Free Florence Gordon by Brian Morton Page B

Daniel was growing increasingly tired of his job, as budget cuts kept making him feel less like a social worker with a badge and more like a clerk. He’d be eligible to retire at half-salary in a few years, and she was confident of his ability to find something here—much more confident than he was, but she was certain that she was right. And she’d been all but assured that she’d be able to make her position at the lab permanent if she wanted to. Nothing was stopping them, except, perhaps, his mixed feelings about being back in the place he’d once felt the need to escape from.
    “You ever see that show
McCloud
?” he said. “This cop from out west moves to New York, walks around wearing a ten-gallon hat, outsmarting the city slickers.”
    “I never saw that,” she said, and heard a heart-sunk inflection in her own voice.
    “Maybe it’s on Netflix. I think I’d have to watch a few episodes. Get a sense of whether I could make it work.”
    “Sounds like McCloud made it work,” she said.
    “Well, he did. But I’m not sure I have his talents. You should see the way he could ride a horse. The bad guys would jump into a getaway car, but McCloud . . .”
    She didn’t listen to the rest. She took his arm and they continued their ramble.

31
    “You must be hating all this,” Vanessa said.
    “Why?” Florence said.
    “It must be upsetting all your routines. It must be hard for you to clear out your inbox every day.”
    Florence grunted. She was vain about the tidiness of her inbox.
    “Seriously,” Vanessa said. “Is it overwhelming? Or is life pretty much back to normal now?”
    Florence was having dinner with five friends whom she’d known for more than forty years. Three of them were in her study group; they’d been meeting once a month to talk about books and politics since the seventies. (Back then they used to call it a consciousness-raising group, but none of them had used the term in years.) Tonight her friends had taken her out to celebrate what Vanessa had called her “coronation.”
    “It never stopped being normal. You know that. You get a few phone calls, you get a few emails. Life goes on.”
    “I don’t know about that,” Vanessa said. “Success can make you crazy.”
    Vanessa was a psychotherapist who worked with people in the arts. She proceeded to give a few examples. A painter who, after selling one of his works to the Whitney, began to speak of himself in the third person. A writer who’d so long suppressed her desire for fame, so long suppressed the narcissism near the root of every creative life, that when she finally achieved a bit of recognition, all her hunger for it had come bursting out—a ferocity of hunger that no degree of success could satisfy—and she was plunged into a depression from which it took her months to recover. Another writer, a woman who’d always seemed a model of tolerance and tact, who, after finally writing a book that brought her a degree of acclaim, felt nothing but anger toward all the people who were celebrating her. Late recognition, Vanessa said, was the stage for the return of the repressed.
    Alexandra too believed that success could make you crazy, and she too had a theory. Buried deep in the psyche, she thought, is a sort of lump, a creature that craves nothing except stability, and as far as the lump is concerned, change for the better is just as bad as change for the worse.
    The conversation wandered away from its starting point, the revolution in Florence’s fortunes. And Florence was thankful for that. Her experience had been very different from the kind of thing they were talking about, and she was glad to be relieved of the necessity to explain this or to pretend otherwise.
    For Florence, this moment in the limelight hadn’t been disorienting in the least. It hadn’t been disappointing, or vexing, or complicated in any way. It had been that rare thing: an unmixed pleasure.
    Ever since the voluble philosopher had anointed her,