Florence Gordon (8 page)

“Your daughter knows a lot of things,” Janine said.

“I do. Anyway, the point is that Grandma is a literary lion now. You know what this means, don’t you, Grandma? It means you’re going to have to start tweeting.”

“My publisher has already broached the idea.”

Because her mother seemed oddly immobile, Emily went to the kitchen and got some snacks and brought them back into the living room. Nobody seemed to have moved.

“Will success change Florence Gordon?” Daniel said.

Emily was surprised when it seemed that Florence was taking the question seriously.

“If you make a big splash at
her
age,” Florence said, looking at Emily, “then it changes you. I’m too old to change.”

“I don’t know, Grandma,” Emily said. “I don’t think it would have changed you even if you’d been my age.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I think you’re made of iron.”

“I’m glad you think of me that way.”

“Are you going to do anything differently now?” Emily said.

“What should I do differently?”

“My dad said you said the review got everything right. Right?”

“I have nothing to complain about.”

“So now you can rest assured that people understand you. So I was wondering if there were other things you might want to say, now that you know you’ve said your piece and people have understood you. Maybe it’s a chance to change your life.”

“I never had any doubt that people understood me. And I didn’t need Martha Nussbaum to come along and help people understand my meaning. I think I’ve managed to make it plain enough myself.”

“Okay.”

“And I have no need of a chance to change my life. My life is just fine as it is.”

“She wasn’t trying to offend you, Mom,” Daniel said. “Don’t jump down the girl’s throat, for God’s sake.”

“She wasn’t jumping down my throat.”

“Exactly,” Florence said. “I wasn’t jumping down her throat. And you stay out of this.”

Emily couldn’t quite tell whether her grandmother had been jumping down her throat. Florence always made you feel as if you’d just said something dumb. It was impossible to tell whether she was more irritated than usual.

Janine felt oddly . . . what was the word? Not exonerated, but something like exonerated. Passed over? Let off the hook? She was usually the object of Florence’s scrutiny, but life was coming at the old lady so fast now that she didn’t have any spare energy to conduct her usual inquisition.

But this didn’t leave Janine feeling relieved. She was infected with a spirit of restlessness. She couldn’t wait for Florence to leave, but when Florence did leave, Janine felt lonely, even though her husband and daughter were still there.

In the evening, she and Daniel went to the movies downtown. After that, he wanted to walk around in the East Village, where both of them used to live.

She’d visited New York often enough in the years since they’d moved to Seattle, but she hadn’t gone back to the East Village. She hadn’t set foot here in more than twenty years. By the time they got to Cooper Square, she felt like a ghost, haunting her own life.

Here was the street where she’d spent her first summer in New York, just before she started at NYU. Here was the bar where she met that sad, sweet boy she’d once thought she was destined to spend the rest of her life with. What was his name? Here was the bench where she’d kissed that girl with the purple hair. She’d thought of herself as such a daring soul back then.

Here was the spot where she made that desperate and humiliating phone call to that boy she had a crush on in her sophomore year. The phone booth, of course, was gone. Here was the club where she used to listen to her friend Spider play guitar. It was a shoe store now. And here was the spot where she met Daniel.

“What do you think?” she said to Daniel.

“That was the place, right?”

“That was the place.”

Each of them had been traveling with friends that night. Some of her friends knew some of his friends. They’d met on the street corner, and while their friends were talking about what to do that night, the two of them launched into an argument about the country versus the city. Pure flirtation. He, who had grown up in the city, was denouncing it as prisonlike; she, who’d come from a suburb, couldn’t understand how anyone could ever be unhappy or bored here. She had pointed to some random apartment building and said, “Every brick in that wall is alive with human intention!” Later he had told her that when she’d said that, he’d decided that he wanted to go out with her.

They went out for a year, broke up after they graduated, and got together again a few years later.

“I wonder what we would have turned into if we’d stayed here,” she said.

“You would have become exactly what you are. Questing, self-questioning, deeply involved in your work. And I would have remained a snot-nosed would-be poet.”

“You think so?”

“I’m not sure I would have had the guts to give up.”

The young man finding the courage to live the life of an artist: that’s an oft-told story, a story people are fond of. For Daniel, it had been a question of finding the courage not to. During his childhood, living with two obsessed parents, the background music was a duet for typewriters, and he took it for granted that he’d become a writer himself. In high school he’d seen himself as Byronically romantic; during one spring, besotted with poetry and marijuana, he strode around in a cape. In college he studied literature and writing. During the week before commencement, his poetry teacher, an ex-marine who wrote poetry marked by a sort of burly anguish and who seemed to regard the academic world with a genial contempt, asked Daniel what he planned to do next, and when Daniel said he didn’t know, the teacher suggested that instead of bumming around aimlessly, he should spend a few years in the military and see how the other half lived.

Normally, this was the kind of suggestion Daniel would have laughed off—his teacher probably expected him to—but it came at a time when he was feeling rigorously critical of both of his parents, and within a few weeks he went to a recruiting office and signed up. When he looked back on this decision in later years, his only question was whether he had done it to spite them or merely to baffle them. He served for two years, and although he saw no action and never even left the States—he was posted to Fort Lewis, Washington, where, having been recognized immediately as a bookish type, he was assigned the job of editing a veterans’ newsletter—by the time he got out, he felt thoroughly liberated from his parents. Not just from his parents: he was liberated, also, from their world.

Florence and Saul, long divorced by then, were united only in this: neither of them could understand why the hell he’d done what he’d done. They were comfortably cloistered in the worldview of the Upper West Side; they wouldn’t have called themselves pacifists, but they’d been against every war the United States had waged in their adult lifetimes. If he’d joined a revolutionary organization dedicated to overthrowing the government by force, that might have made a little sense to them; joining the U.S. Army made no sense to them at all.

Later, when he became a cop, one thing he felt clear about, and felt good about, was that he hadn’t become a cop to spite them. He’d known that it would leave them both aghast, but that wasn’t why he did it.

He’d hated most of the things he encountered in the army. He hated the rigidity, he hated the hostility to thought, he hated the way you get turned into a machine programmed to inflict harm. But the thing that he loved about it was that it gave him his first real experience of democracy. The institution as a whole was hierarchical, but the enlisted men lived in a condition of stripped-down equality: nothing from your past, nothing that you’d been or done or had, meant anything now. The only thing that meant anything to the people you bunked with was not being an asshole, not doing your job so poorly that it made everybody else look bad, and not doing your job so well that it made everybody else look bad.

When he joined the police force, his parents thought that he’d rejected them twice. What they failed to understand was that under his unfamiliar aspect, he was not very different from the person he’d been all his life. He still had the same social conscience that had led him to make posters for an Upper West Side anti-littering campaign when he was eight and to go door-to-door for Jimmy Carter when he was fourteen. He still wished to be of use.

He’d rarely regretted his decision to become a cop, but, even after working for the Seattle PD for more than twenty years, he’d never really fit in. Early in his time there, one of his colleagues had spotted him reading a book on his lunch break, which was apparently a signal event in the history of the police force, and this led to someone’s calling him “the professor,” a name that had stuck with him since then—mostly because he was a reader, and partly, he suspected, because he was a Jew. Nobody hazed him or gave him a hard time, but he never stopped feeling like an outsider.

After a few years he found his way into the Crisis Intervention unit, which is a little world within the world of the police force, with its own culture and its own values. He spent most of his time working with people who were mentally ill, trying to make sure they didn’t get swallowed up by the criminal justice system. (Crisis Intervention kept getting funded every year only because the city had found that it was cost-effective in keeping the violent mentally ill from clogging up the courts.) When you’re in CI, most of the other cops don’t think of you as a cop anymore; they think of you as a social worker with a badge. And for Daniel, at least, the description was accurate.

His parents didn’t know anything about all this. As far as they understood, he was a cop now, through and through. They didn’t know that he still read, doggedly and intently—they probably assumed he’d stopped reading. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure why, he got the feeling that they didn’t even think of him as Jewish anymore. They apparently held to the Lenny Bruce theory that if you live in New York you’re Jewish, and you’re a goy if you live anywhere else.

But though he was more like his old self than his parents realized, he wasn’t simply the same old Daniel in disguise. He’d been changed by his experiences, and he’d wanted to be changed by them. He had a different idea of what was important. He didn’t believe you could be judged by the number of books you’d read or the number of articles you’d written; he didn’t believe your worth was based on your attainments or your erudition or even your intelligence. Just about the only thing he valued was simple decency.

Janine had been with him through all of this. She had watched him grow into manhood. Year by year she had been more and more impressed—with his steadiness, his compassion, his gentleness with and interest in the children. But she couldn’t tell herself that all of his changes had pleased her. When they were young, he’d seemed ambitious—or maybe she’d just assumed that he was—but it had been years since he’d shown any signs of wanting to improve himself in any way. Maybe there was nothing wrong with that. Maybe she should have felt nothing but appreciation for his ability to treasure the life he actually had. But she’d always believed that if you weren’t striving, you weren’t alive, and she couldn’t understand his complacency.

The life they lived was far from the life she’d always dreamed of living—a life of cultural excitement, a life of conversation, a life in which you kept meeting people who made you think. To the extent that she’d had that life, it hadn’t been one that Daniel had been interested in sharing; it had been one she’d had to find for herself.

Sometimes she thought that Daniel’s rival wasn’t Lev, it was Manhattan. It was coming here that had made her feel alive to her own possibilities. She hadn’t been unhappy in Seattle; her job was absorbing, and she’d found a balance between being a mother, which she loved, and being a woman at work in the world. But on coming back here she’d discovered how little she’d trained herself to live with. Everything was richer here: work life, cultural life, street life—even her dream life. She didn’t know if it was even possible for her to go back.

Tonight she couldn’t shake off her restlessness. Before they’d left the apartment, she’d felt as if she were in the wrong clothes, and she’d changed twice, but she still felt as if she were in the wrong clothes.

Florence’s success had shaken something loose inside Janine. Florence was a woman who had never compromised. And now, at long last, she was reaping the fruits of her courage. So the question, Janine thought, is this: If I exercised a bravery in my own life equivalent to that which Florence has exercised in hers, what would I be doing? What would I be doing differently?

“You think you could live here again?” she said.

“Saint Mark’s Place?”

“You know what I mean. New York.”

“We’d never be able to afford it. We’d have to live out in Brooklyn, with my father. Cozy times around the fire with Saul. We could read his masterpieces as soon as they came out of the typewriter.”

“Wherever. You know what I mean. Could you see yourself coming back east?”

They could do it, if the will was there. Daniel was growing increasingly tired of his job, as budget cuts kept making him feel less like a social worker with a badge and more like a clerk. He’d be eligible to retire at half-salary in a few years, and she was confident of his ability to find something here—much more confident than he was, but she was certain that she was right. And she’d been all but assured that she’d be able to make her position at the lab permanent if she wanted to. Nothing was stopping them, except, perhaps, his mixed feelings about being back in the place he’d once felt the need to escape from.

“You ever see that show
McCloud
?” he said. “This cop from out west moves to New York, walks around wearing a ten-gallon hat, outsmarting the city slickers.”

“I never saw that,” she said, and heard a heart-sunk inflection in her own voice.

“Maybe it’s on Netflix. I think I’d have to watch a few episodes. Get a sense of whether I could make it work.”