The Uncoupling (17 page)

“Hurry up,” Willa commanded in a stern voice. How strange that she spoke this way, and that she
wanted
this; no one could ever explain why. She’d tried to discuss the topic with Marissa Clayborn recently, for Marissa would surely have some wise observations. Willa had begun the conversation by saying to her, “I completely agree with the general idea that sex is this great thing, but what I don’t understand is
why
it’s great. I don’t even have any idea, Marissa, do you? I know in health class they gave us all kinds of biological explanations, but having had a little personal experience myself this year, I don’t agree that we’re basically a collection of cells and hormones. We also have feelings
,
obviously, and for some reason my feelings tell me:
I like that. I like that and I really want it.
Which is the freakiest thing I know. Not to mention the fact that don’t you think a penis looks anatomically absurd? And it looks more absurd than usual when it’s stuffed into a condom. It’s not even objectively attractive
.
It’s
ugly.
So what I want to know is whether we are actually attracted to it. It looks to me like one of those pastry tubes they use on the Food Network. And I am definitely not attracted to pastry tubes.”

When she was done with her chattery, naïve soliloquy, Marissa Clayborn made an expression of contempt; her mouth became uncharitable, and Willa was embarrassed. Marissa, always willing to help explain a particularly difficult passage in their French homework, seemed to be a snob when it came to discussing sex. Apparently there was a club of girls and women in the world who understood the astral secrets of Fucking and Why We Want It. Marissa was probably the leader of that club; she probably got up at their annual meeting and performed a brilliant and moving monologue.

If Marissa would not explain why Willa longed to sleep with Eli again and again, then Willa would simply have to keep wanting it without understanding it. She would remain rapt by Eli and his beautiful eyes and his name written in bubble letters in her notebook, and his inflamed skin, and his shining center-parted hair, and his heavy, thick penis, and his seemingly unwavering affection for her. She had every expectation of doing this, but suddenly now, through the low, pipe-crossed ceiling of the Hellers’ basement, Eli’s mother’s voice could be heard. Ms. Heller was obviously situated near some duct that led directly down here. Her voice was so clear all at once that it seemed to be coming in through a sophisticated amplification system.

“I think we’re coming along just fine,” Willa heard Ms. Heller say. “My lead is fantastic, babe. And, interestingly, black
,
which gives it an extra dimension, I think. Anyway, she’s wonderful.” Willa shifted against Eli, hardly breathing, listening closely. “Some of the others,” Mrs. Heller went on, “are less wonderful. They stand there grinning at rehearsals, as if they think they’re in a production of
The Happy Happy Play
. No, I just made that up, you nut. What did you think it was, Samuel Beckett? Ha ha, right, a recently unearthed, never-performed work. Listen, did you get an estimate on that weatherproofing? Good. You are the best. What,
I
am? No, no, you are. I insist that you are, my darling. All right,
I’m
the best. Case closed.”

The conversation poured into the basement, and all sexual activity had now stopped. Willa thought of herself among the girls onstage, awkward and grinning, and she was immediately embarrassed. “You
don’t
stand there grinning,” Eli whispered. “You look amazing onstage,” he added seriously. “I’ve looked in during rehearsals.”

“Thank you,” Willa said. “I assume that’s your dad on the phone?”

“Yeah.”

He began to kiss her neck again, and as she mewed involuntarily and turned her head to allow him better access, the spell came without warning. It seemed to have to work harder than usual to get her, its cold wind sneaking up around her and being entirely ignored at first, so transfixed was she by this boy, and by the sensations he elicited. But still she was human, and female, and vulnerable. Its cold wind slapped her in the face, then roared downward, filling up the tiny spaces where her body and Eli’s weren’t perfectly aligned. Air-blasted, with her eyes shut and her jaw set, and with her first boyfriend kissing her neck, the suddenly spellbound Willa Lang moved slightly away from him, thinking:
This is never going to last. Oh, what is the point?

She and Eli would go to different colleges and meet other people. He would meet some girl at Harvard or Yale, according to Ms. Cutler, schools that Willa would never go to, for her grades weren’t nearly good enough. And they would talk about the books they loved, and they would make sly, private jokes, and then off they would go into the rest of their lives. Why hadn’t this ever occurred to her before? Even if Willa and Eli did find a way to stay together long-distance after high school, they might end up like her parents, sitting together watching TV under a
Cumfy,
of all things, trapped forever like two figures in a his-and-hers sarcophagus. But the chances were that she and Eli wouldn’t last that long; almost no high school couples lasted.

Now that she thought of it, there had been several bad breakups already this winter. Chloe Vincent and Max Holleran had recently announced that they were no longer “an entity.” No further explanations were given, but just the other day, Max and two friends were suspended for spray-painting the words “CV is a Bitch” on the overpass near the school. And Paige Straub and Dylan Maleska, who both possessed muscled legs and a confident, symmetrical shallowness, had also abruptly ended their relationship recently; or rather, Paige had ended it, saying that Dylan was boring and that she wanted more from a boyfriend, and he couldn’t give it to her. He had called in sick frequently since then. High school love felt so important at the moment it was gearing up and happening, Willa thought, but it really wasn’t important at all. It was completely meaningless. It was as temporary as anything. It was
pathetic.

“Where’d you go?” Eli asked her. “You got all distant.”

“It’s going to end,” Willa said.

“What is?”

“Us.”

“Our lives?” he said with a small smile. “Existentialism comes to Willa Lang.”

“No. This.
This.”
She gestured around her to indicate their half-dressed bodies in the murky basement, their clothes on the ping-pong table, and all else that was associated with this night and these sensations.

“It doesn’t have to,” Eli said, suddenly a little panicky now, but clearly trying to keep his voice calm. “It can just go on and on. It can even mysteriously accelerate,” he tried.

“But it won’t,” said Willa. “That’s the point; don’t you get what I’m saying?” She was choking up, even gagging a little. “There have been a lot of breakups lately. People realizing that if they really face the facts, they probably have no future together. And you know it too, Eli. You’re going to go somewhere without me eventually; it’s just inevitable. And I’m going to go somewhere without you.”

“No, that’s not true,” he said. “I mean, you were just playing me a song on your
flute.
And it killed me, how amazing it was. You were just lying here with me, about to let me go
inside
you. What was
that
about? Doesn’t it count for anything?”

“Of course.”

“Then what, Willa? I mean,
Jesus.
”

“What I said. We can’t see each other anymore.”

“Oh, come on
,
” Eli said. “Please don’t do this to me.”

She almost let him call her back, but the new spell had overtaken the one that had first wrapped them in each other that fall. So she said no to him now. The spell had frozen her up and grabbed her by all the parts of her body that had been touching all the parts of his.

He pulled away from her and then stood up, looking down to where she still half-sat, undressed, on the couch. “Get out of here,” he said.

“What?”

“Leave my house,” said Eli, and he took her bra from the ping-pong table and threw it at her—that little scrunched-up piece of aqua sea foam that barely seemed capable of holding anything, let alone her breasts, which Eli had loved. Frantically Willa tried to put the bra back on, scooping each breast into a cup; but now Eli was tossing her blouse at her too, and she had to let go of the bra and catch the blouse. Her arms were full of her own clothes, and he kept telling her to get out, to leave, and he was crying already, his voice mucousy and heavy and unfamiliar.

“Please, wait,” Willa said, but he wouldn’t. He wanted her to leave,
now.
He hustled her up the narrow basement steps as she struggled back into the bra, and then half-back into the blouse, but there wasn’t enough time to get fully dressed. At the top of the stairs he pushed open the door for her and she ducked out of the darkness and into the light.

His mother was standing in the hallway, leaning against a wall still cradling her phone, when Willa Lang tripped out from the doorway. It was Fran Heller’s right to stand anywhere she wanted in her own house, but it couldn’t help but seem as if she had been listening to the breakup. Willa stood facing her with her hair slashed across her face and one breast completely out of its cup beneath the thin cotton of the blouse, which, she could now see, was on both inside out and backward. It was like a bib, with the label showing, providing proof that Willa was a baby who didn’t deserve a boyfriend anyway. Eli’s behavior had only proven the same thing; he wasn’t ready for a girlfriend either. They were two babies and it had all been a mistake, and thank God it was over now.

She walked quickly back through the hall, and when she got out the front door, Willa Lang broke into a run. She wanted her mother, but she also didn’t want her; her mother would be
so concerned
when she heard they’d broken up. She’d be all over Willa, and she’d want to know everything that had happened. Willa was already exhausted just thinking about her mother’s somber, anxious face coming so close to Willa’s, asking her if she wanted to talk.
No,
Willa thought,
I do not want to talk.
Not to her mother, and not to her father either, for what could he do to make her feel better? What could anyone do? No one could do anything. Tam o’ Shanter Drive was absolutely silent and comatose on this Saturday night as she ran down the middle of the icy street, occasionally skidding, almost falling, but making it home in one piece. As she put her key in the door, she realized that she’d left her flute in the Hellers’ basement, and she had to wonder if she’d ever see it again, and even if she did, if she’d ever play it.

The news about the breakup of Willa and Eli would soon hit her circle of friends, and Farrest, and elsewhere. Chloe Vincent, who had never really been a good friend of Willa’s, texted her in the middle of the night, saying, “if u want to talk i am around.” By Monday, the news would be all over the school. For a few days Willa and Eli’s breakup would be a big story, at least among the people they knew, like those other recent breakups had been. But after a while it would die down, and perhaps, by graduation in two years, it would seem as if they had never been involved at all. No one would think about this boy and girl who had been in love. Only the teachers, staying behind in the school and occasionally haunted by the ghosts of students who had walked those halls, might remember.

11
.

T
he gym teacher, entering her house at the end of the day, dropped her key chain into the metal pie tin on the front hall table and waited for them to come. They always came within seconds. That chink of keys against tin was their signal, and no matter how loud the television was, or the
blam blams
or
vroom vrooms
that had been coming from their mouths almost since the second they were born (Ruth Winik swore that, on the ride home from the hospital, one of the twins had cased the interior of the car with lusty vehicular approval), they heard that key chain against pie tin, and they came to her.

Or maybe they heard the door first. Or the car in the driveway. Whatever it was, they
heard
it, and they dropped everything and ran. Ruth had to go to the bathroom badly, but she would wait for them to come first. She couldn’t bear not seeing them right away. Distantly now Ruth Winik heard the clatter of indestructible toys being flung to the upstairs floor and bouncing off some hard surface—a head, maybe. The twins both called out, “Mama! Mama!” in near synchrony, and came thudding along the upstairs hallway and then down the carpeted stairs. They appeared before her, showing themselves to her in their glory. Ryan wore plastic knight armor; Brant wore nothing but training pants. One side of his face curiously appeared corrugated, as though he had fallen asleep on an accordion. Both boys thrust their enormous, hard heads against her legs, and Ryan wept, perhaps simply out of relief that his mother had returned, that she was really and truly still
alive
, as though she had been abducted, while Brant stood in easy, patient silence, his embossed face and naked torso and crimped, vulcanized undergarment aligning themselves efficiently against Ruth Winik’s legs.

Slowly now, easing down the stairs, came Ruth’s husband Henry Spangold, with the infant Kyle slung casually over one shoulder, the way Ruth sometimes carried a mesh bag of volleyballs as she led a group of ninth-grade girls out into the middle of the gym. Henry was sleepy, his black hair chick-headed, and he handed the baby over to her. Perhaps he had been the one to throw a toy to the floor when she came in; he was often as boyish as his boys. The Winik-Spangold household was a world of males, and Ruth lived in it like Snow White among the dwarves, or like Wendy among the Lost Boys. It was easy to feel special in such a situation, and to get credit merely for being a woman, even if you weren’t all that womanly to begin with, as Ruth was not. All of them, herself included, she sometimes thought, were like a gang of some kind, or perhaps like a team. A great deal of roughhousing took place in their house.