The Uncoupling (28 page)

 

 

 

A
cross town, parents and teachers and assorted other adults were coming back together, picking up where they had left off earlier in the winter, or even earlier in the night. Men and women threw themselves upon each other. Laughter bounded around rooms. Wine bottles were opened, buckets of spicy chicken wings were eaten, candles were lit, and meaningful music was played. It wasn’t all giddy and easy, however. Over at the Cutlers’ big house, although glad to be reconciled, and lying on their backs in bed side by side, holding hands, Ed and Bev were silent. It had been a long time not only since they’d touched, but also since they’d talked about themselves with any seriousness.

“That thing you said,” she suddenly said to him. “It hurt me so much, you know.” She kept looking at the ceiling, not at him.

“Please look at me, Bev.”

She didn’t want to, but she did. Their heads were close, and there was his handsome face, a few capillaries broken in the nose—each one perhaps representing some vicissitude in the stock market—and the strong chin. He put a hand on her face, which felt to her as if she was being given a glass of water after a fever: relieving, but almost too much.

“It was stupid of me,” he said. “It just came out. What can I say? You’d changed. But hey, who was I to talk? I had no hair anymore. My ass sagged like an old man.”

“But Ed, this was building up. You were obviously not all that interested in me anymore. Your heart wasn’t really in it; I could tell.”

“What was I going to do? So many times you turned the other way. You faced away from me.”

“I did?” she said. “I didn’t realize. You could have said something.”

“I probably should have. I figured that this was what you wanted, that it was easier for you. I wasn’t going to beg you, Bev. And,” he added, “I was distracted too. I had things on my mind. The numbers were horrific. Everything was out of my control.”

And for the first time in a long while Bev could imagine finding some way back, though the particulars of how that would happen remained obscure. She knew that Ed had always been a little bit
dickish;
that was the word she’d heard a couple of students use, and it had stayed with her. He couldn’t just cast off this quality when he was at home with her. It was part of him, though the world no longer supported it in him, or cared about him very much. The world now cared only about the
young
and dickish. He was an aging, fairly aggressive man who was also a decent person, she knew, and who had been partly misunderstood, and humbled, and loved her.

Maybe she would always be fat, and if that was the case, then at least, she thought, she could try to use her body for the things she’d always liked doing. She could move around more; she could start walking. They had so much property, and Bev could ask Ed if he would go walking with her; and while they walked they could talk about whatever bothered them—all the slights they’d felt, the betrayals—as well as what they still liked, and loved. But she wasn’t sure yet how to be in this version of her body, how to inhabit it and have sex in it; how to feel that it was hers, regardless of whether it was the one she wanted, or would ever have chosen.

She thought about how she had let herself go.
He
had let her go too, though he hadn’t meant to, or wanted to; and then she had let him go as well. Tonight, in bed, Bev had talked to him, and it was a kind of foreplay—almost as good as talking dirty in their bed, which they used to do, and which maybe, at some point, they would do again. She remembered once talking this way to him, and how his whole head—already balding at the time but still with some silky light brown hair—had responded by blushing, glowing. Now he rested his head against her, and they stayed like that for a long time.

 

 

 

T
hree miles away, in the Winik-Spangolds’ house in the middle of the night after the play, Ruth and Henry lay poised, waiting for a child to cry or need to be held or brought into the bed. But for some reason, as though they’d been given knockout drops, the children slept, while the adults were both wide awake. “Listen to me, Henry,” said Ruth. “The problem, for me, was that I was never very protective of myself. I thought I didn’t need that, but apparently I do.”

“Okay,” he said. “Go on.”

Their baby boy stirred and banged in his bassinet, and Ruth half sat up, but it was a false alarm, and she lay back down. “I may get a lock on the bathroom door,” she said.

“I could install it tomorrow.”

“And when the boys are older, a lock on the bedroom door too.”

“Wouldn’t that make it like a prison?”

“
Our
door,” she said.

“Oh. I see.”

“I am not interested in women,” she said. “I mean, sometimes I see one who I think looks sort of androgynous and cute, and that’s nice. But it doesn’t pull at me now, because I’m not available. I’m not. The problem is that I never really parceled myself out properly to all of you. I gave everybody everything. I know it won’t always be like this,” Ruth told him. “With everyone all over me, touching me; I know that. One day it will be much less intense. But I just don’t want to wait it out. I don’t want to have to
tolerate
my home life. That’s not something I ever wanted.”

The silence continued; the boys slept on, which was a miracle. “What about me?” Henry asked.

“You. I am here for you. But I have to say—and I mean no offense by this—I don’t think these dates you keep asking for are exactly up to par. For you either. They’re always so rushed, Henry, aren’t they? I don’t want us to rush like that. I don’t want to miss so much.”

Henry Spangold threw a thick, hairy leg across his wife, and she lifted herself up on her strong arms and towered over him, smiling. And soon, somehow, their war was over.

L
eanne Bannerjee left the school after the play, and behind her in her rearview mirror she could see the lights of Malcolm Bean’s low-riding car. He flashed his brights at her, which seemed to be the equivalent of winking. As she headed toward her home, she thought one final time about the scene she had witnessed in the auditorium, the way the principal’s wife had reclaimed him publicly, and how he had willingly gone with her. Leanne would be fine with this; she wasn’t in love with Gavin McCleary. But still she didn’t want to change her life and become one of the married women of Stellar Plains. She was glad to be seeing Malcolm tonight; she felt
crisper
knowing he was following her home. She hummed and bristled and stepped a little harder on the gas, thinking of what they would do.

Briefly Leanne imagined telling her friend Jane that she would quit her job at the high school and come to New York City and join Jane’s practice of teenologists. There were three of them in the suite of offices on Park Avenue and 80th, and they even had a receptionist. All of the women were young and fashionable; that was part of the point. Teenagers related to these therapists and were starry-eyed about them, and somehow some kind of therapeutic transference took place, but it was all dubious to Leanne. No, she wouldn’t leave this town, not yet. Plus, the idea of appearing on reality TV with her clients, which was about to happen to Jane—some show called
Families in Freefall II: The Kaplans
—was too appalling to consider. Did everybody have to be famous? Wasn’t it enough to be excited by your own life; by, say, sleeping with a few different men, enjoying each one for the pleasures he could give you, and not caring about whether or not other people had judgmental thoughts about you?

She loved men, that was the whole of it; or anyway, she loved the complement of them, and the way one gave her something that another did not, and still another gave her something else. When she was by herself she could think about all of them, or one of them, or none. Leanne didn’t want to be without male involvement and envelopment, or without
action
—without screaming in bed with a small rotation of men who each offered something, in concentrate. Who each brought her sharply up toward the rim of extreme excitement, where she could peek over the edge. She wanted all of that, and could have it too; but she didn’t need to be involved with a married man; that was obvious to her now. She could draw the line there.

And when a girl like Jen Heplauer came into Leanne’s office during the school day and said,
Dr. Bannerjee, a blow job isn’t sex at all, it’s just a blow job
, Leanne might tilt her head in that bird-on-a-branch way, but she really hoped to be able to say,
Well, it depends on the blower and the blowee. It depends on the light in the room. It depends on the kindness of the guy.
And so on and so on.

 

 

 

S
o do you think the Cumfy will burn to a crisp if I set it on fire?” Dory asked Robby after they walked into the house. “What? Oh, that’s funny,” he said. “I see. A symbolic burning.”

“I really want to try it,” she said. She was all charged up tonight. The play had been wonderful, and Willa had been brilliant in it, and through the overwhelming, now only partly recalled experience of watching the actors and hearing Robby talk to her from the stage, and then joining him up there, she had come around. They were alone together in the house now, while Willa was off at the cast party for the rest of the night. They both knew that something was about to happen between them, and the anticipation had a highly stimulating, nearly teenaged quality to it. Something was about to happen, and it was inevitable, and they were heading right toward it. Robby wore the soft blue shirt that he’d been wearing forever; it never went out of style. He could wear it to school and he could wear it to bed. It was not new, and he was not new to her either, but his long arms filled the sleeves, and there at the ends were his hands, which weren’t a woman’s hands at all. They were his. Onstage she’d held them, and had kissed his mouth, and kissed it more and more easily. One of the kids in the audience had called out, “You go, Mr. and Ms. L!”

You go,
she thought now. She took the Cumfy out into the yard along with a pack of matches, and Robby followed her. He told her he thought this plan of hers was dopey and unnecessary, but still he accompanied her outside, and the dog came too. Snow was melting in the yard; Hazel peed on the curled, unfrozen palm of a leaf that had been preserved all winter in the ice’s amber. On the patio, near the barbecue in its plastic winter apparel, and near the white metal chairs that were speckled with rust and lacking cushions, Dory tried to light the edge of the yellow blanket.

Nothing happened. The blanket, even with the match cupped in her hand, would not catch. She tried match after match, but the Cumfy was apparently nonflammable. “Let’s go in,” Robby said. “It’s cold out here.” But this was just a reflexive response; it wasn’t that cold out anymore. The winter had softened. The Langs went into the house, and she carried the Cumfy upstairs in her arms, and then Robby lay down on the bed, and she did too. They took off their clothes and slipped under the Cumfy, which looked to Dory like a big, garish American burqa. Clicks of static could be heard and felt as they turned beneath that yellow, chemical, indestructible piece of cloth.

They had roared through sex and childbirth and their child’s childhood, and now they were different, and they couldn’t go back there. Or maybe they could go back there, but it wouldn’t look the same. Sometimes they would still want this, just not necessarily frequently. Stirrings would take place, and they would arrange themselves accordingly. Sex wasn’t everything, but it was something. It was something to them.

She thought of the thing he had been saying when they had first met in the hotel at the conference. He’d been quoting that ridiculous student paper: “ ‘At the time that Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were writing, the world was very much as it is today, though to a lesser extent.’ ”

Which somehow was even a little true if you applied it to your own life, your own history, because what you knew and felt and wanted now, and the way you could love now, had a long valley of seriousness running through it that had perhaps always been there, though to a lesser extent.

16
.

O
n Monday morning,
The Campobello Courier
described the performance of the Aristophanes comedy
Lysistrata
as “heady and almost breathless,” and the reviewer complimented Ms. Heller for her decision to go with “a po-mo angle that everyone seemed to love. My parents loved it too!” The review didn’t get into specifics, and nobody really remembered that much from the play anymore. “Ms. Heller did a great job,” the reviewer went on, “even with all the graphic material that she had to remove.” He called sophomore understudy Willa Lang “fantastic—a performer who compels us with her urgency, integrity, and beauty.” For weeks Willa would enjoy thinking of those three final nouns. But now, before the review had come in, late Saturday afternoon after the cast party—that long, weird night—Willa Lang couldn’t stand that she had let Eli go for reasons that no longer seemed reasonable.