She wiped again, trying to get more on her finger, and tasted it again. If she had been served the glop as a pâté on bread at a fancy restaurant she could have been convinced, without a lot of effort, that it was a delicacy, and she would probably have eaten the whole thing and not been revolted, even if she was only eating it because it had been served to her and because she was going to pay for it. But the blood, if that was even what it was, was so viscous that her tongue didn’t seem able to absorb it properly; it rolled on the surface and lingered, strangely, in the back of her throat. Was it lining? Was it tissue? And what was tissue made of, anyway? Was there something to it, or was it tissue all the way down? She flushed. She rolled the panty liner into a tiny ball and wrapped the ball neatly in toilet paper and buried it in the trash under her hair. She drank handfuls of tap water from the bathroom sink but the taste was still there, in the back of her throat, metallic, keeping her awake for some time.
The Next Day
Dorothy was still in bed the next morning when her phone vibrated. Her best friend, Gaby.
Gaby: Yooooooo
It was an ongoing feature of Dorothy and Gaby’s textual communication that repeated letters or punctuation marks were used to signal enthusiasm and intimacy. In the absence of these orthographic quirks, which constituted a kind of adolescent drag, both felt insecure, and with good cause: In their well-educated hands, proper spelling could be a cold formality; a properly placed period, a knife.
Dorothy: hiiiiii
Gaby: We’ve been partying since FIVE
The words appeared in a box against Dorothy’s lock screen, a screenshot of a Pierre Bonnard painting called Young Woman Writing. It showed a woman scribbling over a red tablecloth, with squares of white paper all around. Dorothy liked that the woman was intently focused, or perhaps collapsing, heapishly, over something that the viewer would never be able to read. She had heard it suggested that the papers were some work of art or letters to a great love. She liked to imagine the woman was writing her grocery list, or doing her taxes.
She pressed on the message and entered Rog’s birth date to unlock her phone, and a photo popped into the chat: Gaby’s baby, Sherman, in a Black Flag onesie and suede slippers. Sherman had a hawkish nose and a round face smushed into a cube of skull. The effect was that of a cute and old-fashioned bowl placed on a square plate. This morning his flat black hair was sticking in every direction like a punkish halo, and he was looking coyly to the side. Before her best friend had a baby Dorothy had not known that babies were flirts.
Dorothy: Aw!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gaby took this as an invitation to send another photo. Dorothy’s fondness for Sherman was mostly theoretical—she was not one of those women who love babies qua babies and fantasize, for example, about eating them—but she did enjoy the photos, if only as a way to stay in touch with her friend. In this one, Sherman’s eyes were squeezed shut and his mouth was gaped wide. He was crying. Dorothy could see that there was an underlying comedy to all despair that was specially revealed in an exaggerated infantile expression, but she couldn’t help mentally criticizing Gaby for delaying the giving of comfort in order to snap a photo. But maybe Sherman hadn’t been crying when she first held up the phone? Maybe he started crying because she held up the phone? It seemed unethical to take a photo of a crying child, but Dorothy couldn’t say why. Equally in the case of crying or smiling, the photographer distanced herself, electing to document rather than participate in the child’s feeling. That it seemed worse to do that with sorrow than with joy suggested that culturally, joy had been given short shrift.
Gaby was not being cruel or unfeeling by sending Dorothy these early-morning baby pictures. Dorothy hadn’t told her about the pregnancy, and anyway, she didn’t mind the photos. This flesh and blood creature with hair and teeth who wore slippers made from animal hide and who labored tirelessly to perfect the art of transferring objects from one hand to the other had no connection that she could see to her situation. Gaby would have agreed, if Dorothy had told her, which she would have, much as she would have told her therapist, except when she was about to, Gaby had started talking about her birthday, which had recently passed. They had been sitting on the sectional in Gaby’s apartment, facing each other, socked toes nearly touching. Gaby was trying to explain the relief of aging out of people’s misperceptions of her. She had crossed the Rubicon, she said.
“Like Caesar,” Dorothy had joked.
Gaby’s eyes were runny, two undercooked eggs. She did not like the reference. “No,” she said, pulling away her feet and tucking them underneath her. “I’m not an emperor.”
“I know,” said Dorothy. “I just meant that Caesar also—”
“I don’t think I’m Julius fucking Caesar,” Gaby said.
“I’m sorry,” Dorothy said. “I don’t think that you’re an emperor, or that you think that you’re an emperor, or whatever.”
Gaby pushed her glasses to the top of her head and rubbed tears from her eyes. This quality of tenderness was new in Gaby, and Dorothy assumed it was hormonal. The glasses were extra-large gold-wire aviators that had been purchased at the pharmacy on one of those plastic racks that spin. Whether or not they were fake was a matter of debate between Dorothy and Rog; it really depended on what you meant by fake. Technically there was a magnification of vision involved, although it was so small as to seem an insult to the truly vision-impaired. But the bigger issue was that Gaby was the kind of person who could make wearing glasses from the pharmacy seem chic. She had that inborn and absolute style that money can only partly explain and motherhood had not diminished. She pulled the frames back down over her face and explained that what she meant about the Rubicon was that she had crossed to the place where no one expected anything of her. She had tried various careers (law school, journalism, playwriting, documentary filmmaking) but had failed to fulfill her youthful promise—not because she was an interesting lost cause, but because the promise itself had been overstated. On this birthday in particular, her first since having Sherman, she had felt keenly and unmistakably that the world had given up on her. But it wasn’t a failure. It was a becoming.
“Everyone thought I was precocious,” Gaby said, “but that was never true. I was just young.”
Dorothy, who had known Gaby for ten years, thought that Gaby had been precocious, but she had also been indecisive and easily bored, and unwilling to work hard and improve incrementally. But what Gaby said helped Dorothy clarify something she had been struggling for some time to put into words.
“I feel the same way,” Dorothy said. “It’s like every time I don’t get a job, my own sense of fraudulence gets closer to being accepted as the truth I always knew it was.”
“I have a job,” said Gaby, who was spending ten hours a week fact-checking a book on the history of surveillance written by a friend of her father’s, and who had not entirely forgiven Dorothy for the Julius Caesar moment. “I mean, you have a job, too.”
“We both have jobs,” said Dorothy, aware that this was the kind of thing most people didn’t have to insist on.
“You should have a baby,” Gaby said. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to be needed. Sherman would die without me. It’s good for my self-esteem.”
Dorothy, who at that point had not decided one way or another what should be kept and what thrown away, said only, “I know.”
* * *
—
He looked betrayed. His eyes, shocked with a new awareness of pain. His arms, reaching up, out, to be held.
Dorothy: poor Shermie—is he OK?!
Gaby: Yah he’s fine…I keep meaning to tell you I met someone who is writing a book about Daphne du Maurier
Dorothy: !!!!!!
Years ago, Dorothy had the ambition to write a popular biography of Daphne du Maurier, the author of her favorite novel, Rebecca. At that time Dorothy was
fresh off her first publication, an article about du Maurier and Carolina Nabuco, who claimed that du Maurier plagiarized her novel A Sucessora. It was an early triumph that Dorothy would fail to surpass or even match. While riding high on this success—which in the years since had come to seem small, and therefore humiliating, especially in light of its accompanying feeling of achievement, of having “made it”—Dorothy fantasized that she might enjoy a notable career, that she could be a scholar who taught at a top-tier research university and wrote books for the general reader that would be reviewed in the daily paper. She had long since abandoned such ambitions, and remembering them made her shrink from herself in agony, but Gaby, even as she changed careers in the enthusiastic, slightly idiotic way that some people fall in love, believing each new affair will last, had held Dorothy to this ideal. Gaby had a lot invested in the notion that Dorothy could do what she had set out to do. Gaby had no way of understanding what a decade in academia could do to a person, but if she had, Dorothy wouldn’t have wanted to be friends with her.
Dorothy: is OK it’s an honor just to be a superfan
Gaby: She seems dumb anyway
Gaby: This woman I met, not DDM
Dorothy: Right right
Dorothy: What else
Dorothy: Heyyyyy?
Gaby was busy, or she had lost interest, or she had suffered a stroke and Sherman was crying with outstretched arms and there was no one in the room to feed him or take his picture or prevent him rolling off the bed into an accident Dorothy tried not to picture, but it was too late, she saw it, the crushed skull, the still body. Dorothy sent an emoji with hearts for eyes and thumbed over the headlines. She rolled to the edge of the bed and tugged on the curtain. The sky was a thick impasto of white. It looked freshly poured and wet, as if you could leave footprints in it. She pulled down her underwear to see if there was any new blood. There wasn’t. Gravity had yet to do its morning work.
She didn’t regret not telling Gaby, but it made her feel far away, like she was drifting in the ocean and Gaby was back on shore. If only there was some way to have the intimacy of telling without losing control over the story. That was the worst, when all your little pieces got scattered around. Rog got up and they drank coffee while looking at their phones. After he left, she took a shower and put on pants and looked at the article by Silvan Tomkins she was teaching later that day and then it was time to go into the city for a session with her second therapist.
* * *
—
Rog insisted, whenever Dorothy asked for reassurance, which was often, that he didn’t mind that she was spending money they could have been saving for an apartment or retirement on therapy. “First of all,” he would say, “would we really be saving it? I think we would just waste it on takeout and frivolities.” This word, “frivolities,” was characteristic of Rog, who had the questionable gift of turning his and Dorothy’s worst qualities into a joke. Some people, he added, his voice hinting at an obscure knowledge of human vice, had far worse and more expensive habits. Dorothy went as far as to offer to pay for the second therapist out of her own paycheck, but that would have required an overhaul of their entire fiscal scenario. Rog always said that it was merely an accident of history that his labor, which involved project management and a software company, was compensated at a rate higher than Dorothy’s, and as this recompense had no inherent relationship to their respective human worth—a word that betrayed the deep cultural bias toward the economic—it made no sense not to redistribute his salary, which could hardly go by the name “wealth,” and was anyway not so great by New York standards, though it dwarfed Dorothy’s—the point was that their finances were all mixed together, “joint,” making them by some measures more married than their married friends who maintained separate accounts. But on this point Rog would not negotiate. He did not want to be in a relationship where pennies were counted and receipts were submitted. Neither did Dorothy.
Dorothy’s second therapist had the inside office of a suite on the seventh floor of a building downtown. Her waiting room doubled as a real estate agent’s office. The broker was a smoother operator than the slobs and hustlers from whom Dorothy had rented apartments. He wore slim-fitting suits that hit at the ankle, and smelled like a hair salon. Once Dorothy had trailed him from the subway to the office, the length of an entire block. There had been some activists blocking the sidewalk that day, protesting the bank next door for funding a tar sands operation. “Get a job,” the broker yelled as he shoved his way through the picket. Dorothy could have predicted the broker’s contempt, but the nakedness of his hatred, how he didn’t feel he had to hide it—that was surprising.
Today he sat at the desk with his earbuds in, breathing noisily, listening to what seemed to be a guided meditation. On the table in front of Dorothy was a tattered copy of Psychology Today. Your Deepest Secrets: What You Hide, Even From Yourself. The watercooler burped. Dorothy pulled out her phone. On Twitter, Alexandra was sharing some personal news.
Alexandra was a former member of Dorothy’s cohort who was on the tenure track at Northwestern. “Friends (and enemies, ha), my book has been acquired by Oxford!” she had tweeted. Dorothy scanned the replies. She knew or recognized most of the names chiming in—young professors scattered around the good schools on either coast, a few ambitious grad students who had learned to leverage the power of social media, and Dorothy’s and Alexandra’s former adviser, Judith Robinson. Most everyone confined themselves to “congratulations” or the champagne emoji; a couple asked what the book was about. Judith had replied, “I expect nothing less.”
It had been some time since Dorothy had felt herself to be in Judith’s favor, but to witness Alexandra publicly claimed in this way was nonetheless gutting. Dorothy exhaled so loudly that the broker opened his eyes to glare at her. “Sorry,” she said, and regretted saying it. He closed his eyes and his first fingers and thumbs floated toward one another as if of their own accord.
Dissertation advisers, like parents, have favorites. For the first three or four years of grad school Dorothy had assumed that she was Judith’s favorite, because Judith trusted her with so many tasks, from alphabetizing books to footnoting articles and even housesitting. She made Dorothy privy to departmental gossip, and once had set Dorothy up with a professor from another school. (It didn’t work out; the professor’s divorce was not as final as Judith had led Dorothy to believe.) Dorothy had assumed that Judith’s attention was a sign of interest in her work. But one day in office hours Dorothy happened to overhear, while waiting outside the cracked door (the excuse for leaving the door cracked was always Judith’s demand for fresh air, but it was widely acknowledged that Judith believed that whatever she said to one person was worth hearing by the entire department), her beloved adviser, a titan, a woman who broke major ground, exclaim that the argument Alexandra was working out in her article draft was “significant.”
“Significant” was not a word that anyone had ever used in relation to Dorothy’s writing. She heard “clever” or “bright” or “promising,” a word that contains in it the threat of being broken. Even when she published her du Maurier article, no one had believed it to be “paradigm-shifting” or “field-defining,” which everyone knew were the aims of twenty-first-century literary scholarship. It was, instead, “very good,” and “relevant,” and even, one of the readers said—and Dorothy still wasn’t sure whether this was meant as a compliment—“stylish.” Not “significant.”
While Alexandra was basking in her anointment, thrumming with pride, Dorothy was pretending to be too engrossed in a passage from Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction to be eavesdropping—though again, it could hardly be called eavesdropping when they had wanted her to hear everything. She held the book, which was enormously large and heavy, high up to her face, hoping to indicate fascination and ease—that while she was too engrossed in Bourdieu’s important text to notice whoever was exiting the
office, she did not have to be engrossed; she was not confused or struggling. On the contrary, her interest had the lightness and breeziness of a person enjoying a wonderful conversation with a dear old friend who happens to be the most popular kid in school. She was absorbed but effortlessly; she just really liked it! Usually Dorothy underlined her books with a heavy hand and filled the margins with bewildered asterisks and question marks, indicating passages to which she must return in order to obtain even a shred of comprehension, but that day she forced her hand to flippantly issue little check marks, bubbly evidence of offhand agreement, of her capacity to quickly scan a text and intuit its most important points, which were so transparent that they hardly needed annotating, except that it was a habit—habit, habitus, ha!; or maybe it appeared that she had read this book so many times already that these check marks were ultracasual greetings or reminders, just a cursory dip back into extremely familiar territory. Check! As she waited for Alexandra to leave Judith’s office, Dorothy’s hand issued check after happy check—check!—conscious as she did that she was producing a chaos of checks, a senseless chorus of dimwitted marginal accord. Then Alexandra tapped her on the shoulder and Dorothy jumped, sending a line of graphite across one of Bourdieu’s famous charts and dragging the point of the mechanical pencil through the page.
“Oops,” Alexandra said. “You tore it.”
She peered down. “Wow, you really like this page,” she added.
Dorothy smiled without teeth and shoved the book into her bag.
The Life of the Mind Page 4
