“Pardon?”
“Oh,” said Faith, “he is who he is. He hasn’t always put his money to good use. He’s funded some pretty questionable ventures. You can read up on it. I have. It doesn’t make me happy, but he has also frequently been heroic with his money, and he seems genuine in his desire to make this work. It’s a risk. But he’s promised to really go deep. Of course that’s not all of the criticism we’ll get. There’s also me.”
Greer wanted to say, Who could criticize you? But she knew who could; she had seen them on blogs, and of course in the comments section of Fem Fatale.
“I do what I can,” said Faith. “I do it for women. Not everyone agrees with the way I do it. Women in powerful positions are never safe from criticism. The kind of feminism I’ve practiced is one way to go about it. There are plenty of others, and that’s great. There are impassioned and radical young women out there, telling multiple stories. I applaud them. We need them. We need as many women fighting as possible. I learned early on from the wonderful Gloria Steinem that the world is big enough for different kinds of feminists to coexist, people who want to emphasize different aspects of the fight for equality. God knows the injustices are endless, and I am going to use whatever resources are at my disposal to fight in the way I know how.”
“As long as you keep wearing your boots,” Greer impulsively put in. She remembered then that she had thought working at Fem Fatale would have been more exciting than working for Faith Frank, but she understood that it wasn’t true.
Then Faith said, “There’s another aspect to the venture that I wanted to tell you about, Greer. And this was the reason I finally accepted the position, after telling Emmett no.” She leaned in a little closer. “Here’s the deal. Fairly often,” she said, “we’ll actually be able to initiate a special emergency project that will make an immediate difference in some women’s lives.”
“That sounds great,” said Greer, though she couldn’t imagine what any of this really meant except in some blurry way that involved a line of strong women standing under a rain shower of funding. She wanted to be in that line. Despite often being so quiet and uneasy, she wanted to seem like an appropriate and inevitable choice: Greer Kadetsky, the young woman with the hot face, who works as fiercely as that hot face would suggest.
I will work so fucking hard for you, Faith Frank, she wished she could say.
“We’ve already started doing this. I recently got Emmett to release funds to an organization focused on improving the health and well-being of women of color living in the rural South. By the way, we’re calling ourselves Loci,” said Faith.
“Excuse me?” said Greer.
“I know. I had the same reaction. But it grows on you. Loci, as in the plural of locus. Because there are so many issues to focus on, concerning women, and so many places to put our energy. It’s not the greatest name in the world, but we reached the deadline and didn’t have anything better. People see the word on the page, spelled L-O-C-I, and they think: Oh God, how am I supposed to pronounce this? Is it Lo-kee? Lo-kye? Lo-sigh? The dictionary gives you all three options. Me, I’m firmly in the sigh camp.”
“Then so am I!” said Greer.
“Emmett wants me to complete my team very quickly. I’ve already brought several people in, and they’ve started working. He rented this enormous space for us here. God, it’s so different from what I’m used to. You saw the Bloomer office. I’m used to places where three people share a desk, and the elevator always breaks. That’s what sisterhood means to me. But now we’ve hit the big time. ShraderCapital wants us close by, and they’re right upstairs on twenty-seven.” She glanced upward in illustration, then laced her hands and looked directly at Greer. “So what do you think?” she asked.
“I think it sounds amazing.”
“It does, doesn’t it? Does it fit into your master plan?” Faith asked.
“Not sure I have one.”
“Really? I thought everyone did at your age. Mine was to get as far away from my parents as I could.”
Greer became self-conscious. “I’d like to work here. That’s my plan. And at night I’d like to do some writing. Maybe I could even become a writer someday, but for now I want a job that will kind of put me in the world, I guess, and help me . . . make meaning. That’s what you said when I met you. Anyway, I think this job could be that.”
Faith nodded seriously. “Okay. I’ll be blunt with you, Greer. I’m not interviewing you because of your brilliant intellect. I know you’re smart—your grades are great, and frankly you’re a good, instinctive writer, and I think you’ll have some real luck with that. But you’re, what, twenty-two? When I was twenty-two I knew nothing about anything, and I went skipping off into the world.”
“To be a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas,” Greer said, remembering.
“Yes, exactly. No, I’m interviewing you primarily because I think you’re promising. And hey, you also brought me a frying pan today, which was witty. So if you’re willing, I’d like to bring you on board.”
“Oh, Faith, thank you,” Greer said, flushing. “I’m definitely willing.”
“The job will of course be entry-level. Much of it will probably feel boring and repetitive.”
“I doubt that.”
“No, it’s true, hear me out. You’ll be one of our bookers. Eventually you’ll be much more involved with a variety of things here. It’s up to you how quickly that happens.”
Greer could barely stay seated as Faith described the specifics of the job to her. She wanted to crouch down on the floor like a weight lifter and raise the long white length of sofa into the air with Faith Frank still on it, just to show her that she could.
* * *
? ? ?
Two weeks later, Zee helped Greer move into a studio apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. She could never have lived in such a place by herself if Emmett Shrader hadn’t been unusually generous with all salaries at Loci. The apartment was a simple, grimy box in a small building, and it needed a deep clean that neither Greer nor Zee was willing to give it, but it also possessed original moldings and pressed tin ceilings, and the lease was hers. Through friends Greer had found a bed, which had been placed in one part of the L-shaped studio; she also bought a compact little sofa, lightly used, that could open into a place to sleep if a friend stayed over, and this she wedged tightly into a corner across the room. The walls held only a few generic prints, for now. There was a flower-slash-vagina painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. “Not the original, in case you were wondering,” she’d said to Cory when she gave him a Skype home tour, carrying her laptop around the room.
While Zee assembled an IKEA chair for her, Greer continued the tour for Cory outside alone with her phone, providing audio narration, describing the farmer’s market within walking distance, and Grand Army Plaza, and the park, and the Brooklyn Public Library with its big gold doors. Nearby, she said, hulked the Brooklyn Museum and also the Botanic Garden, and along Washington and Franklin were Caribbean beef patty emporiums—“Not that I will ever set foot in them, but you will, soon enough”—and check-cashing stores and taxi dispatchers.
Late that first afternoon, with the place unpacked and set up enough to be functional, Greer and Zee sat on the front stoop. “I love your street,” Zee kept saying as it got chilly out there.
“Me too,” Greer said. “But it feels so strange.” She looked at Zee. “You okay up there in Scarsdale? Not too lonely?”
“I’ll manage. One nice thing is the refrigerator with the ice maker. And the heated toilet seats and all that.”
“Come stay with me as much as you want,” said Greer. “Really. You can just show up. I’ll give you a key.”