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Interlude. Clients and employees come and go. Clients last for years sometimes, and then there’s an upheaval. A company is bought and the new owners have a different philosophy. A manufacturing company liquidates, selling off its going businesses and products, and using its huge factories and real estate to develop and sell very profitable condominiums—with high ceilings, marvelous views and unique structures. She is shocked that a likeable executive of a successful financial firm whose annual reports and promotional material her firm has been preparing for years has been accused of looting the company. The lawyers put it into bankruptcy and all its beautiful stuff is auctioned and bought by a competitor, an arrogant guy who has a country house near hers. She is sorry about her client’s downfall; he was always an agreeable man. But he is now in a white-collar penitentiary in Pennsylvania. It is harder to get new clients, and she is preparing proposals for organizations she would formerly have had nothing to do with. Some of their executives are vulgar, one threatening to change his trousers in his office while she is working with him. “Go ahead,” she says. “I won’t see anything I haven’t seen before.” “I don’t wear underwear,” he proclaims. “That’s your problem,” she says shortly, returning to her paperwork. It is a kind of hazing. He does not, after all, change his pants. But when her firm’s very successful project is finished, he does not want to pay the fee he had signed on for earlier. He sends his son to negotiate. Disgusted, she settles for half the money, glad to be rid of him. The son apologizes, “This is what my father does. Your firm did a terrific job.” “It’s ok. We just won’t work with you again. I’ve had a similar experience with an executive of one of the largest computer companies in the country. He did it to look like a good businessman to his boss. Then he was appointed to head the Federal Small Business Administration.” Another firm wants to buy hers. She has two lunches with its principals, an older woman and a younger man, in the most “in” restaurant in New York, with notable toilets (according to one of her employees, who asks for a report on the ladies’ room. He has seen the men’s room), and very expensive meals. Then she realizes, they don’t want her—they want her clients. She does not like them or how they do business, and does not think her clients will, either. One or two valued employees decide it is time for them to go elsewhere – they’ve been with her for seven or eight years, and … She cannot keep them. They are young men who have their own adventures to seek, and neither of them feels that he is able to do her entrepreneurial work. Good “seconds,” not heirs, not able to build or rebuild an organization, make it grow. She understands. She hires replacements -- but the replacements are less distinguished, their work is less capable, needs more from her—more time, more energy, more. She is getting tired. Recessions come and go, and she is glad to be on some government lists of female consultants, presumably disadvantaged, for projects that are unrelated to the economy. In one case, she prepares a proposal for a major public agency’s restructuring, and after the deadline, is stunned to get a phone call from a man in Harlem. “We should be partners on the project for the overhaul of the public authority.” “What do you mean? Who are you?” “I’m on their minority contractors’ list, and the guy in charge of the contracts gave me your proposal.” “How could he do that? The request for proposal specified that it was competitive…” “He’s my friend. And they think very highly of your plan…” “I do not understand how a proposal I spent weeks researching and working on is simply handed out by some minority proposals bureaucrat to his ‘friend.’ Don’t you think that’s corrupt?” The man’s deep Southern-accented voice says, “You’ll get your piece.” As it happens, the whole Request for Proposal is canceled after a change of Authority executives. But after a few more of these unqualified “executives” call to tell her they want in on her ideas, she gets the message: don’t waste your time and energy on public projects. Ordinary honesty is out of style. It is not just minority business executives – a year later, she learns from a man in a major Boston consulting firm that a completely different competitive proposal she has prepared for an industrial organization was turned over to him by a guy – his “friend” in the “objective” contracting group -- so that he could revise his proposal after the deadline. Corruption here, too. These people are younger. They have not been brought up with old-fashioned standards. She realizes that she is obsolescent in a changing world. Does she have enough money to wave goodbye to it all? She is tired of clients, tired of mentoring employees, tired of rising commercial rents, tired of technology “developments” that constantly need fixing. She can do it, if she is careful. With a two-year transition period, she can finish what is scheduled, wind down, help shift clients to a few firms whose integrity she respects. And solicit no new work. And then? Michael has to give up the tapes he so much enjoys making. The privacy he has at the library where he does volunteer work in exchange for a little space is gone. The library needs the room for new collections of non-books – tapes, CDs. They stock best-sellers, but few old books, and in fact are almost giving up on books – offering poetry readings, and performance art to a media-saturated audience. “I’ve asked a photography shop if they have a corner where I can work. I’m exchanging a weekly free photography workshop for novices. This is a good deal for them, because they’ll sell more stuff as a result.” She is very impressed with the creativity that goes into his barter and tax-free economy. It is a good deal for both sides, and he is writing again, letters about the condo, letters about his buying antique bits of furniture and making them into something else. Art is now something you make from something else, he says, as Meret Oppenheim put a fur lining in a teacup or Beuys felts everything to commemorate his war time in a Mongol yurt. “We have more time now, but less cash. The old lady died at about one hundred. No one really knew how old she was.” It is an oblique way of acknowledging the contributions of Jennifer’s brother. For the first time, he mentions that Jennifer had a stroke at work years before, but has made an almost full recovery. Jennifer, too, has had her times of stress, and Ruthie feels a moment of sorrow and pity that the life Jennifer had won with dazzling Michael had not turned out as she hoped. Their children were not scholars or successes; Michael has had a series of career dead ends, and then, with his failing lung, she had to go back to work… But Michael is still cheerful, still looking for new barter opportunities. “I’ve registered as a guest expert on the cruise ships that take off from Miami for the islands in the Caribbean. They go to different ports in the Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, the Dutch and French islands, and the British. People who have money sign up for them; they eat and sleep on board, and get off to shop, a few days or a week or more. I have three specialties: I teach photography workshops and bridge and the most interesting: interpreting body gesture. Everyone loves that one. The cruise ships give us a cabin and meals free in exchange for all my workshops. This can go on forever. I love cruising.” “If you can travel", she writes, “why don’t you go someplace you’ve never seen – South America, India, China, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia… The world is full of marvelous places to see … “No desire,” he responds. “I don’t want to see anything new. I just love being on ships. You’re away, the service is good, there is plenty to eat and you’re safe.” She finds this incomprehensible. Isn’t he bored? And what about safety? “Some of the cruise ships that start here seem to have infections running through the passengers – they sometimes are forced to sanitize the ships, throw everything out, treat the passengers for gastrointestinal disorders. Does that happen on your ships? You never mention it.” He writes back, “We only travel on the finest ships; they have perfect records.” Again, “Do you get off when the passengers go ashore? Do you look around, chat with the islanders wherever you’ve stopped, do you look at the clothes, the crafts, taste thefood? Do you take pictures?” “No, I’m not interested in shopping. I don’t need clothes; I have clothes. Jennifer, too. These places have linens, jewelry, a few antiques. None of it is for us. We stay on board, talk with the crew and the people who don’t go ashore, eat and sleep. It’s very restful. The places we stop all look alike – the people, too.” She is baffled. What happened to the brilliant, creative, intuitive Michael he once was?
Interlude. She has been thinking about what to do now that work for pay is in the past. But the habit of work is still current. What? She thinks about a book about the women’s movement and how far it has gone since its early days; about how to tackle a consulting project to make it a success; a book about interpreting financial news; about so many of the things that have engaged her interest briefly or longer in a full lifetime. No. She knows how to do those things. She wants to do something she has never done; something hard enough to make her stretch. Peter is still working, plans to keep working to be sure he has an adequate pension. He acknowledges that it was much easier planning when they were still together. She took care of everything. She stays in touch to keep some kind of family feeling when the kids visit, now with spouses. They eat together in restaurants, meals for which she pays. She stays in touch with friends and relatives, too. Everyone gets a bit of time and energy, help and love. She joins a gym and does aerobics and yoga several days a week, all for the long haul, assuming there is a long haul. Fiction. She wants to write stories about unpopular subjects, literary stories. She joins a writers’ workshop that meets weekly, and submits a story about a private school in which the headmaster has affairs with staff members. The workshop leader wants more sex –“make it sexier,” he says. “There’s nothing very new about sex. It’s all been said before,” she says obstinately. “I’m more interested in what he is thinking and feeling; in what the people who know what is going on do about it, in the public consequences of private acts.” Other members of the workshop bring in their stories: allusive stories of serial sex from a young girl’s point of view; much too specific and somewhat grotesque stories, perhaps autobiographical, by a middle-aged man who has an image of himself as a priapic superman. Why not? These are funny, sad, depressingly without talent, sloppily written and in need of copyediting and better word choices. Her participation is valuable to the others, but they are either uniformly admiring of her work and fail to find the flaws she knows are there, or even worse, they imitate the critical devices of the stylish University of Iowa writers’ workshop: “Show, don’t tell.” “Turn it into a scene.” She keeps writing, one story after another, and finds a few “little” magazines to print them. “Send me a story,” Michael writes. “I want to read what you’re working on.” How nice. Her kids aren’t interested. Even if they ask for a story, when she asks a few weeks later, what did you think of it, they haven’t had time yet to read it. After a while, she no longer sends them stories. But Michael, dear Michael. He identifies with the characters in the stories, he reads them as if they were scandals in the tabloids, he does not understand that they are stories, not real. He asks about the characters, he pities them or hates them… She is embarrassed for his inability to read them as literary artifacts. He writes full answers, but they are on the wrong subjects. His letters are literate in his beautiful handwriting (“write yours,” he says, “on the computer. Your writing is hard to read.”) She sends him the story about a married schoolmaster having an affair with a French teacher on a temporary exchange: the one her workshop fellows wanted more sex in. The story takes place all in one day, an experiment with the Aristotelian unities, and it is full of real schoolmaster issues: problems of how science is taught; what physical ed for adolescents should be – team sports for the talented or lifelong fitness for everyone (or both); the stupidity of new styles of discourse called political correctness; the ethics and methods of fund-raising; the hit or miss assembly of governing boards for non-profit organizations. None of that engages him. All he is interested in is the “pert breasts” of the French girl. “Is she real? Do you know her?” She grimaces as she reads his questions. Then she forgives him. He read Shakespeare to Jennifer so long ago… “No. She’s made up. A fiction,” she writes. He asks for another story, and she sends one about a man dying of AIDS, a story without cute girls. But he is again using the fiction as present reality, more pitying of the character than he should be and unable to comment on style or development or flaws. She thinks, maybe that’s what critics are for; I am not being very smart in my choice of readers. He writes the book about his stock market activities, and sends it to her for comment and editing. It’s really a booklet – a “how to” invest that he wants to sell, offering “profits without risk.” Not a bad idea, since he describes how he cautiously takes money off the table whenever he wins, so he can’t dump too much at a time. The gambler’s hedge. He wants to publish it himself and sell it by mail. She thinks finding a real publisher is better… letting someone else do the marketing. But the whole thing is boring to her, and she is surprised that anything Michael does seems boring and trivial. Maybe, she suggests, “you could sell the whole thing to a big brokerage house as a ‘give-away.’” No. It’s the attention span. He wants it out in the world right away and to receive a couple of bucks for it. A huge envelope arrives, its upper right corner festooned with first class stamps. In it, a letter, “Jennifer asked me before I get senile to write up my wartime experiences. For the kids. You know I have never talked about them. Never.” (No, not about them or about other critical matters.) “I wrote this manuscript for the kids, but I thought, I must write another set of reminiscences for you – about sex in the war.” She is deeply touched that she is receiving something special, that no one else is seeing. The war – behind them now by almost fifty years – training in the U.S., shipping out to England, from there to duty in North Africa where a French ship was blown up, and a young officer had his face blown off. Fear and horror. The military feint to southern France. The invasion of Italy, and the sun and the women’s big breasts. Back to England, and the preparation for the invasion of Normandy, he in the vanguard – on a submarine, scouting the shore for the next day’s onslaughts, fearful of being spotted, fearful, fearful. In the Pacific, as “safety officer” on a munitions ship – an oxymoron – if it took a hit, there would be no safety. It would all be over. He says nothing about being frightened during four years of constant exposure to danger and risk. But it is visible between the lines to anyone who reads his description of ships, locales, events. Heart-stopping fear, never expressed, never discussed. Do his children understand what he felt? Do they feel with him? Or are they shallow readers who read the words and miss the feeling just under them? She writes to ask – “Do they get it?” He does not respond. The answer is probably not. And the sex – his special for her alone -- the attractive young ensign was taken in hand in Chicago, in Duluth, in England. Taught about oral sex by women whose professional delivery of services and whose pleasure at dealing with an appreciative, handsome, clean, witty young man was imprinted on him forever. He says he learned from them, she reflects, but did he? Only to receive, not to give. Women whose professions require that they profess pleasure even if they feel nothing are not good teachers – they have no expectations for themselves. In fact, many of them turn to each other for satisfaction. They understand their own “spots” very well, and are unabashed about pleasuring each other, Ruthie thinks. But he does not understand that sex is a mutuality of activity, and apparently Jennifer is so happy to have him and so uninformed herself that it does not matter.
Interlude: She is publishing her stories in literary journals, and has become the “favorite writer” of one editor. This is nice but not major, she knows. She sees very little of her children; they are far away, and visit once or twice a year at most; or she visits them for three or four days, enough to ensure some continuity, but not so long as to get on their nerves. They are not close. Most families now have scattered — just like the friends of the postwar period. Friends and families can only rely on reminiscence and wishful, wistful aspirations to closer relations. Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun incorporated essays on self transcendence between segments of the main story, exploring the need for connection. We need to get past ourselves, she thinks. We make up solitude with phone calls, books, magazines, movies, TV and theatrical experience, visits to museums or participation in an organization. It is hard to find connections, she thinks. What else is there? Doing the right thing, whenever there is a right thing to do. Still it is mostly friends. But the definition of friend has changed. Who is a friend now? Whom do you talk to when life overwhelms you? When loneliness or sadness, frustration or rage at the mostly ugly changes in the world – greed, preoccupation with short-term goals, shallow focus on the self, rampant ignorance – seem intolerable? Your friends are people whom you meet here or there, exchange a “how are you?’ and a bit of sympathy with, eat dinner or go to the theater with. Budding new friendships do not bloom or take root, or feel organic like the old ones. We are separate in our skins, trying to make sense of our aloneness.
She and Peter are now, against all expectations, closer. Best friends. They respect and love each other in a way that would have been impossible with the day-to-day incompatibilities of living together and being married. A good thing, something to celebrate. There is a review of a new book by John Updike that mentions the friendship between two people who have been married that overrides the rage and pain that caused their split. She is still relying on reading to shape her understanding, a lifelong dependency. Ronald and Nancy Reagan have departed the scene, he into the shadows of Alzheimer’s and she into less Republican advocacy of stem-cell research. But they have been “special” – special to each other, reminiscing writers note. No one has defined “special”, even now, and Ruthie winces when she sees the word. “He’d never have been president without her.” “That’s what a man needs.” What does a man need? Ruthie is appalled on a long trip with a woman who was once a close friend and probably still thinks she is, to hear the abrupt change in her telephone manner from ordinary discourse when she speaks to her husband. She is cooing and “Sweetheart”-ing her husband as if he is a baby or a beloved cat, while demanding that he do things for her that she should do for herself. Adults don’t coo at each other like that, do they? Not long after, during a phone conversation with another friend, she hears the same phenomenon. Her friend answers a call on another line within her hearing, and her voice changes from the mature matter of fact discussion of a science issue with Ruthie to a sugary burble. “Was that your husband just now?” Ruthie inquires when her friend returns to the phone. “Yes. How did you know?” “You changed your tone of voice completely.” Ruthie cannot understand this transformation in free, sensible, independent women. She wonders why she never noticed it before. Kootchie koo, put on as needed. No wonder she is lonely. It is equivalent to lying, a perfectly dishonest, unethical way to behave even if the guy “eats it up.” When did it happen that you did not behave, within reason, as you felt, but in order to have someone “eat it up?” How could you have trust when even simple relationships are full of fakery? She begins to wonder if she is naïve, infantile… and comforts herself with the recollection of how often clients said, “If you say something, everyone will believe you.”
“Here it is, hard and ready – for you.” Cartoons of giant, horizontal penises decorate one letter after another from Michael. His letters demand that she suck him off to orgasm. They depict a dripping organ in a final state, as crude and ridiculous as street graffiti. She does not know what to make of these letters, one after another, private fantasies sent unselfconsciously to her as if he knows she will understand and collaborate. What does he want? By mail? Or just to put forward the idea that he is still virile and thinking about her? Ruthie answers these letters with tales of meetings, museum shows, brief encounters with old friends, her presidency, yet again, of another organization. She does not mention the new content of his letters. She does not know what to say. Responding in kind does not even occur to her -- women, she knows, are (at least in her generation) less responsive to symbolic stimuli. She has no interest in writing pornography. The most available stuff – by Anais Nin, the silly bits that made Jean Auel so popular, the putative femininity of the author of “The Story of O”, they were all unbelievably boring. No. Literary pornography is no choice. Neither is signifying annoyance or disapproval. She loves Michael. He can do as he pleases safely without fear of her response. Between these desperate communications, he writes comments on her letters and on the stories, clippings, museum leaflets – that she sends with them. Then he picks up his preoccupations – goes back to his penis. Alberto Moravia, one of her favorite writers, has devoted a whole novel, “Two” to the interplay between a man and his penis. She thinks, it’s a difference between men and women. She has learned somewhere about St. Augustine’s struggles with his genitalia before his full-time religiosity, and that he regarded it as a heritage of “original sin,” an idea adopted by Constantine to get endless political control of a burgeoning Christian population who might otherwise have thought baptism enough for salvation. “Jennifer comes into the shower where I masturbate and sucks me off. I really prefer masturbating in the shower to anything else, including her participation.” Ruthie wonders why he writes this. She would rather he preserved Jennifer’s dignity. The aging Arthur Miller writes a masturbatory fantasy about drawing on a naked girl’s body. The story is printed in The New Yorker. Arthur Miller doesn’t remember – and neither does anyone at The New Yorker -- that his idea came from a Japanese movie. She reflects, he is an old man, trying to hang on to his image of a hero of virility – the man who made love to Marilyn Monroe. We all forget who we are and where. Michael, too, but she cannot say that. Our illusions of living are all we have. Ruthie looks for richer stuff to send with her letters – clippings about institutions, ideas, images – booklets, excerpts from magazines, cards, photos. He never sends anything extra to her that acknowledges her interests. Of course, he does not read as much. He knows she takes care of her own intellectual and artistic interests. Doesn’t he? Then she thinks – her sending this stuff is a submissive act. She is the good girl, being good. Dogs, monkeys and other animals all play out their submissiveness to power. Women do so in little acts of care. When they are not reciprocated, it is the acknowledgment of power. It is the cajoling, cooing voice again in another form. To be fair, she notices that she is on the receiving end of such a voice from a middle-aged man who sells lawn mowers. “You have the most seductive voice,” she says to him, realizing a moment later that he is thinking, she is alone, looks all right, and might be susceptible to a little carnal activity. She is surprised, too. He is newly married to a much younger third wife – what does he need her for? The man backs off, resuming a normal tone of voice.
“I have something important to tell you. You need a husband, a man to take care of things. You should move to Florida where the climate is better…” She starts a letter, “Michael – I know you mean well, but I like living alone. I am bored by most of the men I meet. Even if there is an occasional sleepover – I want him to go home. I do not want him here in the morning; I do not want to serve breakfast. I want him out. Maybe it’s because I am working on stories, analyzing other people’s work, running a writers’ workshop… I am an independent, self-starting person. I do not need an accessory male, especially one who drags along behind me. The only thing some of these guys want is to tell me what to do, how much to spend on dinner – even when we’re sharing the meal, and I am paying half. There is an assumption that men know better ---. It’s just not so.”
She thinks to herself she is turning into an impatient, cranky woman. She should not be writing this kind of stuff to Michael. He is innocent and frail. She throws away her letter and writes about other things. About skinny, little Tobias Schneebaum, a boy born in Brooklyn who studied art with Rufino Tomayo and then explored anthropology in South America and Africa and now calls himself an art historian and anthropologist. He speaks and writes on the Asmat of New Guinea (also Margaret Mead’s stamping ground). He loves living with cannibals and other primitives and joining them in their activities, while also engaging in wild homosexual sex with whomever among them is willing. She encloses a few pages of photo-illustrated ads in a weekly rag, The New York Press, offering the buttocks of men who specify how long their penises are, while simultaneously proffering hairless chests enhanced into bulbous bosoms by hormones and implants. She thinks he will find these amusing. There are more of them than of ordinary women or dominatrixes who offer carnal services or of cute young men who promised unlicensed massages and specify their inches, cut or uncut. Such gross ads pay the bills for the newspaper, and permit its owner to publicize his extreme political conservatism. She thinks Michael will find the new frankness interesting, as well as the huge gap between the paper’s editorials and its advertising. But no.
She detects depression in his correspondence – his brother in law, Jean’s husband, dying a slow death of a brain tumor, depressed…”I often wonder who will die before me,” he writes, “but I don’t think about that often.” A contradictory statement. “I’m busy lecturing, giving local talks, working the cruise lines…” She thinks it is always the same, no wonder he is bored, unfocused. Then he writes, “Do we know who we are, who are you, who am I?” Legitimate questions, but also ways for an aging person to ruminate fruitlessly. She is beginning to see that in Peter, as well. Rumination – sitting still, wondering…
Another letter – he was the president of his condominium association –“knifed” in his absence – forced out for no reason. No reason? That’s his view. Then he writes “nothing feels as good as revenge.” How, for what? “We met some interesting people on our last cruise, as usual. But luckily, no follow-up. That always seems boring.” She writes about what is happening at her upstate house, about finding a tick on her arm after cutting the grass and her treatment for Lyme disease, about the self-appointed handyman who retrieved a natural gas water heater from the town dump to replace her propane gas heater – and the result, a bout of carbon monoxide dizziness and nausea till she calls the propane company and they send a technician who tells her what the fool had done, and puts in a new heater. She gets rid of the handyman, whose prime goal, sometimes voiced, is to “play house” with her. These are ordinary events of no particular consequence when you have a house in the country; you just cope with them, and mention them in letters which are like diaries in their continuity.
A new letter from Michael – a shocker to her. “Your letter contents make me think you are not ready to live alone. Or put another way, you’d be more comfortable with a full-time ‘companion’. Get married. Take in a full-time lover. Too many of the things that are happening might be avoided if you had another person with you. Things have been happening to you lately, starting with Lyme problem, etc. Two minds are better than one. “Your typing is much better. Not one strike-over or correction – so I’m guessing that your brain is working fine but I believe your body may be not so perfect. Love and kisses, Michael.”
Again… doesn’t he know that most guys in her age range are no longer ambitious sexually? That they are more likely to be looking for a nurse for themselves, and she, healthy and lively, looks exactly right to them? She is outraged. Patience, patience, she counsels herself. She waits two weeks, still angry. There is nothing for it: She has to respond with what she feels: “I do not understand how a man who has not seen me in more than ten years, who does not understand that Lyme disease is a bacterial infection caused by a tick bite and not by any infirmity of mine, and that Dutchess county has the highest incidence of Lyme in the country, and that one of those guys you might want me to take in -- a self-appointed “caretaker” and retired plumber -- installed a natural gas water heater he picked up at the town dump to save me money -- causing carbon monoxide poisoning and some other problems -- none of which has to do with my beinng enfeebled – can therefore prescribe a male caretaker to supervise me. “You say I am ‘not ready’ to live alone. I have been living alone, happily, for almost twenty-five years. When will I be ready? I do not need to be told what to do ‘for my own good.’ I am sure if you asked an Arab man why he insists on his ladies’ not going out without a male escort, and on their being covered from head to toe, and not driving a car, he’d say, ‘It’s for their own good.’ Spare me. “Peter and a much younger man who used to work for me both heard the substance of your letter. They laughed at your foolishness. Even the strike-over, no- error- ‘typing’ comment. I’ve been writing to you on the computer for many years, since you asked me to. And finally, the epiphany, “You’re stuck in the bourgeois male chauvinist attitudes of the 40s. You’ve never grown past them. Wake up!”
Of course, he is insulted. He sends a decorative card with the final announcement. “I can’t write to you any more. Love, always, Michael.” She no longer cares.
It is her turn to ruminate. What took her so long? Why had she not realized her gradual disillusionment? Why had she not registered that she had grown way past him, that he had indeed been stuck in the lovable/arrogant/fearful mode of the mama’s boy of the 40s? She had been infatuated with his potential, not the actual man, as blind in her way as he was. Now she is remorseful. When did she turn into a cranky old lady? And what was it about, anyway, her feeling of satisfaction that her kids managed to find careers that meant something whereas his did not? Who the hell was she to judge? We are all headed to the same limbo. But, still in life, still reaching, she finds a statement by Catholic Gary Wills in the New York Review, that the most important and unexpected change of the sixties and after was the success of the women’s movement, “which for the first time in history, has made us take seriously the equality of half the human race with the other half.” Almost the same words used by Voltaire’s lady, the Marquise du Chatelet in 1735, Scientific American notes. But ordinary understanding still lags. In fact, Chomsky’s buddy Pinker thinks that women are inevitably to be dominated by men because that’s how it used to be. It’s built into our genes, he thinks. He doesn’t understand that the mechanics of gene expression are regulated by environment, and there is a great deal of flexibility in our brains and behavior. And then, of all things, here is IBM out with many pages of advertising, asking the question – the question that has bugged her for so many years, “What Makes You Special?” in full pages in all the media that matter. Each “special” ad has a thing or an idea on display – and next to it its counterpart that is “special”. The thing that is special wears an asterisk to denote its specialness; otherwise it is identical. She reads the ads looking for what makes anything “special” -- after all it was the question of her life, “When ‘You’re Special,’ What Are You?” The ads proclaim “Special is everywhere…” On a car. On an elevator door identical to two others except that it has an asterisk. On a capsule. On a woman greeting a man. On an apple in a tray. On a football player’s helmet. Each of them bears the asterisk that marks it as “special.” So what’s special about her – what makes her special? It is a distinction without a difference. Nothing. She has known it all the time.
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