“Don’t give up on this country,” I say. “It still has a chance.”
“But what if Trump gets reelected?” He’s been reading up on fascism and voter suppression, posting memes about their dangers alongside pleas for Breonna Taylor’s killers to be arrested and for police budgets to be redirected to schools, healthcare, and social programs.
“We’ll move to France,” I say, missing Paris, wondering if we’ll even be allowed over the border. “Or…somewhere.”
“But I want to stay here,” he says. “This is my home.”
“I know, sweetie. Same. But let’s wait until after the election to start panicking, okay?”
* * *
—
Two days before I’ll head to the polls to vote, Ken Kurson will be arrested and charged by federal prosecutors for cyberstalking, based on the research I provided the FBI after my #MeToo essay in The Atlantic unleashed “The Others.” I will listen in on the public call between the judge and Kurson—in-person court appearances during Covid will not be possible—and feel both a profound sense of relief and so many PVCs I’ll faint when I stand up too quickly afterward.
That same day—that same hour, in fact, of Kurson’s hearing, on October 23, 2020—I will close a deal to executive produce and write a TV show based on this book, a coincidence of timing not lost on me. We women have to work twice as hard to get half as far, and the moats are filled with Kursons and Weinsteins and Lauers and Cosbys and Kellys and Batalis and Nassers and Aileses and Trumps and Moonveses and Browns and Roses and C.K.s and Ratners, plus untold others. But eventually, if we live long enough and fight hard enough, some of us will get to the other side with our bodies still intact.
On November 3, 2020, Trump will be voted out of office. My first thoughts, upon hearing the election finally called for Biden on the morning of November 7, will be those of unbridled relief and elation. I will scream. I will cry. I will combust into human confetti. My second thoughts will leave me drenched in the cold sweat of panic: Shit, I’ll think, now he’ll pardon Ken “I come from a grudge-holding desert people” Kurson.
“ ‘Ken Kurson’ Trump pardon,” I’ll keep googling, day after day, hoping to find nothing. On December 23, 2020, Trump will pardon Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Charles Kushner, Jared’s father. I’m sunk. If Jared can get his daddy off the hook, he’s definitely working behind the scenes to save his best buddy Ken from going to jail, too. Every day, I’ll keep scanning the headlines for more pardons, waiting for the Kurson shoe to drop. Maybe the president will be too busy spreading lies about voter fraud and inciting violent insurrection to even think about pardoning Kurson or anyone.
For the next thirteen days, I’ll keep hearing more pardons are forthcoming, but none will come forth. I’ll go to bed late on the night of January 19, 2021, breathing a sigh of relief. The White House pussy grabber will be out of office the next day by noon. Justice prevails! Pussies triumph! God bless America.
“Bad news,” Will will say, waking me up at 4 a.m. on the morning of Biden’s inauguration. “He pardoned Kurson.”
“Fuck.”
“What do I do?” I’ll ask Special Agent Eckstut, the FBI agent who showed up at my apartment in Inwood wearing sensible flats. Two other federal agents are listening in on the line, Zack Goodman and Andrew Taff. “I gave you guys the information that led to his arrest!” I’ll say. “Remember his email? ‘I come from a grudge-holding desert people’? You arrested him for his acts of revenge. This is who he is.”
“If there’s an imminent threat to your safety,” Emily will say, “call 911. If it’s less imminent, let us know, and we’ll certainly look into it.”
“That’s it? Call 911? I have no other recourse to guarantee my safety?”
“I mean, as a last resort, there’s always witness protection,” one of the male agents listening in on the line will offer. I have no idea which one. They’re just disembodied voices on the line.
Yeah, no, I’ll think. I am not going to go into hiding and leave everything and everyone I know and love behind because the man who carefully targeted, groomed, and sexually harassed me, as well as inflicted emotional and reputational pain on many others, has been pardoned by the fucking president of the United States.
Reader, I am afraid.
* * *
—
The bootleg fireworks are going nuts now all around us, becoming more intense and numerous.
* * *
—
Brooklyn, July 4, 2020, © Deborah Copaken
“Oh my god! Is that a heart?” says my son.
Indeed, it is. An Ephronesque red heart exploding next to the full moon. A “Buck Moon,” they call it, because it coincides with the time of year when young male deer grow their antlers. A deer bar mitzvah, I think, since the main purpose of antlers is to attract females. And the main purpose of attracting females is to continue propagating the species. And the main purpose of propagating the species is god knows what, but I’m sitting here atop the slanted world with the final fruit of my excised womb watching hearts explode beneath the full Buck Moon, so hey. Thanks, genes!
My son’s baby fat, I notice, has melted down overnight into angles and planes after his own bar mitzvah last year, at that nightclub in Bushwick with the dildo chandeliers my freshly widowed aunt loved so much, she giggled and posed for pictures with them. The House of Yes, it was called. I chose it because Dani, one of their employees, had sent me an invitation on LinkedIn, and when I googled her place of work and read its core beliefs—art heals, weird is wonderful—I thought yes. Just yes. Plus, I mean, the name alone: The House of Yes? Sign me up.
“Do you do bar mitzvahs?” I wrote.
They’d never done one before, said Dani, but why not? Would I like to come by and check out the space? What a perfect “Yes, and…” I thought. Of course the House of Yes would follow improv protocol. They also rented me the space for a steal, since we’d be the bar mitzvah guinea pigs, plus hardly anyone booked Saturday afternoons, so it was found revenue. I paid the bill out of the advance for these words.
It was only after I’d sent out the invitations that a friend who’d received one told me what goes on there at night.
“Wait, it’s a sex club?!” said my son.
“Only at night!” I said. “Your bar mitzvah’s at four.” Besides, what better place to mark one’s passage into manhood?
Another heart explodes on the horizon. And another. And another. In my brain, watching these hearts explode, neurotransmitters light up at the same time to form this thought: Had you died three years ago, during that other Fourth of July weekend, when the stitches at the top of your vaginal canal came undone, you would have missed this perfect moment. You would have missed meeting Will; your daughter’s graduation; Aunt Marilyn laughing at the dildo chandeliers; your mother’s hand in yours as you spun around and around in a giant circle of love during the hora. You would have missed the look of pure shock on your sister Jen’s face, after she realized dozens of her closest friends and family had gathered for her surprise fiftieth birthday; and you would have missed those four perfect minutes a couple of days later, when you and Will were driving north along the Pacific Coast Highway, Kacey Musgraves’s “Oh, What a World” came on the radio, and you burst into tears.
“That was my favorite moment of my life,” you’ll later tell Will, “the way the ocean suddenly appeared over the horizon as the song came on, and then I looked at you,” and he’ll pause for a moment, cock his head, and say, “I think mine was at a Grateful Dead show.” So you would have missed chortling at this response, too. You would have missed climbing that hill outside Kathmandu and swimming naked in that lake in Maine and bearing witness to 1,098 sunsets in between, some of which you know were breathtaking, in the pre-Covid sense of the word, because you keep evidence of them in your phone.
“You ready to hea
d back down?” I ask my son. It’s getting late.
“Five more minutes?”
“Sure.”
After a minute or so of silence he speaks. “Why is there a moon?”
I have no idea. Why is there anything? “For the tides,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I mean, how did it form?”
Chaos, buddy. “Oh, um…” I mumble what little I can remember about impact theory from my dad’s astronomy lessons in my childhood bedroom, when he pretended to be the sun, and I, the earth, twirled around him, a blur of nightgown and dizzy glee. “I think, like, Earth bumped into another planet, and then the moon formed from all the pieces of orbiting debris that remained. Or something like that.” I put my arm around my son. It’s rare these days that he allows this, but tonight he does.
“Every time I think about the universe, my brain hurts,” he says.
“Mine, too.”
“Still,” he says. His eyes remain fixed on the moon. “It’s cool that something that beautiful could grow out of something so violent.”
“Yeah,” I say, breathing in oxygen, blowing it out for the plants. “It is.”
Skip Notes
* In two months, we will receive written notice from our landlord’s lawyer, saying our two-year lease will not be renewed.
For Sasha, again
&
in memory of Nora
Acknowledgments
Just as no human springs forth fully formed without egg, sperm,* uterus, and forty weeks, no book is the spontaneous creation of one person. Since this is a book about the body, it seems only fitting to assign each collaborator a specific body part. I might regret this a few organs in, but let’s try.
UTERUS: In late fall of 2014, Lisa Leshne took me out for lunch at a restaurant down the street from my office at Cafe. Over mussels and fries, with my boss in earshot at the next table, she made her (quiet) pitch: Shutterbabe was one of her favorite books; I needed to write a follow-up; and she should be the one to help me birth it. I laughed. Yeah, right. That I was already represented by another agent; that I had no time to write a dating profile, let alone a book; that the proposal itself would eventually take four years, two failed incarnations, and so many rejection letters we lost count did not faze her. Her multiple acts of grace are already mentioned herein, but I will add one more: a souvenir from the day I went in front of a judge to reclaim my birth name, and she insisted on not only joining me at the courthouse, but on taking me out afterward to celebrate.
BRAIN: In March of 2018, Mark Warren—then a stranger, now my editor—reached out after reading my Atlantic story about being sexually harassed by Ken Kurson. “Your piece,” he wrote, “is kind of Rosetta stone to understanding not just Ken, but people like Ken. I’m really sorry that you had to go through that.” After thanking him for these and other kind words, I wrote, “I feel ruined by it and him in ways I can’t even articulate. He dangled a dream that was never mine to have. The ploy was always my pants, not my brain. And I hate him for that.” To which Mark, having just been hired as an executive editor at Random House after twenty-eight years at Esquire, wrote back, “I would encourage you to write your way through this sentence: ‘I feel ruined by it and him in ways I can’t even articulate.’ ” Ladyparts is the result of this encouragement. Of forcing myself to sit down every morning for sixteen months to try to articulate what had felt so inarticulable, I’d given up trying. Mark is a gifted editor and the sweetest deus ex machina to ever drop from the sky, but more saliently, he is a feminist. I wish more men were like him.
EYES: Tad Friend has loaned me his eyes for each of my books. He is my first and most generous reader, my beloved friend of nearly four decades. When I think back on the years described in these pages, mostly I picture myself sitting at his and and his wife Amanda Hesser’s kitchen table laughing, occasionally crying, but always feeling loved, heard, and well-fed while our little ones chased one another through the apartment. Diane Sokolow, running charades maestro, read the Uterus section in its early incarnation, after I’d asked her to please help me make sure I got the essence and verbal cadence of our much-missed Nora just right. Tommy Siegel, Stephen Alexander, Elizabeth Perkins, James Tucker, Zibby Owens, Joaquín Güell, Hara Woltz, Marion Mertens, Darren Star, Samantha Morrice, Eric Alterman, Monique El-Faizy, and Matt Whitaker read various early versions or chapters and provided valuable thoughts and suggestions. Ayelet Waldman, Mary Pender, Kate Adler, and Whitney Berry not only were early readers, it’s thanks to them that Ladyparts might make it out of my computer and onto your TV. Suzi Schiffer Parrasch took on the thankless role of editing the entire manuscript in the three days leading up to its deadline. If every apostrophe is finally removed from each mention of an era, it’s thanks to Suzi. (I thought it was the 60’s and 70’s, not the ’60s and ’70s. What? It still looks wrong to me.)
BREAST: It is impossible to overstate how grateful I am to be back in the bosom of Random House after a twenty-year absence. The last time I’d been to the mothership was in 2000, when I hand-delivered a printed-out version of the Shutterbabe manuscript—plus floppy disc—in a cardboard box held tight with rubber bands. My next visit was in the spring of 2019, after I’d written the first chunk of this book. The late Susan Kamil gleefully squeezed my hands and exclaimed, “We are so excited about Ladyparts! Welcome back!” She died of complications from lung cancer four months later. I hope I have honored her early enthusiasm, her love of words, and her memory. Andy Ward was equally welcoming, inviting me into his office for a long, amiable chat, as if he had all the time in the world instead of a giant publishing house to run. Cheyenne Skeete kept us in line and on schedule, dealt with all the rights, and laughed with me—not at me—as we pored over every ad hominem attack in our tear sheet photo gallery (“Yes, such ‘poor judgment’ to get yourself raped,” she tut-tutted). Ella Laytham tirelessly designed over a dozen different covers, and Robbin Schiff—who coincidentally worked on the Shutterbabe cover—not only was not annoyed by my input during the design process, she actively welcomed it. The minute we all saw this one, we knew: Ella had nailed it. Thanks, too, to Marlene Glazer, for her critical legal reads and video conference calls at all hours of the day and night plus weekends as well (“What’s a weekend?”); to Liz Carbonell, for her witty marginalia and for making sure every i was dotted, every t crossed, every repetition noted, and every cervix typo excised; to Cindy Berman, for overseeing the book’s production editing under a tight deadline, when Trump’s last-minute pardon of Kurson set us back yet another two weeks; to Jo Anne Metsch, for her beautiful design inside these pages, which she nailed on the first try; to Thomas Perry, for being this book’s champion; and to Rachel Rokicki, Barbara Fillon, Ayelet Gruenspecht, and Penny Belnap, for making sure this tree didn’t fall in a forest: The marketing and PR departments are the unsung heroes of the publishing world. I am grateful for their efforts.
HANDS: Many hands had my back during the year and a half of writing this book. Too many, in fact, to name, but here are a few. Adrienne LaFrance gave my voice a platform in The Atlantic and the chance to work with Paul Bisceglio and Julie Beck, Google Docs magicians. Elli Kaplan gave me the first breathing room of my adult life—a living wage, benefits, and a flexible job in Silicon Valley that started at noon in Brooklyn, which allowed me to work at home and write this between dawn and lunch. My Emily in Paris family not only gave me reasons to laugh every day for three months, working in that writers’ room was a daily reminder, while pushing my way through some of the darker chapters herein, to extract the humor from the sludge. (It’s always there, and not even well hidden.) As for my friends, you know who you are. You’re either in this book, on my phone, going on a socially distanced walk, or smiling in a sad little Zoom rectangle on my computer. Speaking of Zoom rectangles, a special shout out to my ladywriter friends spread out across the U.S. and in Paris, and to our two honorary writerdudes in their wood-beame
d rectangle in Liguria for providing an imposed daily seven-minute workout and a sense of community during our strange communal moment of disconnection and isolation.
HIPPOCAMPUS: Every week, for those couple of years when I had good insurance, I spent an hour in the office of Dr. Steven Tublin. I told stories and decimated his tissue box; he listened for patterns and talked me off the ledge. I’m sorry I ran out of both money and the good insurance to keep up with this weekly practice. (Let’s fix this, America. Mental health is not a separate category from general health. It’s not only a critical part of the body’s immune system, the less financially secure you are, the more you need it.)
HEART: My children have given me more than I could ever give them: not just love, but life, texture, joy, awe, and all the other corny nouns in between. This cri de coeur—which literally translates as “cry from the heart”—is for them. I don’t want my daughter to have to face the decades of sexism and inequality my mother and I faced, and I don’t want my sons to grow up in a world that would ever treat their sister as less worthy of income, scientific study, or respect; or her body as a commodity, object, baby factory, or bargaining chip in an employment negotiation. I also don’t want my kids to have to choose between their professional passions and health insurance. If this book can shine one tiny light on our unwinnable, shameful game of healthcare Frogger, dayenu. To my sisters, Jen, Julie, and Laura Copaken: You got me through those penniless three months in the summer of 2014, and I will never forget it; I look forward to paying you back in limitless Kohr’s as soon as we’re all vaccinated. Aunt Marilyn? You’ve kept me sane and made me laugh: the best medicine I know. And Mom? I hope it’s clear from these words herein that I not only love you, but I see you, I appreciate you, and I know that, however hard my generation of women had it, yours had it worse. To my new family, the Betts, Perkins, and Danas: Thank you for saving me a spot around your hearth. Its warmth has been a soothing balm. And Will. My god, Will. You are the still point of my turning world.
Ladyparts Page 49
