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A Woman Does Not Owe You a Likeable Hunger
Give me a woman who leaves dinner before dessert. She has a coat over one arm, lipstick on the rim of her glass and no intention of explaining herself to the man who has spent the evening explaining her. She is going to meet another woman. This is inconvenient for several people, including the woman she is going to meet. The dessert can survive without her. Whether the rest of them can is another question.
The first objection arrives before she has reached the door: she is hard to like. Has she actually done anything? Left someone with the bill? Lied about where she was going? Made a promise to a woman who has arranged her whole evening around it? Tell me that. “Hard to like” offers the critic a comfortable chair while everybody else sorts out the damage.
I can dislike a character and want another hundred pages with her. Vanity is interesting when it costs somebody something. Desire becomes interesting when the desired woman has her own plans, her own bad temper and a perfectly good reason to say no. The woman at the door may be brave in one respect and a selfish pain in the arse in another. I would rather read both than watch the writer polish one side until she can be presented to the audience.
There is a particular sort of polishing reserved for women who want too much. Give her an unhappy childhood, explain the appetite, apologize for the sex, make the ambition secretly maternal. By the time she reaches for anything, an accompanying note has assured us that she is asking for very little. I am tired of the note. Sometimes she wants the job because she wants the job, including the money and the pleasure of being good at it. Sometimes she wants the woman because she wants her.
None of this makes her harmless. The woman waiting for her may have children asleep upstairs. She may have cleared the kitchen, changed her clothes twice and decided she will not spend another night wondering whether somebody finds her life inconvenient. Her desire has equal weight. If the arriving woman treats that desire as an obstacle to her own freedom, she is being cruel. A speech about empowerment will not wash the plate.
But I also do not want the familiar correction, in which a sexually unruly woman suffers until the story can call her wiser. It matters what she actually did and who paid for it. A missed promise has a different consequence from a refused marriage. Wanting another woman is not the harm; treating her as a room to enter and leave without consideration might be. A writer should be capable of keeping those things apart.
The woman at the door is in danger of getting all the good lines. Her lover deserves more than hurt feelings for dialogue. She has a mouth, too, and it need not remain beautifully wounded. Nor does being caught behaving badly make the late arrival suddenly sweet. She might be furious at being asked to account for herself. She might make an ugly joke, recognize its ugliness and remain too proud to take it back. Let the conversation take the time it needs.
One woman has kept dinner warm. The other says she has already eaten, and has the grace to look down when she says it. There is still a plate on the table. Before anyone makes a grand statement about freedom, somebody has to decide whether to sit down.