“Maybe you’re right,” he said.
“We’ll have the fish tonight,” Candace decided, closing the menu.
The waiter came over to the table. Claire watched as Candace ordered their fish. She found herself smiling.
“And you, ma’am?” the waiter asked.
“I’m having the lamb,” Claire said. The more grease the better.
The waiter left and another server came and replenished their wineglasses. Joe asked her what she did for a living.
“I’m a sculptor,” she said. “It’s not much of a living, though.”
“That depends on how you define living,” he said.
“How marvelous,” Candace said. “What sort of sculpture?”
“I do figures, mostly women.”
“Have you shown your work?”
“There’s a gallery in L.A. that shows my work.”
“Not New York?” She said it in a poor baby voice.
Claire shook her head and for some reason felt ashamed. “No, not right now,” she said. She had never shown in New York. “But soon, I hope.”
“I know you,” Greta announced importantly. “I read about you somewhere. You’re one of the ‘New Feminists.’ ”
“As opposed to an old one,” Claire said, wryly. The article had been about her and four other women artists whose work explored issues that related to being female. Aside from the fact that being deemed a feminist was the kiss of death for any artist these days, the article had been published in Artforum, which in itself had been something of a career feat.
“What the hell is feminism, anyway?” Joe said. “Would somebody please explain it to me?”
“Feminism?”
“It’s a seventies term,” he said with distaste. “I don’t see anybody out there burning their Wonderbra.”
“I’ll tell you about feminism,” Greta said. “It’s supposed to protect us from assholes like you.”
Candace blurted a laugh.
“I’m serious,” he said. “What does it actually mean—feminism?” He spit the word out like soggy bread.
“Equality,” Claire said simply. “Basic provisions for women, like fair pay.”
“Respect,” Greta proclaimed.
“The word’s a relic,” Joe said. “Our kids, for example—I would bet they don’t have a clue what it means.”
“I would probably agree with that,” Greta said, then leaned into Claire’s ear and whispered, “My daughter’s too busy giving blow jobs to feel discriminated against.”
The comment put her off—she remembered Teddy describing Monica Travers as the girl with the “big mouth,” which Claire had naively misinterpreted as a girl who wasn’t shy about speaking her mind—perhaps times had changed. She found herself wondering if Teddy had ever had a blow job—they’d never discussed it—it wasn’t something she liked to think about. She’d never admit to it, of course, but the idea of her son’s penis in some girl’s mouth made her extremely uncomfortable.
Joe shrugged. “The world is different now, the economy, the politics. Everything’s different. It’s a different playing field.”
“Oh, yeah, it’s different all right,” Claire said. “Not good different, just different.”
“I know I’m generalizing,” Joe continued, “but the truth is people don’t like words like feminism anymore. It sounds, oh, I don’t know, pedestrian.”
“Yeah, like the word vagina,” Claire said. “Most people don’t like that word either.” Claire and Greta laughed, and Candace laughed too.
“Solidarity!” Greta said, raising her glass.
“What makes you think men and women are equal in the first place?” Joe said.
Some of the other men at the table snickered.
“You’re in a mood tonight,” Candace said to him.
“Sexual tension 101,” Greta muttered to Claire.
“Look,” he said, backpedaling. “You know it just as much as I do. Look at yourselves—look at the way you starve yourselves, the way you dress, the shoes you wear with the skinny heels. Your tit jobs, your Botox. You think that makes you equal?”
“It’s complicated,” Claire conceded.
“Yeah, it’s complicated all right. Just for argument’s sake—and at the risk of sounding misogynistic, which I’m sincerely not—let’s say a war broke out right here, right now. Who do you think would take control?” He didn’t wait for an answer—apparently he didn’t want one, and finished off his glass of wine. “You girls would be running around like ants in a puddle, waiting for someone to tell you what to do. It’s biological. Protection of the species and all that—but you know I’m right.” He poured himself another glass of wine then held up the empty bottle, signaling to the waiter to bring another. His face was flushed, he’d broken a sweat. “We’re not the same,” he said, looking right at her. “You’re weaker. Admit it.”
“On the defensive is perhaps more accurate,” Claire said, but it was not the robust comeback she’d been hoping for. “Equality is in the head, not the body. It shouldn’t matter who has more physical strength. That’s entirely the point.”
“But it does matter. That’s the trouble. It matters a lot. Men are stronger,” he insisted. “It’s how we’re made. It gives us an edge. You know it’s true.”
She had nothing to say to him—or perhaps there was too much to say—the restaurant was not conducive to the sort of argument she would have to put forth. Golding helped himself to more bread and dipped it in the oil and put it in his mouth. He licked his oily fingertips. “You think it’s easy for men?” he said, chewing. “You so-called,” he made quote marks with his fingers, “feminists have turned us into a bunch of confused eunuchs.”
“Poor baby,” Greta said.
“You say one thing then do another. That’s not equality—it’s manipulation. We’re so fucking confused we’d rather have sex with the computer.”
“Speaking from experience, no doubt,” Greta said.
“You girls are just a small part of the female population,” he said. “You want to know why women are still the inferior sex? You can bitch and moan all you want about getting fair pay, fair benefits—but when it comes right down to it, there are still plenty of women out there who are perfectly happy to suck dick with the meter running, just as long as they get paid.”
"What?”
“In other words: They’re perfectly happy to run up a tab, as long as somebody else picks up the check.”
What an asshole, she thought.
Working in the barn the next morning, Claire found herself stewing over Joe Golding and their conversation at the restaurant—maybe he was right, maybe feminism was passé. Maybe people couldn’t relate to it anymore. And it was for that reason too that she hadn’t liked the article in Artforum. She didn’t like being labeled as an artist of one kind or another, and now that she thought about it, perhaps “feminist” indeed had a shopworn connotation—not to mention that, as an artist, being dubbed a “feminist” wasn’t going to sell tickets, as her father would say. Her father had always been contemptuous of critics. Years before, Waldo Klein, the theater critic for the New York Times, had owned a house in Egremont and, out of the goodness of his heart, as her father put it, always reviewed Eddie’s plays—more often than not, abysmally. Eddie would read them aloud at breakfast in a cockney accent, pretending it didn’t hurt—but even as a child she knew it did. She felt a fresh surge of anger and asked the room, “Who are these people, anyway?” Writing their wicked little articles. Who were they to judge her work? Did any of them know it was the single thing, aside from Teddy, that kept her alive, that made her want to get up every morning? It was what had gotten her through all the other bullshit. It made her whole. And what did their work do for them? She imagined her critics as the goody-goodies in high school, so eager to bestow their brilliance upon the ordinary folk that they could barely sit still, their hands flapping in the air with the desperate enthusiasm of freshly caught fish. Pick me! Pick me! They
were the “experts,” always ready to dish out the bad news. While the artist was down in the dirt getting her hands dirty, the experts were pulling on white gloves. When you were locked in the stocks of critical opinion, it could take years to wash off a comment hurled in haste. Being branded as a “feminist artist” conveyed a certain subliminal message to the public that perhaps what she had to say in her work was, in fact, old news. Somehow it didn’t have the same lofty ring to it as being, for example, a Postmodernist or a Realist. “Feminist” was her art with parenthesis around it, as if it were separate or removed in some way from the work that the other artists did, the real artists.
Recently, she’d read an article about some young male artist who’d put his own semen on a piece of paper and called it art, and the critics, relying on their substantial knowledge of art history, had heralded the boy a genius. But when female artists painted with menstrual blood, the critics pursed their lips and called them “Feminists,” satisfied that the word, with all its dowdy implications, would suffice.
Still, she could not separate her work from her politics—the word politics had become a catchall phrase, another kind of category that inveigled your hidden dreams and fears. She couldn’t separate her needs as a female person from her art. She had to wonder: How could you be female and not be a feminist? Joe had called the word a relic—but to her it was more important than ever—an emblem that needed to be raised up high in the air for all those blow-job-giving girls to see. Not that she had any issue with oral sex, but what were those girls getting in return? Certainly not the handy orgasms of their partners.
What woman didn’t want equality? The question seemed preposterous to her—yet there were still women out there who were indifferent to their own rights and powers. It made her angry and, indeed, it fueled her work. What if a war did break out, she readdressed Joe’s question. What about all those women who’d been raped in Afghanistan—would that happen here? Could it? According to Joe Golding it was a definite possibility.
18
Golding was a superstitious man and it was superstition that made him go to temple on the High Holidays, not religious devotion. You went to temple to get written into the Book of Life and if you didn’t go, you risked insulting God, which was never a good idea, no matter how remarkable your excuse. Even Candace, who had not been born a Jew and had converted when they’d married, went to temple on the High Holidays. That morning the sun was bright and the air smelled of apples and horses and wood smoke. Joe felt the promise of survival in his bones. He felt unbearable gratitude.
Driving with his wife and daughter to the synagogue, he reflected on the years that had come before, the rituals they’d shared as a family. On every Rosh Hashanah, they used to take Willa apple picking after services. They’d wander through the rows of trees, filling their bags. Look, Daddy, look at this one! She’d hold the apple up in her perfect little hand. Later, in the kitchen, she’d stand on a stool at the counter, dipping her apples in honey. Would the year be sweet? he wondered now. For some reason, he felt a sense of doom when he looked at his daughter. Her aura of mystery. Her morbid sartorial inclinations. He supposed it was natural, inevitable; she was growing up. Sometimes he’d look at her and do a double take—he hardly recognized her. This was not his Willa. This Willa had breasts, hips. She’d taken to wearing dark eyeliner. She wore patchouli oil and tea rose and those awful black sneakers with the broken shoelaces and she made noise like a Hindu dancer when she walked, her bracelets up to her elbows. And she wrote lines from rap songs on her arms and legs—at least they weren’t tattoos, he reminded himself. “Not yet,” his wife had said. Their daughter was becoming a stranger. He glanced at her in his rearview mirror, not surprised to find her on her cell phone. At least she was wearing her tallit, he thought.
Candace sat beside him in a black Chanel suit. His wife looked like she was going to a funeral, but most of the women dressed like that on the High Holidays—more so on Yom Kippur. Everybody felt guilty, or at least looked like they did. Although he’d asked her not to, she’d brought the cane. It had been two weeks since the mare had thrown her and she was still using it. They’d been to the doctor, she’d had an MRI, nothing was found. When Joe had discussed her condition with the doctor in private, the doctor had said, “It’s not uncommon for women of menopausal age to experience psychosomatic symptoms.”
He looked at his wife now as she adjusted her makeup in the vanity mirror. No amount of makeup could cure her expression of perennial discontent. Joe knew it had something to do with the fact that when she was two years old her mother had left her in a bus station locker and disappeared—luckily, somebody had heard her screaming. After that, it was one foster home after another until he’d met her, when she’d showed up at his office in New York, hoping to work as a typist—he’d taken one look at her in her Catholic school clothes, St. Theresa’s stitched on her breast pocket, the knee socks, the feed me look in her eyes, and that was it—she was hired, and not just to sit behind a typewriter—her shrink at Riggs said it wasn’t uncommon to have flashbacks of the bus station ordeal, even now. Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, he’d called it. Joe tried to be understanding, he tried to indulge her, but still, it irritated him. Get over it already, he wanted to shout. But instead, he said, “You look pretty.”
She offered him the slightest of smiles. No I don’t.
“I’m glad you came. Thank you.” Such civility!
To his surprise, Candace reached over and took his hand and squeezed it. He knew he was supposed to interpret the gesture as some meaningful symbol of her devotion, but he could not.
The temple had its origins in a large brick house on Crofut Street, but after a major capital campaign, of which he’d been a major contributor, a new, larger temple was erected just north of town. The new building had been designed by a congregant, a well-known local architect, and resembled a modern Noah’s Ark. Whenever he entered the building, walking first through the glass, light-filled annex from the parking lot, then into the enormous foyer, he felt an unmitigated sense of pride knowing that his money had found its way into every brick and beam that had made it. The head rabbi was a woman, which bothered him slightly, although he could never speak of it to the others. As a boy in Queens, he went to the narrow crumbling shul on his block, of which the aged Rabbi Pilchick had been its wizened leader. With his sprawling white hair and imposing forehead glistening with the sweat of his great intellect, Pilchick was a real rabbi. But this woman, this Rabbi Zimmerman, who was all of forty, seemed, well, ordinary.
Still, he went to temple with an open mind, eager to feel something, eager to feel, what—resolved? He had not married a Jew, and in the beginning, when he had gotten himself embroiled with Candace, he hadn’t thought it would make a difference in the long run, but it had. Although she had done her best to maintain a Jewish home, lighting the candles on Shabbat and making elaborate holiday meals, his wife was not a believer and he detected in her compliance a simmering contempt. He often wondered if he died first—and he was nearly certain that he would—if she would even bother to have a funeral for him or would simply cremate him and throw the ashes out in the next day’s trash. This was entirely possible and no amount of discussion on the subject made him feel any better. Candace did not like discussing the subject of death, and he knew that, regardless of what he put in his will, she would do what she liked.
Willa, on the other hand, was a good Jew, and this phenomenon was more than he could have ever hoped for, knowing that her biological parents had been Catholics. She had become a bat mitzvah, not because he’d told her to, but because she’d chosen to on her own. At the age of twelve, with her picket-fence teeth, she’d come into their bedroom to deliver the earnest declaration—she didn’t care if her blood was green as a four-leafed clover, she, Willa Golding, was a Jew! Joe had never been the sentimental type, but he had to admit, that was one of those parenting moments that really got to him. It made him believe that, even with all the other crap in his
life, at least he’d done something right. Not that he was religious—not that he was even a believer—he wasn’t. He was a true skeptic and, in general, the concept of religion gave him the creeps. But somehow this was different. He guessed if he had to pinpoint when things had started changing for him, religion-wise, it would be then, when they’d go to temple regularly in preparation for the bat mitzvah. He’d never been comfortable going before, but Willa had a way of making everything easy, and before you had a chance to freak out, you were there, doing it, mumbling prayers in some close approximation of the actual Hebrew. Her fearless nature frightened him too, because he knew, eventually, it might get her into trouble. He would try talking to her about it from time to time, when he’d drive her back and forth to her meetings with the rabbi, but she’d just roll her eyes at him and shake her head and say, “Oh, Daddy.” The months passed and they grew accustomed to hearing Hebrew in the house, her melodic haftorah wandering through the rooms, and soon the day arrived. Candace had risen to the occasion by planning a magnificent party, inviting two hundred guests to the black-tie event. To the distaste of many of the locals, they’d had the party at their country club, which had very few Jews as members, taking over the ballroom of the club-house, which was an original Berkshire Cottage—a place so staunchly cultivated you’d think the cushions were stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. For her mitzvah project, Willa had spent the year working at a local barn with abused racehorses. All the hard work had been worth it when she finally saw her present, a black Dutch Warm Blood named Boy.
Late as usual, they had to park in the lot of the Greek Orthodox Church down the road. The church and temple shared an understanding and reciprocated to each other as needed. You always saw Jews walking along the road in all their finery during the High Holidays, and during Easter you saw Greeks in the temple lot all dressed up for church. Services started at ten; it was ten-twenty now, and he parked in the only spot that was left, deep in the farthest corner of the lot under the drooping branches of a chestnut tree; he hoped the little brown pods it dropped wouldn’t scratch his car.