Who is Maud Dixon?(3)
In general, Florence tended to look down on books that owed their success to the dramatic machinations of plot. Murder, in her eyes, was cheap currency. But when she’d read Mississippi Foxtrot she’d been astounded. The murder wasn’t a technical ploy to up the stakes; it was the novel’s raison d’être. The reader could feel the author’s urgency; the murderer’s absolute imperative; even the satisfaction of the knife going in.
Florence could still recite the passage:
The knife slipped in easily, a sharp-edged interloper among the warm, feminine folds of Frank’s insides. She raised the knife again. This time, it hit a rib and shuddered violently. Her hand slipped off the handle and slapped the soft pale flesh. His stomach was coated in blood now, the coarse, dark hairs slicked down like a newborn’s scalp.
The voice was like nothing Florence had ever read before: sharp and savage, almost violent. Ultimately, she didn’t care whether Maud Dixon was a man or a woman. She knew that whoever she was, she was an outsider, like Florence herself.
“Why are you getting so worked up about this?” Fritz asked Amanda. “Jesus, I’m not saying women can’t write. I’m just saying that this particular writer is not a woman.”
Amanda pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath. “Why am I getting so worked up? Because this particular writer was the best-selling novelist of the year and she was nominated for the National Book Award. But of course it can only be an ‘important’ book if a man wrote it; if a woman wrote it, it’s just book-club drivel. For god’s sake, you can’t have all the fucking cookies and then come take our crumbs too.”
“Technically,” Florence interjected, “James Patterson was the best-selling author that year, even though Mississippi Foxtrot was the best-selling book.” The group turned to look at her in one synchronized motion. “I think,” she added, though she was sure, and immediately hated herself for it.
“Well thank you, Florence, there goes another crumb.”
“This isn’t about whatever absurd scorecard you keep in your back pocket, Amanda,” said Fritz. “My friend—who happens to be a woman, by the way—works at Frost/Bollen and swore to me that Maud Dixon is a man. She could be a woman, obviously, but she happens not to be, in this case.” He shrugged in apology. Frost/Bollen was Maud Dixon’s literary agency.
“So who is it then?” Amanda demanded. “What’s his name?”
Here Fritz faltered. “I don’t know. She just overheard him referred to as a ‘he.’”
Amanda threw up her hands. “Oh, this is total bullshit. There’s literally no way a man could have written that book. There’s not a man on earth who can write women that convincingly. No matter how well he may convince himself.”
As if to punish herself for her earlier timidity, Florence said: “Henry James? E. M. Forster? William Thackeray?” She’d always felt a special affinity with Becky Sharp.
Amanda turned to face her. “Seriously, Florence? You think Mississippi Foxtrot could have been written by a man?”
Florence shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t see what difference it would make.”
Amanda looked at the ceiling and said in wonder, “She doesn’t see what difference it would make.” She turned back and asked, “Are you a writer, Florence?”
“No,” Florence said quietly. In fact, she wanted nothing more than to be a writer. Didn’t they all? Every one of them probably had half a novel tucked away in some drawer. But you don’t go around calling yourself a writer until it’s out of the drawer.
“Well then it may be hard for you to fully appreciate how important it is for female writers to have female exemplars. Women who have come before them and refused to let their inner lives be explained by men. I don’t need one more man telling me how women are, okay? Can you understand that?”
Florence performed some motion between a shrug and a nod.
“Unhappy the land in need of heroes,” Amanda added.
Florence said nothing.
“Brecht?” Amanda prodded, raising her eyebrows.
Florence felt heat rushing to her face, and she turned her body instinctively away from the group to hide it. She downed the rest of her drink in a single gulp and walked back to the bar, where she raised her empty glass in the bartender’s direction with a tight smile.
She leaned against the wood and lifted her sore feet out of her heels one by one. She had never liked girls with Amanda’s easy confidence. They were the same girls in high school who had taken Florence under their wing for a week and paraded her around like a rescue dog before losing interest in the game. Florence knew that to them she was nothing more than a prop to be used in their performances. And if she didn’t cooperate by playing the grateful protégée, they had no use for her. It was such a fatuous routine, too—that was what annoyed Florence the most. Amanda, who had grown up on the Upper West Side, wore her feminism the same way she’d probably once worn her private school uniform—casually, without thinking too much about it, but committedly.
Florence had never been able to reach the pitch of outrage the times seemed to require, and this immunity to communal indignation often left her on the outside of, well, everything. This outrage seemed to be the glue that held everyone else together: couples, friends, the target audience of most media conglomerates. Even the young petition hawkers on the street ignored Florence, as if they could sense her innate solipsism.