The End of Men(73)
“You’re making me sound like an awful person,” he says petulantly. “Like I skipped off into the sunset without a second thought.”
How did I ever love this man? He’s a complete twat.
“You have three children, Sean. You had a wife! You disappeared like a thief in the night. I don’t think you’ve learned a fucking thing from any of this, but I’ll tell you what. The Plague and you leaving made me realize, more than ever, that my children are my world and that I like my life. The worst worries I had were whether having sex once a week was enough for us to ‘keep the spark alive’ and if the girls would find jobs they liked. Jobs they liked! What an idea now.”
Sean slinks down into his seat, mumbling incoherently.
“My job used to be something I enjoyed well enough but if you had told me I could have retired tomorrow, I’d have jumped at the chance. But now I’m an electrician and I’m useful. You never made me feel useful. When I get home at the end of the day, I know I’ve used my hands to do something that not many other people can do. And I get home, I see the girls and I know I’m in the right place.”
“It’s not the same for you, Helen. You weren’t staring at death like it was a gun on your forehead. I couldn’t do what you did.”
I realize I’m not getting through to him. I’m wasting my breath. It feels outrageous that he can just get away with it, but not much about life over the last few years has felt fair. There’s no moral judge and jury that can convince him on my behalf that he is wrong and I am right. He left and I stayed.
“I belong here, Sean,” I say, with a trace of a sigh. “You decided that you didn’t. You made your bed, now you have to lie in it.”
Sean smiles weakly at me. He finishes his drink and tells me he’ll be back at five o’clock to see the girls. I shut the door behind him with a thunk and think how lucky I am that, against the odds, without a husband and in a job I was assigned, I really, really like my life. And when someone isn’t there anymore, you adapt.
ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON POST ON SEPTEMBER 5, 2029
This is one of our “Woman Least Likely” series of pieces about the women in the United States who have taken on leadership roles, despite being “unlikely candidates.” This week’s piece, by Maria Ferreira, is about Clare Aspen, 29, the mayor of San Francisco, who was elected last month, beating out eight other candidates, all of whom were women.
Clare Aspen’s San Francisco apartment is like something out of a 2024 millennial’s dream Pinterest board. There’s a gallery wall over her couch. Her kettle is vintage style and pink. There’s a bar cart in the corner (albeit with only a small selection of alcohol that, on closer perusal, all seem to be produced in and around the Bay Area by small distilleries). The chopping board has an avocado print. Need I say more.
When pressed, Clare laughs and looks around the apartment as if seeing it for the first time in years. “I suppose it is a bit of a time capsule. I bought this place when I was in my mid-twenties just before everything happened. I haven’t been particularly concerned with interior decoration since,” she adds wryly, an understatement for the ages.
The story of Clare Aspen is now folklore but the basics bear repeating. When the Plague hit the West Coast in 2026, she was living an admirable life of public service as a cop. “Super green, super keen,” she says. “I’m lucky I didn’t get into more trouble early on. I was so eager to do everything right—catch the bad guy! Make a difference! I was a bit much.”
She didn’t move to San Francisco—a city in which, prior to the Plague, only the super-rich had even a hope of affording to live in for much longer—to be a cop earning under $70,000 a year. No, she came to make her fortune. The classic tech dream a million men who had watched The Social Network were determined would be in their own future. Unlike most of the hoodie-clad tech bros who came before her, however, Clare succeeded. Here’s the story in a nutshell.
Girl with engineering degree (summa cum laude, natch) from UT Austin moves to California to be a developer. Girl finds culture in medium-size start-up to be as gross as all the Reddit threads had warned her it would be. Girl perseveres because she is many things but a quitter is not one of them. Girl is one of two women on a team of sixty men, many of whom appear to be sociopathic in their pursuit of wealth. Girl thinks she’s doing pretty well with a hefty salary. Girl has no idea what is coming. Girl is in the right place at the right time and is offered the golden ticket: an IPO. Stock goes public, stock goes up in value quickly. Girl becomes very rich.
So far, so cinematic. Can’t you see Hollywood salivating over the movie rights already? But no! It gets better.
Girl is rich but unfulfilled and decides to quit her (very lucrative) job, cash in her stocks and become a cop. “I still remember my dad shouting down the phone at me when I told him I was going to be a cop. A cop?! I didn’t pay a hundred thousand dollars for you to be a Goddamn cop.” Clare wrote him a check there and then for every penny he spent on her college education and accepted an offer to join the San Francisco Police Department.
If the Plague had never happened, the end of this movie would write itself. She would have met a nice boy, maybe a fellow cop (we all love an office romance) and had a few adorable, rule-abiding children. Her dad would have seen the value of her choices and she’d have lived a long and healthy life with her husband by her side in comfortable obscurity.