I step toward you and you step back. “I’m moving,” you say.
“You’re what?” No no no no no.
“We put the house on the market.”
NO NO NO NO NO. Your insanity is supposed to be temporary. “Mary Kay, come on. Slow down a minute. You can’t tell me you want to move away. Not with him.”
“I just did tell you.”
“Hang on a minute. This feels a little unfair, Mary Kay. I love you. You know that. You said it.”
And now finally you do meet my eyes. “I told you, Joe. That day never happened.”
That was the best day of my life—I have the Polaroids to prove it—and you cut me off when I try to reason with you. “I’d appreciate it if you would respect my feelings and stay away.” You take my doorknob in your hand. You squeeze. “Goodbye, Joe. Good luck.”
You close my door—you don’t slam it—and I walk to the window and I wait for you to look back—the woman always looks back at the one she loves—but you don’t do it, Mary Kay. You don’t love me anymore.
36
It’s quiet in the Whisper Room and in the great tradition of so many authors on this island, I open Microsoft Word and I open Chrome because the old adages are true: Write what you know and know thy enemy, especially if you’re going to write about him.
I open my mind—ouch—and watch a video of one of Ivan’s newest female converts—possibly a paid actor, actually let’s go with probably—and she’s wearing her thinking cap and she is energized. “Ivan should be the biggest life coach on the planet,” she says. “He changed everything for me. No more pop music, no more Air Supply when I’m PMSing, and no more sappy movies. Ivan taught me to stop feeling my feelings and start leading with my mind.”
I dig up Ivan’s bio on his website and there he is with his wife and her kids—second marriage—and her name is Alisa and she’s a mousy brunette who tends to everything at home. She is rigid. She wears a sweater set. She’s from another time and she’s on Facebook—of course—and she’s “busy” raising their sons… who are away at college. None of these people showed up at Phil’s funeral and Ivan and Alisa met in grad school—bite me—and the quote at the top of her profile would make RIP Melanda feel sick: “Stop your feelings before they stop you.”—Ivan King, my husband
Ivan really wanted his new career to happen, and at some point, an intelligent woman must have gotten on his nerves and told him to back the fuck off.
I google #MeToo Ivan King.
Nothing. Which makes sense. He’s only been officially selling his snake oil for a couple years. But then, there are older videos, some of them from his early days, when he didn’t know about bounce boards and lighting. Surely he made a mistake at some point, and I’m not talking about technical shit.
I google gross things: Ivan King blow job. Ivan King affair. Ivan King rumor. Ivan King harassment. But it’s the same every time. Ivan King decent. Ivan King loyal. Ivan King ally.
There’s no way, Mary Kay. I remember my old life in L.A., fighting with RIP Forty about our screenplays and the one good piece of advice he gave me—Trust your gut, Old Sport. It’s all in there—and I do that now. I trust my gut and I know I can be stubborn about technology. I hate the name. I hate the clear intention to shrink our attention span even more. But I do it. I go on fucking TikTok.
This is the miracle of the creative process. Of inspiration. You. Because I love you, I am in touch with all the narrows of my soul, my talent. I didn’t think someone like you existed. You found me and I do exist and my instinct was right—good job, gut—and I find Megan.
Megan isn’t very popular on TikTok—she doesn’t shoot her whole face, only her mouth—but I like her for bucking the shallow, image-obsessed system. I like Megan’s voice, too. She’s indignant. Brave. Rattled. It takes a few TikToks to tell her whole story—San Francisco tech fucks, you can do better—but I listen to the whole damn thing. And then I play her videos again and this time, I write it all down:
This is pretty scary. My #MeToo isn’t famous but he isn’t not famous but that doesn’t matter. What matters is what he did to me. The part of me that loves Ivan King says that I’m acting with my feelings, not my brain, because that’s how men kept women down for so long, by telling us that we feel too much. But I do have feelings and I can’t hold it in anymore. I met Ivan King at his workshop. He told me that I had true potential but that I lacked confidence. He told me he could tell that I had never had an orgasm with a man and at the time it was true and I told him that wasn’t true and he knew I was lying because if you know Ivan, you know how he is. How he just KNOWS. He said that sex is an activity. The single most important activity. He said that without good sex I would never reach my true potential. He could tell I had never been in love. I cried a lot. He said I wasn’t attractive because men have intuition too. They can tell when you haven’t been loved correctly, when you’ve faked too many orgasms and blamed yourself. So I did it. I took my clothes off. I know I did this myself. He didn’t hold me down. He didn’t “make” me do anything. I put my “thinking cap” on and I kept that hat on during sex. He abused his power. I know I can’t be the only woman who got played. He makes it so hard to come forward. He makes us blame ourselves for having feelings. But I am sick of pretending that I don’t. Because if you ask me, no one has more “feelings” than Ivan King. If this happened to you, please tell me. #MeToo is good, but it’s not perfect or Ivan King would be on the way down, not on the way up. I saw him in GQ and well… I just had to speak up.
My fingers are numb and my left eye is twitching and I wrote it once and I doubled back to check for accuracy—as Megan’s megaphone amplifier, I owe it to her to nail every word—and then I do what Megan should have done.
I dump Megan’s manifesto on Reddit, where people like to pay attention to every word.
And now I wait.
We live in strange times—refresh, nothing—because for all the men who are exposed, there are plenty of bad men who carry on in the shadows because they know how to convince women that they’re emotionally responsible for whatever the men did with their dicks—refresh, nothing—and I forgot about how good it feels to tell the truth and help a wronged woman seek justice—RIP Melanda would be so proud of me—and I refresh.
Nothing.
But I am patient. I believe Megan. I believe in her so much that it wouldn’t surprise me if she called me right now to thank me for sharing her story. （I linked the transcript to her TikTok. Unlike RIP Forty Quinn, I give credit when credit is due.） Megan has dirty blond hair—refresh, nothing—and slouchy shoulders and credit card debt from Ivan King—refresh, nothing—and I find her other accounts and I learn about her overdue bills from personal trainers and therapists and… grad school. Yes! She’s a grad student—sadly, snobs care about shit like that—and she’s relatable, fiercely intelligent in the classroom, but less confident when it comes to her personal life. She contacted Ivan because she thought he could help make the pain go away and he made it worse and she’s not alone and that’s why he should be canceled. I refresh.