Time and Envy
For Ann Law
“[My grandfather] built one of the great organizations in America, a nonprofit or figuring out how to get complicated finance structures [for] affordable housing development … I was working for him in New York. I literally went down when I was 21 and sat on his porch and apologized to him because he paid for me to go to college and I thought, ‘How do I tell him I want to be an actor?’”
— Edward Norton, interview with Alec Baldwin on Here’s the Thing, 2019
This essay isn’t about acting. It isn’t about affordable housing, either, though I’ve been reading anything I can find about Motherless Brooklyn, the 2019 movie Norton wrote, directed and starred in, for reasons partly to do with its treatment of urban development and the chimes with Chattanooga history and partly to do with the virtuosity and precision of the writing. More on that another time.
No. I’m writing this essay because when I heard these words — and that young fellow working for his grandfather’s nonprofit had already spent time in Japan and toyed with the idea of a career in the diplomatic service — I almost died of envy.
Money means time and time means choice and I don’t want to go into an economic analysis of privilege and free will because — while true — those words so often mask a mewling, sneering envy.
Me at 21: I turn down a graduate position at Vanderbilt because I cannot bear to leave Chattanooga, where this dude Shawn Rogers lives. I would trade the world for him to look twice at me. The world and all the remaining years of my life for a kiss.
He doesn’t look at me twice. He looks once and it ends up with my first time — a bit of a pleasant blur, the only clear detail the blue, secondhand condom he fishes up from under the bed.
Me at 24: I get pregnant with Oldest Son.
Me at 29: I’m working on a dissertation, teaching a heavy course load and raising Oldest Son. After our bills are paid, we have $160 left for the month. I put it in four envelopes. Forty dollars a week.
Me at 36: I marry Babydaddy, move to Syracuse and have Middle Son.
Also me at 36: There’s no work in Syracuse and no way to pay the mortgage, so I go into the Army.
Me at 37: I’m invited to take the officer’s intelligence courses instead of those with my cohort. My teachers are folks who worked with David Petraeus.
Also me at 37: My family is falling apart. This time I see the choice more clearly. People I love or this profession which, I think, I could also love. I go to Fort Drum, where I’m chaptered out. My family moves down to Oneida County, north of Syracuse.
Me at 38: I have Youngest Son.
By age 39 I am working as an office assistant. I have accomplished less than Ed Norton had done by age 21.
This is an essay about envy. This is an essay about sitting at my desk listening to a three-year-old radio interview while part of me is lying on the floor, beating my head on the boards, bawling my eyes out.
Why cry?
I’d still be a 50-year-old novice in the arts I want to pursue.
I talk about this with my friend Ann. “But I can’t stay in that mind space. Envy is corrosive, absolutely corrosive. It destroys the work.”
Ann agrees. She tells me about her youth and young womanhood as a hungry artist. This city, that city. These jobs, three or four at a time. Those men.
We think about other trajectories. If we had, if we hadn’t, followed that man. If we had, if we hadn’t, had that child.
She still looks like a hungry artist, though it’s the spareness of furious energy and regular physical training. Professionalism, I read somewhere, is the everyday garb of virtuosity. For a dancer, part of your professionalism is you keep fit enough for the demands of the work. If you’re serious, it’s nonnegotiable.
Ann, who is celebrating a birthday a few years shy of 70 on Sunday, is preparing a solo concert of word and dance. Forty-five brutal minutes or maybe an hour alone on the stage, speaking or in motion.
The verbal part of the show — a quartet of monologues, which she reads to me — lasts 17 minutes. She’s still tightening it.
You add up how many minutes that leaves for dance.
Between Ann’s age and my age lies more than a quarter of a century, more time than Ed took to get from diapers to the first flower of professional maturity.
Of what, children, are we afraid?
Ann is not afraid. She reads me the quartet. I close my eyes. They’re good. Spare. American without being Americana. I think of Emily Dickinson or Andrew Wyeth. The writing is dry, the imagery wet, their counterpoise exquisite. The swinging rhythms, like a woman with long arms striding up a valley, will carry Ann into the dance.
I open my eyes. “The monologues used to be longer, didn’t they?”
“So much longer.”
Cutting, that’s the mark of a professional, that ruthlessness. I look at her face and see a vibrant tan, a powerful skull. You cut and you cut until nothing but bone is left.
I don’t know how not to be envious. I don’t know how not to break my heart. Nor, perhaps, would I choose to be whole.
Ann’s eyes are blue. They are gold.
“Someone asked me to write about my life as a choreographer,” she says. “The dances I’ve made. How I make dances.” She laughs. “I told them: ‘I’m too young, I’m far too young!’ I have so many dances to make. Once I retire I’ll wait five years. Then I’ll begin.”