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" Not in heaven but someplace close by, Norman Mailer sits with Nora Ephron at a lily-white table piled high with airy grilled-cheese sandwiches. They are both as beautiful as they wanted to be. Nora says to Norman, Our names were alike, but that&amp;#039;s the end of it. That&amp;#039;s not true at all, Norman replies. You and me, we had a slew in common. War. Wegotism. Women. Wangs. I&amp;#039;m not obsessed with war, says Nora, never was. Fine, says Norman, Waistlines and Women, then. He lights her cigarette and pulls down a heavy book from a floating Ikea shelf. We were so obsessed with women because we couldn&amp;#039;t get them straight, he says. Speak for yourself. Women have these stitches\u2014they&amp;#039;re made up of billions of them. Thousands, anyway. What men like you do when they get women half right is they pluck one of these stitches, pulled by the atmosphere or by some douchebag who&amp;#039;s slept with her lately. Then they glorify that stitch, or vilify it, or conduct some faux-reverent treatment of the stitch that is alternately laudatory and cruel, Madonna and whore, Pauline Kael and Kim Kardashian. Is that Esquire or\u00A0Sophie&amp;#039;s Choice? I know you shuffle between the two. What? says Norman. It&amp;#039;s Esquire. I don&amp;#039;t know what\u00A0Sophie&amp;#039;s Choice\u00A0is. Hand it over, I&amp;#039;ll show you. Nora grabs the book. Tom Robbins on Debra Winger&amp;#039;s voice, from 1993: &amp;quot;[It] sounds as if it&amp;#039;s been strained through Bacall and Bogey&amp;#039;s honey-moon sheets and then hosed down with plum brandy.&amp;quot; One thousand issues of that gluttonous dookie. You&amp;#039;re pissed because they got it right, says Norman. Sometimes, says Nora, taking a deep and thoughtful drag. For example, says Norman, George A. McNamara&amp;#039;s 1937 ode to jiggling: &amp;quot;the champagne of movement&amp;quot; that happens &amp;quot;when a young woman walks. Or turns or bends or reaches or stamps her foot. And she approaches the absolutely ultimate in jiggling when she runs.&amp;quot; What&amp;#039;s your point, guy? It&amp;#039;s gorgeous, it&amp;#039;s scientific. Only women without a jiggle would be pissed. You&amp;#039;re a weasel, how&amp;#039;s that for a\u00A0W? Look at this asshole, Leland Stowe, in &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s Wrong with Our Women?&amp;quot; from 1948: &amp;quot;There is no other country in the world where women wait so presumptuously for some male to light their cigarette. And this is the only country where obliging males frequently get not so much as a slight nod for their pains.&amp;quot; Or\u00A0D,\u00A0for Dickless. What about Capote,\u00A0Breakfast at Tiffany&amp;#039;s,\u00A0in &amp;#039;58? says Norman. The only piece of writing you ever complimented that wasn&amp;#039;t your own. I suppose that&amp;#039;s notable. But yes, it&amp;#039;s true, he gets it right. Holly Golightly was every southern girl I ever knew in the big city. Moreover, she owned real estate in her own brain. But Capote was gay. I wrote in my column for Esquire about beauty\u2026 Yes! says Norman. I happened to read that, at, uh, the doctor&amp;#039;s office. You said you couldn&amp;#039;t sympathize with a woman who was losing her beautiful looks because you yourself never had any. Well, yes, that&amp;#039;s true. So they got it right? Well, I got it right for them. Then look here, says Norman. September 1962. Esquire sent a blazing-hot Gloria Steinem to write about sex on campus at the dawn of the Pill. Jesus, remember that? According to the piece, the biggest bitch for young coeds was that there weren&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;enough sexually liberated men to go around.&amp;quot; Oh sure, good for Esquire, until a decade later when they published Leonard Levitt&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;She.&amp;quot; That bastard said Gloria was willing to take on any persona, so long as the hot man of the moment was in tow. I heard she&amp;#039;s still furious about it. I heard she&amp;#039;s still hot. It&amp;#039;s a shame you didn&amp;#039;t stick around for Viagra. But I did! Gotcha. &amp;quot;She&amp;quot; was 1971? You had yourself a year. You were sent to debate Germaine Greer, and then she wrote about it for Esquire. She was going to put down your looks before she saw how puny you actually looked in person and felt bad for you. Norman winces, stuffs an entire grilled cheese through his lips. Now look here, says Nora, the eighties and nineties brought more stitches, like the feature on NBA groupies and an aging literary novelist on the ever-popular old-guy yen for fucking younger women, the two running in back-to-back spring 1992 issues. You&amp;#039;re speaking of Salter? Oh God, of course, your brother in arms. And now we get the annual Sexiest Woman Alive next to an argument that it&amp;#039;s okay (finally!) to take your local forty-two-year-old to bed, not to mention the April 2015 Women and Men issue\u2014one of Esquire&amp;#039;s handful of attempts in eighty-two years to dedicate an entire issue to how men relate to women in hopes of finally understanding them. But they can&amp;#039;t, because \u2026 Because WHY? Because Esquire is a mirror for all men, for the way your species has bungled our secret garden and then reseeded it and said, &amp;quot;Hey, Mom, look! I replanted the goddamn peonies I pissed on!&amp;quot; So what&amp;#039;s the takeaway, Nora? All men are peony pissers? Quite a stitch you&amp;#039;ve picked. No. The takeaway is, well, the takeaway is that women are necessary. Necessary in the most heavenly possible light \u2026 You mean like a case of crabs in Phuket? Look, it&amp;#039;s impossible to get anything ample down about women in a thousand issues that covers the life span of one woman, let alone the billions of stitches. But it&amp;#039;s a start. I hope you read Capote and you understand the deep needs of young girls from dusty places. I hope you become a mother and understand your mother. Become a wife and understand the housewife. Or at least read about them. I hope you read an entire history of women and you understand them 10 percent better. That&amp;#039;s the problem with all you women. You all talk and write like women. At least we don&amp;#039;t write\u00A0Ancient Evenings. Hey, Nora, don&amp;#039;t hate me because I&amp;#039;m beautiful. -- For Esquire&amp;#039;s 1,000th issue, October 2015 (on sale now), we look back on the history of the magazine and launch a digital archive of everything we&amp;#039;ve ever published,\u00A0Esquire Classic. Read the full Encyclopedia of Esquire here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/sex/a38228/understanding-women-nora-ephron-norman-mailer/>