“Yeah, sure. I’ll solve all the problems.”
“You have that grassroots experience from Chicago,” Greer said. “You’re so good at all that. Noelle could find a school here, couldn’t she? I know this sounds a little bit like, ‘Let’s put on a show.’ I don’t want it to be like that. I’m just saying if this ever turns into something, you could be part of it. And I owe you a job,” she said lightly.
“No you don’t,” Zee said. “You really, really don’t.” She paused. “And anyway, Greer, I love my work.”
“I know you do.”
They were both quiet, thinking about Darren Tinzler. A man who degraded and threatened women made you want to do everything possible. Howl and scream; march; give a speech; call Congress around the clock; fall in love with someone decent; show a young woman that all is not lost, despite the evidence; change the way it feels to be a woman walking down a street at night anywhere in the world, or a girl coming out of a KwikStop in Macopee, Massachusetts, in daylight, holding an ice cream. She wouldn’t have to worry about her breasts, whether they would ever grow, or grow big enough. She wouldn’t have to think anything physical or sexual about herself at all unless she wanted to. She could dress the way she liked. She could feel capable and safe and free, which was what Faith Frank had always wanted for women.
Faith appeared again at moments like this, stamped all of a sudden into a conversation. Walking in the city, Greer would have occasional sightings of an elegant older woman, perhaps flanked by other women, and she would hurry to catch up with her. But then the woman would turn to the side, revealing herself, and not only was it not Faith, it was laughably not Faith. The woman was thirty. Or the woman was black. Or, once, the woman was a man. Or, most often, the woman was someone who vaguely resembled Faith and could have been her stunt double: lovely and accomplished-looking. During the Women’s March, everyone buoyed by the sense of being right, Greer was certain that Faith was there somewhere—she wasn’t one of the speakers—and that maybe she would see her. Though their relationship had ended in the worst way, the ice would be broken then and there, and everything that had happened between them would no longer matter. Sometimes you had to let go of your convictions, or at least loosen them far more than you ever thought you would. She would call out, “Faith?” and in the middle of the crowd of roaring women, Faith would swivel her head and see her. Their long period of being apart would end. She would be returned to Greer like a lost person in SoulFinder. Although, as Zee once pointed out, in SoulFinder you had to go looking for the person you had lost.
* * *
? ? ?
Faith, now, was closer to eighty than seventy. She still worked at the foundation, though three years earlier Emmett Shrader had died of a massive heart attack. His death was itself a significant story, covered widely in the news section of the newspaper and extending into the business section, with profiles and encomiums; but there were also rumors online about the cause of death. He died in bed with a young woman, it was said, having taken a drug for erectile dysfunction. It wasn’t that he had been told not to take the drug; he had apparently been told not to have sex, not anymore, or at least not the kind of sex that Emmett seemingly liked, which was active, athletic, whole-bodied, heart-quaking.
The foundation was to continue, he’d instructed in his will, though he hadn’t paid attention to the details enough to specify at what level, and the people upstairs had decided to reduce Loci’s operating budget bit by bit until the foundation essentially became a low-level and modest speakers’ forum. It occupied a place in the world similar to the one that Bloomer had occupied at the end of its long life.
But still it carried on, and still Faith Frank stayed in charge, with a vastly scaled-down staff and a much smaller office on a lower floor of the Strode Building. Nothing had ever come out publicly about the mentor program. Ben, who was still at Loci, told Greer that Faith often stayed late at work, and because her new office was so much smaller, she’d had to have a few inches shaved off the top and bottom of her suffrage-door desk so that it could still fit. Greer imagined Faith sitting there grimly watching as someone came in with a saw and cut down the door.
Loci no longer held summits, but small gatherings of twenty-five or thirty people or so, the same size as the lunchtime speeches that they used to give as teasers leading up to the summits. Faith wrote very occasional op-eds for the New York Times and the Washington Post, but had ceased most public speaking. Greer saw pictures of Faith once in a while; more to the point, she sought them out online. It was Faith, despite the deeper lines in the face like a fisherwoman in a woodcut. Faith with the smile, and the intelligence, and always the trademark sexy boots. But Faith in a tighter space, with a lower budget, in wild, uncertain times. Faith still working. Misogyny had stormed the world in an all-out, undisguised raid.
The Senate seat of Anne McCauley, who had retired and whose late-life hobby was canning plums, had been filled by her daughter Lucy McCauley-Gevins, whose views of reproductive rights were even more extreme than her mother’s, and who had been given much more support and money. Loci was small; Senator Lucy McCauley-Gevins was getting bigger; Fem Fatale had lost its popularity over the past couple of years, but there were other sites to replace it, newer, fresher ones providing sharp commentary, humor, and a receptacle for rage; Ragtimes, that sweet little play, was occasionally still performed in community theaters and high schools around the country; and Outside Voices showed no sign of falling off the bestseller list.
Also, Opus’s old hit “The Strong Ones” was now the song on a famous television commercial, accompanied by the image of a pair of female hands pulling at a sheet of paper towel, which did not rip or disintegrate. Some people defended Opus’s decision, said it was good to commodify art, because at least then you could get your message into the shared waters of the culture. Everyone knew that you could never rest, never stop being vigilant, and even though it wasn’t always enough anymore just to keep working, still there wasn’t the luxury of stopping. Faith sat at her desk in her small office late at night, in lamplight, with papers spread out around her.
For a long time Greer had thought that if she ever did get in touch with Faith, she would give her the latest bulletins from her life. She’d write and say:
Get this, Faith. I ended up marrying my high school boyfriend, who I once cried over in your office. At first I was hesitant to get married; I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. But we knew we wanted to have children, so it made sense financially. I knew I loved him, but I don’t feel that all love relationships have to culminate in marriage. I was ambivalent at first, but then I came around.