In Liaisons Dangereuses, the eighteenth-century epistolary novel of cynicism by Choderlos de Laclos, the plot turns around two aristocrats who co-conspire to seduce their unsuspecting victims. Their purpose is not so much to gratify sexual desire as to enjoy the exercise of power. The power of cynicism over innocence. By their exchange of letters, they advise each other and keep each other in the loop. 

At one point, the Vicomte de Valmont, the male seducer, realizes that he has fallen in love with his victim, and writes that he hopes to win her back. His female co-conspirator, the Marquise de Merteuil, who has composed the disillusioning letter for the Vicomte to send to his victim, responds with these words: 

Vicomte, when a woman strikes at the heart of another woman,

she seldom fails to find the most sensitive spot,

and the wound is incurable.

You don’t want a woman for an enemy. At least not a woman who’s any good at what she does. There was such a woman in my life – someone formerly close to me who became an intelligent, effective enemy. I’ve referred to her in a recent column where I noted that, after our rupture, I stayed away from mutual friends who were part of her world of work and therefore professionally important to her. 

Why did I do that? Because it seems to me obvious that you don’t undermine another woman’s livelihood – her actual means of survival.

Since she was not similarly inhibited with regard to my professional life, I soon found myself shorn of collegial friends who’d meant the world to me! Although, in time and in varying degrees, some drifted back, on the whole it has remained the most amazing feat of social surgery that I’ve ever seen.

It seems a case that vindicates the Marquise de Merteuil – at least in her capacity as diagnostician of social forces.

On the other hand, here’s a different case. I seldom think about it, so the precise dates have faded, but it occurred after my divorce, also after I’d won tenure – thus at the time when I was resuming my life as a single woman in New York.

It was the morning after I’d been told I had breast cancer. I lay in my bed, utterly terrified. No place to hide where the dread verdict wouldn’t be able to find me. 

Then the phone rang. It was a friend calling, a woman colleague. I told her my news. 

     “Come over!” she said immediately. We lived in the same neighborhood.

     “I need to go for a walk.”

     “Come over after.”

It was a wintry day. I circled the Central Park reservoir, entering at 90th and Fifth, looking down at the water below as I walked. The water looked cold and grey. As did the sky overhead. All nature appeared to join in my despair.

When I came into my friend’s warm apartment, and sat down to talk, I told her that what was bitterest to me in this news about cancer was that it meant she had won. It seemed likely that my body had registered the effect of my defamer’s seductive fictions. Her calumny had peeled off precious friends, priceless collegiality and the protective surround of mutual trust.

Cancer was the residue of all that exfoliation.

If your enemy can kill you anyway, and that’s what this is all about – murder real or symbolic – then in real terms she’s won! Moral victories are insubstantial compared to the vital question of who is left standing when the smoke and the dust clears.

“They envy you,” remarked my collegial woman friend. In her “they” she included all the former friends who gave credit to preposterously belittling fictions.

I don’t know why that was, for me, Balm in Gilead, but it was. It was a woman friend saying that, hey, we see you –

the freemasonry of women –

sees you.

It moved me from a sense of being homeless, without a tie under heaven, to a sense of being once again –

at home in the world.

A woman can give you that.

Related Content: Call No Woman Happy