Florence Gordon (13 page)

She mentioned her ankle again, as if it were the reason for her visit, and he said her ankle was healing perfectly. He said it almost dismissively, as if a mere sprained ankle wasn’t distinguished enough for either of them to be concerned with.

He asked her for fuller descriptions of the other things she’d been experiencing. He made her walk in a straight line; he made her follow the beam of his flashlight with her eyes as he moved it back and forth a few inches from her face. Then he took a look at both hands and both feet, testing their range of motion very gently—her left ankle was the one she’d sprained, and he somehow manipulated her left foot without bringing any more pain to the ankle.

He took his stethoscope off. He always turned it into a dramatic act.

“Okay. Suit up and meet me in my office.”

That was part of the ritual of seeing Noah. After he examined you, he asked you to put your street clothes back on and join him in his office, and you talked like two real people, not like a doctor and a poor, defenseless patient in a paper gown.

When she got to his office he was furiously emailing away, but he closed the lid of his computer when she sat down.

“These little complaints you have. They’re interesting.”

“I’m glad to be able to interest you, Noah. It’s been a dream of mine.”

“No, they are. When my star Stoic comes in to tell me she feels a little weird, it gets my attention.” His phone started vibrating and he slapped it and it quieted down.

“Now, there are about a thousand things that this might be, and the huge majority are nothing. So the first piece of medical advice I have for you is this: don’t go on the Internet. If you go on the Internet, you can make yourself crazy. You’re free to spend your time that way, if that’s your thing, but I have a feeling you have better ways to spend your time. All the bad things that it might be are very exotic and very unlikely. You may have heard this before, but if a good doctor hears hoofbeats, he thinks it’s probably a horse. He doesn’t think it’s probably a zebra. We’re going to have you do some tests—some blood tests, an MRI, maybe an EMG, maybe a nerve conduction test—and we’re going to have you see a very good neurologist, and we’ll find out what kind of a horse it is. Okay?”

He picked up his stethoscope and put it back around his neck and came out from behind his desk. He was ready for his next appointment.

“And listen,” he said. “You live, what, ten blocks away? You shouldn’t be a stranger.”

He patted her on the knee.

“That’s a reassuring nonsexual pat, by the way. Don’t sue me.”

“I won’t sue you, Noah. My family’ll sue you, though, if this turns out to be a zebra and you keep looking for horses and fuck this up.”

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I haven’t fucked anything up yet.”

“That’s what I like to hear from a doctor,” Florence said.

During the two months that Emily had spent alone with her mother in New York, they’d seen Florence twice, at her birthday party and after the Town Hall event. Now that Daniel had joined them, they were seeing her almost every week.

Emily had the impression that Florence didn’t enjoy these visits, but there was something about Daniel’s commitment to family life that made it impossible to say no to him, even for Florence Gordon, the master of the art of saying no.

Whenever they got together, of course, Florence held center stage. Tonight, in the living room at West Ninety-fourth Street, she was complaining a lot—about her students, who, even in the summer, wouldn’t let her alone; about her sprained ankle, which still hurt, and still left her dependent on her cane; about her success, which was preventing her from concentrating on her work.

“For the first time in my life, I can’t take care of everything I need to take care of. I’m behind on my emails, my apartment is a mess, I have books overdue at the library. I have research I need to do but it’s a hassle to get down there to do it. I need a wife.”

“You don’t need a wife,” Emily said. “You just need a trusty assistant.”

“Are you nominating yourself?” Janine said.

Emily expected Florence to quash the idea, but Florence didn’t say anything.

Emily had time on her hands—she was taking a literature class at Barnard two evenings a week, but other than that she was free. And it would be nice to earn some money.

“I guess I am,” she said.

Florence had been looking nowhere in particular; now she looked at Emily. The look lasted only an instant, but Emily felt as if she’d been scanned, searched, and sorted. She was sure that neither of her parents had registered anything at all, but Emily felt . . . it was absurd to think anything like this, but it was as if she’d been treated roughly.

“Excuse me a minute,” she said, and left the room.

Florence’s first thought: Thank God it was Emily who’d volunteered and not Janine. It would be just like Janine to thrust herself forward at a moment like that (“I have free time! I can help you!”), which would have meant that Florence would have had to say no, which would have been awkward all around.

Her next thought: Is there any way Emily might end up being a Trojan Horse for Janine? Not that Emily was intending anything like that, obviously. But if I let open the door to Emily, will her mother barge through?

Her next thought: Is Emily intelligent enough?

She took a look at the girl. She wasn’t sure she’d ever looked at her closely before.

Over the years, Florence had had many assistants, and the main thing she’d learned was that people were stunningly inept. It wasn’t just that they didn’t know how to research anything competently; they couldn’t even use a Xerox machine. It was amazing how few of them would fail to fuck up even that. They’d copy the pages out of order; they’d press the book down so weakly against the screen that the images ended up blurry and smudged; if they were students of hers at NYU, they’d be too lazy to go to the Duplicating Office to use the machines that were kept in good repair, instead using the crappy old machines in the library. Often enough Florence stopped asking her assistants to do anything more challenging than pick up her mail at the faculty mailbox. So she wasn’t sure she could trust Emily to do the work. She seemed smart enough, but you could never be sure. If Emily fucked it up it would be painful. It would be painful to have to fire her, but damned if Florence was going to keep her on the payroll for the rest of the summer just to be nice.

Emily was leaving the room. Where the hell was she going?

When she came back, she was holding an iPhone or BlackBerry or some kind of smartphone—what a stupid term, Florence thought—and peering down at it. Infuriating.

“I can give you a week of work,” Florence said. “After that, we’ll see.”

We’ll see whether you’re an idiot, she thought. If you’re not, I’ll keep you on. A week should be enough time to find out.

“Cool,” Emily said, making an effort to sound as unenthusiastic as possible. “When do I start?”

She said this without looking up from her Android. There was nothing she needed it for; she just wanted to annoy the old battle-ax.

Idly she went to Google and typed into the search bar:
What have I gotten myself into?

Emily spent the next few afternoons in the Tamiment Library’s feminism and women’s history collection, on the second floor of NYU’s Bobst Library on Washington Square. A trove of material from the dawn of the contemporary women’s movement was housed there, including documents and recordings that couldn’t be found online. The idea that there
were
documents and recordings that couldn’t be found online had never really occurred to her before.

Emily’s first task was to read through a collection of periodicals and pamphlets from the late sixties and early seventies—
Redstockings,
Off Our Backs,
the
Female State
—looking for references to a few key women and a few key events. Her second was to dive into the oral history collection, which included dozens of interviews with women activists. Some of them had been transcribed, but most of them were still available only on tape.

Emily liked going to Bobst. It was vast and quiet and humming with the thoughts of everyone who was studying there; and it had every book you could imagine wanting. She liked getting comfortable with obscure tools of research. Cassette tapes! Microfilm! She felt like a votary of ancient knowledge. She felt as if the experience were preparing her for going back to college, not that she’d be having any contact with microfilm and cassette tapes when she did.

She took more time in the archives than she needed to, because, in addition to doing the research Florence had asked her to do, she couldn’t stop herself from doing research on Florence. If, next to an article that Florence had asked her to summarize, she found an article by Florence herself, she always took the time to read it. These were things that she was pretty sure had never been collected in Florence’s books. Many of the articles were more personal than she would have expected. Sometimes she felt almost as if she were leafing through her grandmother’s old diaries.

After she finished working for Florence, she would spend an hour just haunting the stacks and reading things at random. Then she’d take out a marbled composition book she carried with her everywhere, and spend some time writing her . . . whatever it was she wrote. Stories, or sketches, or snippets—she never knew what to call them. She liked to write in one of the glass-walled reading rooms over the square, from which you had a beautiful view of Manhattan, a city whose grandeur she was finally beginning to feel. She was coming to understand why her mother had been such a Manhattan-worshipper all her life.

At the end of the week, she went to Florence’s and handed her a folder of material. Florence opened it and started looking through the notes and photocopies Emily had made.

“I was surprised about some of the positions you were taking back then,” Emily said.

“What positions?” Florence said, not bothering to look up.

“If I understand what . . . during Vietnam, you were saying that protesting the war and stuff wasn’t as important as fighting for gender equality.”

“I never had any problem with protesting the war. And stuff.” Florence was already leading her to the door. “I’m not sure if there’s anything else I need from you. I’ll call you.”

Florence didn’t say anything like “Nice job”—probably, Emily thought, because she considered herself too intellectually rigorous to say such a thing before she’d had a chance to go through Emily’s notes and ascertain whether she actually had done a nice job. You couldn’t expect Florence to engage in meaningless pleasantries.

You might, though, have expected her to say thank you, but she didn’t do that either.

Fuck you too, Emily thought as she went to the elevator. Pardon me for being interested.

Emily got a call from Florence later that day. Florence wanted her to do more work. Evidently she had passed the test.

The more time Emily spent doing research for Florence, the more complicated her idea of Florence became.

It’s just as difficult to imagine an old person’s past as it is to imagine a young person’s future. If you had asked Emily to imagine what Florence had been like in her twenties, she would have guessed that Florence had always been more or less the person she was now: a creature of rectitude and morality and sanity, though one who liked to demonstrate the virtues of sanity in attention-grabbing ways. The Florence of today was militantly sober. But it turned out that in her younger days, Florence had been a hothead. Among the articles Emily found were a silly thing about how wonderfully radical it is to stop wearing a bra (bralessness, Florence had believed, was a harbinger of the new, more liberated world to come), a diatribe against romantic relationships (it was so extreme that it made you think that maybe the author’s true problem was that she couldn’t get a date), and several semi-insane paeans to Cuba and Vietnam, each of which she’d visited in the early seventies, and each of which had struck her as a kind of a paradise (though not, curiously, a paradise in which she had any desire to live).

And the stuff about sex, drugs, and rock and roll! Some of it was enough to make you embarrassed on the writer’s behalf; some of it was not so bad; but none of it reminded her of her grandmother at all. It made Emily wonder whether your identity has less to do with anything inside you than with the time in which you happen to be alive. The Florence of 1973 resembled other women of 1973 much more than she resembled the Florence of today.

All of this was stunning to Emily, because Florence, more than anyone else she’d ever known, had seemed to be a self-created being.

But maybe none of this was evidence that Florence was just a creature of her times. Maybe Florence
had
been a product of her times when she was young, but had gradually liberated herself from her influences. Maybe she’d only gradually come to be herself.

Emily would have liked to ask her about her transformation, but it was impossible to ask her about anything. You could ask, but you couldn’t get an answer. One day Emily came across an essay about Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
that Florence wrote in the late seventies. Florence made it sound like one of the greatest novels ever written. Emily promptly read it, and didn’t find what Florence found. It struck her as one of those novels that hadn’t outlived their moment. She told Florence that she’d read it and that she hadn’t liked it that much.

“Read it again,” Florence said. That was the end of the conversation.

She doesn’t, Emily thought, understand how generous I’m being, in showing any interest at all in this stuff.

Emily wasn’t particularly political, and she had no idea if she was a feminist. She knew she was a beneficiary of the women’s movement—she’d read enough novels, she’d seen enough episodes of
Mad Men
to know what life before the women’s movement was like—but at the same time, the word “feminism” didn’t have great associations for her. The feminist girls she knew at Oberlin, her roommate among them, were the kind of people who made you feel bad for liking what you liked. Sometimes when Emily was tired or blue she liked to watch
When Harry Met Sally,
or
Love Actually,
or old episodes of
Friends,
and at Oberlin she’d had to wait until her roommate had gone out or fallen asleep.