The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick Read Free Book Online

I would manage life both as an agent of revolution and as a devotee of Love. Inevitably, then, a picture formed itself of me on the stage, my face glowing with purpose, and an adoring man in the audience waiting for me to come down into his arms. That seemed to cover all the bases.
    As I passed into my late teens, this image in my head of myself leading the revolution began, mysteriously, to complicate itself. I knew, of course, that a significant life included real work—work done out in the world—but now I seemed to imagine that an Ideal Partner was necessary in order to do the work. With the right man at my side, I posited, I could do it all. Without the right man … but no, that was unthinkable. There would be no without the right man. The emphasis began to shift away from doing the work to finding the right man in order to do the work. Slowly but surely, finding the right man seemed to become the work.
    In college, the girls who were my friends were literary. Every one of us identified either with George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, who mistakes a pedant for a man of intellect, or with Henry James’s Isabel Archer, who sees the evil-hearted Osmond as a man of cultivation. Those who identified with Dorothea were impressed by her prideful devotion to “standards”; those who didn’t thought her a provincial prig. Those who identified with Isabel admired her for the largeness of her emotional ambition; those who didn’t thought her dangerously na ï ve. Either way, my friends and I saw ourselves as potential variations of one or the other. The seriousness of our concerns lay in our preoccupation with these two fictional women.
    The problem, in both Middlemarch and Portrait of a Lady , was that of the protagonist—beautiful, intelligent, sensitive—mistaking the wrong man for the right man. As a problem, the situation seemed entirely reasonable to all of us. We saw it happening every day of the week. Among us were young women of grace, talent, and good looks attached, or becoming attached, to men dull in mind or spirit who were bound to drag them down. The prospect of such a fate haunted all of us. We each shuddered to think that we might become such women.
    Not me, I determined. If I couldn’t find the right man, I swore boldly, I’d do without.
    For nearly ten years after college I knocked about in pursuit of the holy grail: Love with a capital L, Work with a capital W. I read, I wrote, I fell into bed. I was married for ten minutes, I smoked marijuana for five. Lively and animated, I roamed the streets of New York and Europe. Somehow, nothing quite suited. I couldn’t figure out how to get down to work, and needless to say, I couldn’t stumble on the right man. In time, a great lassitude overcame me. It was as though I’d fallen asleep on my feet and needed to be awakened.
    On the very last day of my twenties I married a scientist, a man of brooding temperament who had taken eighteen years to complete his dissertation. His difficulty made him poetic in my eyes. He, of course, was remarkably sensitive to my own divided will. During our courtship we walked together by the hour while I discoursed ardently on why I could not get to Moscow. His eyes flashed with emotion as I spoke. “My dear girl!” he would exclaim. “My beautiful, marvelous girl. You are life itself!”
    I became the interesting, conflicted personage and he the intelligent, responsive wife. The arrangement made us both happy. It felt like comradeship. At last, I thought, I had an Ideal Friend. Life seemed sweet then. Alone, I had been cramped up inside; now I felt myself breathing freely. It gave me pleasure to open my eyes in the morning and see my husband lying beside me. I experienced a comfort of the soul that I had not known before.
    One morning I awoke desolate. Why, I could not tell. Nothing had changed. He was the same, I was the same. Just a few weeks before I’d