Work, Kids, Sex
Together, Sonet Film, 2000
From Enormous Eye:
10 PM, Chez Jay. I order two beers for us and a glass of wine for Mona. She’s teaching Middlemarch for the first time on Monday, and though I wrote about it for my undergraduate thesis I remember it very poorly. We talk about New York, magazines, her kids, Los Angeles. She didn’t like it at first but it snuck up on her. Now she finds she can get a lot of work done here, her life is set up for it. She’s so animated. I love talking to her, watching her flip her hair.
I ask her about her students, which leads us to feminism. “What does your generation want?” she asks. “I worry my generation screwed it up for all of you.” I say the usual things—work, kids, sex. The sex thing is interesting, we agree. She tells us a story about the open-marriage / free-love throuples she knew in Berkeley, where she went to college. They were very open in this particular way, she says, but it was still a woman who was inviting people over, who was serving the drinks or cooking the food, who was following up to say thank you if the throuple had been invited over. What would it take for all that to change? The world would be unrecognizable if it did, says Mona, for the better.
Midnight or so, the 10 freeway. This is my freeway. I love to drive it.
1 AM, the apartment. We fall asleep with all the lights and our clothes on.
