Free Intimate Wars by Merle Hoffman Page A

was too autocratic, that I should be more collaborative. But the union contract had spelled out every part of the manager/ employee relationship, and there was little for me to do but follow these directives. Gradually, the employees found that dealing with the union and the details of the contract was impeding their ability to work with me on a personal level in our intimate setting, and that our former situation had been far more advantageous. After about a year, quietly and without my knowledge, the union was voted out.
    After that experience I took on a new management style that suited me, one that combined some of my feminist attitudes
with the lessons I had learned from the unionization of my employees. I thought of it as a collective autocracy. I listened to everyone’s opinions with respect and interest and promoted a good deal of feedback, but I stopped treating my staff as my surrogate family. I kept myself separate. The decision-making role was ultimately mine, because the results of those decisions fell—and still fall—most heavily on my shoulders.
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    I HAD ANOTHER IDENTITY besides executive director: I was the mistress of a married man, a role I had never intended to play, though I did relish it. Marty and I had successfully created the world he wanted to have together, a world that his family never entered. At Flushing Women’s his wife and son receded to hazy impressions in my mind, and it was easy to push aside the fact that his evenings and weekends were spent attending to a home life to which I had no access. My own evenings and weekends were saturated with the anticipation of seeing him at the clinic, which in itself was an enormous pleasure. Our meetings outside the clinic were hidden, riddled with obstacles that heightened the intensity of each stolen moment. I would pray for red lights to lengthen our time together when he drove me home from the office.
    At times I felt I was in the Bette Davis film Now, Voyager : “Don’t let’s ask for the moon! We have the stars!” I was satisfied with the stars—content, even pleased, with our situation for the time being, even if I could not have all of him.
    My mother slowly began to suspect that something was going on between Marty and me—all those late evenings and lunches on Saturdays—but she never asked me about it directly. One day I finally spoke frankly about my affair. The first thing that she said was, “You know, he will never leave his wife for you.”

    I answered with earnest disdain, “Oh mother, I don’t want him to!”
    Being a married woman had never entered into my fantasies; the passion and transgression of being a mistress seemed so much more alluring. After all, I was the one for whom he was risking his marriage. I was the one he wanted, the one he loved. Obstacles were the fuel to our fire, and his marriage was the constant and immobile obstacle, his wife a psychological paper cutout for me. I was too much in love, too self-involved to have empathy for someone I considered to be powerful, someone denying me happiness. It would be many years before I would come to understand the pain I had a share in causing her.
    Like any new lovers, Marty and I did rather reckless things in the grip of our passion. Once, we took a few compromising Polaroid photos of me in the office. The cast-offs were stupidly left in a garbage pail and picked up by another employee , an older married woman who worked the morning sessions and had her own designs on Marty. I received a telephone call telling me that she had the pictures and would send them to his wife; she only wanted to ensure that she would get a raise and have job security.
    Marty knew the Brooklyn district attorney, Eugene Gold. He contacted him for help and was advised that I should tape all my conversations with the woman as potential evidence.
    As I sat in my studio apartment for hours transcribing these unpleasant discussions, I felt