The Uncoupling (26 page)

As the two months of rehearsal had passed, the spell had spread quietly, changing everyone it touched. The
Lysistrata
spell was a phenomenon that very few people knew about, but it was real, and it was here.

In the twelfth row, on the far side of the auditorium now, the sixty-nine-year-old school librarian Mrs. Kessler suddenly thought
: If Marcus wants to be with me that way again tonight I will tell him, “Don’t even think of it. We are much too old.”

Up in the balcony, Sarah Milkin thought:
I am done with Todd Eberstadt forever.

In one of the very back seats, the head of the debate team, who just last weekend at a meet had sneaked into the hotel room of the head of the debate team from a school in Maine, thought:
He was clueless about euthanasia. He and I are done.

All around the auditorium, the spell roared past and among them, beneath their seats, up the aisles, silent and powerful as it made its way. Onstage, after a little while, unaware of this, Lysistrata and Calonicé became slightly more comfortable and began to speak their lines a bit more naturally and with increased volume. Dory felt a vague loosening of her jaw, which she hadn’t even realized had been so tight and jutting. Lysistrata started to get to the point:

Dory’s daughter seemed to be easing into the part, and the play was becoming more like a breakthrough rehearsal than a performance. It was like one of those rehearsals in which the actor
gets it
for the first time, and you see it happening before you, and as a result the other actors get it too. She flings the excitement and new understanding all around, and the director says, “Yes!” Except tonight the director couldn’t say anything, for this was a performance, with an audience; but Willa Lang’s mother, her posture now a little more that of a theatergoer than a sprinter about to spring, quietly said
yes
inside her head.

Dory felt herself relax further; she leaned back, and let the velvet curve of the chair receive her. The play began to go more swiftly past, with lines batted back and forth, though Dory could only really concentrate on Willa, who was now speaking some of the lines that Dory had heard Marissa Clayborn read on that very first day of rehearsals. The day of the night that Dory had ended up first refusing Robby in bed.

“ ‘We must refrain from the male altogether,’ ” Willa said, and the words were stirring, but more than that, Willa was stirring, and it seemed to Dory as if the rest of the audience felt it too. Willa said:

Dory felt sixteen years of shame concentrated into the opening of this play. She thought of how she had underappreciated her daughter, condemning her as average, not a big reader, just a constant user of Farrest, merely a regular girl, not one of the ones who knocked everyone out with their specialness. She had underappreciated not only Willa, but perhaps most of the students she taught. She’d always liked thinking of them as “the kids.” The young people were the kids, and the old ones were the adults, but really, she thought now, look at these people onstage; they stirred her and thickened her throat. They were not only emotionally affecting her and the rest of the audience; they were also clearly affecting one another too, and this in turn affected her further. She could see the way they shook a little as they spoke about changing the world through unorthodox means.
People!
teachers called out in the classroom to get their attention, and that word described them best.

Lucky them, those not really kids, who were constantly having experiences and would once in a while actually try to change the world. Lucky them, with their recent-vintage powerhouse bodies and their passions for all things electronic and fast, all things dissonant and inexplicable. Lucky them, for the public square. Dory had maintained that the world was worse now, for a world without intimacy—what kind of a world was that? And a world of glibness and shallow references only to events that had taken place five minutes earlier—what kind of a place was
that
? She felt that these had been inaccurate descriptions, or at least incomplete ones. There was shallowness all around her, certainly, along with exhibitionism and a preoccupation with the transitory and the dumb, but that wasn’t the whole tale. And yes, the public square could be treacherous, but so were subways at night, yet teenagers from Elro went into the city and rode them anyway, transporting themselves in clusters, swinging from handrails, calling attention to their ecstatic, suburban selves. But also, lucky them for the future, and the love that lay waiting. They could make whichever analogies they chose: the love that lay waiting like a web page as yet undesigned
,
or maybe even like a forest as yet unwalked in. A bafflingly simple forest green and virtual, or one wet and dark and real. Lucky them.

She had underestimated them, and now she felt only regret.

Willa, full-throated, standing in what seemed a new posture, was speaking again:

The girls onstage who had somehow become women were using their formidable sexualities to end the men’s long, long war. They were standing up to the men at last, and the room sat at attention. A female voice from the balcony—someone young—called out, “Show them, girl!” There was some laughter. One row in front of the Langs, two audience members began to argue, and the people around them began to shush them. The arguers, Dory realized, startled, were Ruth Winik and Henry Spangold. Henry’s voice was deep and urgent, barely a whisper. Dory heard, “Not exactly fair,” and “Maybe a little
too
relevant,” and “So I just have to sit here and
listen
?”

“Keep it down,” warned a woman nearby, and activity bloomed in that little front section of the auditorium. Henry, in shadow, stood up as if he was going to leave. Then he bent and said something furiously to Ruth. Henry, big and broad, lumbered past the other people seated in his row, and then he stood in the aisle, pausing there. All the while, the actors onstage kept talking, valiantly trying to remain unconcerned by the squall in the audience. But then Henry Spangold turned and leaped up the three steps onto the stage.

“Oh my God,” said Señor Mandelbaum’s sister from the wheelchair tilted and braked in the aisle.

Dory took in a hard breath as she saw Ruth’s husband go from silhouette to fully textured human being under the stage lights. “Look at this,” she whispered to Robby, and he shook his head slowly. She gripped his arm. Ruth’s husband had wild, uncombed hair, as if he’d been tugging at it in his seat.

“What is he doing?” Robby said. Willa and the other actors had recoiled from the sudden, surprise presence onstage of a man from the audience. They looked at one another, panicking. “He’s ruining the play,” Robby whispered. “I’ll kill him.”

Henry, in profile, faced the actors. “It’s not fair
,
this play,” he said to them. “I was reading the stagebill before. Apparently we’re all supposed to think that men are so warlike that they sometimes have to be
denied.
And someone out in the audience was cheering a little while ago, like everyone knows this is the truth about men—that we deserve what we get. That we’re just these violent, lusty animals who need our horniness placated. But it isn’t true. We’re not all disgusting, sex-crazed warriors. And what’s wrong with what we do want? Urges are normal. What’s so bad about them? I resent this whole play.”

Willa and the others said nothing; they stared at him, and the whole audience did too. Now Robby could no longer sit in his seat and let Willa’s moment be destroyed. He stood and pushed his way out of the row and into the aisle and then onto the stage. A few people clapped when he appeared, but mostly everyone watched in excitement. “This is my
daughter’s play
,” he said quietly to Henry Spangold, poking his chest with a finger. “And I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

There was applause. The sculptor backed away, but then he didn’t move. “Am I wrong, Robby?” he asked. “You don’t think everyone’s sitting here thinking, yeah, it’s true about men; I agree with the play. But maybe you don’t know what I’m saying at all. Maybe no one does. Maybe it’s only me whose marriage has gotten—” His voice broke off. “Oh, why am I going on about this?” Dory thought Robby would run him into the wings.

But Robby said to him, “No, you’re not wrong.”

His voice was a rough stage whisper. The other actors had by now retreated to the sides and rear of the stage, leaving the two men to face each other. They looked so young, Dory thought; they appeared like actors in a high school play. Dory watched as Robby turned and said, “Willa, just let me have a second, okay? Then you can go back to your play.”

Willa didn’t even want to look at him. She turned away, and her friends, who had been there to buck her up before the performance, tried to comfort her now. Robby looked out over the auditorium and said, “I’ve read this play, and I’ve seen it performed. It’s not my favorite Greek comedy, but I actually like it. I don’t mind it at all. What I mind, though, is that apparently something can happen inside someone you love—it can just
happen
somehow—and like magic she thinks that she’s had enough, and that the way the two of you have been for a really long time is no longer worth the effort. Does that sound familiar to anyone?”

Dory closed her eyes and tried to stay conscious.

“I want our life back,” Robby said to her from the stage.

She put her head in her hands. But then there was movement to her left, and the man sitting there—the husband of Gavin McCleary’s secretary—stood up too. He pushed past Dory and then there he was onstage beside Robby. He was squat, sweating. “Okay, fine, if people are taking this opportunity to say something, then I will too. Beth,” he said. “I know I can be such a schmuck. Please forgive me. Please, please come back to bed.”

The actors had fled the stage completely. Willa had been shepherded off by her friends, and surely she remained distraught; surely the kids were all in a huddle in the wings, talking about how these few men had gotten obnoxious and ruined the show. How her father, that beloved teacher, had been part of it. Where was Fran Heller in all this? Dory wondered. Surely at about this point, the drama teacher should be ordering someone on tech crew to close the curtains, and the house lights would go up and everyone in the audience would stand and say to one another, “What was
that?
” But Dory didn’t see Fran, and no one moved to close the curtains.

Then, rising up one by one and gathering courage, several other men quietly stormed the stage and the Acropolis—fathers, teachers, local merchants. Some of them were there to get the other men to leave—“You are ruining my son Zach’s play,” a father said sternly, taking another father by the lapels. But some of them were there to make pronouncements to their women.

“I feel bad about that lamp, Marie,” said a man.

“Will someone explain something to me?” asked Ron di Canzio. “How can the women of Greece actually ‘stop sleeping’ with the men, if all the men are away at war to begin with?”

Boys came up onstage as well, and they said their tender and sometimes inarticulate pieces, some with a swagger, some with tears, begging the girls to make love to them once more, to let them be together in the way they used to be. “This thing we had,” said Max Holleran to Chloe Vincent. “It was un-fucking-believable. Sorry, sorry,” he added, as if just now remembering where he was, and who would be listening.

Everyone was listening. The people who remained in their seats listened. Children turned to their parents in disbelief. “Is this part of the play?” a six-year-old asked his grandmother, who said she really wasn’t sure. The actors who had walked offstage had begun to gather together in the wings, or to return to the stage itself again, confused about what was happening here. Maybe the play hadn’t been ruined? Maybe it was some sort of postmodern success that Ms. Heller had planned all along? They didn’t really know, but they started to see that what was happening was very watchable.

Principal McCleary now approached the stage, clambering up awkwardly, and he adjusted his tie and looked out over the audience. Dory, who could barely think, felt relief knowing that Gavin was going to bring order. He was the principal, and that was what principals did. He had given a somber and surprisingly reassuring speech on 9/11, though that was already such a long time ago.

But when everyone both onstage and in the auditorium seats grew silent, McCleary announced, “I’d like to say tonight that I too am also in love with a woman who has been indifferent to me for quite some time. I need to say it now, despite how it looks. I cannot go on like this any longer. I need her to know I love her so much, and that I am sorry. I am sorry I am stiff and maybe unspontaneous. I just have to say it. Thank you, people.”

Dory put her hands to her head, as if ducking from a boom. Where was poor Leanne? Had she already died in her seat in the back? Suddenly a small woman came up onstage and joined all the men. It was Wendy McCleary, the principal’s wife, and she strode up to her husband, putting her arms around him. She was as tiny as a little girl.

“Gavin, I never meant for any of that to happen,” Wendy said. “I didn’t know it caused you such pain. I am here now, Gavin. Don’t worry anymore, I am here.”

The principal was briefly confused, but he bent down and let his wife hold him, and within seconds he had relaxed into the embrace. Soon he was looking into his wife’s eyes as surely he had done twenty years earlier, when they had first fallen hard for each other in their own way, somewhere, somehow. Everyone’s story of love had its own catchphrases and props that the couple would always remember and refer to tenderly. It was as if the principal was suddenly remembering now. He closed his eyes as he leaned against his wife, who held him steady. He let her take him, and he was relieved.