BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SPRING 2001

49 :: love. understanding. all that crap. :: 6/18/01

The major disadvantage of being a designer is that you begin to realize how few well-designed objects there are in the world.

The major advantage of being a designer is that you get paid enough to afford a few of them. Case in point: Janine's overstuffed velvet armchair. A collection of straight lines and curves playing together. Because of its brilliant saturated blue, Janine selected this chair for her living room, which has pumpkin-colored walls: the chair seems to optically vibrate in space. When you sit in it— as Janine is doing now —you can feel that the designer has anticipated the way a skeleton comes to rest: it's less a chair that you sit down on and more a chair that catches you as you fall into it. She spotted the chair in a Wicker Park home furnishings store and for the better part of a month agonized over the price tag. At the end of that month she received news that she and her fellow designer Lee were both receiving raises, and the first thing she did was go out and buy the chair. You don't want to know is what she tells people when they ask.

In front of the chair is a low glass-topped table piled with magazines: ID (the design magazine ID, not the fashion magazine ID) and Bust, which lately has begun to make Janine feel old in some ill-defined way. She is thirty. She is sitting in her armchair, talking on the telephone to her friend Ingrid.

Ingrid met Janine in grad school— Janine was working on her Master's, and Ingrid was working on her Ph.D.. She was studying the roots of German feminism: gathering information on the working conditions for women in post-WWII Germany, that sort of thing. About three years ago she spent nine months over in Berlin, visiting and photographing factories; she returned right around the same time Janine dropped out of grad school and went into design. In Berlin, Ingrid had become involved in a relationship with a woman named Elsa; Ingrid returned to the United States with the plan that she would spend two years taking her exams and finishing her dissertation, and then she would move to Germany in order to get married to Elsa. Ingrid is on the verge of completing with this plan exactly as she'd worked it out: she will be leaving for Germany on the first of October.

Janine and Ingrid still keep in touch fairly regularly: they get together for a weekend lunch maybe once a month. It's not the same as when they were both involved in the same program, of course: Janine has to get up for work in the mornings and she can't really spend her evenings staying up till two at some greasy spoon or another, hunched over a pile of books and index cards, periodically reading some passage out loud across the table to Ingrid. Trying an idea out in the mind and the mouth. Janine still enjoys reading, she still thinks an understanding of theory is crucial to an understanding of contemporary gender politics, but she doesn't ever find herself in a position where she needs to finish a book before the end of the week in order to write a paper, so her rate of reading has been dramatically outstripped by Ingrid's. They used to be able to have conversations about theory so easily, but now those conversations contain a faint faultline, a zone where the two of them fail to connect properly: almost imperceptible, but there, undeniably there.

At this point in today's conversation she has already wished Ingrid well on her upcoming departure and marriage. And Ingrid has asked about how Janine is. Janine is mostly fine: she's out of debt and in good health, her work is occasionally annoying but tolerable, etc. None of this has really changed much in the last year or so. The running drama for Janine is the lack of activity in her love life: about a year now without even so much as a one night stand. Unlike the other standards in her life, this one has the quality that it gets more pronounced— basically worse —the longer it stays the same. Which gives her something to complain about:

—I just can't believe it, she says. —I used to have to practically fight people off. And now? Nothing. I'd chalk it up to the national climate if it weren't for everyone around me getting laid. For God's sake, even Thomas is scoring. Do you know my friend Thomas?

—He's a guy you worked with at the hotel, right? Asian guy?

—Yeah.

—Yeah, I think I met him at one of your parties.

—He's a good guy; I like him a lot. But totally shy. It's taken me like two years to get him to even talk to me a little bit and he just somehow got into a relationship. I don't know. Maybe I've become seriously socially retarded and I just haven't noticed.

Ingrid laughs.

—I mean, jeez. They say that guys just want cheap sex, no strings attached. Where are all these guys? I'm telling you: cheap sex? That'd be fine with me. That's be ideal for me. I'm a busy woman. Love, understanding, all that crap? I don't need it. Not in the market for it. Just give me somebody I can frickin' page when I need to get off.

She pauses, then continues:

—Maybe it's just as well. I'm burnt out on guys anyway. They say that guys have, like, this fear of commitment and all that, but, I'm telling you, they lie. Guys are fricking needy. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a relationship with a guy where two or three weeks into it it's like I feel uncomfortable with the idea of you seeing other people. Guys want wives; don't let anybody tell you any different.

—So what about girls?

—Oh, girls? I'm burnt out on girls in a whole different way. I'm just tired of dealing with them. I've never— I'm serious, never —been involved with a woman who just communicated with me directly. You've got to figure out how they feel from, I don't know, inference or something. You remember that woman I was involved with when you got back from Berlin? Lila?

—Yeah.

—She was like, miserable the whole time we were going out. But yet she'd never tell me, like, what I was doing that was making her unhappy. I spent like a year trying to figure her out just on the basis of, like, inflections. They say that women are better at expressing their feelings, but, I don't know, that sure hasn't been true in my experience.

—You're shattering gender stereotypes wherever you go, Ingrid says.

—Yeah, Janine says, dryly. —That explains why I can't get a date. I'm going to have to find some transgender person; maybe that'll work out.

Ingrid laughs.

—I know there are people I knew back in the program who would have slept with me, Janine says, but I just don't feel like it'd be exactly appropriate to, you know, call them up out of the blue and say hey, now's your chance. I'm not in touch with any of them anymore.

—I don't know, Ingrid says. —I would have slept with you back then.

This gives Janine pause. Ingrid had never expressed an interest back then, not that Janine can recall. Janine always thought Ingrid was attractive, but never really considered that she might be interested. Ingrid always seemed to have herself so together, and Janine always thought of herself as kind of falling apart, making it through school by dint of persistence and a kind of fool's luck: she never thought that her traits were of a type that Ingrid would find attractive.

—Reeeally, Janine says.

—Yeah, sure, Ingrid says. —Didn't you know that?

—No, Janine says. She pauses again. —You never said anything.

—Nah, says Ingrid. —Your love life was just so busy then; there were always like four people interested in you at any given moment. I just figured you didn't also need to hear that I was attracted to you, too. I mean, it wasn't like I was walking around with this like repressed love or anything: there was some sexual attraction there, but I'm a little bit sexually attracted to all my friends. We were so close as friends that I felt, I don't know, satisfied without having to ever bring up that sexual component.

—I'm always the last to know, Janine says.

—Yeah, well, says Ingrid. —I still think you're attractive.

—Right, says Janine. —Fat lot of good it does me now.

Now. She is sitting in a chair. She is thinking. She is revising the past. Her mind is making room for new information.