Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [124]
—PHILLIP ROTH, AMERICAN PASTORAL
Raoul Felder is a divorce lawyer. Specifically, he is a celebrity divorce lawyer, with the adjective “celebrity” modifying the man, his clients, and his clients’ exes: think Elizabeth Taylor, Martin Scorcese, Mike Tyson, 50 Cent. If you are wronged in love and very rich, very famous, or very both, Felder is your go-to guy.
Probably you should try to get rich, famous, and divorced just to go sit in Felder’s waiting room. Back in the pre–9/11 era, when Rudy Giuliani (also a client) was busy cleaning out the triple-X storefronts of Times Square like they were the caves of Tora Bora, Felder stopped by a recently condemned smut shop and scavenged a few items. You can admire one of them in his waiting room: the “Love Tester,” a five-foot-tall, Coney Island-worthy contraption that promises to measure your sex appeal on its love-o-meter (zero to uncontrollable). Or you can rest your eyes on another Felder find: a food vending machine from some long-extinct automat of the type that was omnipresent in New York in the 1930s and ’40s. This one offers, in art deco lettering, Hot Dishes. Or you can just look at the walls, which are hung with innumerable framed magazine covers featuring Felder himself. “Dr. Estranged Love,” reads one. Another—from Vanity Fair, appropriately—features the famed lawyer astride a life-sized plastic tiger.
Sitting in Felder’s waiting room, surrounded by its peculiar blend of kitsch, irony, self-aggrandizement, and smut, you realize something. It isn’t just marriages that come here to die. It’s the idea of marriage. All of our noble notions about the beauty and durability of love, the romance, the wedding cake, the rings, the vows: all of that is either sent up or taken down by the waiting room’s collected campiness. True, every divorce hints at the possibility that our notion of love is suffering from a fatal flaw. Still, not every divorce lawyer turns that fact into a fashion statement. Felder, however, has styled his office as a particularly garish graveyard for the dream of true love. Likewise, he has styled himself as love’s particularly over-the-top undertaker—which explains what I was doing in his waiting room. Lacking the fame, the money, and the marriage, I wasn’t there to get a divorce. I was there to talk to Felder about why people are so wrong, so often, about love.
Wrongness and love: when I sat down to write this book, I was determined to avoid creating what I thought of as the wrongology slideshow. You know: here we are being wrong at the beach, here we are being wrong in Paris, here’s my nephew being wrong in kindergarten. That’s why this book isn’t built around chapters like “wrongness and science” and “wrongness and politics.” Both of those domains (and plenty more) are rich with examples of screwing up. But to approach the subject of error that way seemed to risk compiling an encyclopedia rather than writing a book.
From the beginning, though, wrongness and love struck me as a different story. Specifically, it struck me as the story. Of all the things we like to be right about, none is so important to us as being right about other people. This imperative reaches a kind of urgent apotheosis in matters of love. But to understand why, we need to start much earlier—before the age of consent, before our first crush, even before the dawn of complete consciousness. Like our desire for nourishment and security (and, as we’ll see, closely related to them), our desire to get other people right begins to develop the moment we enter this world.
Trickily, however, it begins in reverse: as young children, we need other people to get us right. Our very survival depends on our caretakers understanding and meeting our needs—first and foremost for physical comfort and safety, and secondarily (but scarcely less crucially) for emotional reassurance and closeness. As we get older, we improve the odds of getting those