The Best American Magazine Writing 2014 Read online

  In the clinic, there were very bright lights and more needles and IVs and I let go of the baby and that was the last I ever saw him. He was on one table and I was on another, far away, lying still under the screaming lights, and then, confusingly, the handsomest man in the world came through the door and said he was my doctor. His voice sounded nice, familiar. I asked if he was South African. He was surprised that I could tell, and I explained that I had spent time reporting in his country, and then we talked a bit about the future of the ANC and about how beautiful it is in Cape Town. I realized that I was covered in blood, sobbing, and flirting.

  Soon, he said that he was going home and that I could not return to the Blue Sky Hotel, where I might bleed to death in my room without anyone knowing. I stayed in the clinic overnight, wearing a T-shirt and an adult diaper that a kind, fat, giggling young nurse gave me. After she dressed me, she asked, “You want toast and tea?” It was milky and sweet and reminded me of the chai I drank in Nepal, where I went backpacking in the Himalayas with a friend long before I was old enough to worry about the expiration of my fertility. It had been a trip spent pushing my young body up the mountains, past green-and-yellow terraced fields and villages full of goats, across rope bridges that hung tenuously over black ravines with death at the bottom. We consumed a steady diet of hashish and Snickers bars and ended up in a blizzard that killed several hikers but somehow left us only chilly.

  I had been so lucky. Very little had ever truly gone wrong for me before that night on the bathroom floor. And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me. I was still a witch, but my powers were all gone.

  That is not what the doctor said when he came back to the clinic in the morning. He told me that I’d had a placental abruption, a very rare problem that, I later read, usually befalls women who are heavy cocaine users or who have high blood pressure. But sometimes it happens just because you’re old. It could have happened anywhere, the doctor told me, and he repeated what he’d said the night before: there is no correlation between air travel and miscarriage. I said that I suspected he was being a gentleman and that I needed to get out of the clinic in time for my eleven-o’clock meeting with the secretary of the interior, whose office I arrived at promptly, after I went back to the Blue Sky and showered in my room, which looked like the site of a murder.

  I spent the next five days in that room. Slowly, it set in that it was probably best if I went home instead of to the Gobi, but at first I could not leave. Thanksgiving came and went. There were rolling brownouts when everything went dark and still. I lay in my bed and ate Snickers and drank little bottles of whiskey from the minibar while I watched television programs that seemed as strange and bleak as my new life. Someone had put a white bath mat on top of the biggest bloodstain, the one next to my bed, where I had crouched when I called for help, and little by little the white went red and then brown as the blood seeped through it and oxidized. I stared at it. I looked at the snow outside my window falling on the Soviet architecture. But mostly I looked at the picture of the baby.

  • • •

  When I got back from Mongolia, I was so sad I could barely breathe. On five or six occasions, I ran into mothers who had heard what had happened, and they took one look at me and burst into tears. (Once, this happened with a man.) Within a week, the apartment we were supposed to move into with the baby fell through. Within three, my marriage had shattered. I started lactating. I continued bleeding. I cried ferociously and without warning—in bed, in the middle of meetings, sitting on the subway. It seemed to me that grief was leaking out of me from every orifice.

  I could not keep the story of what had happened in Mongolia inside my mouth. I went to buy clothes that would fit my big body but that didn’t have bands of stretchy maternity elastic to accommodate a baby who wasn’t there. I heard myself tell a horrified saleswoman, “I don’t know what size I am, because I just had a baby. He died, but the good news is, now I’m fat.” Well-meaning women would tell me, “I had a miscarriage, too,” and I would reply, with unnerving intensity, “He was alive.” I had given birth, however briefly, to another human being, and it seemed crucial that people understand this. Often, after I told them, I tried to get them to look at the picture of the baby on my phone.

  After several weeks, I was looking at it only once a day. It was months before I got it down to once a week. I don’t look at it much anymore, but people I haven’t seen in a while will say, “I’m so sorry about what happened to you.” And their compassion pleases me.

  But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. Sometimes, when I think about it, I still feel a dark hurt from some primal part of myself, and if I’m alone in my apartment when this happens I will hear myself making sounds that I never made before I went to Mongolia. I realize that I have turned back into a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone.

  Most of the time it seems sort of OK, though, natural. Nature. Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses.

  The New Yorker

  WINNER—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY

  The National Magazine Awards judges described Emily Nussbaum as “discerning and authoritative” and likened her to New Yorker critics of the past, including Edmund Wilson and Pauline Kael. “She can zing with the best of them,” the judges said (in “Shark Week,” House of Cards is “handsome but sleazy, like a CEO in a hotel bar”; in “Private Practice,” Master of Sex’s Lizzy Caplan is “the swizzle stick in the show’s erotic cocktail”). But what really sets Nussbaum apart is her understanding of how and why we watch television (we being Nielsen families, Twitter users, fan-fiction chroniclers, and even other critics). As she suggests in “Difficult Women,” she’s still the woman “argu[ing], often drunkenly, at cocktail parties” to get you to take Sex and the City seriously.

  Emily Nussbaum

  Shark Week and Difficult Women and Private Practice

  Shark Week

  House of Cards is an original release from Netflix, a DVD-distribution and streaming company that has decided, after several years of selling tickets to the circus, to jump into the ring. Adapted from a British political thriller and produced by David Fincher, the series stars Kevin Spacey as a mercenary Democratic House majority whip and Robin Wright as his wife. This prestigious résumé has turned House of Cards into big news—not least because Netflix has cleverly released all thirteen episodes at once. As a model of TV production, it’s an exciting experiment, with the potential to liberate showrunners from the agony of weekly ratings. It suggests fresh possibilities for the medium, feeding an audience that has already been trained to binge on quality TV in DVD form.

  As a television show, however, House of Cards is not so revolutionary. This isn’t to say it’s bad or not worth watching or unmemorable. (Certain lines, such as “Twitter twat, WTF?,” might become catchphrases—for all its elegant contours, the show is marbled with camp.) Over a recent weekend, House of Cards acted something like a scotch bender, with definite highs and lows. I found the first two episodes handsome but sleazy, like a CEO in a hotel bar. Yet by episode 5 I was hypnotized by the show’s ensemble of two-faced sociopaths. Episode 8 was a thoughtful side trip into sympathy for Spacey’s devilish main character, but by then I was exhausted, and only my compulsive streak kept me going until the finale—at which point I was critically destabilized and looking forward to season 2.

  Sensually, visually, House of Cards is a pleasure. Its acrid view of political ambition is nothing new (that perspective is all over TV these days, on shows like HBO’s Veep and Starz’s Boss), but the series has some sharp twists, with an emphasis on corporate graft and media grandstanding. There’s also one truly poignant plot about a working-class congressman hooked on drugs. Yet in the days after I watched the show, its
bewitching spell grew fainter—and if House of Cards had been delivered weekly I might have given up earlier. Much of the problem is Spacey himself, as Francis (Frank) Underwood, a wheeler-dealer who is denied the job of secretary of state and then conspires, with his steely wife, to go even higher. Spacey’s basilisk gaze seems ideal for the role, but he’s miscast by being too well cast—there’s no tension in seeing a shark play a shark. It’s a lot easier to buy his opposite number, the investigative blogger Zoe Barnes (the awesomely hoydenish Kate Mara), who strikes up an affair with Underwood in return for access. Her hair slicked down like a seal, her eyes dead, and her T-shirt sexily V-necked, Barnes is like some millennial demon from the digital unconscious, catnip for condescending older men. You could criticize the show’s portrayal of female reporters as venal sluts in black eyeliner, but it’s hard to object too much since Mara’s performance, which has a freaky, repressive verve, is the liveliest thing in the show. Robin Wright is regal as Claire, Underwood’s charity-running wife, and Sakina Jaffrey makes a quiet impact as the president’s chief of staff, a restrained professional who in this lurid context feels downright exotic.

  Fincher’s Washington is full of eerie imagery, such as a homeless man folding a twenty-dollar bill into an origami swan, and it’s magnificently lit (although I don’t understand why a sought-after journalist like Zoe lives in a flophouse full of spiders). But eventually the show’s theatrical panache, along with Spacey’s Shakespearean asides to the camera, starts to feel as gimmicky as a fashion-magazine shoot, with melancholic shots of Claire jogging in a graveyard. The show may be made of elegant material, but it’s not built to last—it’s a meditation on amorality that tells us mostly what we already know.

  And, honestly, the more I watched, the more my mind kept wandering to Shonda Rhimes’s Scandal—an ABC series that’s soapy rather than noirish but much more fun and that, in its lunatic way, may have more to say about Washington ambition. Scandal, which is inspired by a real-life political “fixer,” started slowly, as a legal procedural blended with a Rielle Hunter–flavored presidential affair. It took a season to shed its early conception of Kerry Washington’s PR bigwig Olivia Pope as a “white hat.” But, once it did—whoa, Nelly. Popping with colorful villains, vote-rigging conspiracies, waterboarding, assassinations, montages set to R&B songs, and the best gay couple on television (the president’s chief of staff, Cyrus, and his husband, James, an investigative reporter), the series has become a giddy, paranoid fever dream, like 24 crossed with The West Wing, lit up in neon pink. Last week’s episode was such a #GameChanger—that’s the hashtag that the show’s creator used to advertise the episode—that Twitter exploded with exclamation points.

  Because Scandal is so playful and is unafraid to be ridiculous, it has access to emotional colors that rarely show up in Fincher’s universe, whose aesthetics insist that we take it seriously. Like Underwood, Jeff Perry’s Cyrus is a Machiavelli who cozies up to the president, but he’s got rage, wit, and a capacity for passion, not just oleaginous asides. During last week’s episode, he and his husband faced off, naked, in a fight about Cyrus’s crimes. (They’d stripped to demonstrate that they weren’t wearing wires.) The scene was absurd but also genuinely intimate, with all the daring that House of Cards lacks. Rhimes’s show is made under the opposite circumstances from Fincher’s: nearly twice as many episodes, ratings pressure, constant threat of cancellation, a ravenous tweeting audience. These forces wreck other network dramas, and Rhimes’s previous shows have flown off the rails, but Scandal has only got stronger. It’s become more opera than soap opera, as the critic Ryan McGee observed online. Like much genre fiction, Scandal uses its freedom to indulge in crazy what-ifs: What if everyone but the president knew that the election was fixed? What if the president tried to divorce his pregnant wife? What if—well, I don’t want to spoil everything, but you might consider jumping in at the beginning of season 2. It’s a different kind of binge watch.

  • • •

  After nine seasons, NBC’s once great mockumentary sitcom The Office is ending its run. Instead of going out like 30 Rock—at the top of its game—The Office has had a more typical trajectory, staggering to the finish line in a weakened state. First, it was hobbled by the departure of Steve Carell as Michael Scott, the bad boss whose Pinocchio-like transformation concluded when he found real love. In the aftermath, the writers introduced new characters, but they never jelled; potential plots were set up, fiddled with, then abandoned.

  Still, the biggest problem has been the relationship that used to be the show’s heart: the one between Jim and Pam, work friends whose unspoken longing fueled the early seasons. Jim was a handsome prankster trapped in a soul-killing job; as an escape, he poured all his emotions into sweet, plain Pam, who was engaged to a neglectful man named Roy. That primal triangle went fractal, very effectively: the initial model flipped several times, as Pam rejected Jim, then Jim, Pam, and it was mimicked in crueler forms (Angela, Dwight, and Andy), sillier forms (Kelly, Ryan, and Darryl), and more grownup forms (Michael, Jan, and Holly), until nearly every character had dealt with some form of unspoken longing or romantic betrayal.

  Eventually, Pam and Jim married and had two children. They were soul mates, and the show had the sense not to throw any doubt into that mix—until this season. Now the showrunners have made the bold choice to threaten a perfect marriage, with Jim in Philadelphia, pursuing his dream job at a sports-marketing company. He’s distracted, seduced by the free, fun-guy single life he never had, and, as a result, he’s left Pam isolated, with two small kids, furious at the financial risk, her supportive smile cracking. The primal triangle has resurfaced, with a bizarre revelation—Brian, the soundman on the crew that has been filming the show’s implicit documentary for years, has broken the fourth wall and fallen for Pam. And she has clearly, in her Pam-like way, nurtured this emotional affair.

  Much of the show’s audience has bridled at this development, but it works for me. I’m impressed by the daring of the writing staff, which has done the unthinkable: set up a realistic challenge to a marriage of soul mates. Pam may be a sweetie, but she has a history of passive-aggressive insecurity, fear of change, and, well, sneakiness. Under pressure, she triangulates. She flirted with Jim while engaged to Roy; when she briefly moved to New York to attend Pratt, she attracted a male friend whom Jim found so threatening that he proposed. (In contrast, Jim wasn’t even tempted by a colleague who threw herself at him.) Jim’s sexy new job is much like the one he dreamed of when he played the online game Second Life, in season 4. These compulsive flirtations are Pam’s Second Life.

  I have no idea if the show will be able to pull this off; on a beloved network sitcom, there’s no way that Pam and Jim will divorce. Who would want them to? But I appreciate this return to the show’s roots, which were always about complicating easy notions of human happiness. As Michael Scott once put it, “Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

  Difficult Women

  When people talk about the rise of great TV, they inevitably credit one show, The Sopranos. Even before James Gandolfini’s death, the HBO drama’s mystique was secure: novelistic and cinematic, David Chase’s auteurist masterpiece cracked open the gangster genre like a rib cage, releasing the latent ambition of television, and launching us all into a golden age.

  The Sopranos deserves the hype. Yet there’s something screwy about the way that the show and its cable-drama blood brothers have come to dominate the conversation, elbowing other forms of greatness out of the frame. It’s a bias that bubbles up early in Brett Martin’s otherwise excellent new book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, a deeply reported and dishy account of just how your prestige-cable sausage is made. I tore through the book, yet when I reached Martin’s chronicle of the rise of HBO I felt a jolt. “It might as well have been a tourism campaign for a post-Rudolph Giuliani, de-ethn
icized Gotham awash in money,” Martin writes of one of my favorite shows. “Its characters were types as familiar as those in The Golden Girls: the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, the Heroine. But they talked more explicitly, certainly about their bodies, but also about their desires and discontents outside the bedroom, than women on TV ever had before.”

  Martin gives Sex and the City credit for jump-starting HBO, but the condescension is palpable, and the grudging praise is reserved for only one aspect of the series—the rawness of its subject matter. Martin hardly invented this attitude: he is simply reiterating what has become the reflexive consensus on the show, right down to the hackneyed Golden Girls gag. Even as The Sopranos has ascended to TV’s Mt. Olympus, the reputation of Sex and the City has shrunk and faded, like some tragic dry-clean-only dress tossed into a decade-long hot cycle. By the show’s fifteenth anniversary, this year, we fans had trained ourselves to downgrade the show to a “guilty pleasure,” to mock its puns, to get into self-flagellating conversations about those blinkered and blinged-out movies. Whenever a new chick-centric series debuts, there are invidious comparisons: don’t worry, it’s no Sex and the City, they say. As if that were a good thing.

  But Sex and the City, too, was once one of HBO’s flagship shows. It was the peer of The Sopranos, albeit in a different tone and in a different milieu, deconstructing a different genre. Mob shows, cop shows, cowboy shows—those are formulas with gravitas. Sex and the City, in contrast, was pigeonholed as a sitcom. In fact, it was a bold riff on the romantic comedy: the show wrestled with the limits of that pink-tinted genre for almost its entire run. In the end, it gave in. Yet until that last-minute stumble it was sharp, iconoclastic television. High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, Sex and the City was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show. It also originated the unacknowledged first female antihero on television: ladies and gentlemen, Carrie Bradshaw.