The End of Men

by Karen Rinaldi

  Maggie pushed up her sleeves and pulled the rubber gloves out of the bathroom closet and the toilet brush from its holder. Just as she began to scrub the sticky cereal from the bowl, her office cell rang from her back pocket. She’d had enough foresight to bring it with her but not enough to pull the gloves off before answering. Toilet water ran down the gloves and dripped into her ear. “Ugh!” Then, “Hello?”

  “Maggie, remind me not to get out of bed on this date in the future.”

  “Sure thing,” Maggie replied, thinking, I’d like to have skipped it too.

  RHM was Maggie’s favorite client. She’d started doing publicity and strategy for the company when it was just starting to gain momentum almost four years ago. Beth had recruited her from the New School, where Maggie worked as the director of project development and PR. Her job to connect art and commerce helped fine arts students find practical applications for their work with commercial enterprises. She’d caught the media’s attention with a stunt she miraculously pulled off at the Guggenheim Museum on behalf of a skateboarding urban studies major and Sector 9 skateboards. Outfitted with four GoPros, the student rode down the spiral ramp of the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building and out the front door. Sector 9 used photos from the stunt in its ads and the museum benefitted by attracting students and twentysomethings to the museum in unprecedented numbers. Beth had called Maggie after a profile in the New York Times detailed Maggie’s ambitious plan for the performance piece. Beth told her that the PR event exemplified exactly the kind of audacious ambition she was looking for in a strategist.

  Since then RHM had grown exponentially, due partly to generous backing from an angel investor. Beth had been able to take on huge risks in development and materials. Someone somewhere had enormous faith in Beth.

  It turned out to be a good bet for the backer, because RHM, after the initial start-up costs, had done nothing but make tons of money. Much of it was reinvested into the company, which had, among other unusual aspects, the best employee package Maggie had ever seen. With the exception of two people Beth had fired, every single person who started with the company was still employed today. On the firm’s fifth anniversary, Maggie placed a feature on RHM in Fortune magazine. The investors were more than satisfied.

  Maggie worked on a freelance basis out of choice, but she was an integral part of the company. She and Beth had worked out a mutually beneficial arrangement where Maggie could budget from the reliable monthly retainer and, with a few points on the company’s net profit, have a sense of ownership. Since Maggie’s home life was chaotic at best, the freelance life helped her juggle it all. Over time, she and Beth had grown to be very close friends. She knew Beth well enough to let her rant for a minute or two on the phone—she would eventually get to the point.

  Beth recounted the crazy day over at RHM.

  “Can all these people really have such a problem with underwear? They’re worse than animal rights activists. Anyway, I’m sure this is all good for us, so no reason to complain about it, right?” Beth said, signaling that she was ready for business. “Are you ready to get all of this down? Here’s the deal . . .”

  Maggie could hear Lily and John across the loft and knew her daughter had been successful at waking him. At least she could now turn her attention to what Beth needed her to do. John kept the crossword puzzle and a pen handy in the bathroom for those long visits. Maggie traded her toilet brush for the pen and sat on the closed lid of the toilet to take down notes.

  Beth put Maggie on hold then seemed to forget she was on the line, so Maggie hung up the phone. She absentmindedly picked up the toilet brush and, brandishing it as a weapon, went in search of her daughter and husband. They were cuddled on the couch watching a Dora the Explorer video. It was midafternoon on a glorious June day and John hadn’t done anything but watch La Dolce Vita for the 108th time. Literally. She knew because he kept a tally on the fridge and the last time she looked it was at 107.

  John was an adjunct professor of film history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was an ABD (all but dissertation), struggling to finish his doctoral thesis on Visconti and Fellini. A learning disability prevented him from mastering Italian and had slowed down progress toward his doctorate. Maggie thought the “learning disability” was more likely caused by the amount of weed he had smoked. His excuse for viewing these movies over and over again was the hope that if he watched them enough times in Italian with subtitles, his brain would eventually kick in and he would understand the language. Maggie was sure his frequent viewing had more to do with an obsession with Claudia Cardinale and Sophia Loren. Not that she could blame him there.

  “John, why don’t you take Lily to the park? It’s sunny and warm and she’s been cooped up inside all day. It’s crazy to stay inside. I’ve got to take care of the crisis over at Red Hot Mama.”

  “I don’t really have the time. I have to get over to Rutgers by four for a student advisory meeting.”

  “Can you change your meeting?” Maggie asked, doubting the urgency of his schedule. “I need you here this afternoon. Rosie isn’t coming today, and I have to get over to RHM this afternoon.”

  “Can’t. No one is in the office, and I don’t know how to get in touch with my student.”

  “Then who is supposed to pick up Jules and Justine from school this afternoon?” John’s children from his previous marriage were living with them full-time this year while their mother was in France researching her book, a project inspired by the affair between Maggie and John that broke up their marriage.

  “I just figured you could. Is that a problem?”

  Maggie’s mouth hung open, too astonished to respond with anything but “Oh, right. Sure.” She often found herself acquiescing in spite of a voice in her head screaming, Tell him to go fuck himself!

  The phone rang again, this time on the home line. It was Jules’s school calling to say that he had just sprained his ankle playing basketball and needed to be picked up right away.

  Maggie raised her eyebrows at John, hoping against hope that he would step up.

  “I guess you should leave now, then,” he said.

  MAGGIE CALLED BETH and spoke with her assistant, Sacha, to postpone the meeting they’d arranged for that afternoon until the following morning. She packed up a bag for Lily and drove off in her minivan to pick up John’s son, whom she resented as much as his father at the moment. The saving grace was how excited Lily would be to get her older brother from school. She took such delight in him that Maggie couldn’t be angry for long. Once they were on their way, Maggie turned on the car radio. CBS News was reporting on the day’s festivities at RHM:

  “A crowd of more than one hundred has gathered to protest maternity lingerie at the popular Flatiron district store Red Hot Mama. Modeled by America’s sweetheart Agnes Seymour and actor Milly Ling, the campaign seems to have sparked off debates about whether maternity and lingerie are proper bedfellows . . .” The newscaster seemed to be having some fun with the report.

  “Wow, people really don’t have enough to do with their time . . . Give me a break!” Maggie said aloud, before she turned up the volume to hear more about how the media was positioning the protests.

  “What, Mommy? Why you said that?” Lily had been listening as usual and didn’t miss a thing.

  “Nothing important, baby, nothing at all.” Maggie was aware that the vitriol she felt at that moment had little to do with the protests and was more likely the result of her frustration with John. She knew Jules would give anything to have his father or his real mother give a damn that he had hurt himself at school. Now she felt like the evil stepmother, pissed off that she was sent to take care of it all.

  Maggie heaved a sigh and fought off the anger gaining momentum inside her. “What could I have been thinking?” she said too loudly.

  “What, Mommy?”

  “I said, what are you thinking about, Lily love?”

  No matter her state of mind, there was always Lily. Whenev
er Maggie began to regret her affair-turned-marriage with John, she had to think only of her daughter to know that any discomfort whatsoever was worth it if it brought her the curly-headed creature now kicking her legs and humming a rambling tune in the backseat of the car.

  MAGGIE HAD MET John four years earlier at the New School in Manhattan, when John was teaching an Italian film history class. One week, midsemester, Maggie received two checks and John none. The payroll system had a glitch and read Johanna Margaret Harding and John Maris Harting as the same. The two met inadvertently in the accounting office.

  John, a vision of a boyish man, stopped Maggie’s breath. Two-day beard, a wool beanie pulled over his head showing unruly hair, a ratty backpack slung over his shoulder, a skateboard and book under his arm. He was reading A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film by Joseph Luzzi. That did it.

  “Hey, can I help?” she offered when she overheard John explaining his situation.

  “I don’t see how you could, but I am so fucked without this paycheck . . .”

  “I can lend you half of mine if you want,” Maggie said before even realizing that she had just offered a stranger half her paycheck. Typical! the voice in Maggie’s head screamed.

  “Oh, no . . . I couldn’t do that. But thanks.”

  Maggie was in the maelstrom of setting up the Guggenheim/skateboard stunt, which was proving nearly impossible to pull off. Beset with obstacles every step of the way, Maggie was thinking about bailing on the project.

  To keep the conversation going, she asked John, “Is that a Sector 9 board?”

  “What . . . ? This, oh, no, it’s a Carver; the trucks are looser and it rides more like a surfboard . . . Why? Do you skate?”

  “No, but I am interested for professional reasons.”

  “I can’t imagine what those would be.” His tone was incredulous, but his attention was hooked.

  “I can tell you about it if you’re interested . . .” Maggie said, a touch too eagerly.

  “Yeah, sure, I’d love to. Do you mean now?” John seemed confused.

  “Well, I have an hour before my next meeting. I mean, only if you aren’t busy . . . Do you want to grab a quick coffee?”

  Maggie and John headed to the corner dive diner where Maggie regaled him with stories about the stunt. Between the insurance companies, community boards, city bureaucracy, and museum donors opposing every detail, Maggie had doubts about the plausibility of seeing the project through. For the next few weeks, she and John spoke every day. His enthusiasm helped her to find the resolve to work through the obstacles threatening to derail her project.

  In return he confided in her about his crumbling marriage, which had been on the rocks since the birth of their youngest, Jules, now four. Two frustrated academics who competed with each other for the attention and respect neither of them could garner for themselves, John and Georgette would tear each other’s already fragmented egos to shreds. Or at least this was how Maggie pieced it all together from John’s stories. Most comfortable in her self-appointed role as savior, Maggie rushed in to bolster John’s spirit.

  By the time he received his own check, Maggie and John had shacked up together for several sweaty afternoons in Maggie’s tiny Village apartment. It was lust instigated by computer error and felt fated by the gods. They couldn’t get enough of each other. Their post-class fuck and postcoital cupcake from Magnolia Bakery became ritual. By the end of the semester, they were in love and torn about what to do next. Just as they’d made the decision that John would break the news to Georgette that he was leaving, someone beat them to it.

  An undergraduate auditing John’s class had developed a mean crush on her instructor. John was so caught up with Maggie that he didn’t notice the seductive, professor-struck student, Desi.

  One afternoon, Desi followed John and Maggie back to Maggie’s apartment. She waited on the front stoop of a brownstone across the street until they emerged an hour and a half later, then followed them to Magnolia Bakery. Desi hid in the playground from where she watched the lovers lick buttercream icing from each other’s lips. An art major with a burgeoning talent in charcoal, Desi brought a sketch pad and pencil with her everywhere she went. She drew each scene with the voyeuristic detail and melodramatic flourish of a courtroom artist’s sketch.

  Her series, which she entitled Love for Sale (no one could figure out why), would be used effectively by Georgette later. They included sketches of John and Maggie kissing on the street, John touching Maggie intimately on the front stoop, the lovers eating cupcakes. One sketch, which must have been imagined (and with frightening accuracy), showed the two lovers in flagrante delicto. These pictures were hung in the school gallery for a week, and while they aroused some suspicions, no one could say for certain who the lovers were. Maggie and John were completely unaware. When the show was taken down, Desi had the series sent to Georgette with a cryptic note, “Because you’re you.”

  John came home one night to the horrific surprise of an artist’s rendition of his affair hung expertly on the living room walls. Georgette had left for the night, taking the children with her, to let John stew in his own humiliation. What Georgette intended as exposure became instead the curation of her marriage’s demise.

  When John saw the drawings hung up in his living room, he phoned Maggie immediately. “Darling, we have a problem. I know you said you’d never come here, but I think you should see something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it’s you and me in charcoal. You have to see them.” John’s breath was short.

  “Them? Charcoal? For God’s sake, John, tell me something I can understand.”

  “Just get over here,” John demanded. He’d never done that before.

  “I’ll be right over.” Maggie hung up, fled down the four flights of stairs to the street, and hailed a taxi.

  The intensity of the havoc wreaked by the affair bonded John and Maggie together till death. Or something. Four weeks later, John moved his clothing, books, and computer into Maggie’s apartment. It all happened so fast, Maggie didn’t put any sort of protest in motion, although she knew she was making a mistake. But how could she insult John just when his whole life had fallen apart because of her?

  Georgette, admirably, had turned her heartache into opportunity. Months of tears ended with the publication of an article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled “Love for Sale.” A thinly veiled account of the affair between Maggie and John, in which Georgette made an argument in favor of the nineteenth-century French courtesan.

  “Mistresses today are clumsy and don’t understand the implicit boundaries between sex for sex’s sake and lasting marriages,” she wrote. “A fling with another man or woman should not be misconstrued as a replacement relationship. Since contemporary American society doesn’t provide an outlet for, or acceptance of, extramarital activity, every casual fuck has the power to dislocate a marriage.” The article, accompanied by Desi’s semi-erotic drawings, drew an enormous response from readers. A week later, Georgette had been offered a book deal with an obscene advance and was on her way to becoming a popular talking head on marriage and infidelity on every morning news show.

  BY THE TIME Maggie arrived at Jules’s school, Lily had fallen asleep in her car seat and she had the unpleasant task of waking a toddler. It will all be fine was Maggie’s internal mantra as she wrangled her reluctant daughter out of the car. She dreaded the inevitable wounded look on Jules’s face when he saw her, instead of his father, coming to his rescue.

  The forlorn boy was waiting in the lobby, his ankle misshapen from the ACE bandage wrapped over an ice pack.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Oh, he had an emergency at Rutgers and I was on my way in anyway . . .” she lied. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes.” Jules was sullen. “When’s Mom coming home? I thought she was supposed to be here by now.”

&nb
sp; “I don’t know, Jules.” Maggie tried to sound sympathetic instead of impatient. “Look, Lily, it’s your brother, he has a boo-boo. Give him a kiss and help him feel better.”

  Maggie was trying to keep Lily from the meltdown she was about to have and quell the expression of abandonment welling in Jules’s eyes at the same time.

  “What do you say we go and get a banana boat at the Ice Cream Palace before we pick up Justine? We still have an hour to kill. Sound like fun?”

  She took one groggy yes from Lily as a positive response and forged on.

  By the time they headed to pick up Justine, the younger children were in high spirits. Justine was the more gregarious of John’s two children, and Maggie felt a stronger sense of responsibility toward her than she did toward Jules. She wished John would be a better role model for his son but felt that, as boy and man, they needed to work that out on their own. With Justine, Maggie thought and hoped that she could provide some positive influence.

  Maggie pulled up in front of Justine’s school lobby with five minutes to spare. Lily and Jules were keeping each other occupied in the backseat with the pile of lift-the-flap books they kept in the car. Maggie sat back and closed her eyes, welcoming these precious few moments of not having to physically do anything. Her mind raced back to what was happening at RHM. It would be her job to spin the protests and controversial ads into gold ink for the company. She considered what, exactly, had so offended people.

  Maggie’s thoughts worked their way through the issues, as if arguing for both sides.

  On the politically conservative side of the issue, she reasoned, sexualizing pregnancy and birth blasphemed conception and motherhood. The sacrosanct exploited for commercial gain.

  Maggie saw RHM’s approach as a celebration of women’s God-given gifts. How can I spin it so that others can see it in this positive light as well? she wondered.

  On the left-leaning side of the argument, Maggie contended, RHM’s lingerie and ads were blatant objectification of women in their most exalted and revered capability. The female image turned fetish.