Little Labors (7 page)

When the baby was very small, still in what I have often heard termed the “fourth trimester,” an out-of-town relative came to visit the baby, and to visit New York, and so one afternoon, the baby was put into the sling and was in this manner transported through a Magritte show at the Museum of Modern Art. The baby's sling consisted of two loops of black fabric, the one nestling into the other, and the baby was still so small that her feet didn't stick out, nothing showed of her save her bald head, and sometimes, a tiny hand gripping at the edge of the fabric. The paintings at the Magritte show included: men whose heads had been replaced by apples, a gathering of legs without bodies, an iris that was a clouded sky. Magritte-type images, naturally. Magritte's stated goal, the museum copy noted, was to make “everyday objects shriek aloud.” In one exhibition room after another after another, a stranger would catch sight of the bald head, the small hand, floating amidst a vanishing cloak of sling and raincoat. One stranger after another said of the baby's inadvertent performance art, “That's my favorite piece in the show.”

If you discovered you could communicate with a chimpanzee, would you give that up? Or would you spend near on all your hours with the other species?

Some women and studies have reported to me, or to researchers, that during pregnancy they develop, alongside a heightened aversion to slightly overripe lettuce, a heightened fear of strangers. But fear of strangers is, in some cases, a euphemism. One woman confessed to me that she felt something she had never felt before, which was anxiety at night when she saw, in particular, black men on the street. She felt horrified by her own feelings. Having herself dated a black man for nine years, she said, she would have thought any primitive sense of dark-skinned people as strangers would have been eliminated. But no. Here she was, a professor who had done field studies, alone, in several central African counties, interviewing people about how they came to be involved in political violence, and regularly visited, not in a friendly way, by the local police, and through all that she had never been anxious, and now, here, alone on Amsterdam Avenue, in a New York with the lowest crime rate in years, she was worrying. However, once her baby arrived, she was, again, “cured.”

Walking with the puma, especially when she was very young, I found that the young black men who use the drum space in my building would bless me and greet the baby, and the men working at the Pakistani restaurant around the corner would talk to the baby and talk to me, and the Yemeni man at the deli would never fail to ask after the baby, and in the immigration line when I landed in India, a man escorted me and the baby to the diplomats line, and said, This is how we treat a mother in India, and at a foreign train station an Ethiopian man walked me and the baby five minutes out of his way to the correct platform when I asked for directions, and on the subway, the construction workers whose shoulders the baby would reach out and pat, asking for their attention, would also play with the baby, and pretty much all women, everywhere, would smile at the baby. There was only one group, very demographable, to whom the baby—and myself with the baby—was suddenly invisible, and that was the group with which I am particularly comfortable, the youngish, white, well-employed, culturally literate male. There's nothing inherently commendable, or deplorable, in liking, or not liking, babies, or women with babies: it is what it is. And I encountered exceptions, in all categories. But when, without a baby, you walk by hundreds of people a day for years, and then, with a baby, you walk by hundreds of people a day for months and months, you feel you have slip-slided into another strata or you feel you have gone pre-Cambrian, or, perhaps more accurately, that you are contributing, somehow, to the next geological stratum (or both at once) and you begin to wonder what formed each geological layer, and what really was the geological layer you were in before, and what is the geological layer you are in now, and how was it that each layer seemed, individually, when you were in it, to be
everything.
Did a meteor crash, or the climate abruptly change, or a series of volcanoes erupt? I decide the baby is like a minor climate catastrophe, or, through dumb luck, redemption, and all the people who might hold out the smallest hope that a shift could result in their life on the earth being ever so slightly better feel one way about the royal catastrophe/­redemption of infants, while another group that has, more or less, nowhere to go but down, on however subconscious a level, and even however much they might consciously
want
to be shifted down, also don't want to be shifted down, which is why their encounter, therefore, with the royalty of infants unavoidably bears an unwelcome message of the end of their own reign, meager or real as it may be, and so they simply avoid noticing the possibility.

Most of the great women writers of the twentieth century who write or wrote in English were or are writing from England. Or from the English commonwealth. Not as much from America. Also most of the beloved mystery novels come from England. A woman I know, who writes mysteries nowadays, mysteries that are set in Saudi Arabia and often involve a female pathologist, told me, after she sold her first mystery book, that what excited her most was having sold the book to England, where they rarely buy mysteries by Americans, being so well stocked by their own. Why are the English so drawn to mysteries? I read somewhere once—with all the diagrams and tabulations organized like cavalry—that the rise of the mystery genre in England, particularly following the Industrial Revolution, coincided with increased anxiety about social mobility. The argument pointed out, among other things, that the villains in Holmes's stories almost invariably came from the lower classes, that Moriarty (Holmes's archnemesis) has an obviously Irish name, and that there's something supremely comforting about pinpointing a single criminal, about being able to say of a sense of evil just generally around: Here it is, the source, we have found it. Along these lines it is also noticed that the golden age of detective novels in England followed World War I, and the golden age of detective novels in Japan followed World War II. Usually the arc of the novels was a homicide, or a short series of homicides. It makes emotional sense that, among the unmysterious deaths of millions of one's countrymen, one might find it soothing to focus on a mysterious one or two. The theory may not quite hold water, but has at least a dense enough weave to keep in place a few oversized bouncy balls. Penelope Fitzgerald's first novel,
The Golden Child,
was a murder mystery set in a museum, written to entertain her husband as he was dying. Muriel Spark's third novel,
Memento Mori
, was also a murder mystery of sorts: a series of anonymous calls going out to a circle of older people, saying simply “Remember You Must Die,” which of course they nearly all do, as they are old, and murdered by time.

I have often in the past decade or so wanted to write something about “women writers,” whatever that means (and whatever “about” means), but the words “women writers” seemed already to carry their own derogation (sort of like the word “ronin”), and I found the words slightly nauseating, in a way that reminded me of that fancy, innocent copy of
Little Women
that I had received as a gift as a child but could bear neither to look at nor throw out. What was I going to say? That this or that writer was not Virginia Woolf but was similarly female? That one of my favorite contemporary novels that also happened to be by a woman was
The Last Samurai
by Helen DeWitt, and that one of the things I liked about it was that it takes so many pages into the main section before you recognize the narrator's gender as female, and then so many pages more before you realize that the narrator of that section is a mother, in fact a single mother, who is trying to develop herself as a scholar and who tries to solve the problem of presenting a male role model to her son by setting him up to watch Akira Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai
over and over, a ridiculous but understandable plan, and that then the major section of the book is the son trying to solve the mystery of his paternity by investigating one potential father after another? It also seemed relevant to me that this brilliantly wordy and weird book actually sold many copies only because randomly—and I feel pretty sure about this, though I'm only guessing—there was a Tom Cruise film by the same title that came out around the same time as the book. I had so many little artifacts like this that seemed to point to . . . I didn't know what they pointed to. I had a strong feeling that I couldn't see the contemporary situation, and I decided that this was because firsthand knowledge is an obstacle to insight. What of the other artifacts? There were those forgotten American noir women, like Evelyn Piper of
Bunny Lake Is Missing
and Dorothy Hughes of
In A Lonely Place
and Vera Caspary of
Laura
(and thirty-eight other novels) and Patricia Highsmith, less forgotten, of one terrifying betrayal after another, and these oddities, and their odd obscurity, seemed to cluster around . . . something. As did the fact that the Feminist Press had reissued many of these books, which were otherwise out of print, and I wouldn't have come across them save their placement on certain remainders tables. (I also felt that
Gone Girl
took most of its plot from Caspary's
The Man Who Loved His Wife.
) Why so much crime? Why so many mysteries? Why was my copy of
The Collected Works of Jane Bowles
part of the Out-of-Print Masterworks series? The same was true of my copy of
Mrs. Caliban
by Rachel Ingalls, a perfect novel about a neglected housewife in love with a giant escaped lizard man.

And then there was the fact that contemporary crime fiction coming out of Japan is written mostly by women, and that when I had wanted to write a profile of the Japanese writer Natsuo Kirino, the author of the bestselling
Out—
about four women who work in a bento factory and become involved in a series of murders of men whom they have to dispose of by cutting them apart like sushi—I was told that she was very private, didn't give interviews, and that the publication of her next book in English had been canceled because she was just so difficult to work with. I was enamored with a story by Kono Taeko called “Toddler Hunting” about a woman who goes to great lengths to buy other people's little boys beautiful sweaters that she then is obsessed with watching them struggle into and out of. I even had in my mind a list of male writers that I thought were somehow “female” on the page—Walser, Kafka, Kleist, for some reason all German-language—which made me realize that maybe I just meant writers that I really liked in a way that had something to do with the volume of certain kinds of quiet. I wanted to line up all the baubles and bothers and clusters and . . . but in the end, all the lining up of these almost-things got me to thinking of one of the more hauntingly ridiculous passages in Claude Lévi-Strauss's
Tristes Tropiques
, where he attributes Christopher Columbus's mistaking of manatees for mermaids to an “error in taste.” “This was before people saw things as belonging to a whole,” he clarifies. I had to let the “women writers” go. Better to just let things accrete, like the rust on the vats at the rum distilleries Lévi-Strauss visits in another chapter; rusty vats make much better rum, he says, and I find I trust him.

Near the end of
Life Among the Savages
by Shirley Jackson—a writer most remembered for her story about a civic group of people stoning to death their fellow citizen—the narrator is expecting her fourth child; her children and husband are asking after the not-yet-born baby daily; the narrator is trying to get a reprieve from the topic. “I took my coffee into the dining room and settled down with the morning paper. A woman in New York had had twins in a taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman's page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me.”

For many years, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only “woman writer” I had read. Then, around age twenty-five, I had the blunt experience of looking at my bookshelves and noticing that my bookshelves were filled almost exclusively with books by men. Which was fine, I wasn't going to get in a rage about it, I loved those books that I had read. But I was unsettled, since my bookshelves meant either there were no good books by women, or I had somehow read in such a way as to avoid them all. I had never had my Jane Austen phase, or Edith Wharton phase, or even George Eliot phase, I associated those writers with puberty, or “courting,” both things which repelled me. (I now know I was stupid to feel that way.) But, like I said, I wasn't going to rage at myself, or at the world, I was just going to try to read some books by women. But where to start? I came across a book by someone named Denis Johnson. (I didn't run in a bookish crowd.) Graspingly, I thought that Yes, I was pretty sure that I had heard that this Denis—I was imagining a French woman, or maybe a French-Canadian—was very good. There was no author photo on the book. The first Denis Johnson book I read was called
The Name of the World
, a sort of rewrite of a Bernhard novel; it centered on a man who goes to look at the same painting in a museum every day and the reader eventually learns that the man's wife and child died in a car accident. I liked the book, though upon finishing it, I did find myself reflecting that it was surprising that this particular book was by a woman, but I dismissed that thought, because it's always so unpleasant—so distasteful!—to think about the gender of who wrote a book—shouldn't it ideally be anyone? Maybe it had been textbook self-defense, or self-loathing, that had kept me from reading books by women. The only “girl” book that made it through to me—also a gift, from my childhood best friend's mother—was
Anne of Green Gables
, that book that is mysteriously so beloved in Japan that there are direct flights from Tokyo to Prince Edward Island, the tiny green patch the fictional redhead is from.