All Is Vanity

  “It doesn’t matter where I work,” I remember him saying his first week there—I’d come in to help him arrange the furniture, and I think may actually have burst into tears when I realized that I was looking not at some sort of oddly speckled gray wall, but at the sole window (university policy dictates window washing only once every three years). It was only because they wanted him so badly that he got any window at all. As far as arranging the furniture, by the way, we’d had no options; everything had to be pressed in a line against the cinderblock. That afternoon, he’d tapped his head and told me not to worry. “It’s what goes on in here that counts,” he’d said.

  This, of course, is exactly what I worry about in the case of this new wood-paneled, cuisines-of-the-world, helpful-and-well-connected-secretary job. The point of this position, as far as I can make out—which, I admit, is not extremely far, given that the only details I’ve been given are the perks—seems to be making art more accessible to the public, when what Michael’s always been happiest doing is his theoretical work, which, quite frankly, makes art less accessible. As an academician, Michael has always been of the opinion that art exists for its own sake—whether people see it is irrelevant. (Feel free to be aghast at this—everyone else is.) But now he’s going to have to believe, or at least pretend to believe, just the opposite.

  “You’re sure there’ll be enough for you up here?” I asked, tapping my own head. Sadly, he seemed unable to recall the gesture.

  “Sure,” he said, “I’ll be helping people experience art.”

  “Pod person!” I shrieked, pointing an accusatory finger. “What have you done with my husband?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. All innocent. They’re clever, those pod people.

  “Michael,” I reminded him, “you don’t care about people.”

  “I care about some people,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “I care about my wife and my children and I’d like them to have a decent life for a change.”

  You see what I mean about their cleverness?

  But here’s the thing, Margaret. Already I was hoping he would persuade me that it was right, that it would be good for art, for humanity, for us. I wanted him to take that job. I wanted to be a pod, too. Not for the sake of the office, of course; I would not have the office, or even very much of the food, despite the guest privileges and what I anticipate to be a liberal use of doggie bags, but because I could already sense the relief it would bring. I’ve felt for years—how can I describe this?—like I’ve been trying to stretch the double-bed-sized sheet of our resources over the king-sized mattress of our needs. It’s exhausting. Not only that, it’s impossible. And now it seems that Michael will be bringing home several large shopping bags from Bed Bath & Beyond. Also, I can imagine that it might be quite delightful when conversing with, say, Alex Prescott, to know she knows my husband has a job with a touch of glamour and puissance.

  “Wait!” you say. “Michael will be working for a museum,” you say. “He will not be the CEO of a major corporation.” And I say to you: “this is the Otis. You know the Otis. No one has a bigger endowment than the Otis. Plus, Michael will be up there, the number four, or at the very least, the number five guy.” He explained it to me like this: the people on the next rung down have espresso makers in their offices. Michael’s espresso maker is in his assistant’s office, and Michael will not have to learn to operate it to enjoy a teeny cup of superstrong coffee with a twist of lemon peel whenever he desires. (During regular business hours, of course. Michael would never ask an assistant to stay late just to make coffee.)

  “Well,” I said (this is to Michael, not to you), “it would be a change. Maybe we can put in a dishwasher.”

  This is the way it is, Margaret, after four children. My first thoughts are for appliances.

  Yours, with dreams of high thread counts and low-energy drying cycles,

  L

  My admission letter arrived one week later. I was ecstatic at the confirmation of my skill as a writer I believed it implied and had even decided that it meant I could easily get into Columbia’s MFA program if I so chose, when the credit card receipt also slid from the envelope and I remembered that this class was a moneymaker for the New School and for Professor Berginsky, so they were unlikely to turn many prospective students away. Nevertheless, I was in and was eager to see how quickly my novel would shoot forward, now that I would have guidance, supervision, and like-minded companionship.

  “First,” Peter Berginsky said, “I’d like to go around the room and have each of you tell the rest of us your name and say something about why you chose to take this class.”

  Four tables were pushed together in the seminar room, forming one giant rectangle. We had arranged ourselves around three sides, leaving the head for the professor. We looked dismayingly eager, more like earnest students than jaded writers. Every one of us sat with a pen hovering over blank paper, ready to inscribe the wise words of our teacher, and so emerge from this hour with a two-dimensional talisman that would somehow coax our latent talents into the light. I was glad that I’d at least pulled my hair back severely into an Emily Dickinson-ish bun.

  “My name is Bathsheba,” the large woman next to me was saying, “but most people call me Bathy. I’m a lawyer. I mean, that’s how I make my money, but spiritually, I’m a writer. I’m working on a novel right now that’s sort of loosely based on a period of my life that was very difficult for me. You could say that I’m trying to work through some issues by writing it. Really, I don’t care if it ever gets published. I just want it to be the best I can make it.” She beamed at the rest of us.

  Obviously, she said this only to protect her feelings in the face of possible future rejection. A novel had to be published; otherwise it was pointless. Her prevarication made me suspicious, and I reacted in my usual extreme manner. “My name is Margaret, and I’m working full-time on my first novel,” I announced defiantly when my turn came, daring the rest of the class to snicker. All of the others had fully formed, respectable identities and, with the exception of a retiree, were managing to squeeze this project around serious careers. Most of them, in fact, were lawyers, a job I had always believed to be quite time-consuming. One ran a company that matched freelance professionals with businesses. Businesses too cheap to pay benefits, I thought. He handed each of us a card, even Peter Berginsky, who put it into his wallet.

  Inexplicably, and so, I assured myself, randomly, it seemed that Mr. Berginsky had asked a management consultant, thin and supple, with luminous toffee-colored skin and Botticelli hair to come prepared with pages for all of us to read over the following week. She exemplified the triumphant mix of races that, according to the Gap and Coke and other such arbiters of popular culture, symbolized her generation, which, irritatingly, was the one that followed mine. However, she was so charming as she modestly slid a paper-clipped sheaf of fresh, white papers before each of us, and begged us to be gentle, that I resolved to treat her work with the indulgence I’d give my students’.

  I volunteered to submit my work at the next class meeting.

  “Thank you …” He consulted the legal pad on the table in front of him, “Marge. We’ll look forward to your twenty pages.”

  If I reserved a day for revision, that left five days to write. Four pages a day, that didn’t sound so bad.

  “Oh, and please put it in my box the day before class,” he added, “so I can get it copied.”

  Five pages a day then. Pressure was what I needed, I told myself, jabbing a slipping hairpin back into my scalp. Fear of leaving Professor Berginsky in the lurch, not to mention shaming myself in front of the rest of the class, would spur me on. “I’ll do that,” I promised.

  M—

  We just found out that Michael will not have exactly the job the museum has dangled before him but only a facsimile thereof, in that he will do all the work but not begin to collect the whole of the pay “for approximately nine months.” Something to do with budget approval and taxes
and several obscure, at least to me, legal issues. “It’s because it’s a new position,” Michael says. “They’re creating it just for me, so they didn’t figure it in.” It’s not clear to me whether we understand what it is they didn’t figure it into, but Michael insists there’s nothing to worry about. “It’s not like this is some fly-by-night company,” he says. “This is the Otis.” He’s also very taken with the director, who took him out for a drink the other night and ended up talking to him for five hours. It seems the fellow’s read all of Michael’s books, or at least looked at enough of them to be able to fake it convincingly. Michael appreciates that. “Duncan Bishop wouldn’t make a promise he couldn’t keep,” he says. “He’s that kind of guy.” Michael’s faith is touching, but the word “approximately” bothers me. Apparently, however, this is standard. “That’s just so we can’t sue them,” Michael says, which is exactly why I worry. But the bottom line is that the minute he starts work at the Otis, he’ll be making much more than he’s making now, so I feel kind of ashamed obsessing over whether he’ll eventually be getting the whole amount. It’s not like we need it.

  Love, L

  P.S. Michael can’t take donors to lunch in a 1980 Honda CVC, so we’re test driving a Saab convertible, his “dream car,” tonight. It’s not nearly as expensive as it seems, since I’m pretty sure we can write it off.

  CHAPTER 7

  Margaret

  OF COURSE I COULD NOT DO IT. Three days later, I had written two paragraphs.

  Late on the fourth night, I escaped the apartment and in desperation wandered the aisles of the A&P.

  “We need capers,” I’d told Ted.

  “OK,” he’d answered distractedly from the bedroom where his fingers had been pounding the keyboard with infuriating speed all night.

  In college, I’d done this sort of thing often, prowled Wawa’s, the twenty-four-hour convenience store, in my sweat pants, searching for inexpensive snacks and praying that an idea for the paper that had stalled between paragraphs five and six would come to me if I looked the other way. Generally, I was, in fact, inspired, somewhere between the purchase of a nickel chocolate Ice Cube and my return to my dorm, doubtless thanks to the trickle of adrenaline that began the moment I started down the dark sidewalk. But New York in the nineties was, alas, much less scary than Philadelphia in the eighties.

  I had chosen the University of Pennsylvania because in tenth grade I’d decided that I wanted to become an archaeologist, and according to the literature, Penn’s program was probably the best in the country. I planned during the course of my career to explain the extinction of the Neanderthals, as well as trace the influence of the ancient Assyrians on the Archaic Greeks. I don’t blame myself for having grandiose ideas. I know from teaching that many students have them and are able to sustain them for years until, like me, they run smack against a course like statistics.

  I say that only for effect. My disintegration, in fact, was under way long before that particular course entirely dissolved the Margaret I’d known for so many years. My decline is not an interesting story (or perhaps I would have tried to get it down on paper and passed it off as my “novel in progress”). It began when my roommate, Annabel Huggins, let slip as she snapped her violin into its case, that she’d written a symphony. I was pretty sure that I’d never even heard a symphony in its entirety. I’d brought my saxophone intending to join the jazz band, but after I’d heard Annabel play, I stuffed the instrument in the back of my closet and piled my shoes on top of it for the rest of the semester. At Christmas, I took it home and left it there.

  Discovering that I would never be a musician only scratched my facade. I’d never really believed that I had a great talent for the horn. Even back in Glendale, there were kids who were better than I on all sorts of instruments. But not so much better that my notes didn’t even sound like music in comparison, the way it was with Annabel.

  It turned out that I knew nothing about movies, although that had been an area I’d been surer of. I was an expert on silent films, thanks to the theater on Fairfax, but no one cared about those, and when it came to talkies, it seemed I’d only seen the standards. In the dining hall, when opinions about obscure prints and foreign releases were bandied about, I had nothing to say.

  English, a discipline in which I’d always excelled, baffled me, although it became my major, since I believed I understood the texts, at least before entering the classroom. In seminar, we often spent a full hour and a half discussing the word order in a single phrase, seemingly chosen at random by the professor, who would in the final minutes of class gleefully and inconclusively draw our attention to a pun at some entirely different point in the text. Along with the others, I pretended to laugh when it came time for the pun, but I worried about the exam.

  Swiftly and incessantly, college life chipped away at my sense of myself as a high achiever. Until those years, I admit, I had, as quietly and modestly as possible, considered myself to be exceptional. Even brilliant. I now realized that I, like a million other people, was merely smart.

  As I said, I’d chosen Penn strictly for its reputation in archaeology. With overweening confidence in my own abilities, I’d not cared a whit about the schools membership in the Ivy League and the fact that its name attached to mine would, in future, ensure a specific status. Had I given this issue a moment’s thought, it was only to assert that I would never need such false distinctions.

  Most of my classmates clearly thought otherwise. Brooke Wickerson, my neighbor across the hall freshman year, for instance, had never made a move without calculating its effect on her résumé. Back when she was twelve, she explained, she’d dropped tennis in favor of fencing. “More unusual,” she said, “especially for a girl.” She told me that Penn was more prestigious than Cornell but not as good as Columbia, where she’d really wanted to go. When she found out I’d been admitted to Stanford, to which I’d applied simply to placate my father, who hated the idea of my living in downtown Philadelphia, she actually looked ill.

  “But Stanford doesn’t offer advanced classes in Near Eastern archaeology,” I protested.

  “Well,” she answered, pouring boiling water from her hotpot into two crimson mugs stamped “Veritas” with tea bag strings dangling from their lips and handing one to me with a look of pity, “I guess we just have different ideas about the purpose of college.”

  I was rather dense in the ways of the world then, and despite Brooke’s example, it took me more than a year to realize that for most people, college was an opportunity not to learn but to position oneself. In retrospect, given what little I retained about the rise of the city-state and elementary Akkadian, I suspect that those who were not like me had the more reasonable attitude, and I’m ashamed of the contempt I felt for them our senior year, as I watched them dash from recruitment meeting to recruitment meeting, collecting folders full of indecipherable corporate propaganda.

  “I got an offer from J. P. Morgan,” Brooke confided, lighting a cigarette, while we sat on the library steps in the lingering spring evening.

  “Congratulations,” I said, “what will you do there?”

  She shrugged her pretty shoulders beneath her cotton sweater and picked a fleck of tobacco off the tip of her pink tongue. “Something with money, I guess,” she said. “It should help me get into Tuck.”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to go to business school.”

  “You have to have an MBA if you want to be an international investment banker.”

  “Which has something to do with money and travel?”

  She laughed, tipping her head back so that her hair brushed the pebbly concrete step behind her. “Oh, Margaret, you’ll never change, will you? It’s, you know, deciding how to invest money internationally. It’s really the best field to go into right now.”

  I saw what she meant now or, since I couldn’t literally see what she meant, having no access to that world, I could at least imagine it.

  But that sort of high-powered glamour w
asn’t what I wanted, I reminded myself as I reached for a jar of nonpareil capers and checked the price. I could see the numbers taking shape in the ledger. “For this little jar?” Ted would say.

  What did I want exactly? I replaced the capers and strolled the narrow aisles past olive oils and dry cereals and mint-flavored cocoa mix, the soles of my shoes sticking disconcertingly to the linoleum in front of the pickle display. I didn’t want fortune. As I’ve said, we weren’t poor—we had plenty of money for our needs. I could even have splurged on the capers, if I chose. And not fame either, although I could see how others, also wanting what I wanted, would believe it was fame they craved. But I, and I would bet most of them, didn’t really care to gain the attention of strangers. What I desired was far more fundamental and far less grand. I wanted people to meet me and think, “Ah, someone worth my notice.” I wanted them when speaking to me to stop gazing absently over my shoulder, hoping someone more interesting would arrive. Simply, I wanted them to recognize me for the person I believed I truly was. I can’t imagine that this is a particularly unusual wish. Emily Dickinson may have disdained an admiring bog, but she did hope that Thomas Wentworth Higginson would take her seriously.

  “Why do you care what others think?” This is what my mother would say. But I did care. I suppose because I, unlike my mother, would never be quite sure that I was someone to be reckoned with until someone else told me so.

  Margaret—

  We have braved Circuit City on a Saturday and survived—nay, triumphed—for we parked in the nether reaches of the lot, in fact, in the far corner of the TJ Maxx lot, two grotesquely oversized stores away, our pale yellow Tercel bravely tiring the asphalt between a navy Navigator and a bronze Suburban; we slipped past those in ties who would entice us with DVD and large screen TV, stopped our ears against the siren song of Surround Sound and steered hard past Circe’s aisle from which PlayStations beckoned. For forty-five minutes, we languished among the dishwashers, searching and waiting, crying out for a knowledgeable sales associate. But, at last, guided by clues gleaned from plastic-coated cards affixed with impossible-to-remove sticky stuff to the door of each machine, we made our selection: the Maytag Superwasher, Model #1247, with pot-scrubbing, glass-shining, and copper-polishing capabilities. Obsidian, stainless steel, or faux cherry finish? Well might you ask. The choice was agonizing, rusty as our taste has become after years of avocado, harvest gold, and almond. But at last, I saw myself in the shiny one—it was I and I it; I glisten, therefore I am—and we joined the snaking line of pilgrims at the register, our yellow copy of the order slip trembling in our hands.