Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  “I could make you happy,” Lev said now. “We could be happy together.”

  “Happiness? Isn’t that . . .”

  She had intended to make some allusion to Freud’s famous remark that the best one can expect of life is ordinary unhappiness, but she decided that there would be no point.

  He began to talk about a project he’d been working on. He’d been in touch with Walter Mischel, his old mentor, the genius behind the Marshmallow Test. They were planning to work together on another series of studies, using neuroimaging to map the effects of music, multitasking, and other stimuli on the decision-making capacities of adolescents.

  They were still a block from the bowling alley, but he stopped.

  “Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “You’re talking about neuroimaging.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about us. You’re interested in the same things I am. But you see it all differently. You go at it all differently.”

  “I’m still not . . .”

  “We could help each other think,” Lev said.

  The bowling alley was bright and modern; it had Wi-Fi and waitress service and a bar. She missed the shabby bowling alleys of her youth. They got their shoes—she remembered how exciting it was to rent bowling shoes when she was a kid—and found their lane.

  Amazing how the personality doesn’t change. She bowled the way she always had, as far back as she could remember. She would draw a line with her gaze to the center pin, only to discover that the ball had a mind of its own. It would start off as if carrying out her wishes, but by the time it reached the middle of the lane it would have second thoughts, and it would wander off, sometimes this way, sometimes that, obeying not the laws of physics, but its own whims.

  Lev was lumpily graceful as he bowled. She thought of him as someone with only the most accidental relationship to his body. That’s how he’d seemed during the months in which she’d gotten to know him, and their night together had not dispelled that impression, having been filled with warmth and hugging but few traces of what might conventionally be described as sex. But now he seemed to have a body. He glided down toward the lane and released the ball with a sort of loving reluctance, as if it were a child, a small, round child, whom he had birthed and whelped and cared for and whom he was now granting its freedom. There was something tender even about the way he bowled.

  90

  “Well, this isn’t what I was hoping for,” Noah said.

  “I don’t imagine it was. I’m going to try hard not to blame you.”

  “You can blame me if you have to. Not in the legal sense. Don’t sue me or anything. But in the spiritual sense you can blame me all you want. I’m your doctor. I’m supposed to keep you well. That’s what I’m here for.”

  It was what he was there for. He was her doctor, and she had trusted him, and his role was to stand between her and disease. His role was to make sure she never got sick. He had failed.

  It was remarkable how, in a part of one’s mind, one can actually believe this.

  “Have you talked to your family?”

  She didn’t want to lie, but neither did she want to tell the truth. If she told the truth he might feel the need to intervene.

  “Yes. They’re all being very kind.”

  “Kind is nice, but what we need is helpful. It’s good to have family to take care of you.”

  “I’m sure they will.”

  She let the conversation wander for a while, and then she said, “I was wondering if you could prescribe some antianxiety medication.”

  “Florence Gordon? Antianxiety medication? Now I am shocked.”

  “I’m glad to know that I’m still capable of surprising you.”

  He had his prescription pad out.

  “Xanax’ll do? You don’t need anything stronger?”

  For a moment she thought he knew. But he didn’t know. He wouldn’t be willing to prescribe something stronger if he knew.

  “Well, a few years ago, when I had shingles, you had me on Vicodin. That was helpful.”

  The truth was that she’d never filled the prescription. She’d thrown it out. Shingles had been the most painful thing she’d experienced since giving birth, but she had preferred to endure it without cushioning.

  “Vicodin’s for pain. You don’t need Vicodin. If you want something to calm you down, I can write you a prescription for Ativan. But take it only if the Xanax doesn’t do the job. And don’t mix ’em, all right?”

  So she left the office with prescriptions for Xanax and Ativan. Those would do. In a month she would ask him to refill them, and in another month after that. By the time her situation became dire, she’d be well armed.

  How many people claim that if they feel the onset of dementia or any kind of radically debilitating disease, they will make their own exit? And how many of them actually do? She’d be one of the few who actually did. She wanted to live—she wanted desperately to live. But she wanted to live on her own terms.

  91

  Saul was waiting for her in Bryant Park, walking back and forth. He was wearing a suit—from a distance, he looked almost elegant—but when she got closer she saw that it hadn’t been cleaned or pressed in a while.

  “Have you heard anything about the job yet?” was the first thing he said.

  “We’re beyond the formalities, are we?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Most people like to start with ‘Hello.’”

  “Oh. Hello. How are you. You look divine.”

  “Thanks. So do you.”

  They sat at a table in an outdoor café near the public library.

  “Have you heard anything about the job yet?”

  “Saul, I haven’t heard anything about the job. As you know, it’s not even certain that there’s going to be a job.”

  “Well, aren’t you in a position to make it happen now?”

  “Why?”

  “You’re famous now. You’re a star.”

  “Saul. You’re overestimating the effect of one review. It’s not that big a deal.”

  “It’s not that big a deal? Are you crazy? This put you on the map. You can get things done now. You’re not the same person you were a month ago. You might feel like the same person, but in everybody else’s eyes you’re different. Which is what matters. And if you want something to happen at your school, you can make it happen now.”

  She thought of asking him why it mattered so much, since, as he’d told her a few months ago, Brooklyn and Stony Brook and Purchase were “begging” him to work for them again. But that would have been too cruel.

  If she told him she had ALS, would he stop nagging her? She almost wanted to tell him, just to see his response. It would be a fascinating experiment. Would he actually give a shit? He was so locked into his own egotism, so locked into his own bitterness, so locked into his obsessive recounting of the one story he had—the world never gave me a break; the world never gave me a break; the world never gave me a break—that she found it hard to imagine that he’d be capable of putting his needs aside and responding with a mature concern.

  “I just don’t understand why you can do favors for Tanya, who’s never published anything, and for Murray Gold, who’s someone you barely know, and Denise, who screwed you over not once but twice—”

  “Denise didn’t screw me over.”

  “You hired her twice and she screwed you over twice.”

  “She didn’t screw me. Her mother was in a car accident and ended up with brain damage—”

  “Her mother ended up with brain damage. Right. So she quit her job because her mother, who was senile in the first place—”

  “And the second time she had to withdraw—”

  “Because she had a better offer.”

  “She didn’t have a better offer. The poor woman—”

  “The poor woman! She used you and you respond by—”

  “She never used me. How did she use me?” />
  “How did she use you? Do you remember the whole thing with the credit card?”

  “That was a mix-up, Saul. That didn’t even have anything to do with her.”

  “That didn’t have anything to do with her, the thing with the library didn’t have anything to do with her, nothing had anything to do with her, and yet you still—”

  “Jesus Christ, Saul. What are we even talking about?”

  “What we’re talking about is very simple. We’re talking about the fact that you’ve never seen fit to help me find a job.”

  “I’ve tried, Saul, and you know I’ve tried.”

  “Have you? Have you? Then why hasn’t anything ever happened to turn up? You’ve made your inquiries, and you’ve told me to sit tight, but somehow nothing’s ever come of anything.”

  “I have made inquiries—”

  “Have you ever told them, really? Have you ever told them who I am? Have you ever told them that I was once named one of the top ten ‘writers to watch’ in a national magazine? Have you ever mentioned my column in the Village Voice, which Norman Mailer said was better than the column he was writing at the time? Norman fucking Mailer admitted it! Have you ever mentioned that I’m one of the few people around who could teach basically anything that needed to be taught, in the English Department or in the Writing Department, or the Politics Department or the History Department? Who else do you know who could teach the Bible and Milton and the Lake Poets and Moby-Dick and the Russian Revolution—has anybody ever heard of Martov anymore? Have Denise and Tanya and what’s-her-face ever heard of Martov? And I could teach the history of the little magazine, from the whaddayacallit, the Westminster Review—that was a great course. I taught it at Brandeis once and they had to move it to a bigger room it was so popular.”

  “I know, Saul. I know how great you are.”

  “Fuck off. I’m serious. You hire scholars, and I have more genuine knowledge than any of these phony little Ph.D.s. You hire writers, and I’m a better writer than any of the people you’ve ever hired. So how do you explain that? How do you explain that, Florence? You hired some little pisher from n+1 last year. I can write stuff that’ll knock those little fuckers on their ass.”

  “You’re dreaming, Saul.”

  She said it softly and almost involuntarily. She was almost surprised when it came out of her mouth.

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you’re so talented, do something to show it. Don’t just sit around talking about the amazing things you did forty years ago. If you’re so talented, write something that gets people talking. If you can write things that’ll knock those little pishers from n+1 on their ass, then write them already. So when I mention your name to potential employers they won’t say things like, ‘Saul? Is he still alive?’”

  He wasn’t prepared for her to speak this way. She’d been protecting him for so many years, bending over backward to minimize her successes and his failures, to make every sliver of good news that came his way seem better than it was, that he was unprepared to encounter the other side of her. He must have remembered that she had this other side, but it was almost as if he’d forgotten.

  “That’s really all I can say, Saul.”

  And in another move that surprised her as much as it doubtless surprised him, she stood up, opened her wallet, put twenty dollars on the table, and walked away.

  92

  The trouble with making a spontaneous dramatic gesture is that five minutes later, you’re likely to feel like an ass. Florence didn’t normally regret her spontaneous dramatic gestures—she was proud of them; she was vain about them. But she regretted this one. The poor bastard was down already, and she had pointlessly pushed him down further.

  She walked through midtown in the crowded lunch hour, wondering if there was any way to muffle the blow. But there wasn’t, was there? The blow had already been dealt and suffered.

  Her next destination was the West Village, where she was meeting her granddaughter at a café. Waiting at a bus stop near Times Square, watching people pass, she was struck by the general unloveliness. You can often forget. On the Upper West Side, where people are well off and you see a lot of students, you can think that beauty is the norm. But in other parts of the city you’re reminded that it isn’t true. Most of the faces of the people you pass are marked by hard living or ignorance or indolence or cowardice or exhaustion or smugness or intolerance or the simple causeless ugliness that can blight a life that might otherwise be reasonably pleasant.

  She thought of calling Saul and apologizing. But she was afraid—not of him, but of herself. He was unlikely to take the apology well—he was almost certain to snap at her—and she was afraid she’d respond badly and insult him a second time.

  But why should what she’d said be considered an insult, really? He was a writer. Let him write something good. Why was it an insult?

  It was an insult because they both knew he couldn’t. It was an insult because they both knew he was finished, and she had agreed not to acknowledge it until now.

  93

  Emily was delivering another folder to her grandmother: transcriptions that Emily had painstakingly made of tapes she’d listened to at Bobst, oral-history interviews with women whose lives had been touched by the new feminist thinking in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although some of the stories were fun to hear—she particularly enjoyed learning about the street theater escapades of WITCH, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell—transcribing interviews was the most plodding, time-consuming work that Emily had ever done, and she was glad to be finished with it.

  Florence had suggested they meet at a café in the West Village. Emily was a block or two away when Justin called back.

  Last night, she’d finally decided what she had to do. She wished she could tell him in a text or an email. But she didn’t want to be a coward, so she’d called and left a message. She hadn’t told him anything, just asked him to call back.

  “Hey, Auntie Em,” he said. “When you coming up?”

  “That’s what I was calling about,” she said. “I can’t come up.”

  “You have to come up. You said.”

  “I didn’t say I was gonna come up. You said I was gonna come up.”

  “But you have to.”

  There was a courtyard at the NYU law school, set back from the street, that provided a quiet place to talk.

  It wasn’t that it was any quieter than the street, actually; it was that it seemed wrong to try to break up with someone while you were walking. Justin wouldn’t know the difference, but it seemed wrong.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Can you come up next weekend?”

  “No . . . no.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “No,” she said, but she said it as softly as before.

  “No?”

  “No,” she said, a little louder.

  “You don’t understand. If you don’t come up, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how to live, Emily.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Emily. Don’t you get it? I’m scared.”

  She closed her eyes. If she let herself, she could put herself all the way inside him, and feel exactly what he was feeling. But she didn’t want to. If she allowed herself to feel it, she’d need to go up and stay with him again. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself.

  “Please. You have to come up. Just one more time. Just once.”

  The impulse to say yes was so strong. What would it cost her to say yes? What would it cost her to go up there for one more weekend? What would it cost her to help him?

  A clock on a church somewhere started bonging the hour. She was going to be late to see Florence.

  Florence came powerfully into her mind—Florence, hurrying forward through life, sure of herself, intolerant of distractions. When Florence decided to do something, she did it. There was no corridor of uncertainty between the decision and the act.

  She told h
erself to borrow her grandmother’s decisiveness, and bluntness, and coldness. She told herself that for the next few minutes, she should pretend to be her grandmother.

  “I’m sorry, Justin. I’m not coming up. We need to stop seeing each other. It’ll be better for both of us.”

  “You don’t know that. You’re not the one who’s going crazy.”

  “You’re right. I don’t know, actually. All I know is that it needs to be this way.”

  “You can’t just be with a person and then leave them when they’re drowning. That’s not like you, Emily. That’s not like you.”

  “You can get help. You can call your mother. You can call Steve. You can call the school psychologist.”

  “That’s it? That’s what you’ve got? The school psychologist? You get there two minutes late and instead of talking about your problems, they make you spend the whole session talking about why you were two minutes late. The school psychologist. You’re just going to leave me? Is that really what you want to do?”

  “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

  “I can’t believe you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She ended the call and put the phone in her pocket, and she resumed her walk.

  She felt dizzy; she felt ill. She felt like curling up in a trash can and resting for a while.

  She kept seeing two different Justins: Justin as he’d been on her visit, a boy who needed a kind of help she didn’t know how to give; and Justin as he’d been on the first day she saw him, helping the old woman in the library, with tolerance and generosity and patience.

  Her phone was vibrating. She stopped on the street to read the text.

  Not just one text, it turned out. In the two minutes since they’d gotten off the phone, he’d sent her five.

  The burden of each one was the same. You can’t do this. You’re killing me. I’m going to die.

  Again the thought of Florence helped her. A few weeks ago she’d read an article that Florence had written about Virginia Woolf. Woolf had said that the task of a woman writer was to kill off the “Angel in the House”: the part of oneself that was trained to put the needs of others, in every situation, before one’s own.