The grief, being brought up now, as it often was when she thought about having left her job, was about Faith. Faith, who was barely even a fully realized person to Greer. She felt herself well up, and she thought: Here I go.
“The thing about Faith Frank?” she said to Cory. “The thing I keep thinking about? She wasn’t my friend, exactly. She was definitely my employer, but that’s not the whole description. What was she? I loved what she stood for. I wanted to stand for those things too. And in the end everything fell apart, and she turned on me. Maybe she was right to behave that way. Maybe, even though she’s Faith Frank, she’s allowed to have a really bad moment too, where she says something not so great to someone else. I just didn’t like being the person she said it to. But I’m not one to talk. I did something really bad to Zee.” Cory looked at her, surprised. “I did,” she went on. “I know, you didn’t expect that. It’s like people can’t help doing things to people. I’ve been working that one through with Zee, slowly. There’s movement there. But Faith . . . When I really think about Faith, I get this terrible sensation in my chest, and I feel like I’ll never recover.”
“You will,” said Cory. “And I say that with authority.” He yawned right then and, embarrassed, immediately tried to cover it up.
“You’re tired,” she said.
“No, it’s fine. We can keep talking.”
Greer went to the closet and pulled out a towel for him. “Here you go,” she said. “I’ll make up the couch for you.”
He took his little kit into the bathroom while she placed sheets on the mattress of the small foldout sofa. This was an era in which sofa beds were frequently opened and unfolded; at this age people were still floating, not entirely landed, still needing places to stay the night sometimes. They were doing what they could, crashing in other places, living extemporaneously. Soon enough, the pace would pick up, the solid matter of life would kick in. Soon enough, sofa beds would stay folded.
Cory came out of the bathroom as Greer was spreading the quilt over the sheets. He wore a different T-shirt, one for bed, and he smelled of some kind of unfamiliar skin lotion or soap; he’d changed his routine, she thought with some unhappiness, as if she should have been alerted to the change. But of course it had been a long time now since they had seen the various products each other used. The private and the mundane, which together became intimacy. Cory went to the opened sofa and lay down on it, his too-tall body needing to be angled in order to fit; she heard the exhausted protest of the springs, and she shut off the light and went to lie down in her own bed across the room.
With the blinds turned, it was sealed-in dark in the apartment, and neither of them had any more thoughts about their missions. Instead they were intensely self-conscious, and each sound that came from somewhere in the room was too much, could make them jump. Neither of them wanted to scare the other, or do the wrong thing, so they lay quietly and respectfully, as if it were nighttime and they were patients in the same hospital ward.
“You okay over there?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” said Cory. “Thanks for having me, Space Kadetsky.”
It was so dark that at first she couldn’t see him across the room, but could just hear him repositioning his limbs and then yawning again, the hinge of his jaw opening, being held open involuntarily, then closing. He was somewhere over there; that was what she knew. For a little while she didn’t see him at all, but then her eyes adjusted, and she did.
FIFTEEN
It was one of those parties where you could never find your coat. Which maybe wasn’t the worst thing, because no one wanted to leave and go out into the world, which had changed so stunningly. Even now, years in, no one could get used to it; and conversation at parties still centered around the ways that no one had seen it coming. They just could not believe what had happened to the country. “The big terribleness,” said a tall, spindly, and intense woman, director of online marketing at the publishing house throwing this party. She was leaning against a wall in the hallway, beneath a series of Diane Arbus photos, holding court. “The thing that really gets me,” she said, “is that the worst kind of man, the kind that you would never allow yourself to be alone with, because you would know he was a danger to you, was left alone with all of us.”
They laughed darkly, this cluster of women and a couple of men, they drank their drinks, and then they were briefly quiet. Indignity after indignity had taken place, constant hammer-strikes against everything they cared about, and they had been marching and organizing and raging, but as a defense they also frequently went into a self-soothing mode, which by now they’d been doing for years. Drinking had become a part of the self-soothing. Celebrating had become essential too, and occasionally even warranted. It seemed, once again, that hopelessness had clarified how valuable the fight had always been. “I assumed there would always be a little progress and then a little slipping, you know? And then a little more progress. But instead the whole idea of progress was taken away, and who knew that could happen, right?” said this vociferous woman.
Tonight they were celebrating the fact that Greer Kadetsky’s book Outside Voices had just spent one full year on the bestseller list. One full year that seemed to put a thumb in the eye of the big terribleness. The book, certainly not the first of its kind, was a lively and positive-leaning manifesto encouraging women not to be afraid to speak up, but the title also played on ideas of women as outsiders.
Greer, age thirty-one now, had been giving talks around the country on her Outside Voices tour. She visited women’s prisons and corporations and colleges and libraries, and she went to public schools where little girls crammed into gyms, and she told them, “Use your outside voices!” They looked nervously toward their teachers, who stood against the walls. “It’s okay,” the teachers mouthed, and the little girls screamed and shouted, tentatively at first, then with full throat.
Outside Voices was frequently criticized, of course. It did not speak for all women, Greer was told. Many women, most women, were so, so much farther outside of privilege and access than Greer Kadetsky was now. Still, she heard from women and girls from around the country, who wrote candid, tender, excited notes to Greer on her website and on the Outside Voices message board, telling her what the book had meant to them. There was talk of an Outside Voices Foundation, but nothing concrete. The book had encouraged women to stay strong and loud. And certainly staying strong and loud was urgent.
A few years earlier, back at the start of the big terribleness, before she was living with Cory and before Emilia was born, having been freed from Loci, Greer had gone to the Women’s March in DC. She’d marched with a group of half a million, and had felt vigorous, chapped-cheeked, elated. Endorphins were sprung into the bloodstream like balloons into the open sky. The high lasted the whole four and a half hours home on a boiling-hot coach bus and for weeks to come, part endorphin rush, part despair. She had been seeing Cory every weekend either in Brooklyn or up in Macopee, where he still lived as he helped his mother sell the house and resettle, and during that time Greer worked at a coffee bar, inhaling steam and foam and cinnamon—“I have cinnamon lung,” she’d said to Zee—and all the while at night, in her free time, she worked on her book.