“Envy,” said a friend on a cold night over a glass of red wine, “is the one vice everybody has experienced. There are people who aren’t gluttons, who aren’t greedy, and even some who aren’t particularly proud. But everybody,” he said, leaning over the table and lowering his voice to emphasize the point, “everybody has been envious at some time in their life.” I knew what he meant, given that the very day on which we were speaking was full of envy for me. Hell, I envied him as he spoke to me, what with his good job and happy family. Then I remembered that I also had a pretty good job and a pretty happy family. Why, when everything is going fairly well, do we still spend time envying others?
What do I envy? Like every woman over size 10, I envy women under size 10. Like every worker, I envy other people’s bigger offices (complete with more windows with better views), better staff, preferred seating at restaurants over power lunches, and mythically proportioned expense accounts. I have foreign language envy, speaking only bad Sicilian and bad French-Canadian (and in these tongues knowing only how to say things you can’t say in front of the kids), I routinely envy those fluent in German and Parisian French and Florentine Italian. I envy athletes who play graceful tennis, singers who effortlessly harmonize with Mary Chapin Carpenter, and dancers smooth enough to make George Steinbrenner look like Fred Astaire.
Penis envy I don’t have, although I wouldn’t mind some of the benefits awarded to those members: full access to the power structure, political influence, a decent credit line and the ability to walk into a garage without the mechanic’s thinking, “Oh, good, now I can put that addition on my house,” because I have a question about my transmission. (The best story I ever heard as an antidote to Freud concerns a little girl who, on seeing her naked infant brother for the first time, merely commented, “Isn’t it a good thing, Mommy, that it isn’t on his face?”)
I content myself with envying those who are richer, cuter, taller, better and nicer. I even envy those who are less envious, the ones who applaud the accomplishments of their rivals without a tightening of the fist of the heart. That generosity is characteristic of angels, and not even all of them can live up to it: As I remember, Milton’s version of the story says that Lucifer took arms against God because of envy, declaring it “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
My pal, I think, is right: Envy is pervasive. Envy is what makes you, when an acquaintance is lustily telling you that she’s dating a Greek god of a guy, ask, “Which one, Hades?” Envy makes you, when a co-worker brags about his son’s success on the varsity team, say: “How nice. When I bought my new Cadillac last week, my car salesman’s assistant had also been a football player.” Envy keeps you from saying, “Good for you! You earned it!” even when someone has legitimately, honestly and sweetly come by some success.
Envy feeds on itself, and is a sort of greed with a vengeance. If Greed wants what’s out there, Envy feels a sense of entitlement to what’s inside. When Greed and Gluttony want something, they grab it and consume it; Pride says that if they can’t have it, then it isn’t worth wanting; Envy is destined to be perpetually in a state of longing, howling for what appears just out of reach like a shivering dog baying at the moon. Greed wants money, Pride wants fame, and Gluttony wants satisfaction, but Envy wants above all to breed more envy. Envy grows poor because others gain wealth; Envy grows sick because others are healthy; Envy grows gaunt watching others eat.
Snow White’s stepmother felt envy after asking that magic mirror “Who’s the fairest of them all?” and hearing the wrong answer, and every kid whose parent says “no” declares himself a similar victim. “You don’t want me to go out Saturday night only because you have to stay home,” the teenager yells, and half a parent’s heart might hear the truth in that. Iago in “Othello” was envious; Hamlet may have been envious of the man who got to sleep with his mother; and The Beach Boys certainly envied The Beatles. The teacher who downgrades the smartass but nevertheless smart student might be driven by envy, and so might the boss who won’t give her administrative assistant the raise she earned. “I got it the hard way,” sniffs Envy. “Why should I make it easier for anybody else?”
Envy isn’t jealousy. In “Fatal Attraction,” for example, we meet the mistress who is jealous of the wife, and in “Disclosure” we meet the wife who’s jealous of the mistress. These examples highlight the difference between jealousy and envy; the mistress and wife share exactly the same desire for precisely the same man. (These examples also highlight the fact that the Motion Picture Academy should create a category for the best actor in a But-Honey-She-Made-Me-Do-It role, and that Michael Douglas should always get that award.) The women circling Douglas like two cheetahs around a kill on the Discovery Channel are jealous of one another and wish to replace one another. That’s not the widely-sweeping net of envy, but the hook of jealousy.
The man who is envious of his neighbor’s job, in contrast, probably does not want to steal that job away, but instead wants to get a better one. He’s envious of the ease with which he assumes his neighbor gets through the day; he doesn’t covet his neighbor’s wife, particularly, but he might covet his neighbor’s 401K. If I envy a model’s perfect thighs, I am all too well aware that on my body those thighs would look, to put it kindly, out of place. I don’t want her thighs, I just wish mine were better. The neighbor doesn’t want the other guy’s job; he wants acknowledgement that he is equally accomplished. He wants to be number one, to be best, to be the winner. When only one can be declared a winner, that means that the rest of us are “also-rans,” looking on from the sidelines, hoping secretly that the leader will stumble and that the fall will be our big break. It isn’t pretty.
Envy is an especially embarrassing vice because it often seems petty. The big sins seem noble; envy creeps around coveting the nobility of a regal vice but never quite making it. When it’s not wringing its hands, envy is busy pointing out the spot on the competition’s tie. That the spots are there is undeniable, but the glee that envy takes in labeling them gives the game away.
Let’s say my actress friend and I go to a movie. If all she can talk about is the awfulness of the heroine’s accent, I have a fairly clear sense that envy is coloring her assessment. I can say in all honesty that I thought the performance good or bad, but she can’t. Not if the actress is close to her “type.” If I can’t stand somebody’s essay in a magazine, my husband might lightly point out that my distaste is surprising, given that the essayist’s style is similar to mine.
Of course that’s what’s getting to me, and he knows it. Someone who loves you doesn’t want you to feel envious because it makes everything else in your life seem unimportant. It seems to say, “If I only had her unfair advantages, then I’d be happy.” Someone who loves you wants to hear, “I’ve got you, so how could I ever envy another person?” This is one reason envy is such a secret vice, and the fact of its secrecy is one of the reasons it is tricky to change.
But I owe a great deal to envy. The first piece I ever sent out for publication I wrote only because a girl I went to college with had two poems printed in a small literary journal that I happened to come across in a tiny bookstore on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan’s East Village. There I was, flipping through these thin pages after cranking out another paper for graduate school, and there was her name in print. It tripped some internal alarm signal, her name in print, and all my sirens were immediately set off. I had to do better. For God’s sake, I had to do at least as well.
Buying the magazine, I took it home hidden under my jacket as if it were some controlled substance, and I smuggled it up to my typewriter where I read the guidelines for submission as though they were the answers to an exam. Which they were, in a way. My test was to be as good as this phantom rival. To make a long story short, I got one poem published, one I wrote that night with my eyes more on her words than on my own. I’m sure she never read it; I no longer have any idea where she is or what she is doing, and I’m sure she never gave me even a quarter as much thought as I gave her. And I got only one poem published. I’ve never felt quite as if I’ve caught up. So I keep at it.
In a way, though, I am grateful for the spur of envy that night because it drove me on, took me down the dark road of my own ambition and gave me the necessary gall to toss a typed page on an editor’s desk. If I hadn’t been so envious, I might not have been able to face the blank page. I’m not convinced yet that envy doesn’t have something to do with every word that’s ever been written, and not only by me.
Perhaps fate has arranged for envy to have its best as well as worst uses, and, as is the case with most of fate’s arrangements, we can benefit from those very things we are taught to condemn. Without envy we might escape the pain of comparison, but forfeit the vital heat of competition; we might avoid some tingling sorrow, but lose the pleasure of unforeseen accomplishment.
Maybe it’s a good thing to think that the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence. Maybe without that belief, we would only focus on the fences, those walls boxing us in and trying to keep us in our place, built as high as they are wide and climbed only at great risk. It’s scary to think about getting over them without a reason, and envy can provide a reason–perhaps not a good one, but a reason nonetheless.
Envy refuses to allow us to be complacent inside the box of our own making, chides us to move up and out and away into new pastures, across fields of risk. Envy might entice us toward heartbreaking failure or dizzying success, but at least it moves us. That movement, that taking of risk, is what enables us to leave what is familiar and break new ground.
In having such power for good, envy itself is enviable.
