After going over every major and minor thread of my own story itself plus each similar allegation reported to me from “The Others” in the wake of its publication in The Atlantic, the FBI agents head back to their desks with my Google doc and start hunting down each lead.
Jesse Drucker, along with his colleagues Emily Steel and Danny Hakim, continue to do the same from their desks at The New York Times.
Two months later, Jesse’s second story appears: “A Kushner Ally Was Up for a Federal Post. Then the F.B.I. Began Digging”:
“In November 2015, Mount Sinai began an investigation into allegations of harassment made by two of our doctors against Ken Kurson,” the hospital said in a statement. “We also took measures to protect our staff and the alleged harassment ceased shortly thereafter. We are cooperating with the F.B.I. on their current background check of Mr. Kurson.”
Mr. Kurson said in an interview last week that he withdrew from consideration for the government post around early June, citing the amount of paperwork involved in the vetting process.
“The amount of paperwork!” Will laughs, reading it out loud.
“I know,” I say. “It’s all so crazy.”
In his story, Jesse identifies me as “a journalist who accused [Kurson] of commenting on her breasts as she sought a job at The Observer,” which, though I admire Jesse’s work, I find frustrating once again. The breast comment was but one tiny aspect of a much larger gender-based violation. My accusation was not about his boobs comment alone but about a step-by-step chain of grooming, manipulation, and harassment that denied me both income and dignity. And which, granted, is hard to express in an identifying clause, which is yet another scourge of sexual harassment in the workplace: how difficult it is to describe succinctly. But how about just “a freelance journalist for the Observer who accused Kurson, her boss, of sexual harassment”?
Once again, to set the record straight, I add to the Twitter thread on this topic I’d already started. “It wasn’t the breast comment that rankled,” I wrote. “The reason I wrote my story in the Atlantic is because I LOST MY COLUMN after not capitulating to this email.” I attach a screenshot of the “How come you never asked me out?” email. “More saliently,” I continue, “the doctor in question here had HER career threatened, via the online Yelp reviews. What this shows me is that #MeToo is often just the tip of a very ugly iceberg. And that those who engage in sexual harassment are often harassers in other ways, too. What’s at stake is not only bodily autonomy and freedom from sexual harassment. What’s also at stake for women—what’s always been at stake for women—is financial autonomy & financial control. Or rather the freedom from having our careers threatened by controlling men.”
In the midst of all of this, just as my World Science Festival gig is winding down, and I’m once again starting to worry how I’ll pay my rent and have health insurance when the festival is over, I receive an email from Elli Kaplan, the CEO of a Silicon Valley–based tech company aimed at the prevention of Alzheimer’s, which to me is one of the scariest illnesses out there. Who are we without our brains?
“I’m reaching out,” Elli writes, “because at the risk of sounding a bit stalkerish, I read everything you write and am always blown away by the beauty of your voice and the importance of your work.” Now you’ve got my attention. Have there ever been sweeter, more alluring words to a writer than these? No. There have not. We are as shallow about compliments to our brains as social media influencers are about likes on their butts.
After describing what her product does—using eye-tracking software to assess individual risk for Alzheimer’s, then putting those at risk for the disease on a six-pronged program to improve cognition (diet, exercise, sleep, social engagement, intellectual engagement, and stress management)—Elli asks if I might consider coming to work for her. “Let me know if you would be open to a conversation. Look forward to hearing from you.”
When the student is ready, the teacher will appear, indeed. I’ve been noticing my own brain going on the fritz of late: words forgotten, appointments missed, names of friends—good friends!—unretrievable. Why? I pick up the phone. And dial Elli’s number.
Skip Notes
* Kurson, at this point, will be working at the consulting firm Teneo, which is run by Declan Kelly, whom I’d met years earlier, when he called my phone out of the blue to say that I was single-handedly responsible for his happiness. I’m putting this here in a footnote because, though it’s not relevant to the story of Kurson as predator, it is nevertheless such a weird coincidence. Declan’s wife, Julia—the source of his happiness—was seventeen years old and known as Yulia when she tutored me in Russian in 1991. This was during the months leading up to the Soviet coup, after I’d relocated to Moscow to start shooting for Newsweek and others, and realized I could not do my job without at least some basic proficiency in Russian. That spring of 1991, Julia was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania, and we celebrated her monumental achievement. But then she was told by the Soviet government that she could not leave the country, because her refusenik Jewish parents had once applied for and been denied asylum. As a corrective, I offered to accompany her to the American Embassy in Moscow to sponsor both her and her parents myself, which meant I would be financially and materially responsible for the whole family, which was crazy, since I was only twenty-five at the time and dirt poor, but I did it anyway because you would have, too. Julia’s parents were doctors. They’d find their way, I was sure. Declan found me just prior to Julia’s fortieth birthday to say he wanted to reunite the two of us as her birthday present. Up until then, I’d had no idea what had become of Julia, and I hadn’t seen her at all since she left Moscow for the U.S. when she was seventeen. We had a wonderful fortieth birthday celebration at my house in Harlem, and then Declan offered to help me find work at Teneo when I lost my job at the PR and marketing company, but ultimately neither of us could figure out a place for me there. When I heard through my friend Eric Alterman, a professor and journalist, that Kurson A) was still was going around town, saying he wanted to get in my pants; and B) had landed a job at Teneo, I called a friend of mine who also coincidentally works for Declan, to warn her about Ken’s behavior, as I feared he might target her next: We are around the same age, both Jewish, we look enough alike that we could be sisters, and she was in the middle of her own marital free fall. But I did not call Declan because I did not yet have a multipage Google doc of other accusations against his newest employee, and this was pre #MeToo, when we women worried more about reprisals for speaking up. I regret that decision. I should have formally called Declan, too, not just my college friend as a part of the women’s whisper network. This, to me, is the most useful part of the #MeToo movement: allowing us to name and call out sexism in the workplace out loud. The next step should be its criminalization. A stolen career, income, and future should be punished at least as harshly as a stolen flat-screen TV.
THIRTY-FIVE
Cognitive Health
MAY 2018–JUNE 2019
“Okay, so cognitive health,” I say to Elli. “Tell me about your company.” Earbuds in, I’m rushing from the World Science Festival offices to the 116th Street subway station on Broadway, an hour later than usual. The festival is in three weeks. Work is heating up. It’s raining, windy. My five dollar umbrella has just concaved into a tulip with an errant gust. My son needs empty soda cans for a science project, he texts. And black sweatpants for the performance tomorrow. (What performance tomorrow?) Also, we’ve run out of snacks. When am I coming home? I make a mental scan of what’s left in the fridge to cook for dinner. Nothing. So now I’m crossing 116th Street to pace in front of Morton Williams, a small grocery store near the subway, engaging in just one of a million private conversations that take place on the public streets of New York City at any given minute between sirens and blares. He hit her? Oh, no, it’s cancer? How can you say you love me if you’re fucking her, too?
“Sidewalk snippets,” my kids and I call them: prompts for short stories whose endings we’ll never learn. “Two of your grandparents died of Alzheimer’s?” I say, adding to the cacophony of snippets. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”
Elli started her company, she tells me, after these two grandparents, one on either side, succumbed to the memory holes and devastations of Alzheimer’s. In other words, this is more than just a business for her. She’s trying to save both her own brain as well as millions of others’ before they go dark. Stress, for example. Did I know that stress is considered one of the leading causes of cognitive decline?
I laugh. “No,” I say, “but I’m pretty sure I’m living proof of it.” I’m now standing under a scaffolding to avoid getting drenched, my brain churning with pressing tasks. “So wait, just out of curiosity, how did you happen upon my writing? Why me of all people?”
“I read one of your novels,” says Elli, “the one about the mother who kills herself and her children? I loved it.”
“Suicide Wood.”
“No, that wasn’t what it was called. What was it?”
“Oh, right, duh,” I say. “Sorry. I meant Between Here and April.”
“Yes! That one.”
“The publisher changed the title at the last minute, and I can literally never remember it. Unfortunately, neither can anyone else.”
We both laugh. Elli’s laugh is warm, generous. “Well, we’re all about saving memory!” she says. She mentions two friends of hers, Joanna and Sharon, who are also friends of mine.
“I love Joanna and Sharon!” I say. A good sign: If she likes them, according to the transitive property, I will like her.
The two of us agree to meet in person when I fly out to California for my sister Jen’s surprise fiftieth birthday the following week.
I hang up the phone, oddly excited by this unexpected plot twist. Shutterbabe brought Nora Ephron into my life. Now a novel based on the murder of my friend Connie by a mother who gave up was about to give my children and me a new reason to live.
I picture little Connie Hummel, on our first day of first grade—September 5, 1972—two months before her mother killed her. She was standing by our shared cubby and putting on a pair of red gym shorts under her dress: a moment that has not only stayed with me, it was the memory prompt for the entire novel. “What are you doing?” I’d asked, visibly alarmed. I was a rule abider. A goody two-shoes. Shorts under a dress? Who does that?
“I like going on the monkey bars,” said Connie, with a shrug.
“That’s allowed?” All of our mothers made us wear dresses and Mary Janes on the first day of school. I had not yet learned that a girl could say no to the strictures placed on her.
“Who cares if it’s allowed?”
Before that exchange, it had never occurred to me that you could jerry-rig your girl fate with boy shorts. How many other tricks to surviving femalehood without flashing your underpants to get from one side of the monkey bars to the other could Connie have taught me, had she not been murdered by her mother?
Elli and I meet in her sunny, ground-floor office in Redwood City, California, the day after I watched my sister Jen walk into a restaurant in Carmel as fifty of us screamed, “Surprise!”: a moment of shock and disorientation dissolving quickly into tears, love, and gratitude that never fails to choke me up whenever I see it in the wild. Her husband, Todd, beamed with delight, having pulled off the impossible: keeping a giant secret from my sister. He sprang for our hotel rooms as well. A godsend. I would have never been able to afford this trip otherwise. I brought Will as my date and introduced him to the whole family for the first time, as well as to Jen’s college roommates, all of whom I’ve known for thirty-two years.
But when I tried to make the introductions to the roommates, my brain faltered. “This is Karen, Alison, and…” I was looking straight at Marcy, drawing a total blank.
“Marcy,” she said.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling terrible.
But Marcy, who was in the middle of a divorce herself, laughed it off. “Please! No need to apologize,” she said. She gets it.
Maybe a job delving into memory and cognitive science is just what my scattered, stressed, middle-aged, still-divorcing brain needs right now. I did my homework before this meeting. Neuroscience has reached a new threshold. Or at least a new understanding of the many outside factors affecting memory retrieval. Ever since the FINGER study in Finland was able to show significant improvement in the cognitive functioning of at-risk seniors through a program of sleep, exercise, diet, stress reduction, social engagement, and mental engagement—you need all six, you can’t just have one without the others—it has now become plausible to attach the word prevention to the word Alzheimer’s by focusing less on the brain and more on its scaffolding, the body.
Elli and I agree that I’ll start working as a consultant at first, to see if I like the work and if she likes me. My title will be Head Writer. Over the course of that summer, I’ll help rewrite all of the lessons in the cognitive health program as well as doing research on the brain, creating a company blog, ghostwriting Elli’s op-eds, and generally being available to write any materials the company needs: our website language, marketing materials, Facebook and Twitter posts, public announcements of new funding, etc. I will enjoy this work, for the most part. The inner workings of the human brain are interesting, and I’ll be able to do all of the writing on my own time, on my own schedule, at home. By mid-August, Elli will ask me to come on full-time, with benefits and a salary that will allow me to pay off the rest of my daughter’s college tuition, some of my medical bills, and to be relatively stress free month to month for the first time in, well, ever. It’ll mean flying out to Redwood City once every month or so, to meet up with the rest of my team, but otherwise I can keep working from my apartment in Brooklyn.
“Sure!” I say. “I’m in.” This will give me more time to see my sister Jen and her family in Los Gatos, why not? And win-win for the company, since this will save them my hotel costs when I travel. I agree to her proposal and mention three caveats: 1) I want to be able to keep writing my Atlantic columns, whenever possible; 2) If Emily in Paris goes into production, which it’s looking more and more likely it will, I’ll need to be able to take a short leave of absence to work on that, but I will definitely find an interim replacement while I’m gone; and 3) I’ve been trying to sell a new book—this book—which I plan to write between 5 a.m. and noon, when the California workday begins.
“Of course!” says Elli. “I would be upset if you stopped doing your other writing. Welcome to the team!”
During the two weeks I still have my World Science Festival health insurance, I push off the start date for my new job so I can get a knee operation I’ve been needing for years, to repair a torn meniscus that had collapsed under the weight of my uterus when I was pregnant with my youngest. My knee, after twelve years of injury, is nonfunctional. “No more cortisone shots,” Struan—my freshman year college boyfriend, now orthopedic surgeon—tells me. “It’s time to fix this thing.” I also need time during business hours, when courts are open, to tie up the last strings on my DIY divorce.
Divorcing without a lawyer has required much more legwork and confusing paperwork than I’d ever imagined possible. One hot summer morning, a week after knee surgery, I end up hobbling up the staircase of the Supreme Court building on crutches to file yet another stack of papers in yet another well-hidden office. Halfway up the wide stone stairs, I pause to rest. I remove the heavy grocery bag of documents from my shoulder and place it down on the step but accidentally drop one of the crutches. It slips with a clang down several steps, and I stumble trying to retrieve it. This all feels too symbolically on point, this slapstick climb toward the halls of justice. Too on the nose with the crutches and the bum knee, the pratfalls and Sisyphean ascent.
I should just come b
ack when my knee feels better, I think. But I’ve made it this far, and my new Silicon Valley tech job starts in a week, so I have to get this done today. I keep climbing, one step at a time: First the bag of documents, then me. Bag of documents, then me. Now, finally three steps shy of the grand colonnade, my bandaged knee throbbing, I spot—at the top of the stairs, not the bottom—a sign for the disabled entrance around the corner.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I say. Then I burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” says the policeman guarding the door.
I’m laughing so hard at this point I can barely speak. I point to the sign with my right crutch. Try to form words, but the laughter is winning. “Life,” I finally manage, before heading inside.
Altogether, my pro se divorce will take four years: two and a half of them in a holding pattern of paralysis for lack of money and options; another year and a half of acting as my own lawyer and representing myself. It will cost $626.50.* Which is 99 percent less than the $60,000 I was quoted to do it with lawyers, so I guess all that climbing on crutches was worth it.
Or was it? Maybe we should do away with all those painful, conflict-laden steps that feed only the divorce industrial complex, not those getting divorced, and even the playing field in terms of cost, as they do nearly everywhere else in the world except the U.S. In China, it costs $1.30 to get divorced and it takes around a half an hour. In Denmark, you don’t even have to go in front of a judge. You can pay $77 and do the whole thing online. In Sweden, it’s $151 out of respect to those who might not be able to afford the expense of divorce otherwise.
When the official postcard arrives confirming my divorce has been filed and is complete, I feel not only elated and relieved, but an entire chunk of my brain feels finally freed up for more fruitful pursuits.
Ladyparts Page 43
