Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  “What the hell,” Vanessa said. “Let’s have a party. Let’s celebrate Florence in absentia.”

  “I think I’ll ‘celebrate’ her some other time,” Saul said. “I’m out of here.”

  6

  “Did he divorce her?” Emily said to her mother.

  “Other way round,” Janine said.

  “That’s what I thought. I can’t even imagine them married.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s so independent. And he seems like he needs somebody needy.”

  Janine was constantly surprised by the things her daughter came out with. But parents always are.

  For a parent, time is not a one-way street. In Janine’s mind, the nineteen-year-old Emily was accompanied, shadowed, by the infant Emily, and the toddler Emily, and Emily in all her other incarnations. So when she came out with a shrewd perception or a sophisticated thought, it was always something to marvel at, because it was as if the five-year-old Emily were saying it too. A parent is perpetually thinking, “Where did she learn that?”

  “We’ve got the evening free, at least,” Janine said. “Wanna go to the movies?”

  “But can we not see anything self-improving tonight? Can we go to something fun?”

  “Only if you promise . . .”

  But Janine couldn’t think of anything to make her daughter promise. There was nothing she wanted Emily to change. This hadn’t always been true, and wouldn’t always remain true, but it was true right now.

  7

  The next time Janine and Emily saw Florence, it was in an even less intimate setting.

  The two of them were in the audience at Town Hall, waiting for the panel discussion to begin.

  “Is it unhealthy to have an intellectual crush on your mother-in-law?” Janine said.

  “Not if it’s only an intellectual crush,” her daughter answered.

  Janine’s relationship with Florence was an unusual one for a woman to have with her mother-in-law. It was an unusually strong relationship, though it existed mostly in Janine’s mind.

  Janine had heard of Florence before she’d ever met Daniel, and when Daniel told her who his mother was, she couldn’t believe it.

  Not that Florence was in any sense famous. She was a feminist writer—an essayist and, as she called herself, a seat-of-her-pants historian. She’d had a little flare of literary glory in the seventies, which had vanished, as flares of literary glory tend to do, and since then she’d continued, calmly and patiently and entirely out of the limelight, to do her work.

  But though she wasn’t famous to the world, she was famous to Janine. Janine had read a book of essays by Florence in college. She read them for a class in modern American feminism, and Florence’s voice on the page was unlike anything that Janine had encountered before. By turns eloquent and chatty, confident and self-questioning, it was the voice of a real person. It was a style Janine later encountered in other writers—Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Katha Pollitt—and though all of them were better known than Florence was, Florence had been the first member of this tribe whom Janine encountered, and, maybe for that reason alone, Florence had always meant the most to her.

  Janine had never wanted to be a writer—after a few years spent “finding herself” after college, she went to grad school in psychology—so Florence wasn’t a role model for her in any direct sense. But Florence remained an inspiration. She continued to represent Janine’s idea of a free woman.

  The collection of essays that Janine read in college was called Opportunities for Heroism in Everyday Life, and the idea that there were such opportunities—the idea, in the words of a psychologist whom Florence quoted, that one is constantly confronted by situations in which one must make either a growth choice or a fear choice—conferred a new significance, first, on Janine’s life, and then, the longer she thought about it, on the lives of everyone she knew or came in contact with.

  Janine and Daniel were on their third or fourth date before she found out who his mother was. She couldn’t believe it. She tried to tamp down her excitement—she limited herself to saying something like, “Your mother’s Florence Gordon? I’ve heard of her,” and when Daniel seemed surprised, she said, “Yeah. I’ve read some of her stuff. I liked it.” The funny thing about all this was that because she was determined to play it cool when she first found out (it seemed weird and somehow risky to let a new boyfriend know that she had an intellectual crush on his mother), Daniel never understood, and probably still didn’t understand, how important his mother was to her. She’d told him about it since, but she had the feeling that he’d never really revised his first impression.

  “Here she comes,” Emily said, as the lights went down.

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  About the Author

  BRIAN MORTON is the author of four novels. Starting Out in the Evening was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was made into an acclaimed feature film, and A Window Across the River was a Book Club selection of the Today show. He teaches at New York University, the Bennington Writing Seminars, and Sarah Lawrence College, where he also directs the writing program. He lives in New York.