Composing a Life

environment. When we returned to the United States, Barkev urged me to go on the job market without restricting my choices to fit some obvious next step of his. He said that he would accompany me and find a job that would allow us to be together. It turned out that his idea of being together was weekend commuting, which left me running a single-parent household. Still, much as I resented that decision, I feel fortunate that he never moved into a contingent status in the Amherst community. When a man accepts the vulnerabilities associated with a woman’s position, he is doubly vulnerable. For a woman, it is familiar territory.
    In the puzzle of composing a life, the interdependence of one’s own work with that of someone else is a major complication. Since households must rely more and more on dual incomes, every step must be worked out so that each partner can continue productive work, and both may have to improvise. Men no longer organize their lives around two fully separate narratives, one domestic and one professional; women’s narratives are half autonomous and half contingent. Almost any move puts a working couple at risk and reintroduces old inequities, and even commuting is proving less and less workable as the barrier between home and work weakens. The dual-career household may gradually come to inhibit mobility or reduce it to where it was fifty years ago when families were married to land.
    When two people work in close tandem, a major change in emphasis by one is likely to affect the whole system. Ellen and her husband Steve, who also practiced as a psychiatrist, started out working in parallel as residents at Beth Israel Hospital, doing very much the same jobs in the same place. After they married, they set out together for the same workplace in the morning and returned together at night, but most of the time they were not working side by side or on the same projects. Ellen was, if anything, slightly senior. They did, however, coauthor a standard reference text on psychoactive medications. The malaise that affected Ellen at thirty-five also affected Steve and led him to move from individual psychotherapy and academic medicine to industrial consulting. He based his new professional life at home, just as Ellen did when she relocated her work to allow for childcare. Parallelism continued. My mother often omitted her first marriage from autobiographical statements because, she said, “we had neither a book nor a baby together.” By 1984, Steve and Ellen had both. Writing a book with someone is a curious kind of sharing in the creation of new life, an intimacy that establishes a permanent link even when one moves on to other interests.
    In the children’s classic,
Mary Poppins
, the father goes to the city every day “to make money,” and the children imagine him actually stamping out shillings and pence. This is one end of the pattern, a man disappearing into a world of work that is entirely mysterious to women and children. In an agricultural community, men and women have separate tasks, but these tasks are visibly complementary and familiar to both. In contemporary society, the inclusion of women into more and more fields means that men and women work side by side on parallel tasks. But it also suggests the possibility of new kinds of complementarity.
    Alice’s strategy of creating a setting in which Jack’s involvement with a new technology could flourish—a kind of homemaking—was only partly successful. He continued his ill-fated battles against Orion, including a doomed proxy fight, parking a trailer in front of the Orion door during the annual stockholders’ meeting and serving champagne and coffee while he made his case to stockholders. When Jack sued the board of directors, the public fuss ruffled the Boston financial establishment in ways for which he was never forgiven.
    Alice and Jack’s collaboration also created a new set of problems. After Alice resigned from Polaroid to join Jack in setting up Demonics, the intensity of their work together destabilized the complex equilibrium of Jack’s marriage, already battered by months of his shifting moods of anger and depression. His wife announced, after a brief period of marriage counseling, that she had had enough.
    So Jack showed up one Saturday morning with six shop ping bags and his Labrador retriever at the door of Alice’s condominium in Boston’s Italian North End, a section of a renovated loft with a high living room, a