The Uncoupling (15 page)

In English class the Langs both made the kids look everywhere for symbols. They battered them with imagery, metaphor, insistence that they scour a text for something sweeping and big rather than literal and small. Robby Lang didn’t really see the Cumfy as a metaphor for what they’d become. To him, this item was simply what it had been advertised as: a blanket and a robe all in one. He had bought it because they were now in a period of life in which they could use it. They were seeking warmth from someplace other than each other.

Robby and Dory turned on the TV and got themselves under the thing.

9
.

Y
ou’ve really let yourself go, haven’t you?”

As soon as Ed Cutler spoke these words to his wife, she knew he could never unspeak them. They were like the comments that kids wrote on walls and boards over the Internet: all the graphic sentiments they threw at one another, not really understanding or caring that college admissions officers and future employers would always be able to call them up and read them. Their words were like skywriting that never fully faded.

Ed had said the words to Bev one night the previous spring, long before the spell struck her. They were getting dressed to go out to the senior class banquet and awards dinner, held at the Rock Garden Country Club, a large structure that looked liked Monticello except with a sign looming beside it that read CARPET BAZAAR. They had been getting dressed together in the master bedroom suite of their house; Bev was at the dresser and Ed was behind her, toying at length with his cuff links. She looked up and saw both their reflections in the mirror. Her husband was slender, trim, hairless, patrician, and though his hedge fund had tanked along with everything else in the economy, still he kept his head up, and still they personally stayed rich. Ed Cutler had been part of the ruin of the country in recent years, but Bev had never spoken aloud the disturbing thought she had, which was
: Look what you did. You and all the others.

She wouldn’t have been cruel to him the way he was cruel to her. She was a thoughtful, soft-spoken guidance counselor at school and, to a certain extent, a counselor at home. Ed went on each day as though the markets hadn’t crashed, the financial sphere hadn’t been proven to be an improvised concoction of smoke and mirrors and shit. At fifty-eight, he was getting up there in years, and younger men kept coming through, pushing on in, so Ed Cutler needed to keep his ego and sense of self, and his wife Bev didn’t want to intrude on it or hurt him. They lived in a gigantic, polished house that had been purchased and maintained by hedge-fund money, so she really had no business saying a word.

None of the other members of the Elro faculty lived the way she and Ed lived, not even close. When the Cutlers went to the faculty potlucks in those modest, tidy homes, she was reminded of all she had, and how rare it was. Though at times Bev referred to the house as “the monstrosity,” she privately loved its proximity to nature, and felt pride at owning something so big and glorious. She could have been a guidance counselor for a hundred years, and still she would have been unable to purchase such a place herself. Ed’s hedge fund had bought the weathered redwood and slate floors and skylights; the fieldstone kitchen with its hanging copper vessels. His hedge fund, even diminished, paid for their kids’ college education and post-collegiate loafing. Their daughter Julia was a freshman at Buckland, leaning toward majoring in Queer Studies, though she was not “queer” herself but simply open-minded, she said. And the Cutlers’ bass-player son Jeremy, one year out of college, shared an apartment with a few other musicians in Red Hook, Brooklyn, getting gigs whenever they could, but mostly walking around in their underwear in their fully carpeted pad upon awakening each afternoon, eating bowls of milk with little bits of sugary cereal floating in them.

Ed had been in a dark, fixed mood for a long time now, angry about the markets but acting as if the crash was something that had been done to him, and not, certainly, something in which he had been complicit. He referred to the men in charge as “they” and “them.” When he and Bev were getting dressed to go out to the senior banquet on that long-ago spring night, and he was in his tuxedo shirt, which plants a man somewhere between murmuring, butter-bearing waiter and captain of the Queen’s Navy, he kept trying to do up his own cuff links, but his thick fingers were baffled, and he muttered to himself.

Bev was still in her bra and pantyhose; they found each other in the mirror, and he looked so impressive and she looked bloated, the pantyhose catching her flesh, her breasts barely contained in their nude-colored catchall. If you squinted, you would not have even
seen
any undergarments, but just a vague, blurry, nude-colored woman in her fifties who felt sad about how she looked, but who was still required to stand in front of mirrors once in a while, like everyone.

“You’ve really let yourself go, haven’t you?” Ed said to her then.

For a second they continued to look at themselves in the mirror; it occurred to Bev that he hadn’t even meant to say this aloud. This was what he really, really thought, in the deepest and most uncensored part of himself. She disgusted him. She was disgusting. Bev stood, and then dashed to the bathroom in tears.

“What?” he called, but he probably knew he had gone too far. “Would you come out here, Bev?”

Finally, after several minutes, Bev came out of the bathroom and silently stepped into her dress. Ed returned to the pursuit of his cuff links, and then, after trying for a while longer, he asked her, flatly but perhaps sheepishly, “Can you help me?”

She went to him and pushed the little silver T-bar through the ungenerous slit in the hard white cotton. She remembered the night of a previous senior banquet, two years earlier, before she had entirely “let herself go.” On that particular night, the Cutlers had also looked at themselves in the mirror, but they had still found enough to be pleased with. Bev made that sucked-in face that women make in mirrors, and Ed, who didn’t even know about that face, observed their reflections, and they both thought:
we’ll do
. Then, somehow, they were in bed, his tuxedo shirt off, her pantyhose scrolled down. Their chairs at the table in the banquet room remained empty that night; the leaves of their salad, hosed down with raspberry vinaigrette, remained uneaten. Abby Means, who chaired the event every year, had probably primly and piously regarded her watch, wondering where the Cutlers were. She hoped they hadn’t been killed in a car accident. She hoped they weren’t dead, though she was mad at them for being late. They’d
better
be dead.

But they weren’t dead, not at all. They were conscious, eyes wide, breathing each other’s best, sweet scent. A cuff link might have rolled away into the carpet, lost like a ball in long grass at twilight.

Back in the early 1980s, when Ed and Bev had first started dating in Philadelphia, he had just been coming into his own. He was one of those Wharton School grads who wore suspenders with his white shirts—a brief and unfortunate trend. That era now seemed to Bev as quaint as anything, entirely gone, trampled over. If she was ever in danger of forgetting about that time in their lives, she still kept a photograph in a drawer to remind her. In the picture she showed no hint of the weight to come as she sat on Ed’s lap. She was slender and limber, and Ed had hair
,
and they shared a cigarette.

Bev remembered that they’d been to bed shortly before the photograph was taken; they’d joked in the past about the fact that his fly was actually
still open
. “Open for business,” Ed had remarked once with a little laugh. They were at some yuppie finance guy’s party in the picture; they had shown up late, and there was a strong bowl of blue punch that everyone called “antifreeze.” This much Bev knew, and she had the picture to prove it. She had sat in her husband’s lap, and she wasn’t too heavy for him yet, and she wouldn’t have broken his femur or sterilized him or disgusted him, and she had fit there perfectly.

Originally, he had pursued her the way he pursued everything, and at night in bed he spoke to her about his ambitions for himself, then later on his ambitions for
them
. She had never known someone who cared so much about doing well in life, mastering everything he tried. She’d always known she would work in a school, and she liked the environment, and the energy of teenagers; she liked helping them along, shuttling them gently from this part of their lives into the next. It was a good job, and she was lucky. But Ed was anxious and wound-up and crazy about work, and she was the only one able to soothe him. In those early days she enjoyed being the person he could talk to, and the one who said, “You’re really hyper,” and “
Shhh
.” She enjoyed the way lovemaking could be both an antianxiety agent and an antidepressant at the same time. Her small, nimble body pulsed and chimed.

But later on, less small, it pulsed and chimed more slowly; after giving birth she tried to fight the change the same way that everyone did, but soon it was too demanding, and she didn’t know how to do it, and she couldn’t bear to talk about it to anyone. During sex her body began to feel cumbersome; she closed her eyes so she would not have to see parts of herself suddenly rising up—thighs that were too wide and white, breasts that seemed like
flan
, belonging to someone she didn’t know. She wanted sex to take place under a blanket, and then she wanted it to take place in darkness. They still made love, but less frequently. It was difficult for her, and she didn’t know what it was like for him.

Over time Bev Cutler had let herself go. Ed had expressed his disgust at her physical self in one single, eviscerating line, and he could never take it back, no matter what. Their sex life had shut down as soon as he said it that night the previous spring, and it hadn’t revived itself since then; it had just never been discussed again. Privately, secretly, shortly after that evening took place, Bev enrolled in an expensive program called Susie Sanders’ Wait-Enders, whose name didn’t even really make sense, if you thought about it. What “wait” were you supposed to want to end? The wait between fatness and thinness? The wait between now and dinner? On the program, you were sent diet supplements in the mail and frozen meals that arrived in hampers of ice. But the supplements made her heart race, and the meals were as desiccated as astronaut food, as if Susie Sanders herself—if she was even a real person instead of a taunting, perfect idea of a person—didn’t really want those women to lose weight. After one month, Bev canceled her subscription. It wasn’t only that she hated the program; she also didn’t like seeming so reactive to Ed’s unfeeling words.

So her weight did not
end
; it kept going up and up until she hardly resembled herself at all. Ed had made his remark, and their sex life ended with a shudder.

Bev was positive she was not alone in this. Surely there were other women in Stellar Plains who had given up what they’d had with their husbands. Not her friends, though; her friends were really happy. Dory and Robby were just so fantastic together; you could picture them delightedly stripping for each other and having sex, and then reciting to each other from, oh God,
Mrs. Dalloway
. And the gym teacher Ruth Winik had that big, messy sculptor husband Henry, and all those children as proof of their robust bedroom activity. And Leanne, well, she had broken up with a car dealer and a bartender, but it was hard to feel sorry for her because she could have everyone she wanted. Even Fran Heller the extroverted drama teacher had a long-distance husband whom she loved—as well as, for all anyone knew, a secret giant vibrator in a drawer at home, designed to look like a warrior’s jumbo phallus from the Peloponnesian War.

Everyone Bev Cutler knew was probably having tons of sex. But there had to be other women nearby who had “let themselves go,” and whose love lives had become unhinged. Some women became Manchurian Candidates of midlife married abstinence, barely remembering much of what they were missing. But Bev remembered. And though she had been the one to “let herself go,” Ed was the one who had said those words to her that you should never say to a person you love. Oh, the words tore at her; they ripped her up. They made it so that
he
was the one who had set the gears of abstinence in motion. Before he’d said it, she’d obviously known that her weight was out of control, and she didn’t like it either. But the comment about how she had let herself go was unforgivable. In saying it, Ed had taken control of their marriage and their bed.

Months had passed, and Bev seethed. At dinner they talked about their grown children, and sometimes about the economy. Once in a while, if it wasn’t too boring for him, she talked about school. She’d said to him, recently, “That boy Eli, the drama teacher’s son—you know, the son of Fran, the one who sang those funny songs about
Lysistrata
when we were at Dory and Robby’s for faculty potluck?”

“I remember.”

“Well, he took a few SAT IIs, and his scores were perfect. He’s going to go really far. And I’m going to call him into my office and tell him. I’m certain he could go to Harvard or Yale. His teachers love him too; he’ll get great recommendations from everyone. They’ll all go to bat for him.”

“Nice.”

“I’m going to enjoy helping him with colleges. I bet he could get a big scholarship. I doubt that the Hellers have a lot of money.”

“Good for him.”

“Also, I told Fran I’d lend her some bedsheets for the play. Well, not lend,
give.
The parents who are volunteering to help out are going to cut them up and make them into Greek costumes. Chitons. Fran probably figured we have lots of spare sheets in this house, what with the kids gone, and how big the place is.”

“Sure, go for it,” Ed said.

After dinner, Ed did what he always did: took the day’s papers, the regular ones and the financial ones with their fruity, ediblelooking colors, and sat in the living room with all of them spread out on the coffee table. The newspapers covered the table’s surface, draped over the sides, and he sat in his shirtsleeves with a glass of bourbon, peacefully reading.