Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  Florence was seated behind her. The lighting on the stage made her look ghostly.

  The first twenty minutes of Willa’s talk was a sort of tour of the cultural landscape. After this part was finished, she turned and bowed to Florence, and then she turned back to the audience.

  “It’s an honor to be here today to celebrate Florence Gordon, a woman I respect deeply,” Willa said. “Who could fail to respect Florence Gordon? Our lives would be inconceivable without her. She’s as indispensable as the Pill. She’s as indispensable as Tampax.”

  Emily was shocked by this. It was disrespectful. It was vulgar. But no one else seemed shocked. It got a laugh.

  She tried to read her grandmother’s reaction, but from this distance Florence was unreadable.

  “When the women of the New Left were being exploited by their boyfriends, Florence Gordon was there, to blow the whistle on it. When the media was ignoring sex discrimination in the workplace, Florence Gordon was there, with eloquence and statistics, to prove that it was a national disgrace. When women’s studies and women’s history departments were being strangled in their cradles during the Reagan years, Florence Gordon was there to press our claims. Florence Gordon and her sisters created the world we’re living in today, and we thank them.”

  Everyone applauded, and Florence nodded regally.

  “But I know that Florence Gordon would want me to speak frankly today. To do anything less would be to fail to honor her. And, speaking frankly, we have to admit that for most of us here, Florence Gordon’s world is the world of our grandmothers. We love our grandmothers, and we’re thankful to them, but we don’t want to be them. When I look around this room, at the faces of the women of my generation, I see women who want to express all the different sides of themselves. There are times when we want to speak out against the injustices of the world. And there are times when we want to put on stilettos and a little black dress and find a party.

  “When we do want to stage a protest, our grandmothers are right by our side. They’re proud of us. But when we go out to party, our grandmothers get very upset. They call to us from the doorway: ‘What are you partying for! Men are still oppressing us! Capitalism is still evil! The Republicans still want to repeal Roe versus Wade! You can’t go out and party! There’s work to be done!’

  “And when we hear our grandmothers calling to us like this, we have to respond honestly. We have to say: Yes, and yes—but no. Yes, women are often still victimized. Yes, capitalism still leaves us in a world of risk and constant change. But no. We don’t identify this world as evil. Unlike you, we embrace the risk. Unlike you, we see this imperfect world not as a world of wall-to-wall oppression, but a world of opportunity. In today’s world, women are in the boardroom, asserting themselves; and women are in the bedroom, enjoying themselves. It’s not the black-and-white world that you saw. It’s a world with many colors, and some of them are amazing.

  “Sometimes I think this intergenerational argument comes down to pleasure. Our grandmothers seemed to believe that pleasure is a sin. We believe we need pleasure, just like we need fresh air and clean water and light. They believed you can’t do good in the world if you keep stopping to refresh yourself; we believe you can’t do good in the world if you don’t.

  “We honor you, Florence Gordon. We honor you and your generation. We wouldn’t be here if not for you. To you and your sisters, I say thank you. We’ve learned so much from you. And one of the things we’ve learned is strength of mind, the strength of mind that now gives us the courage to say that your way is not our way.

  “And now, at the end of this glorious day of conferring and confabbing, I turn to my sisters, and I say (cover your ears, Florence): Bitches, let’s party!”

  Willa Ruth Stone left the stage without so much as a glance at Florence. The applause didn’t diminish until she’d left the auditorium, surrounded by friends and admirers. Florence was left by herself on the back of the stage.

  Florence looked unhappy, but above all she looked tired.

  Almost everyone was leaving, but several older women were striding toward a microphone near the foot of the stage. One of them was Vanessa. She looked furious. She planted her feet in front of the microphone and started to speak, but the sound had already been cut. She kept speaking into it, for some reason, as if she didn’t realize that no one could hear.

  83

  The talk made Emily angry, not just because it was unkind, but because it was untrue. From all those weeks in the archives she knew that although many women in her movement had been puritanical, Florence and her friends had never been. They’d been cheerleaders for sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll; above all else, they’d been cheerleaders for freedom. Every kind of freedom, from radical democratic politics to radically unconventional living arrangements.

  And none of this was a secret. All of it could be found in the pages of Florence’s first two books—essay collections from the seventies that were on sale in the lobby. “Against Propriety”; “Notes on What Just Happened”; “A Few Late Thoughts on Oscar Wilde”; “Opportunities for Heroism in Everyday Life”: in her best-known early essays she’d spelled out a vision of personal liberation that might look cheesy today but was nothing like the caricature that Willa Ruth Stone had sketched.

  A published writer who’d given a talk without checking her facts. Who’d based her talk on ideas she thought clever, not ideas she knew to be true. Emily was young enough to be stunned by this.

  84

  Florence’s friends were surrounding her, making a lot of noise, as if to drown out the memory of what had just happened.

  They all went to a restaurant across the street and commandeered a long table. Emily came with. Six of Florence’s friends were there, including Vanessa and Alexandra. All of them seemed to have known one another for many, many years.

  They kept up a steady flow of talk. For a while they talked about the idiocy of Willa Ruth Stone and everything she stood for, and then they moved on to other things. They were outraged about some new threat to second-trimester abortion rights in New York; they were outraged about some new threat to affirmative action. They were outraged about the Tea Party; they were outraged about the Supreme Court. They were outraged about Obama’s lassitude in pushing his health-care agenda; they were outraged about Obama’s zealousness in prosecuting whistleblowers.

  “What do you think?” Vanessa said.

  “What do I think about what?” Emily said.

  “About whatever you’re thinking about. You look like you’re thinking furiously.”

  “I was thinking I’m amazed by the energy you all have. I was thinking I admire the way you can still get so indignant.”

  “It keeps us young,” Vanessa said.

  An article that Florence had written about the early days of the women’s movement came to Emily’s mind. Florence had described it as a “festival of talk.” She said that it was impossible to describe what it had felt like to be part of an entire generation of women who were suddenly speaking to one another without fear.

  Emily was still trying to figure out what had happened back there at the conference. The truly shocking thing wasn’t that Florence had been insulted at an occasion where she was supposed to have been honored. It was that she hadn’t fought back.

  While Emily was listening to Willa Ruth Stone give her talk, at the same time as she’d been horrified, she’d also been excited, because she’d felt sure that Florence would destroy her. And then it hadn’t happened. It was true that she hadn’t been offered the opportunity to reply, but, knowing Florence, Emily had expected her to grab the microphone right off Willa Ruth Stone’s shirt.

  Florence’s friends were being so raucously supportive that it took Emily a few minutes to realize that Florence wasn’t really acting like one of the gang. Florence’s normal manner was so peremptory that if she was sitting there without speaking, as she was now, she could easily be seen to be nothing more than her usual imperious self. But if you looked
at her closely you could see that her withdrawn manner didn’t have anything to do with being above it all. She had tipped her head back and was resting it against the wall behind her, as if she didn’t have the strength to sit up straight. She looked, though it was a word that Emily could hardly have imagined applying to Florence before, defeated.

  85

  Florence and Emily took a cab together to the Upper West Side.

  Emily noticed that Florence was clutching and unclutching her left hand.

  “Are you all right?” Emily said.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason. I just wanted to make sure you’re feeling okay.”

  “Why do you keep asking me that?”

  “I just get the impression—”

  “You try getting old, and tell me how well you feel.”

  “You’re not that old.”

  “You’re right. Of course. I forgot. I forgot we’re living in the era of eternal youth. You’re right. I’m young. I’m seventy-five years young.”

  This is too much responsibility for me, Emily thought.

  Florence asked the cabbie to stop when they were still a few blocks from her apartment. She opened her wallet and passed him a twenty-dollar bill. Everything seemed to be taking her a long time—looking through her purse for the wallet, opening the wallet, passing the bill.

  The driver gave Florence the change, and Florence gave him back a dollar. Taking a cab with Florence was always an embarrassment, because she was such a poor tipper.

  They made their way back toward the apartment, Florence walking in a slow, foot-dragging way. Something was wrong—something more than the disappointment of the day. She’d had a stroke. She had Parkinson’s disease. Emily didn’t know enough about grown-up diseases, which is to say that she didn’t know enough about diseases, to be able to hazard many guesses about what was wrong. But something was wrong.

  Why can’t I put my arm around her? Why can’t I just demand to know what’s wrong?

  What are we made of? What is this passing moment made of?

  With a young person’s curious hyperawareness of the fleeting nature of life, Emily wished that she could stop everything, freeze everything, right now, so that whatever Florence’s problem was, it wouldn’t get any worse. She wanted to extend a sort of bubble of protection around her grandmother, an image she found beautiful, until she realized that she’d taken it from The Incredibles.

  They stopped at a Rite Aid so Florence could buy paper towels, after which they proceeded to her block.

  They were in front of her building.

  “Just for the record,” Emily said, “I thought that talk was awful.”

  “Hers or mine?”

  “Hers, of course,” Emily said.

  “Duly noted,” Florence said. “You can go home now.”

  “You didn’t really eat anything back there. Do you want to get something to eat?”

  “You can go, Emily.”

  She wanted to say, What’s going on with you? Something is wrong and I want to know what it is.

  But do people ever actually do this? Just flat-out ask each other what’s wrong?

  “Okeydokey,” Emily said, and she left.

  86

  She walked back home, brooding about the way she had failed her grandmother.

  If Emily had asked her to talk, Florence might have refused. But she might not have. Why didn’t I even ask?

  If there’s anything I’ve learned from her over these past weeks, it’s that you should always be bold. Take the chance. Take the risk that you’ll end up regretting your speech, because it’s better than regretting your silence.

  She thought about this for another block, and then she went back to worrying about Justin. She had turned off her Android during the conference, and when she turned it on again, there was a new video. It was of a robot named Oscar. Oscar asked her to visit, saying that if she stayed away, he wouldn’t have the strength to keep all his parts together. As the video went on, little pieces of Oscar disappeared, until he was just a tiny, fading voice.

  87

  Lone wolf, huh?

  Florence was still haunted by what that technician had said.

  Wouldn’t it be nice if she were to tell Emily what was truly bothering her, and Emily were to . . . who the hell knows? Devote herself to finding a cure for ALS? Give her a nice big hug? Vow to keep Florence’s ideas alive, by starting a Florence Gordon Appreciation Society?

  Florence didn’t even know why she was intent on keeping her illness a secret for as long as she could, but a deep-seated instinct told her it was the right thing to do.

  88

  So now, Janine thought, you kind of sort of have to choose.

  Some people, when they leave a spouse for someone else, can tell themselves that only now, with the new person, have they found real love. That must make things easy.

  She couldn’t tell herself that. She had known real love with Daniel.

  And some people, when they leave a spouse for someone else, can tell themselves that only now have they found real sex.

  She couldn’t tell herself that either.

  When she and Daniel had had their first kiss—though she’d been a wised-up college student, conversant with Foucault and Derrida and Deleuze and Lacan and Kristeva, defended by a solid wall of critical theory against all sentimental illusions—it had felt like a kiss from a fairy tale. If you have a first kiss like that, you never really want to kiss anyone else. You know where your home is.

  But she felt alert with Lev, intellectually excited, in a way she hadn’t felt with Daniel in a long time. If she’d ever felt it with Daniel. Daniel was just as intelligent as Lev, but he used his intelligence for settling and not for searching. Daniel wanted to live a life in which everything, day after day after day after day, was exactly the same.

  Would it be possible to have both? To live with Daniel in Seattle and Lev in New York?

  She thought of a slogan she’d once read in a book about the May 1968 uprisings in France: “Be realistic! Demand the impossible!” Maybe she’d read about it in one of Florence’s essays, actually. Perhaps she should be demanding the impossible.

  Maybe it is possible.

  But probably not.

  When she was in high school, she did her junior year abroad, living with a family just outside Paris. For most of the year she dated a French boy, Denis. He was planning on becoming a philosopher. He already had a girlfriend, a fellow philosophe, and he wouldn’t give her up. He’d explained it to Janine one night: “When I’m with her, I’m with her. When I’m with you, I’m with you”—as if nothing could possibly be simpler. If another girl interested him, he made it clear, he wouldn’t hesitate to be with her too.

  At first Janine had thought this was very advanced and very Sartre-and-de-Beauvoirish, and she’d tried hard to become French enough to find it appealing. Finally she’d decided that the boy was perhaps just a tad selfish, and that the arrangements he favored, impeccably avant-garde though they were, were notable chiefly in that they gave people new ways to hurt one another.

  So living two lives wasn’t an option.

  She had friends at home with whom she could have talked about this, if she were with them. She couldn’t see talking about it over the phone. She couldn’t see talking about it over Gchat. This whole situation sometimes made her feel idiotically like a teenager, but not that much like a teenager—not enough like a teenager to Gchat about it.

  She wished she could talk about it with Daniel. But of course she couldn’t.

  What will life be like if I stay with Daniel?

  What will life be like if I leave?

  If I do stay with him, she thought, I refuse to see myself as a woman who settled. Or someone who decided not to put her bourgeois existence at risk. I refuse to tell that story about myself. And I refuse to tell that story about Daniel.

  89

  At work it had become hard to think.

  Lev, as always, was a
way half the time, speaking at conferences or chatting up donors. She hadn’t been alone with him since their trip.

  On a Monday afternoon, after she’d seen the last of her college students for the day, he knocked on her door and came in.

  “Are we not talking?” he said.

  “I don’t know if we’re talking.”

  “If we are not talking . . . why are we not talking?”

  “You’re the award-winning psychologist,” she said. “You tell me.”

  “I suppose we’re not talking because . . . you feel guilty? You’ve realized you don’t want to be with me? You don’t know what you want?”

  “All of the above,” she said. “Except for the middle one.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t think so, Lev. Thank you for asking, but I don’t want to get into a conversation about our relationship before we even know if we have one.”

  “Fair enough. If you don’t want to talk about it, do you want to go bowling about it?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. I thought you’d never ask.”

  A new bowling alley had opened up on Amsterdam Avenue. As they walked there, she felt uneasy, as if bowling were the new infidelity.

  She was trying to walk with a stately beauty, unaware that her physical awkwardness was one of her charms.

  She felt embarrassed, but she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was about the night they’d spent together.

  It was a night that might have felt perfect if her life had been less complicated.

  It was fumbling, not wholly satisfying, friendly, not without its moments of humor. Clothes had not fully been removed. It was a kind of pleased-to-meet-you experience that would have been delightful if she’d felt sure that this night together was the first of many such nights. But in the nervous and uncertain state that she’d actually been in, every moment of awkwardness had felt like a sign.