The Uncoupling (29 page)

At the party, a boy on tech crew had gently told her that Eli had texted him and said he’d decided to leave New Jersey and go live with his father in Michigan. When Willa heard this, she felt certain that Eli was gone for real; this wasn’t going to be just one of those brief, moping teenaged sojourns, from which the sojourner returns in a few days, eager for a hot meal and his own soft bed. After she heard he was gone, she drank a lot of beer at the party, and got very drunk, and cried, and was sick in the Petitos’ downstairs bathroom, where not too long ago Carrie had secretly jabbed a sewing needle into her navel and hissed, “Fucking fuck fuck fuck,” as the pain sped through her with its own elaborate stitch. Willa, in her own pain, allowed herself to be helped onto an air mattress in the living room, and she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and listened to the soft sounds of her friends in the other room, and she did not sleep for a very long time.

The next afternoon Willa came home from the cast party and found that though she was ill from love and overwhelmed by the lurching stops and starts in her life, and though she had apparently been such a triumph in the play, such a star, her house was maddeningly the same as ever. Hazel lay asleep. Her parents were probably in the den grading papers. Her father had put one of his cheese bakes in the oven for dinner. It had been just too much for her to find out that Eli had left. Too much to have been the lead in the play after one day’s rehearsal, and then have everyone swarm her afterward. Too much to have gotten so drunk, and then so sick. Too much, perhaps—though in a supremely good way—to have had actual sex this school year, complete with real orgasms, and joking around afterward, and occasional flute playing. All of it, now, too much.

So, how wrong it felt then to come home and find her little white house and her family right here, the same as always, along with all the objects that had been constant in her life over the years—the upright piano, the dog—and yet somehow not be able to take them in, because she was different, and something she now needed wasn’t here. She bent down and kissed her dog, who raised her head and breathed on Willa with meaty but delicate breath, as if she’d just eaten a sparrow. The dog was elderly, and would not live too much longer, and Willa was so emotional right now that she could easily, self-indulgently have flung herself down beside Hazel and wept as if the dog had already died. But Hazel, after a moment of affection for this girl who used to tie party hats onto her smooth golden dog-head, and run with her around the yard all summer, returned to her own slow bout of self-love; she knew what she liked best.

Willa went upstairs to her pink bedroom. At her desk, she lightly touched the space bar on her computer and watched it spring awake. She immediately saw that Eli had written her a short note, explaining that he had left, and where he’d gone: “if u feel like it find me on farrest,” he wrote. “i will be there a lot i imagine.”

She went straight to Farrest then, even though she hadn’t said hi to her parents yet, and she still smelled like beer, and vomit, and she needed to wash, and then sleep. The uncomplicated green forest awaited her after log-in, and it was crowded now, since it was a weekend and no one was in school. There was Marissa the hawk, Marissa who had only just gotten home from the cast party herself, where she had reassured Willa that she was very happy for her that the play had gone well, and that she wasn’t sorry she’d made the decision not to play Lysistrata. Willa said hi to Marissa again now, then spoke for a second to a few other people she knew, some from school, a couple from Farrest. Several of them were aware she had just starred in a play; others had no idea she was even a high school student in New Jersey. To them she was just a purple female ninja in a crowded forest.

She had to find Eli, though she had no idea if he was here right now. She looked and looked in the usual quadrant, past pirates and wraiths and little children with enormous eyes. The centaur was pulsating under a tree.

“there u r,” she said. “r u ok?”

“yes. how was the play?”

“isnt that beside the point now? u LEFT.”

“i couldnt stay. i hope u understand.”

Willa thought about asking him to come back, but she didn’t want to seem to be toying with him, and he was already so far away now, and she was too tired to think. She waited for him to ask her again if she would reconsider their relationship, but he didn’t. For now, at least, they would be together only here on Farrest. A creature that she had never seen before—a spider—kept circling them and scuttling up to the centaur, for some reason wanting to ingratiate itself.

“please,” the spider said to Eli. “please.”

The centaur and the ninja instinctively strode away from it, moving faster and faster together through the grass.

 

 

 

T
hat night, alone in her living room, Fran Heller made the decision to resign from Eleanor Roosevelt High School on Monday. McCleary would be shocked, of course, because he’d expended great effort bringing her into the district. But Fran would resign on Monday because, really, what was the point in staying here now? She’d done what she’d planned to do, and the most relevant and enjoyable part of it—the big climax, the reason she’d done it in the first place—was over. This was the way it always went. You worked and worked to get the play into shape, helping the actors breathe feeling into those ancient lines. You designed the lighting, you drew sketches for the Acropolis, you assembled the cast at your knee and got them motivated for a long season of rehearsals. “A comedy, yes,” you told them. “But what it’s about is something quite serious.” And on the night of the performance, you had them all join hands, and you let them know that they were a part of something significant, and then you sat back and watched.

The drama teacher was alone in her adobe-painted house at the far end of Tam o’ Shanter Drive; the paint choice had seemed like a good idea in the summer, when she and Eli had first moved in, but at some point in the late fall, when the sun had set before dinner and the bright house looked a little desperate in the dying light, she had regretted it. She could also admit now that she regretted causing the women and men in this town so much pain, though it had been a necessary step toward making everything better for them. Their pain was gone now, alleviated in the way she had known it would be. All except her son’s pain, which she had never anticipated. Nor had she anticipated that, because of what she’d done, he would end up leaving her. That she would lose him.

No matter what town you were in, Fran had found, people fell into a rut when left to their own devices, or else they let themselves stray so far from their original desires, or they were sexually reckless, or needy, or built their love lives on a faulty foundation. You could see it again and again wherever you looked. The most well-meaning and loving couples in the world started to let everything get too familiar and
erode
, or forgot to plan for the future, or made sexual choices that would clearly lead to disaster. Again and again people were mindless or erratic when it came to matters of love and the bed.

Decades earlier, at the beginning of the great and wondrous bliss that was Fran and Lowell Heller’s marriage, the couple had agreed that they would never allow themselves to become overwhelmed by their domestic life. This, they suspected, would have been their sensual and sexual undoing. They loved to be together in the mornings after spending the night together. They lay in bed, listening to Bach or the Velvet Underground. They walked around the house proudly naked. But how insidious it could all be; familiarity could steal away everything exciting. They swore one night that they wouldn’t let this happen to them. A year and a half after Eli was born, Lowell found a job in Michigan, and the specific arrangements were worked out. Lowell would move to Lansing, and Fran and Eli would stay behind in New Jersey. Lowell would miss them horribly; he adored his wife and his baby boy. He would visit his family a few times a year, and Fran and Eli would live with him in the summer.

Every night they talked. Sometimes Fran took the phone into her bedroom and spoke to her husband about what she would like to do to his body that very minute, and he responded in kind. He was a compact, sandy-mustached man who did not look forty. But had they lived together, he might have easily looked forty now, even fifty. The limited time they spent together was life-enhancing, because domesticity hadn’t diluted it with its liquid detergents and its conversations about car inspections and the like.

These people here in Stellar Plains and in other towns, they’d had no idea how to conduct their love lives. They let everything fall into comfort or indifference or chaos or disrepair. They’d had no innate sense of how to protect the thing they claimed to care about above all else—and instead they’d found many, many ways to let it rot. Some people
seemed
fine,
seemed
happy and contented with each other, and for the moment they actually were. But you knew that it was only a matter of time—months, years, it depended on the individuals—until their relationships began to erode just like everyone else’s.

So Fran Heller saved them all from themselves. She had done this in Ferndale, New Jersey; and then in Cobalt; and now here in Stellar Plains. She herself had no unusual gifts in this direction, no supernatural “abilities,” of course, and she had never known anyone who did. Such people probably didn’t even exist. She’d only learned about the spell accidentally back in Ferndale, where she’d been the drama teacher in the mediocre high school for a number of years before choosing the play for no particular reason. She’d been in the mood for something classical, and
Lysistrata
had a lot of parts for girls, and she could easily eliminate the racy material.

But right after rehearsals began in that high school in Ferndale, Fran noticed that some of the women and girls suddenly started turning away from men and boys. Relationships broke up entirely, or were simply desexualized, and Fran Heller started to hear about them through the school grapevine. And though no one understood why this was happening to them, Fran began to figure it out. She was open-minded about cause and effect, and she had always intuitively believed in enchantment, and in the powers of literature and performance.

So an amateur high school production of
Lysistrata
apparently could cast a no-sex spell upon the females in its midst. This seemed, on first glance, as random, say, as the fact that bread mold could be used to cure disease. And yet it made a kind of perfect sense. The idea of a sex strike, of saying
no
, was powerful and suggestive, and not just necessarily saying no because of a war, but for a hundred different reasons.

Fran couldn’t get over it; she sat quietly, thrilled, chewing on her nails as she watched the effects of the spell that first year, having no idea what would happen next, or how it would all end. But on the night the play was finally performed, the men and teenaged boys of Ferndale had started getting worked up and arguing in the audience about the message of the play—was it insulting to men, was it fair, was it a little too close to their own lives—and one of them had popped up onstage, and another had gone up to bring him down. There was some kind of theatrical scuffle, and then finally a few go-for-broke men had stormed that Acropolis, asking their wives and lovers and girlfriends to take them back, and they did.

After Ferndale, Fran Heller decided she would go elsewhere and see if she could do it all over again with the same results. She had been made to see that nature was sometimes out of balance; she had always viscerally understood this to be true, and had felt it in other moments in her life, such as once, when she saw a baby dressed like a stripper, or another time, when she saw mushrooms growing in a shower stall. But nature could frequently get out of balance in bed, and now she thought she knew a way to rectify this.

It was overwhelming to be able to sense, roughly, what would happen as the cast rehearsed and the spell moved through a town—yet still not know the exact people who would fall under it. All of the susceptible ones seemed to be in some sort of relationship with men; all of them also had some proximity to the play, or to someone in the play, but it didn’t seem to strike them in any particular order. Fran and Eli had landed next in Cobalt, an innocent, not-bad New Jersey suburb. She put on
Lysistrata
again, and, sure enough, it happened; corrections were made in various people’s sexual lives. Fran told no one about the spell, or about being its conductor, administrator, practically its impresario—no one except Lowell, to whom she told everything, though almost never in person.

The drama teacher realized that she could keep putting on
Lysistrata
all over New Jersey, or even all over the eastern seaboard if she wanted, working with bright-faced adolescents, teaching them to act, getting their parents to donate sheets for use as chitons. Causing couples to fall sharply away from each other, and then, in the middle of the performance, to fall sharply back. Just as it had done last night, here in Stellar Plains—despite that heart-stopping panic about the
lead
needing to be replaced, of all crazy distractions—a combination of other, ardent spells always overtook the
Lysistrata
spell at the very last minute.

She picked up the silver loving cup from where she had placed it on the coffee table, and ran her hand across the inscription on the curved, tarnished surface. Fran had gotten in the habit of taking a small memento from each school, and this one had been a no-brainer. After the kids were all off at the cast party, and after the tech crew had finished striking the set, she had been the last one in the silent school. She’d opened the glass showcase in the hallway outside the auditorium with the tiny key she’d been given at the beginning of the school year, and removed the loving cup from where it had probably been since 1969.