“Nobody suitable.”
When I heard this week that Alison Wright had been nominated for an Emmy (Guest Actress in a Drama Series) for her work as Martha on The Americans, one line–two words–from her biggest scene this season kept echoing in my head.




I thought that was a perfect way of putting it, and that it speaks to part of what makes Martha remarkable. Lonely and overlooked most of her life, now exiled to Russia and aware that her marriage was a sham and that she was targeted in all likelihood precisely because of her history of being alone and invisible, she still is not going to settle for just anyone. She still has standards, she’s still holding out for something real. When I think about the three people I’ve dated in the last few years, all great in their own way and I’m sure suitable for other great people out there but not for me, I think I have some idea of how Martha feels.
After reading Kara Shroyer’s new essay on the film Secretary, which I had never seen, I watched it immediately, and was struck by how much it’s a film about two people discovering their suitability for each other, and creating a space in which they can love themselves and each other more fully. James Spader’s E. Edward Grey is immediately perceptive about Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in a way that few people are.











It’s the start of Lee and Edward’s path to a mutual understanding that lets them both open up and, with each other, in the light of each other’s love, put aside the shame they’ve carried for so long that has led them to be closed off. But along the way, Lee learns that it’s hardly a mutual interest in certain relationship dynamics alone that make them so suitable for each other. During a period of separation from Edward, she meets up with other men who also have an interest in domination and submission, but it’s a complete disaster. They are not suitable for her. She has no desire to know them. Edward, she really wants to know.

Like Lee, I’m closed up tight in the world. I’ve learned to be. And most people, even kind, warm, decent people, can’t open me up. They just don’t have the password for my arcane systems.
In her essay on the film, Shroyer writes of how Lee begins to change with Edward. “She is finally known, and in being known, can know and love herself.” I’ve absorbed a lot of shame in my life. A lot of fear. A lot of distrust. And while I believe that self-love and compassion are essential, I also believe that there are ways in which we can only heal and know ourselves and love ourselves when we are known and loved by another, when we can see ourselves through their eyes as someone valuable and worthy of being loved. In voiceover, near the film’s conclusion, when Lee and Edward are finally, truly together, she says, “For the first time in my life, I felt beautiful.” As Shroyer observes, “In the end, it’s intimacy that frees both Lee and Grey from self-loathing.” Not just physical intimacy, but emotional intimacy. Trust. Knowing.
In this moment, in bed together, basking in each other’s love, she asks him,
“Where did you go to high school? What was your mother like? What was her name? What did it say under your senior yearbook picture? Who was your first love? When did your heart first get broken? Where were you born?” Finally, he answers, “Des Moines, Iowa.”
It’s not the answer itself that matters–Des Moines, Iowa is no more or less profound a response to the question than Peoria, Illinois would have been. It’s the knowing that matters. The knowing. The last time I knew someone who I felt could open me up, someone I really wanted to know and who I really wanted to know me, just learning her father’s name or a job she had when she was young or a bad movie she saw in a theater in 1998 felt meaningful.
As it turned out, she was not mine to know, and since then, well, I have met nobody suitable. But I’m still holding out for someone I want to know who wants to know me, someone who lets me in and who I can see letting in to the places in myself that I keep closed off so tightly, and in so doing, come to know myself in new ways, too.
Notes
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