Florence Gordon (12 page)

Saul scrunched up his face and in a high, mincing, baby-talking voice, said, “Every word I’ve ever written has been in the service of the cervix.”

A waitress turned up, poker-faced about whether she’d heard this, and they ordered, and the waitress went away.

“Florence Gordon!” he said. “Everywhere I turn, it’s Florence! Florence! Florence! People who haven’t mentioned your name in years: ‘Have you heard from Florence?’ ‘Aren’t you happy for Florence?’ ‘Florence must not even have any time to talk to you.’ All these people who’re acting like you’ve accomplished something. Just because some lesbian took her clothes off for you in the
New York Times.
”

“I don’t think she’s a lesbian, Saul. Not that it matters. And I don’t remember the thing about the clothes.”

“The
New York Fucking Times.
These are the bozos who told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. These are the pussies who stopped using the word ‘torture’ and started talking about ‘enhanced interrogation’ because they didn’t want to say anything that would get Dick Fucking Cheney mad at them.”

She had known that Saul would try to make her pay for her good fortune.

If a similar review had come Saul’s way, he’d be crowing now about the greatness of the
Times;
he’d be saying that it was the one newspaper that even the most radical and daring thinkers had always had to take seriously.

She had known that Saul was going to try to make her pay, and she had known that she was going to take it. Not because she feared him, but because she pitied him. Saul had been growing sadder and more bitter and more desperate for the last twenty years, and on the infrequent occasions when they got together, he invariably started by attacking her, and she never had the heart to fight back.

After the coffee arrived he took out a vial and shook some pills onto the table. Pills of many different colors and sizes and shapes.

“I have to take fifteen of these goddamn things a day. Five in the morning, five in the . . . shit.”

One of the pills had rolled off the table. He bent over in his chair and picked it up and wiped it with his napkin.

When you and your ex-husband are in your seventies, the advantage normally goes to the man. The man will look maybe not as good as he thinks he looks, but better than you do.

But with Florence and Saul, fortunately, the facts were otherwise. Bald except for shaggy remnants on the sides of his head, alarmingly red-faced, not fat but puffy and paunchy, Saul was a ruin.

She herself wasn’t exactly turning heads, but she was presentable.

“How are things going?” she said. She sensed that the force of his anger was spent, and that they could move on to other things.

“Great. Things are going great. I’m finishing up two books, if you can believe it, and a couple of publishers are very interested.”

“That’s wonderful, Saul.”

Small talk for a while, and then: “The reason I asked you to lunch, actually, is that I thought we could do each other a mutual favor. I heard about the job in the Cultural Criticism Department—the lectureship thing. I was thinking you could recommend me. It would be good for you, and it would be good for me.”

It would be good for her, in Saul’s reckoning, because his greatness would add luster to NYU. In this, as in many things, he was delusional. Most of the people who’d heard of him were dead.

It was remarkable, though, that he was presenting this as an occasion when they could do each other a favor. His normal way of talking about something like this would be to represent it purely as a favor that he wanted to do for you. His normal way of approaching this would be to say that it would be a painful bore for him to have a lectureship, but he’d be willing to take one, to help you out.

“Well, I’ll have to look into it, Saul.”

“Of course you’ll have to look into it. I know you can’t just slap a contract down on the table. But I’m a great teacher. I’d be perfect for this job. I wouldn’t be bringing it up if I wasn’t.”

“I know that. But these aren’t decisions I can make on my own. I can only make recommendations.”

“Right. Of course. Like you recommended Tanya.”

That had been a misstep on Florence’s part. She’d gotten her friend Tanya a job at NYU a year earlier, pretty much steered her into it. Getting her the job hadn’t been the mistake; the mistake had been telling Saul about it.

“You’ve been a fucking bureaucrat for so long that you don’t even realize when you’re lying anymore.”

Control yourself, she thought.

Saul was one of the few people in the world on whom she didn’t feel free to unleash her aggression. She felt permanently guilty toward Saul. Not because she’d divorced him, but because she’d married him in the first place.

When she was young, she’d had a future in mind for herself, a future as a scholar and writer. She hadn’t yet conceived of herself as a feminist—this was the early 1960s, and she found her way to feminism only toward the end of the decade. But she’d already known that she didn’t want to be a housewife. And sometimes she thought that she’d married Saul with a touch of bad faith.

It was hard to remember it now, but at the time Saul had seemed like a winner: ruddy, hardy, healthy, and alive. He’d seemed like someone you could make good children with. And he’d also seemed like someone who wouldn’t detain her. It was as if she’d sensed from the beginning that the ties that bound them wouldn’t be that confining. He seemed easy to marry and easy to leave.

He’d had affairs all through their courtship, and she knew that he’d continue to have affairs after they were married. In a display of frankness that in retrospect she sometimes counted as her first act of feminist self-assertion, she told him that she didn’t give a damn about what he did in his free time as long as he didn’t embarrass her and as long as the children didn’t find out. (At first she’d planned on having more than one.)

That seemed like an unbelievably good deal to him.

What it came down to was that she’d wanted children, but she’d never really wanted to be a wife. And despite all his foolishness and running around, despite all the behavior that led everyone who knew them to consider her the injured party, she now believed that, in some not quite conscious way, she had used him all along.

She had divorced him in the mid-seventies, when Daniel was still a boy. It had seemed like a good time to leave him. Saul was thriving: he had a comfortable job at Adelphi University; he was writing regularly for
The
Nation
and
Dissent
and the
New Leader
and the
New American Review.
And when she left him, he didn’t seem to mind. Still an incorrigible philanderer, he’d been seeing someone, an editor named Camille, for more than a year.

But then Camille was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died with an astonishing quickness, and a few years later he lost his job at Adelphi because of a mess of his own making. (He had fallen in love with a student, who reciprocated his interest for a while and then drew back, and after she drew back he went a little nuts. Florence had viewed it with a kind of detached sympathy: true, he’d made a fool of himself, but he’d been crazy about the girl. And probably there was an element of delayed reaction to Camille’s death.)

After that, it had been thirty years, no comebacks. He’d never gotten a comparable job—instead he taught for a year here, a semester there, and worked horribly long hours as a freelance copy editor. He’d moved to increasingly shabby neighborhoods as his income declined, finally moving all the way to Brooklyn, which was the ultimate insult to his ego. (For an intellectual of his generation, the great heroic journey was the journey out of Brooklyn into Manhattan; it was devastating to have to make the journey in reverse.) And although he claimed to be writing, and was forever telling her about publishing companies that were panting to see his work, he hadn’t published anything in almost twenty years.

Even his name, his first name, was a burden. When he was a young man, he was proud to be named Saul: his name had been an inducement to greatness, because he had no doubt that he’d unseat Saul Bellow as the premier Jewish writer of the age. It hadn’t quite happened that way, and now his name seemed to mock him. It was like being a mediocre ballplayer who happened to be named Michael Jordan.

Florence had been looking forward to a Saul-free middle age, but she found out that things don’t work that way. When everything in his life fell apart, she felt she had to prop him up. She didn’t respect him, didn’t trust him, didn’t even like him, but she was going to have to look out for him, as best she could, probably for the rest of her life.

“So how come you never showed up for the big family dinner that night?” she said.

“I had a cold.”

“You couldn’t call?”

“I thought I left you a message. How’s Dan?”

“Daniel’s good. They’re all good. They’re thinking about moving here, you know.”

“Yes, I know. That would be heartwarming. I’ve always wanted to get to know my son better.”

That was a joke. Saul seemed to have no interest in his son.

They chatted for another twenty minutes, but Saul seemed restless. He’d wanted to see her so he could ask her for the favor, and now that that was done he wanted to leave.

“Well, I’m going home to take a nap. I was thinking I’d give myself a treat tonight and jerk off, and I gotta rest up for it.”

“Thanks for letting me know that, Saul.”

“I’m not saying it’s a sure thing. It’s more a hope than a plan. You reach a certain age, you’ve got to pop a couple of Viagra even if all you want to do is jack off.”

“That’s also good to know.”

He talked too much about his sex life, when he was having one, and his lack of one, when he wasn’t.

A year ago, Saul had been seeing someone, and he was always laying down heavy hints about the alleged excellence of his sex life. Florence didn’t believe him—when someone keeps telling you how good his sex life is, you can be sure that it isn’t—but even if it was as dandy as he claimed, it didn’t matter to her. There was no residual hurt here, and no jealousy, and no wish to have a physical life comparable to that which he claimed to be having.

Florence still experienced sexual desire, of course, but it had been a long time since she’d actually wanted to have sex. Sex was too messy, too unsettling, too inarticulate, too revealing, too disappointing. She didn’t miss those faintly comic exertions. The thought of paunchy, boiled-faced Saul having sex—she couldn’t imagine it as anything but comic.

He took a long drink of water, and then he had a coughing fit, which went on for so long that it worried her. When it was done, it seemed to have aged him. As she looked across the table at him, with his forever-affronted face, the face of a man who believed that life had played a trick on him, she had an image of his heart giving out while he was laboring atop some doughy sex worker, and she imagined the sex worker taking the bills from his wallet, slipping out of the hotel room (why was this fantasy taking place in a hotel room?), and leaving poor Saul there all alone.

She had the silly notion that she could see his fate. Someday Saul’s corpse would lie abandoned in a cheap hotel. She could see it clearly. And despite everything, for a moment she felt an infinite tenderness toward him, and toward the sad failed project of his life.

Florence’s doctor pressed a button on the sanitizer, spritzed some into his palm, and rubbed his hands together, gazing reverently at her all the while, as if he were in the presence of greatness.

She had called him to tell him about her sprained ankle, and during the course of the conversation she’d worked her way around to the things she really wanted to talk about—her frantic fingers and her flappy foot, which were starting to worry her a little—and he’d asked her to come in so he could have a look.

“Florence Gordon,” he said. “My hero. My heroine.”

“You always seem amused when you see me, Noah. Do all your patients amuse you?”

“My patients don’t amuse me. You don’t amuse me. What you’re mistaking for a smile of amusement is a smile of admiration.”

“And do you admire all your patients? Why do you admire me?”

“I admire your accomplishments.”

“About which you know nothing. Have you read even one of my books? Even one essay?”

“I
have
read your work. I read that article of yours. The one we talked about. I liked it very much.”

“That article. You read that article fifteen years ago.”

“No. Has it been that long?”

While they were talking he was listening to her body with his stethoscope, testing her reflexes, pressing on her lymph nodes. He had a knack of making you feel as if you were spending twenty minutes doing nothing but joking with him, even while he was examining you scrupulously.

He obviously hadn’t seen the review; if he had, he would have been talking about it.

The world, for her, was now divided into two groups: people who’d read the review and people who hadn’t. She trusted that this state was temporary.

“But your accomplishments aren’t the only thing about you that I admire,” he said.

“What else?”

“I treat a lot of writers. You know that, right?”

“I didn’t, really. I knew you treated some.”

“A lot. A lot of very good, very established writers. And they’re all very different, of course—they’re all rugged individualists—but there’s one thing they have in common. Every writer I’ve ever had as a patient, every one, has been a hypochondriac. Except you.”

“I was going to say—”

“You’re the only one. You’re not cavalier about your health; when something is bothering you, you come in and see me. As you should. But you’re not a hypochondriac. And I find that remarkable.”

He was shining a light into her eyes as he spoke.

“And that’s why, when you come to me with a concern, I know it’s real. I know enough to take it seriously. You’re not the Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

“I think you mean Chicken Little.”

“I mean the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But if you want me to say Chicken Little, I’ll say Chicken Little. You’re not Chicken Little either. You know what I’m trying to say. You’re not somebody who comes in to see the doctor for no reason.”