27. Interpretations
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was tired of all the little dramas that his desires and demands created. So I said something like, "Okay fine, whatever."
My mom’s death back in July left me without the bandwidth to do much more than go through piles of articles about police misconduct and binge-watch Orange is the New Black, which I chose having no idea that a Me Too subplot emerges toward the end of the series. I never pass up a women’s prison story—that’s how indelibly influenced I was by some of the gay men I hung out with in the 1980s.
All of which is to explain my not having posted anything for a month or so. As it happens, though, there are only a couple of incidents left in the 1990s part of the story before we come to a sort of lull in which nothing much happens between me and Mr. New Yorker Writer for a year or so.
I said earlier that I’m in love with the poetry of digression, and I am, but digressions are legit a good way to indicate passage-of-time. So after relating the last two things I remember about my 1990 interactions with Mr. New Yorker Writer, I might take an installment to look at the Me Too story arc in OITNB, which I found interesting and artful. Then I might spend a couple of installments with another cultural artifact that I want to suggest is (in its own kooky way) the first modern Me Too story.
The last two things I remember happening with Mr. New Yorker Writer in 1990 are related in my mind because in one I said something that was probably ill-advised and in the other I was punished. But I have no reason to think that the first led to the other or even that the two incidents occurred in the same time-frame. I just remember that they happened and how I felt when they did. As one seemed like a mistake and the other like a consequence, they’re linked in my memory.
The second to last thing that I remember from 1990 came about because Mr. New Yorker Writer had an idea that he couldn’t seem to let go of that I was going to go away with him some weekend. I thought I’d been pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen. So I was surprised on coming into the office one Friday to be greeted by a rather cringing, apologetic Mr. New Yorker Writer who was very much afraid that he was going to have to cancel our plans to go away that weekend. I had no idea what he was talking about but I was tired of all the little dramas that his desires and demands created. So, instead of saying, “What the hell are you talking about?” or trying to set him straight, I just said something like, “Okay fine, whatever,” which ended the conversation and enabled me to continue on down the hallway.
I think what was happening at that point was that I’d stopped paying attention to him the way one stops paying attention to what a nagging toddler is saying and just begins giving unthinking rote responses.
But maybe I’d learned something. Though I don’t remember the subject coming up again, I guess it must have. And I guess I must have started being more forceful in my responses. Perhaps having failed to get my point across verbally I brought on the big guns: facial expressions. Perhaps the eyeroll, the knitted brow, and the hostile squint became my lingua franca.
Something on the subject must have passed between us, because one day Mr. New Yorker Writer stopped me in the hallway to ask me a question. He said it had to do with this theory that his therapist had about why I wouldn’t go away with him: the therapist had suggested that I’d felt rejected when he’d had to cancel before, and so now I was punishing him by refusing to reschedule the escapade. Did that theory have any validity, Mr. New Yorker Writer wanted to know.
You know the much-parodied scene at the end of The Usual Suspects with the montage of little things Chazz Palmentieri is remembering as he starts putting together who Keyser Söze is? This was like that. Little details from the previous months began coming at me and I reeled under the dawning realization that this guy had never listened to a word I’d said. All my tact and diplomacy had been pointless because Mr. New Yorker Writer was either delusional or was going to hear whatever he wanted to hear.
Meanwhile, though, I was stuck on something he’d said way back at the beginning.
I said: “Wait a minute. Your therapist is trying to coach you on how to cheat on your wife with some woman at the office?”
What came next is what my psychoanalyst father would have called “an ill-timed interpretation.”
I told him I thought he ought to find a better therapist.
It was the wrong thing to say. Even now, thinking of the expression that crossed Mr. New Yorker Writer’s face, I find myself wincing.
The last specific thing I remember happening that year took place at a New Yorker party. It may have been the shindig they held every year to celebrate the anniversary issue. I caught sight of Mr. New Yorker Writer seated on one of a pair of small sofas facing each other. Sitting opposite him was John Bennet, one of the magazine’s legendary non-fiction editors, whom I’d never met. I went to join them, thinking Mr. New Yorker Writer would introduce us. But as I seated myself, he very pointedly got up and walked away.
It sounds like such a tiny thing, I know, and I’m not sure a gesture like that would play today the way it did back then, or if there are still worlds as smug, self-contained, well-regulated, and wholly inhabited by well-positioned J. Crew–wearing white men as the New Yorker was at that time. To give you a sense of how staid and buttoned-down a place the New Yorker was at the time: a list of phrases I hadn’t been allowed to use in the magazine that Chip McGrath once jokingly pinned to one of the walls of his office included “charity fuck,” “wank-fest,” and (believe it or not) “blow job.”
What Mr. New Yorker Writer did at that office party was as shocking to me as the scene where Willoughby snubs Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. I thought for a moment I might faint. There was only one construction that one could put on his behavior, and as I met Bennet’s hostile eye I could see that was how he’d read it: I, a designing harpy, had tried to seduce a married man—a man so fundamentally decent that he couldn’t even bear the sight of me, let alone physical proximity.
Bill, when I told him about this, thought I should have seen something like it coming. I said I had. I’d seen it coming from the very beginning.
It was what I’d known all along—how little men have to do to create the impression of women as predatory and sexually aggressive—just as I’d known that Mr. New Yorker Writer could do that or something like it whenever he wanted, anytime I displeased or disappointed him. That was what my whole campaign to not antagonize him had been about.
Then there were all the things he’d been telling me, albeit inadvertantly.
When, in Florida, he had remarked on my straightforwardness and expressed surprise that I didn’t “play games,” he’d been telling me that playing people and manipulating them was his default mode.
When he told me I shouldn’t worry about his marriage because I’d be one in a string of infidelities, he’d been telling me that I was no one special.
And with the story about the nanny where he quelled his wife’s fears about the affair he was actually having, he’d been saying, “I’m someone who can’t be trusted—especially at the moment when I’m representing myself as someone who can be trusted.”
If the therapist conversation made me realize that it didn’t matter what I said, this last incident made me realize that Mr. New Yorker Writer was going to do what he was going to do, and I might as well stop worrying about it.
Of course, I went on trying to stay friends with him as long as I could—I had no choice—until finally his responses to a couple of innocuous overtures made it clear that he now proposed to treat me with overt hostility.