Florence Gordon by Brian Morton Read Free Book Online Page A

guy—that’s how it felt at first. That’s all it felt like.
    One day in March, though, walking down to the lab with the eagerness that had come to feel customary, she’d found a song going around in her head, one she hadn’t heard or thought about in years. Actually just a line. It was called “The Dresses Song,” and the line was simply “You make me want to wear dresses.”
    What she was thinking taught her what she was feeling. It was only when she thought about the song that she understood that as much as she liked the work, it wasn’t just the work that was making her so happy.

21
    Lev was already there when she arrived. No matter how early she got to work, Lev, if he was in town, was always already there. Although she hadn’t witnessed this, she knew he was sometimes there at six in the morning.
    He was a divorced man whose children were on their own and far away, and he could arrange his life as he pleased. When he wasn’t traveling—giving talks and meeting with funders—he worked long hours during the day and spent the evening at concerts or lectures or in restaurants, with colleagues and students and friends. He had an endless appetite for conversation, conviviality, city life, but his work at the lab came before everything. When he spoke about the place, he looked as if he were speaking about a person he loved.
    He was a disheveled, overweight older man, but as someone once said, exuberance is beauty, and in this way, at least, he was beautiful.
    “You’re here,” he said when he saw her. “I’m so glad you’re feeling better.”
    Whenever she showed up, he made her feel as if the party had finally begun. But he greeted everyone this way. His secretary was a woman in her seventies, and Lev brightened up when he saw her too. The old and the young, the hobbled and the swift: he was an overweight, male, middle-aged Statue of Liberty, shining on all.
    “Daniel get in safe?”
    “Yes. Yes. He was very safe.”
    “I hope I can meet him sometime soon.”
    “That would be great,” she said.
    His hair, as always, was Einsteinishly uncombed. He was wearing a nice suit, but it was hanging all wrong; it was as if the suit were embarrassed to be seen with him.
    “You chose a nice set of clothes to sleep in,” she said.
    Lev had been engaged in the same research for thirty years, and he continued to be fascinated by it. Long ago, as a graduate student, he’d been an assistant to Walter Mischel, the psychologist who, researching self-control in children, had come up with the now-famous Marshmallow Test. A child would be told that he could have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later, and would then be left alone in a room with a marshmallow. Some children couldn’t hold out and ate the marshmallow immediately, some devised strategies to help themselves wait. Mischel eventually found that the children who could wait at the age of four or five were doing better ten years later, by a variety of measures, than the children who couldn’t.
    Lev had pursued similar questions, and now, in the age of the Internet, when no one seemed to be able to resist its opportunities for distraction, the subject had become hot. Research funds were pouring in; Lev was being profiled in magazines.
U.S
.
News & World Report
had run an item in which, citing his work on perseverance and goal-oriented behavior in adolescents, Lev had been dubbed “The Guru of Grit.” He was glad to get the additional funding, but he didn’t seem to care about the profiles. All he seemed to care about was the work.
    At the lab, Janine was doing talk therapy with students from Columbia and other colleges in the area, who were also receiving training in “behavior management.” It was part of a study to see if talk therapy plus behavioral therapy was more effective than either of them alone. So she was doing what she’d been doing at home—listening to young people—but learning things that she never would have learned at