The Uncoupling (16 page)

Bev Cutler went upstairs and entered the walk-in linen closet to get the sheets that Fran Heller had requested. Being in this room, with its smells of laundry in the air, pushed Bev back into an earlier time, when her family was in one piece, everyone still living in the house. Suddenly unusually nostalgic, she sat down on a stepstool and put her head in her hands, and soon she found herself crying a little.

Bev recalled giving her son Jeremy some sheets to take to his spoiled-boy’s zoo of an apartment in Red Hook. She couldn’t imagine him buying sheets for himself, or even knowing what size his bed was. He was helpless that way, just like his father. Julia, up in college, needed extra-longs to fit on her bed, as Bev had once needed them too. Buckland was the same small, progressive liberal arts school that three generations of her family had attended. The school now boasted a coed touch-football team, a lute band, and a transgender dorm. Julia had said—and Bev didn’t know whether she was just teasing her—that she was considering taking a seminar next semester called “Dogs and Film.”

When Bev was a student there in the late 1970s, back when she was called Bev Bracken and was skinny and tart and open to everything that the world displayed, poetry was forever being set to music in the concert hall. A soprano would stand alone onstage and sing,
“So much de-PENNNNNDS upon a RED wheel-BAR-row w w . . .”
her voice shooting up and down in erratic calliope fashion. The library at Buckland was modest and understocked, and the endowment laughably tiny, but still the college stayed proudly alive.

Every winter afternoon these days, the sky at Buckland took on a blue-bottle complexion, and the students walked in packs like reindeer, inseparable. On weekends they sometimes went night sledding, drunk, down a perilous hill. The students were eighteen to twenty-two years old, beautiful or homely, with faces painted or studded, or open and full like unplowed fields; but most of them, male or female, felt equality pulsing through themselves. To them, neither men nor women ruled the world. Julia did not understand that her own father treated her mother with contempt.

Or if she did understand it—if, when she had still lived at home last spring, she’d seen the shift in her mother after her father had said, “You’ve really let yourself go, haven’t you?” she didn’t let on. Children were narcissistic to their core, and Bev’s children had been spared knowing the pain of their parents’ marriage. Julia, in her e-mails from college that were often sent in the middle of the night, wrote to her mother, “I can’t believe the conversations we have in class, or even at night, hanging out at The Kiln. And the classes are so much better than at Elro, no offense.”

Only a freshman, or a “year one’r,” as they called them at Buckland in all seriousness, Julia was moments away from officially declaring herself a Queer Studies major, also in all seriousness. Julia had hinted that in her bed, upon the extra-long sheets her mother had given her, she was sleeping with a boy named Holden who lived in the transgender dorm. It was difficult for Bev, from this e-mail, to tell if the boy was really a boy, or else if he was a girl, formerly named, say, Hannah. (Idly, Bev wondered why so many transgender people elected to keep the first letter of their names when they made the switch. It wasn’t as if they already had a lot of monogrammed items at home.) Bev couldn’t ask her daughter about the original gender of this boy, and God knows she couldn’t discuss it with Ed, who had wanted Julia to go to Penn; specifically, to Wharton. Julia was free-thinking, completely independent. She had a good mind and a solid, chunky body that she apparently enjoyed fully. Ed didn’t approve of her interests, but he was proud of her, and not in the least disgusted by her.

To have a husband who was disgusted by you was unbearable. All around Stellar Plains you could see men who were unabashedly in love with women, and boys who were wild about girls. Tenderness and love flowed everywhere between them, but it did not flow here. Men worshipped women, were made humble by them. Once, Bev, Leanne, and Dory were out at a kebab house for an early dinner, and a waiter had come over and placed a sizzling metal plate in front of Leanne. “Lady, this lamb platter is from the owner,” he said quietly. “He would like you to enjoy it, for you are a very beautiful lady.”

Lamb for Leanne, but none for Bev or Dory. “When I’m actually the only one of us who would really enjoy it,” Bev had said. They’d all laughed, and then they’d dug into the charred and spitting meat meant for the very beautiful lady, but Bev understood not only that Leanne was desirable to many men, but also that they treated her in a way that Ed no longer treated his own wife.

Bev Cutler had gained sixty-five pounds between the day she and Ed got married in Philadelphia and the evening he said, “You’ve really let yourself go, haven’t you?” The weight gain had been slow and sneaky; she’d held on to some of the weight she’d gained when she was pregnant both times, and as the years passed she’d continually added to it. She’d let herself be humiliated by what he’d said, and they’d turned away from each other in bed every night since then.

Bev had been crying hard in the linen closet and her face and neck were now wet. She stood up and took an armful of sheets from the shelf, using them like a bloom of tissues that a lonely giant might use, blotting all her tears. She took another load from the shelf above it; she was piling her arms high with sheets for
Lysistrata
. She would give them all to Fran Heller in the morning. Marissa Clayborn, naturally, would play the leader of the women who went on a sex strike against the men. Marissa’s mother would cut armholes in Bev’s sheets, and that charismatic girl would slip her arms inside and stand tall on the shining stage.

Bev grabbed yet another sheet, and that was when the cold air almost knocked her back. She staggered under the pile, aware that she was freezing, dizzy, shivering; then Bev straightened up and held herself in defense against the windless wind that seemed to have entered the small space through some unknown source. She was so cold, she was being surrounded by cold. The spell spent quite a while enveloping her. In the closet, the wind was so strong that the sheets and towels lying folded on their shelves actually lifted slightly at the edges. A washcloth flapped a few times, as if waving for help. Bev Cutler felt the strange and shocking cold air rush up through the bottom of her elastic-waisted pants, flying up her body close to her skin, freezing every part of her as it went. Now a thigh, now the place where leg met crotch, now the field of her stomach, now the cresting swell of her bosom. She was frozen; she was dumbfounded; she was thoroughly enchanted. She hugged the sheets tighter against herself, and they were very cold now too, like a new bed she was about to climb into.

She thought:
I weigh a lot more than I used to, but so what? So fucking what?
He’d had no right to speak to her this way. The spell had taken her over, and she was done with him, done.

Bev Cutler carried the stack of sheets back downstairs and went into the living room, where Ed was still reading the papers. Newspapers were going the way of everything else from the castoff twentieth century. Why not give him this moment of pleasure, he with his dying papers spread out and draped over the table like sheets themselves. But she couldn’t do that. “Ed,” she said. He didn’t respond. “Ed,” she said again, and he looked up. “I have to tell you something. Our sex life is over.”

“What’s that?”

“Our sex life. It’s over.”

He softly closed his newspaper. “I know that, Bev,” he said. “It’s been true for quite a while.”

“Yes. It’s been true ever since that terrible thing you said.”

“What thing did I say?” he asked, but she ignored this.

“It’s been true ever since then,” she went on, “but I am not letting you have the last word. I am not letting you be the one to have done this to us.” His face flushed; his entire bald head flushed. “This time, I am the one doing it, not you,” she said. “So I am telling you: starting now, our sex life is over, really over. And I am the one who has ended it.”

10
.

T
he entire Chorus of Women had been a real disappointment, Ms. Heller told them, and they all deserved to be replaced. “February is much sooner than you think, people, and just look at you,” the drama teacher said in a frantic pitch as she paced back and forth before the stage. The girls stood in a row, slouching and yawning from general exhaustion and being yelled at. They didn’t want to displease their drama teacher, who could be very difficult, but whose opinion mattered to them. Willa Lang, second from the right, had given up on getting Eli’s mother to really like her. Ms. Heller was not particularly nice to Willa, and various cast members had noticed this and mentioned it to her. She had made her peace with it, though, for what mattered to her was only that Eli still liked her. She thought about him all the time; it was debilitating to think about someone so much.

Even now, at rehearsal, it was as if they were together the entire time, for while Willa stood onstage under the hard white lights, he was there in her brain, observing her onstage, taking in the full length of her. Willa was among the girls who were “a real disappointment.” Though she had been to every rehearsal, her attention was only intermittently in ancient Athens; more to the point, it was here in Stellar Plains, on the old sofa in the furnished basement of the Hellers’ house, with Eli.

Thinking about him onstage, she half-smiled serenely to herself.

“Willa, what’s funny?” Fran Heller asked, positioning herself right below Willa Lang and peering upward.

“Nothing. Sorry.”

Later, on Farrest together, with Willa as the ninja and Eli as the centaur, she wrote him about how his mother seemed so critical of her lately.

“obviously she doesnt like me,” she said.

“i cant imagine why not. u r exceedingly likeable,” he wrote.

They were about to say goodbye and log out for the night, when he casually told her that Ms. Cutler had called him into her office and said that she was paying special attention to him; that he could probably go to Harvard or Yale on a scholarship, and that all he had to do was keep his eye on the prize, whatever that meant. Willa didn’t know how she was supposed to respond, so she didn’t say anything. A little later, she went downstairs to get ice cream, and there were her parents sitting on the couch in the den under that awful yellow piece of cloth, already eating ice cream themselves. Some British mystery show was on TV. “Come join us!” called Willa’s mother.

“Can’t,” Willa said. She left her parents there, their disembodied heads eating ice cream and watching TV, and she barely noticed anything about them. They were her parents; that was all she knew, and all she needed to know. She loved them, but she didn’t think about them as much as she used to, or even very much at all. Willa climbed the stairs. The spell was days away from striking her; she sat in bed and ate her own ice cream, and closed her eyes, and thought of Eli.

 

 

 

O
n Saturday night, Willa Lang walked along the street to the Hellers’ house, her backpack on her back. Since she and Eli had started going out, they had reserved Saturday nights for each other. “Go on in, Willa; you know where he is,” Ms. Heller said without much inflection at the front door, which was painted turquoise, while the rest of the house was that cantaloupe color, meant to resemble baked clay. Right now, at night, under the porch light, the colors seemed a little sad to Willa. She wondered if Eli wished his house were more ordinary, and his parents too; though when your house and your parents were ordinary—as hers were—that in itself could be sad.

Ms. Heller wore a big old
Guys and Dolls
T-shirt and her head was cradling a cordless phone; she was obviously in for the evening, which was disappointing to Willa, who preferred it when she and Eli were alone in the house, even though Ms. Heller would never dare come downstairs when the couple was there together. Not to mention that there was a lock on the door of the furnished room in the basement. Willa smiled tensely, mumbled something to Ms. Heller, then walked past the kitchen, where the convex curves and edges of cups and plates could be seen in the sink like the glinting hints of a shipwreck. Beyond the kitchen, on the living room wall, hung the masks of tragedy and comedy. Willa walked past them into the back hallway, opening the basement door.

“I have arrived,” she said into the darkness, and down she went.

They sat together on the brown ultrasuede sofa with the ping-pong table hulking uselessly nearby, and a dehumidifier sucking and sporing the air. His feet were in her lap. “I brought something for you,” she told him.

“Do I deserve it?”

“Yes.”

She unzipped her backpack and took out her flute case; then she assembled the pieces, played a few scales, and was ready. Facing him and taking a hard breath, Willa Lang played the flute version of The Lungs’ song “When You Have Me,” the same song that they had sat listening to in her bedroom that first night when the Hellers came to dinner at the Langs’. She’d worked hard on the flute arrangement for him, writing out the individual notes in her music notebook, and though her tone was tentative and imperfect and she’d added a few too many grace notes, he was awed.

“You did that for me,” he said when she was done. “I loved it. Come here.” Willa put the flute aside and went close, curling against him. All the lights were off except for the single overhead bulb. It was probably living a little dangerously to do what they sometimes did down here even with his mother in the house, but for an extremely busy person, Ms. Heller was often around, and they did not want to be denied.

As they kissed now, Willa could hear every tick as lip separated from lip. Eli rubbed his hand against her pants, which brought on a wave of insanity
,
and then he unbuttoned her button and slipped his hand inside, just playing, just fiddling, as he had once called it, but this excited her so much, so quickly, that she was forced to grab hold of his wrist. You didn’t have to know much of anything in life, and still you knew what you liked. You could be the shyest person in the world, just a member of the Chorus of Women, standing meekly in a crowd, and still you were an expert in letting a boy touch you. Willa and Eli cried out, they held each other’s wrists and begged for what they wanted. They both knew how to do this. He pulled off his skinny jeans, yanking them from the jutting bones of his ankles, and then she handed him a condom from the bottom of the old cardboard ping-pong ball box, where they kept them. He unwrapped it in the dark, and the sound it made was like a candy wrapper being opened in a movie theater.