The Uncoupling (21 page)

The spell grabbed her even as she flew, and she thought
: I don’t want to have sex with him or anyone. I have never liked it enough. I have never felt about it the way I want to
. It had all been a cheat, a rip-off, and maybe someday it would start to get better when she found “the right person,” as everyone said, but who wanted to stick around that long, doing that kind of thing?
Not
touching Jason,
not
doing anything with him or anyone else, she realized, would be far better. Like Willa, Marissa was suddenly done with that. Boys knew
nothing.
They wanted what they wanted. “Kitchen’s closing,” Ralph Devereux had said to her in his car, nervily.

The one she cared about—and it wasn’t sexual—was Jason Manousis. He was deformed, according to Danny Fratangelo and Doug Zwern; he was a monster, and he wasn’t entitled to get a hot girl to hang around him. Jason had once been handsome, and Cami Fennig had liked him and had had sex with him, but the war in Afghanistan had ruined him.

It was all unspeakable, the war, its mutilation and destruction and death, and Marissa couldn’t bear the sadness; she knew it could break her down. Suddenly, on top of not wanting to sleep with anyone, she wanted to do something to protest the war. If she wasn’t going to be thought of as coolly sexual anymore, then at least let her be asexual for a
reason.
Just as she’d become sexual overnight—and now, suddenly,
not
sexual—so too would she be political. It was her prerogative. Ms. Heller talked to the cast all the time about the political ramifications of the play, trying to get the actors to think about them when preparing to go onstage. Marissa Clayborn logged out of Farrest now, and quickly went from being a hawk to being a girl. Fully spellbound, she tried to figure out how to bring together her new desire to have nothing to do with sex and her other new desire to protest the war.

She stood and walked to the foot of her bed, grabbing the footboard and yanking hard. The whole bed shifted with surprising ease.

 

 

 

J
ust before dawn, Jason Manousis’s pickup truck pulled up on the street in front of the Clayborn house, and Marissa ducked quickly outside. Her family were all fairly deep sleepers, and she turned the knob of the front door carefully. Jason got out and stood beside his truck; in the streetlamp light his face appeared almost normal, just a little bit ridged and uneven, and he whispered to her, “This was a surprise.”

“You said I could call.”

“You’re not doing this for me, I hope,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Not for you.”

“Okay. Because it sounds pretty fucked up to me.”

“Do you want me to explain it more?”

“No,” he said. “Please don’t. I’ll change my mind.” He looked toward her house and asked, “So where’s this bed?”

She led him inside; he took off his shoes for silence purposes, but his tread was heavy, and every step made the objects in the living room china cabinet tremble and nearly sing. From down the hall, Marissa’s little brother Conrad quietly called out, “Mom?” and Marissa poked her head into his bedroom and said, “Go back to sleep, Con.”

“Is it morning?”

“No, not yet.”

“I’m presenting my findings in Science today.”

“That’s good. Go back to sleep.”

So her brother kept sleeping, and so did her little sister, Vivian, and so did their parents, all of the Clayborns slumbering for another hour, she hoped, at which point they would wake up and find out what she had done, the stand she had taken. Now Marissa and Jason went into her bedroom. She flipped on the light, revealing her white bed in all its cheesy glory. He absorbed the sight of the scrollwork on the curving headboard, the tall, tapering posts, and the white canopy, which hadn’t been cleaned in who knew how long. The top of it was probably breaded with dust by now. When Marissa had first picked the bed out as a nine-year-old, her parents had been unhappy with her choice. The canopy was a dustcatcher, her mother had said, and the white posts were as shaky as newly planted baby trees. But Marissa, who was in all other ways no-nonsense, had wanted it, and her parents had relented. She’d loved the bed for a long time, and then of course she’d outgrown it and couldn’t believe she’d ever wanted such a bed, but here it was, hers until college, so she thought she might as well finally put it to use.

“It’s actually very lightweight,” Marissa said, and Jason Manousis walked over and lifted the footboard, dragging the whole thing a couple of feet.

“So it is,” he said. He inspected it, gently unscrewing one of the posts from its base. “I don’t even need you for this,” he said. “You can go do something else. I can take this apart in like five minutes.”

Soon they were in his pickup with the disassembled bed in the back, and as they pulled away from the house, she saw the front porch light pop on, and the figure of someone in a bathrobe—her mother, her father; it was hard to tell which one, for they were sometimes interchangeable from a distance—opening the door and looking out in worry and confusion. Something had been different about her parents lately, Marissa had thought, but she didn’t know what was the matter, for no one in her family talked about too much except:
Did you hand in your paper yet?
and,
I saw Janine Devereux at the Bakeleys. She said Ralph joined a fraternity at Rutgers.
The figure raised a hand now, saying
Stop
, or
What are you doing
? stunned by the sight of a departing daughter in a stranger’s truck.

She had left her parents a note on the floor where her bed no longer was—a note in an envelope on that rectangle of bright, unfaded carpet—telling them in her good handwriting not to worry; she said she had something she needed to do, something political rather than theatrical or academic for a change, and that she would be fine. “You know that I have been the kind of person to make clearheaded decisions my entire life,” she wrote. “Please trust me that that hasn’t changed, even though I’m sure you’ll find this out of character for me.” Now the canopy, in the back of the truck, was like a sailboat that they were taking to the water for an early morning launch. The sun rose upon it, and all the ruffles shivered as one.

A while later, the first people to arrive at the school were the old cafeteria lady and her husband the janitor. It was gray outside, but there was no precipitation. The Evanses got out of their car slowly; Marissa watched as they approached her. There she lay in the bed, under the blankets wearing a hat and gloves and a down jacket. She just lay there completely still, patiently waiting for the day to start and the teachers and students to arrive and ask her what the hell was going on.

“This is a prank, I suppose?” said the janitor.

“Why do you think that?” asked his wife. “You always think you
know.
”

“Don’t start up again.”

“It’s not a prank,” Marissa said. “It’s a statement against the war in Afghanistan. I want to encourage women to stop sleeping with men until this war is brought to a close.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Mrs. Evans, and she laughed.

“No.” Marissa flushed in self-consciousness.

“I’m an old lady who lived in the South during segregation. I have seen political protest, and it doesn’t look like this.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said her husband, but his wife just ignored him.

“Well, I appreciate that,” said Marissa. “But people have been confused about this war—the news basically tells you nothing, and the president is really vague—and if you think about the Taliban, and al-Qaeda, you get overwhelmed. But it’s become a pointless mission, and it’s killing soldiers at an alarming rate. I’m asking other women to stop sleeping with men until the war ends. I’m lying alone in my own bed as a symbol of the sex strike.”

“And what do you hope to gain, exactly, being out here like this?” Mr. Evans asked.

“Attention,” Marissa Clayborn said. Moments after the spell had hit her, she’d come up with the idea for the sex strike. At the very beginning of the play, she’d recalled, Lysistrata says a line about how whenever women were “summoned to meet for a matter of the last importance, they lie abed instead of coming.” She thought she could do something with the idea of lying “abed”—turning it into something useful. Marissa had been going to rehearsals day upon day, and though
Lysistrata
was of course just the play she was currently starring in, it had a message that hadn’t been lost on her. Men had been fighting wars forever; what was
wrong
with them? Why were they
like
this? It was so horrible, and all you could do was throw up your hands about it and tear out your hair. Unless, of course, you did something public. So she decided to stay in her bed, alone, symbolically boycotting sex.

As Marissa Clayborn cruised around online she’d read that there had been other sex strikes in the world in recent years. In Kenya, a group of women had organized a sex strike for one week, as a way to call attention to rampant ethnic strife. Even the wife of the Kenyan prime minister had joined in, and though Marissa didn’t know whether the attention to strife did anything to calm it, there was something exciting in the fact that it had been reported around the world.

The attention that Marissa’s bed-in might receive would probably start small. Local news, a blog or two, but things could take off, and lots of women could join. There was no guarantee that this would get any attention at all, of course. She wasn’t a coalition of Kenyan women; she wasn’t Lysistrata. But anything was possible, and she had to see. The janitor turned away from the bed to make a phone call, and soon other people were standing around the bed too. The compact cars of teachers began to arrive, and school buses pulled up. Everyone milled around the parking lot as though at an open-air winter concert. “What’s it doing there?” they asked each other, and when they found out, one of them said, “Maybe they’ll close the school and give us a day off. We deserve it.” Another girl exclaimed over how complicated Marissa was. “She is way beyond us in every way.” “She is way beyond her time,” said another girl, seriously. “I think she just wants attention,” said a boy. “
Obviously,
” a girl practically spat at him.

When the principal arrived, the crowds parted to let him through. Solemnly he approached the side of the canopy bed. “Marissa,” he said quietly, “it’s Principal McCleary,” as though she had been struck blind and couldn’t tell who he was. “Did some other girls dare you to do this?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

“Then is it performance art?”

“No,” she said. “I am encouraging women to stop sleeping with men until the war in Afghanistan ends.”

“Are you trying to get more people to come to the play next week?” he asked gently. “Did Ms. Heller ask you to do this? It’s okay if she did; I’d just like to know.”

“What?
No
,” Marissa said. “This has nothing to do with Ms. Heller. Yes, the play gave me the idea, of course, Mr. McCleary, but it’s more than that.” But she wasn’t sure how to explain it beyond stating the initial impulse, which had occurred to her all at once, with no preamble and no planning, right after she was hit by the spell.

On the other side of the bed, Dr. Bannerjee appeared; she and Mr. McCleary spoke to each other across Marissa. “Hello, Leanne,” said the principal.

“Hello, Gavin.”

“Did you get the notes I put under your office door yesterday?”

“Yes. You are prolific.”

“You have no idea how prolific.”

Marissa watched the scene with curiosity, her head going back and forth. The principal and the school psychologist almost seemed to have forgotten that Marissa was there. They might have continued their strange conversation for quite some time, so Marissa decided to speak.

“I’m not trying to cause problems,” she said. For an extra moment, the two adults lingered in their private, encrypted world and then, at last, Dr. Bannerjee saw Marissa’s questioning face and smiled.

“We know you’re not, Marissa,” she said. “I think we all understand that you’re passionate about what you believe in. It’s a little dramatic,” she said. “But I guess so are all passions. Do you want to come on in and we can talk about it in my office?”

“No, thank you,” said Marissa.

“How long were you planning on being out here?” Mr. McCleary asked. “Because I have to tell you, I’m pretty sure maintenance is going to cart this whole thing away within the hour. So I would say, you have about an hour left to be passionate and political.”

“Oh,” said the spellbound girl, who didn’t really know what to say, for of course she hadn’t planned the sex strike carefully, and hadn’t arranged for contingencies, nor figured out a single, lucid sound bite. The strike was becoming real right in front of her; it was real because she’d created it, and now it was hers. The principal was saying something about how, of course, he couldn’t prevent her from staying in her bed
at home,
but that she should think seriously about the academic consequences.

“You’re an excellent student,” he said. “I’d hate to see you miss class and have your grades affected.”

Was that a threat? Maybe it was. She would take her chances, Marissa thought. She could do her work from her bed at home, the same way she had done back when she’d had mono. People came and went now, stopping gravely by her bedside like visitors in a hospital. Willa put her arms around Marissa. Jade Stills brought her a Danish and a latte, for Marissa had forgotten all about breakfast. Then Ms. Heller showed up and anxiously asked Marissa her plans for the performance.

“My plans?” said Marissa, who had neglected to think about this at all. How crazy was that? she thought.

“You are Lysistrata,” the drama teacher reminded her. “I did not cast you in that part lightly. It’s an honor to have that role. You can’t let us down; that would be a calamity. Tell me you’ll be at the dress rehearsal and the performance.” Marissa didn’t reply immediately. “
Swear an oath
,” Ms. Heller said.