Didi put a hand on each of my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. “If he’s good at his job,” she said, “you won’t think he is doing a job. That’s what it means to be a seducer.” She let me go. “Everybody, for such people, is the exception. You know that. Everybody is an individual to be conquered, and you’re only as good as your last conquest. Which isn’t about sex, necessarily, although it can be. It’s what people said about Bill Clinton—he always made you feel you were the only person in the room.”
“So you’re saying that’s his thing? And all he really wants is a quick blow job under the table?”
She shrugged. “I’m not saying any of that. I’ve never met the guy. I’m saying that the world contains such people. If it’s shaped like a maple leaf, the color and texture of a maple leaf, and you find it underneath a maple tree … that’s all I’m saying.”
But I knew better, even as I feared worse. Both with Sirena and with Skandar, I veered between fantasies of intimacy and of bleak rejection. Doubt, that fatal butterfly, hovered always in my breast. What did I bring to them? Who was I to them, neither glamorous nor obviously brilliant nor important in the world? And yet, all three of them looked to me for something, even if none of us could tell what it was. Each of them wanted something, and their wanting made me believe that I was capable. Not that I was an extraordinary woman, exactly, but only not exactly that. Something quite like that. Which always since childhood I had secretly wanted to believe—no: had in my most deeply secret self believed, knowing that the believing itself was a necessary precondition to any doing at all—but had never allowed myself to let on. It’s not right to say that they made me think more highly of myself; perhaps more accurately, that they allowed me to, in their wanting. My lifelong secret certainty of specialness, my precious, hidden specialness, was awakened and fed by them, grew insatiable for them, and feared them, too: feared the power they might wield over me, and simply on account of that fear, almost certainly would.
3
So began, ironically, my babysitting season. Not the obvious pastime for a Not Exactly Extraordinary Woman; although I see, in retrospect, that it was the perfect—the inevitable—trajectory for the Woman Upstairs. Even at the time, I was aware of how it looked. Plenty of the teachers at Appleton Elementary, the young ones especially, did some babysitting for extra cash. I’d always been disdainful of this: it seemed a sure way to undermine one’s teacherly authority. So much so that when Sirena first suggested the notion, I felt a chastening frisson, as if I’d been struck.
We were lying on cushions in the studio and I’d been laughing at her account of a formal Kennedy School dinner she’d attended, at which the snowy bigwig beside her had held forth for twenty minutes about the unelectability of the Democratic Party (himself a Democrat, without which the lecture might have been considered aggressive), with a glob of red soup glistening upon his chin. She said it seemed almost to be winking at her, the way it caught the light.
“Do you think he had botched dental surgery, and can’t feel anything on his chin, so food routinely gathers in that little hollow? Or do you think if you get big enough in politics, in that behind-the-scenes sort of way, it’s suddenly okay to fart in public or to have bits of food on your face? Or maybe he’s from outer space, or like a person with autism?”
“In English we have a word for it,” I said. “It’s ‘asshole.’ ”
“Don’t,” she said, “because it makes such seeping liquid only more upsetting.”
And we laughed so hard the tepid coffee splashed out of my cup and into my lap; and then somehow even that seemed related to the soup glob, and we laughed all over again. And only when we were catching our breath from laughing, both of us exhaling those strange almost sobbing breaths that accompany crazy mirth, did she say, very serious all of a sudden, “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask for your help with something. To do with Reza.”
“What’s wrong? Something at school I don’t know about?”
“No, no—you mustn’t worry so much. It’s more about home. With Skandar’s commitments, especially this term, we have