A WOMAN’S PLACE : It’s No Longer Likely to Be in the Home, Where Her Man Is Being Creative

Eight of us are hanging out around stacks of banana-nut pancakes at Farmers Market on a sunny Wednesday,flying high on coffee, eavesdropping on Iowa tourists. The weather is warm, the company fine, the air scented with roasting peanuts. It is, you know, a couples thing, a pleasant afternoon. Around 2 o’clock, about the time I contemplate switching from coffee to root beer, half of us--the wives, the girlfriends--look around at each other, shrug their purses onto their shoulders and get ready to go back to the editing rooms, photo studios and production offices where they are probably already missed. The rest of us--all men--go to the movies. We will hear about this when we get home. We will become properly sheepish.

These pairings have always been common in some circles, but recently the condition has seemed endemic. The avant-garde filmmakers are married to hotshot litigation attorneys, activists to engineers, the painters to high-school teachers, the clarinet-playing substitute teachers to the women who make sure movie productions do not exceed their budgets. Somebody’s got to be the stable one; somebody has to pay for the occasional evenings out at Campanile. Among MTV-generation couples of equal talent, achievement and ambition, it always seems to be the female who has to be a certain place at a certain time.

Most of the men who hang out at the local coffeehouse seem to live there, like potted plants fertilized with caffeine; most of the women regulars actually work at the place.

It’s not that our wives and girlfriends are financially supporting us--sometimes, the incomes are more or less equal--it’s that we’re over-acquainted with daytime TV, and they know it. We’ve all watched “Leave It to Beaver” enough times to know in our hearts that men are not supposed to spend their afternoons with Oprah, watching old Sam Fuller videos or running down to Artesia to check out a new Gujarati vegetarian restaurant that’s supposed to be dynamite. (And it’s not like we spend our afternoons dusting or anything.) We promise ourselves that we will get a day job if David Lynch decides to go once again with Angelo Badalamente--or if a baby arrives, whichever comes first. In the meantime, we’re available for lunch.

The most exciting new novelists and politicians and rock musicians are female. Camille Paglia is female. A third of the new cabinet is female, probably the good third. We are not unaware of this.

As strongly as we may feel that it was Hillary’s good job at the law firm that enabled Bill Clinton to run for governor of Arkansas at an age when few of us have yet to speak up at so much as a school board meeting, we do not believe that our gender entitles us to anything. Our parents had a word for us: “bums.”

Though we don’t even admit it to each other, we are propelled by gender guilt. We have read “A Room of One’s Own,” too, if we haven’t actually purchased male-shame-inducing Bikini Kill records or seen “Thelma & Louise” through more than once. Unlike our fathers, we have no problem working for women bosses, insofar as we have no problem in working for a boss at all.

But men can allow themselves to be stay-at-homes in a way that women still cannot. Most of the women I know understand that they’ve got to work overtime and follow rules and make connections if they want to succeed, whereas most of the men hope to be ready when something nice falls into their lap. There is still just the slightest whiff of indolence to an underscheduled woman.

In fact, a woman without a day gig seems singularly exotic. “By the time he gets home,” the only housewife I knew told me once, “I have to clean the apartment, dust the furniture and have dinner hot and waiting for him. It’s like my job.” And before a year had passed, she left the guy, set up a successful business and started to take oboe lessons. She’s been living with a gifted and indolent jazz musician ever since.