John Edwards, Love MacGuffin

This is how women are different from men. When a man calls out another man, what usually happens is that the two of them go round to the alley, roll up their sleeves, slug it out, and whoever wins, wins. Sometimes the two of them even end up pals. Sometimes men just want to size up each other.

When a woman squares off with another woman, what usually happens is that each of them calls on the loyalty of supporters—almost always other women. So it isn’t just Betty squaring off against Veronica, it’s Betty’s Army against Veronica’s Army, and it can be terrifying. Because women do not let up. Women have long memories. I’m not talking brute force—a look or a word from a woman or two or three can kill you for years. Sometimes I think I’d rather be a man and just take the punch.

All this came to mind this morning when I read in the National Enquirer that John Edwards has, indeed, copped to last year’s least-secret guilty secret—he has admitted to his wife that he is the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby. The Enquirer surmises that he did it to keep Rielle quiet: “The last thing John wants right now” (quoted the Enquirer from a source) “is for Rielle to go public before Elizabeth’s book comes out, make new headlines and trigger a nasty battle between the two women.”

Now, nobody loves a public catfight more than I do, but the last one that really held my interest was the decades-long Mary McCarthy-Lillian Hellman feud, which had more to do with conflicting sensibilities and temperament than the visceral heat of sexual jealousy. No latins, no fishwives. McCarthy confronting Hellman pretty much consisted of:

“You’re a liar and a lousy writer. You’re politically jejune. You’ve deliberately undermined the mental well-being of every person who has ever been close to you. And worst of all, you’re artistically bankrupt.”—

rather than that reliable soap opera staple—

“I’m in love with your husband. I can make him happy and you can’t. Set him free!”

But I speak from experience: Sometimes it can be both and neither ground is superior to the other. While the combination of boyish good looks and a morally lofty air in a man can be devastating to certain women, the combination of a boyishly intriguing but “impossible” man with a self-styled rectitudinal wife can also, for these same certain women, stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage, and lend the eye a terrible aspect. Oh, we happy few.

So. Rectitude. That word brings me back to the triangle in question. Of course Elizabeth Edwards is the superior character of the three of them. She’s brilliant, self-composed, despite her illness still vitally attractive, she possesses an exquisite sense of service and duty, and she has been greatly wronged. She is Calpurnia. But that’s just it. There’s nothing inspiring about Caesar’s wife.

Whereas Rielle Hunter is a wildly improvident party girl with a troubled past. She’s awkward, crude, inarticulate, messy, slutty, and she always needs money. But she is, when you come right down to it, an artist at heart. More than that, she is a failed artist, one who has brazenly paraded around the kind of failure that inspires other artists. (Just ask Jay McInerney.) She’s one of us. Guess who I’d be rooting for in a public controversy.

When women go public with their fueds, it’s often the case that if there’s a man involved, the man gets pushed to the background and what the audience sees is only the same clash of sensibilities that is as intrinsic to the Hunter-Edwards friction as it was of the McCarthy-Hellman one.

But then, when the heat of battle rises, it’s easy for the combatants to forget that where it all started was over a pair of strong arms...a knowing glance...a winsome smile...

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