rise over its ridge. (Hi, Dad. It’s been hard since you’ve been gone, but I think things are getting better now.) Step by step by step by step.

  Now that my heart feels calmer, I turn my immediate attention toward its other pressing need, love. It’s been a full year since my separation. Santi and I still see each other periodically on an as-needed basis, but I’m hoping, before I kick the bucket, to find something deeper, more meaningful, and less mutually exploitative than occasional sex with a willing partner.

  What does it even mean, I wonder, to give and receive love from a mature and loving partner who sees you for you, who respects and adores you, who puts your needs ahead of his while you return all those favors in kind? I know such a thing exists. I’ve seen it up close in some of my friends’ marriages, watching it deepen over de
cades. Tad and Amanda, Martha and Adam, Nora and Nick, Margot and Jamie, Marco and Abigail, Meg and Richard, Ayelet and Michael: These are just some of the names I roll call so often that my kids, still reeling from their parents’ rupture, now end their antimarriage screeds with “…and don’t tell me about Ayelet and Michael or any of the others. They are outliers, okay?”

  My children are not wrong. Though I know plenty of marriages now entering their third decades, many of them are loveless or sexless or infidelity-plagued or filled with contempt, anger, lack of respect, financial shenanigans, lying, chronic sadness, or some other combination of these. I know this not only because I see some of the detritus of their broken vows and hearts up close and in person, but also because when you leave your own untenable marriage, you suddenly become the repository for the secrets from everyone else’s.

  This one, with the kind but aloof husband, has been seeking out emotional sustenance from another man for years. That one rolls her eyes so often in her spouse’s presence, you wonder what their home life is like when no one’s around. A woman I meet at a party confides that she is made to feel like a prisoner in her own home. “He controls everything,” she whispers. One friend started counting the weeks between sex, then the months, then the years, now the decades. There’s the woman who looks at her husband and feels nothing, another who feels only rage. The man who feels his wife slipping away but can’t be bothered to try to win her back. The new empty-nesters who were fine-ish when the kids lived at home, but now find time alone together unbearable.

  Friends and acquaintances ask my advice. They want me to tell them whether what they have is fixable, as if I’ve somehow become the expert on where the magical line exists between salvageable and not. I urge them toward therapy. Divorce is hard, I say. Avoid it at all costs. Or I quote Nora to them: “Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.” But I also know, when you’re in the thick of a bad marriage, the impossibility of seeing the path ahead with any clarity. At a certain point in the cost benefit analysis, I tell them, if nothing changes in a struggling marriage, you’re essentially choosing between two sadnesses: the sadness of staying and the sadness of leaving. Which sad is less sad? That’s your sad.

  I try going to more parties and work events, in the hopes of meeting someone, but all the men at the middle-aged gatherings to which I’m invited are married, plus many of the dinner invitations I used to receive when I was part of a couple have suddenly dried up. Note to readers: Your divorcing friends don’t care if they’re the odd woman out at a dinner party or the third wheel on your Saturday night dates, and they’re not trying to steal your husbands. They are simply aching for a few hours of adult conversation during which they don’t have to wash dishes or pretend to love Minecraft or sit alone on their bed, endlessly scrolling through other people’s family vacations.

  I ask my friends to set me up, and…crickets. I’m too ugly, I think. Too short, too big-nosed, too needy, too poor, too damaged, too loud, too much. “Is it…me?” I ask. No, they say. They just don’t know any single men in our age bracket. They do, however, know this great woman who’s also getting divorced, and though they don’t actually say this, you know (because you know) that they’re tired of hearing about her horrific custody battle or her controlling ex, so they pawn her off on you. This happens so often now that I throw my own dinner party for this new and growing group of once-married but now-single new friends, whose custody battles and court dates and copious tears I not only freely embrace, I welcome. There’s strength in numbers. Power in group hugs. “Women Warriors,” we dub ourselves, for together we feel like an army, less alone and fragile, proactive instead of reactive. I urge them each to bring someone new and equally broken to mix things up at the table. Yes, men are allowed to this gathering, definitely, bring them! We end up with twelve single hetero women, two gay men, and two straight men, both of whom are currently in relationships.

  All the cool kids in my level three improv class, where we are learning a type of improv called the Harold,* are suddenly signing up for a new app called Tinder, but they tell me it’s just for hook-ups. I ask one of them, the handsome and funny Shakespearean actor a decade younger—we’ll call him Hamlet—if he wants to come see the Baldwins, an improv troupe at the PIT, with my son and me on Saturday night. Our weekly homework for improv is to see a professional show at least once every week, which is free if we see it at the PIT, plus our beloved level two teacher Meg is in the Baldwins. I’m the only one in the class with a kid who has to be at school early the next morning with a homemade sandwich and julienned vegetables, so seeing shows midweek with the rest of the class, followed by drinks and carousing, is difficult to impossible.

  Hamlet, too, is reeling from a recent breakup with a long-term girlfriend. We also bond over the premature deaths of our parents: His mother died during his adolescence, also of cancer. The three of us—my son, Hamlet, and me, each broken in our own ways by parental loss and absence—fall into an easy Saturday night ritual, grabbing a cheap dinner before the show, cracking up during it, encouraging my son to call out the trigger word. The Baldwins know my eight-year-old will be in the audience every Saturday night, so they often call on him by name, because he gives good kid words like cheese and zombies. (Adults are more prone to shouting out words such as penis and boobs, which produce less funny improv.)

  After the show, we grab beers for us and a ginger ale for my son at the PIT bar and walk back to the subway together, giggling. My son lights up from Hamlet’s presence and attention, as do I. Our Saturday night improv dates start to feel, for lack of a better word, like family. So familial that I now have feelings for Hamlet that go beyond friendship. To admit or not to admit? That is the question.

  One night after a show, when my son is at a birthday party sleepover, and it’s just Hamlet and me walking back to the subway together, I spend the whole twenty minutes working up the courage to say something, certain he’s on the same wavelength but perhaps too shy to admit it. When I invite him to come back to my place, at the top of the subway stairs, he looks at me with a combination of horror and pity before growing visibly upset. He thought I understood, from having shared so many of our private thoughts and feelings, that the kind of love he was seeking from this relationship was fraternal, not carnal. Friendship, not courtship.

  Ah. Got it. There will be no “You had me at hello.” No swelling of music. No sharing of sweat or saliva. Yes, of course, I know, I’m over the hill and post-reproductive, while this man is still in the prime of his life. I wasn’t imagining the two of us sailing off into the sunset or anything, just a couple of quick dips in the ocean before swimming off in different directions. Did I simply dream the electric charge between us or have I been out of the game so long, I can’t even read the signals?

  The A train takes an excruciatingly long time to arrive, during which Hamlet and I are forced to sit across from each other on our respective platforms for twenty minutes. He’s heading downtown to Brooklyn. I’m heading uptown to Inwood. I feel like hiding under a rock. Instead, wholly exposed, I perform the modern-day equivalent of hiding under a rock: pretending to be deeply engrossed in my phone. I absentmindedly scroll through my various social media feeds, watching the endless stream of human faces and words rising up up up into oblivion.

  What a strange race, the human race. Our desperation for connection is matched only by our ineptitude at connecting.

  Derailed but not defeated, I sign up for Match.com. But after a week, I can’t keep up with the psychopaths flooding my inbox, some of whom turn cyber-abusive if you don’t respond. (“You think you’re too good for me, huh? Well, die cunt!”) I make a second attempt at signing up for eharmony, but there are still too many questions. I can’t get through them. What sports do you like? How much do you drink? What do you earn? Are you a smoker? No, I click, for the last one, wishing for a third box to check for, “No, but I did for several years and boy do I regret that,�
�� because I would definitely date someone who filled in that box. Are you willing to date someone with kids, yes or no? Willing? Where’s the box for “I’d rather”? How would you describe yourself? Right now? Um, sad, frightened, lonely, on the brink of homelessness, occasionally suicidal, and trying my best to ignore a near-constant arrhythmia. I click the boxes for happy, well-balanced, fulfilled, positive-minded, and at peace. What’s your idea of a perfect date? Anything involving food, kindness, and sex, is there a box for that? Do you believe in love? Oh, for fuck’s sake, yes, or I wouldn’t be answering these annoying questions.

  Yes, yes, self-love, self-partnership, you don’t need a significant other to live a healthy and fulfilling life: I’ve heard and read all the arguments, political, feminist, celebrity, and otherwise, for trading love, marriage, and partnership for solo-living and self-reliance. But while I’m thrilled to be living in an era when this is a perfectly valid choice, when we women can have our own credit cards without needing a husband to sign off on them—I mean, let’s all take a moment here to remember how recent that fuckery was—I’m also highly attuned to my own particular, individual needs.

  These needs are both basic and embarrassingly mundane, but they are also strong and deep-seated and mine. I want someone to come home to; someone with whom to share dinner and stories of our days, to binge-watch the latest show everyone’s talking about, to go out and see that new movie with the good review; someone to walk with me, hand in hand, as we unfold our vulnerable selves; someone to listen to me with the same attention and lack of judgment as I listen to them; someone to see me, fully, as I see them; someone to share the driving, to watch the leaves change, to catch me when I fall (literally, like when I faint, and figuratively, when things fall apart); to throw a dinner party together; to read books side by side and to trade off bringing each other coffee in bed; someone to share all those oxytocin-boosting, after-hours activities, such as lovemaking and storytelling and giggling and whispering and spooning and falling asleep in each other’s arms.