13. Hector and me
One of the reasons I’m doing this is to show how untidy these stories are and how incomprehensible they can be, even to the people they happened to.
I’m telling this story a little out of sequence. That memory of hanging out with Veronica and watching her do Tarot readings, five installments back—that should have come much later. And the anecdote in the last entry about Mr. New Yorker Writer pulling me into his office when Mr. Longform Journalism was right next door: that belongs to another part of the story—the harassment part, after we got back to New York and I couldn’t get Mr. New Yorker Writer to leave me alone.
Parts of this story don’t seem to want to come in chronological order. In some cases, I can’t actually remember when things happened in relation to one another, only how I felt and what went through my mind when certain things were said and done. But I thought I should try to recount events more or less in sequence. So, for a while there I got all hung up and stopped reading bits of this aloud to my husband so I could hear how they sounded. I told him, one day recently, that I didn’t seem to be able to tell this story in chronological order. Bill said maybe telling things out of sequence was okay because memory doesn’t work chronologically; it comes how it comes, however it wants to, and that’s part of the truth and another example of why these stories are so difficult to tell.
Truth is messy and imperfect. It’s also irrational at times. Notice, for example, that I referred to the period after we got back to New York as “the harassment part” of the story. Until I wrote that phrase, I didn’t realize that I don’t regard what happened in Florida as harassment, because it ended with my decision to sleep with Mr. New Yorker Writer, and that was a conscious choice. In my mind the harassment—the part I didn’t have any control over—came after, when Mr. New Yorker Writer decided he wanted to turn a one-night stand into an office romance and wouldn’t take no for an answer, when it became clear that he wasn’t a big fan of other people exerting their free will.
So, even though I spent over an hour in that hotel room telling Mr. New Yorker Writer that I didn’t want to sleep with him or have a fling with him or play jacks with him, I just wanted to go to bed alone and wake up in the morning and go the fuck back to New York and forget this whole ridiculous surreal experience; and even though he kept coming back at me with justifications for his feelings and descriptions of his problems and explanations for his point of view, I consider that once I got scared and gave in, the harassment stopped. Or it stopped being harassment.
One of the reasons I’m doing this is to show how untidy these stories are and how incomprehensible they can be, even to the people they happened to. Thirty years have passed. The world and I are both more sophisticated, and I know for a fact that what Mr. New Yorker writer was doing in Florida was the very definition of sexual harassment. Nevertheless, it’s distasteful to look back on myself as someone with the capacity to be bullied or maneuvered into anything. That would be so unattractive and out of character. So, even now—although I think I’m long passed caring about any of this—it doesn’t sit well with me to have just given in and gone along with what someone else wanted. I need to feel that I took control of the situation, took ownership—like Hector, when he sees his spear glance off Achilles’ shield and knows for sure he's bought it. Because anything else would be too humiliating.
I just compared myself with a Homeric hero, which is absurd of course. It’s absurd first because it just is, and second because of all the heroes in epic, Hector is widely thought of as the most tragic. And nothing very terrible happened to me as a result of all this. I wasn’t assaulted—not in any serious way; I wasn’t physically damaged or traumatized. I lost a job and didn’t end up finishing a book—though it’s possible, I suppose, that Tina Brown firing both me and Veronica had nothing in the least to do with Mr. New Yorker Writer. In any case, it was a pretty fancy-ass job—I wasn’t a single mother trying to support my kids cleaning offices—and it wouldn’t have been a very important book, just sort of a sweet one. We’re not talking about the Fall of Troy here.
Still, I understand why I find the comparison with Hector appealing. It helps offset the degree to which I find this part of the story objectionable. Likening myself to an epic hero makes my decision to sleep with Mr. New Yorker Writer seem prettier, less ignoble.
There’s something else out-of-whack about comparing myself with Hector at that moment in the Iliad. What’s happening, just there, is that he’s realized he isn’t going to be able to get his hands on another spear—to replace the one that’s just gone astray—and is going to have to fight Achilles with his sword alone. That’s where he makes a speech that ends with some of the saddest participial phrases in all of Ancient Greek: “Let me not die obscurely, without putting up a fight, But having done something worthwhile for those who will come after me to hear of.” So, even though Hector and I were both making a decision to do something despite each of us knowing we were sunk, we were choosing to do opposite things. He was choosing to fight, while I was choosing to give up.
I’m not sure I actually remember making that decision. I just remember thinking, when I saw how angry he was, that the son-of-a-bitch had the power to influence my life. He had relationships going back more than a decade with people at the magazine who didn’t make eye contact with me when we passed each other in the hallway because I wasn’t “old” New Yorker. I kept picturing the face of Roger Angell, who always avoided my glance when he walked by me.
Maybe I just imagine that I remember making a decision as to what to do about Mr. New Yorker Writer. What I find I can’t do is imagine what went on between us after that. It’s not just that I can’t remember: I can’t begin to picture it. Because I can’t fathom why anyone would want to have sex with someone who’d made it so clear they were not interested. Which leads me to think it was about submission.
A couple of things, by the way, seem worth noting about the time Mr. New Yorker Writer hauled me into his office and got physical with that other writer right next door.
First, it illustrates something about why sexual harassment can be so hard to address: the things you can sue someone for aren’t necessarily always the things that have the capacity to really harm you, while the things that have the capacity to do you lasting harm often aren’t actionable.
Two things were going on there. Technically, he was assaulting me, albeit in a very minor way. That was certainly unpleasant; it was awkward and embarrassing and creepy, and it was just the sort of thing that, at the height of the Me Too movement, guys were getting cashiered for. But it wasn’t something that was going to have any lasting effect on my life or career or psyche.
Far more potentially damaging was the fact that Mr. New Yorker Writer didn’t care about the position he was putting me in. He may actually have been performing for Mr. Longform Journalism (there’s no way he didn’t know that his next-door neighbor was in residence) or he may just not have given a damn about the way what he was doing might affect me professionally, how the situation would make me look. That was far more upsetting to me than getting mauled and groped a little. But that’s not something you could really litigate. You can’t sue someone for being a prick.
The other thing about that incident: it’s how I knew Mr. New Yorker Writer was full of shit—in case you worry about my making light of his feelings for me. If he’d had any regard for me or taken me seriously as a colleague—or even a person—everything about his behavior would have been different, because he'd have cared about the position he was putting me in.
In fact, looking back I’m not sure I believe that it was me Mr. New Yorker Writer was obsessed with. I think it’s quite possible that this was a misdiagnosis, that the person he was really obsessed with was David Mamet.