The Uncoupling (3 page)

“She doesn’t even understand that she plagiarized,” Dory went on, using Jen Heplauer and her mother as a human shield. “She thinks that you can just go on Booxmartz and read a summary of the book, then read other people’s analyses of it—other people’s actual thoughts, the brainpower of strangers who you’ll never meet—and write them down and hand them in. Because why actually just sit there with the book trying to come up with something of your own, right?”

“Right,” he said.

“And you can take these little pieces of information that you read on these websites, as if you’re building a nest or making paella,” she continued with new conviction. “And suddenly it’s
your
work. You actually tell yourself that you worked very hard. And you believe it. It’s suddenly all yours. It’s suddenly . . .
Jen Heplauer’s
! I just can’t get over it. She’s like someone in a dream.”

“Oh, sweetheart, they’re all like someone in a dream,” Robby said, and they grimly snickered together at the idea of a whole generation prodded by pixels and clicks, and link after link that sent them leapfrogging in search of something increasingly abstract that they thought they wanted. The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.

Dory thought of Jen Heplauer and her friends, and her daughter Willa and her friends, all of them constantly checking for news or non-news from one another. All of them lately logging onto Farrest, spending many hours in its puzzlingly simple mossy green groves, feeling as if they were getting an infusion of air and sunlight and vitamin D. She thought of Willa’s avatar of choice on Farrest—a sleek purple ninja—and she imagined her daughter stalking silently across the grass to locate a patch that was untrampled by elves or dry-docked mermaids or big-eyed androids or various woodland animals. Dory could picture her daughter’s ninja-self free of the little plantation of whiteheads that grew in a scatter at the hairline of her real self. She pictured Willa standing in one place, pulsating lightly, the way these animated creatures always seemed to do when they weren’t in motion.

All of which forced real-life parents to make curdled and no doubt ignorant remarks about what their kids were missing, even as the parents themselves were drawn to their own screens, where they sat slack every night before a radiant blast. As the hours disappeared, sometimes they purchased slippers, or read about a newly discovered species of lizard, or about a disease they feared they had, or about the unmysterious wars that quietly continued in Iraq and Afghanistan, as unseen as fires burning underground. Leanne had recently remarked that if you wanted to get to know someone’s unconscious, all you had to do was take a look at everything they had looked at and done on the Internet over the course of a couple of hours when they were all alone.

After a second or two now, Robby’s hand fell away, openpalmed. He’d had to accept that there would be no touching tonight. The closeness of love had temporarily been replaced by the closeness of railing together, predictably, against this brave new world and all that was shallow or incomprehensible or life-frittering about it. Dory kissed his head in consolation, smelling the tang of the tea tree oil shampoo they both used.

She said, “I love you.”

“Love you too,” he said.

They did; they loved each other.

She moved farther away from him, as if there hadn’t been the suggestion of sex at all. It was as if he had
made it up
, and it was all in his head like the desires of a man toward a woman he’s never spoken to in his life, rather than toward a woman whose body he has been in and around so many times that it was staggering to them both. Once, driving home from a faculty potluck, probably a little too wine-headed, they had actually tried to figure out how many times they’d slept together. “Is it even a doable calculation?” Robby had wondered. “Wouldn’t you have to have kept diaries about it over the years, like Pepys?” They attempted to count every sexual experience they’d shared, but by the time they arrived at their house they realized that somehow marriage itself had made it all uncountable. At first they’d been able to think of various episodes that had taken place before they’d gotten married, pinning them to different, specific events: sex the night they’d been to the Spanish place with those good, slippery olives; sex in front of the stuttering air conditioner during that heat wave. Then, though, the marriage began, and not too long after Willa was born the suburban years began. And though those years had still been layered with pleasure and humor and joy, distinguishing one time from another was much more difficult.

Now, in bed, Dory imagined telling a couple of other women in the teachers’ room tomorrow morning about what had happened here tonight. “It’s strange,” Dory could have said to them. “In bed last night, when Robby touched me, my first thought was,
Please, please don’t.”

Had Dory admitted this, another teacher might have looked up from scraping the last of her yogurt with a plastic spoon, and said, “Funny. Same thing happened to me last night too.” Across the room, by the coffee machine, still another female teacher might have looked up as she flattened and smoothed a filter, wondering if she should also join this conversation, because, interestingly, the exact same thing had happened to her within the past few days.

Dave Boyd, the biology teacher, might have watched from the side, not really relating to any of it. He was a gay man, and he would never be affected by the spell. Apparently he and his boyfriend Gordon, a landscape architect, would continue to throw themselves upon each other in their restored carriage house without any interruption. Only women were enchanted that winter—specifically, women who were in some way connected sexually to men. The men, it seemed, stayed the same, never changing, only responding to circumstances. But Dory didn’t say a word to anyone in the teachers’ room, and no one else did either. What she had done in bed was private. She had no idea that what was starting to happen to her would happen all around the high school, and that it would keep happening in waves. It happened mostly to middle-aged women, but also to ones who were older or, notably, younger. The spell touched some teenaged girls, who had so recently experienced the first shuddering illogic of love, only to find themselves sharply pulling back from it, leaving boys shocked and thoroughly undone.

“Really?” a boy might say to a girl, his voice splitting in the middle. “We can’t do this anymore?
Never?
” How could he have been introduced to all that beauty, only to have it taken away?

Suddenly, the sex lives of these girls and women caved in and collapsed, just as the women had been warned they would someday ; suddenly, they collapsed them. Dory knew she was obviously much too young for this moment to be considered the
someday
she had been warned about. She was still on her own upward trajectory. She was only just past forty, after all, and forty didn’t mean sixty. Forty was still rapacious, viable, possibly fertile, in the mix. Forty was way too soon for this to happen. Forty didn’t need to lie on the front hall rug in a patch of sun, licking itself into unconsciousness.

But the spell had started to come over all of them, seizing them in their separate beds, changing them in an instant. Starting that night, and continuing for quite a while afterward, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped and the windows shook like crazy in their frames, and all over that town, you could hear the word “no.”

2
.

P
re-enchantment, the only thing at all unusual so far that year was the fact that a drama teacher had joined the faculty of Eleanor Roosevelt. On the first day of school in September she had appeared, quietly and without much fanfare. The other faculty members were aware that she’d been hired, of course, for the principal had sent a memo the previous spring proudly stating that even in these budget-slashing times, money had been found to bring a drama teacher to Elro.

But everyone, as usual, was distracted and overextended on the first day of school. New teachers were just a part of life; for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else into the homogenizing vortex of 8-to-3 school-day life. Before you knew it, the fresh new ones seemed to have been teaching there forever, too, or else they didn’t last very long, and were gone before you’d gotten to know them.

On that day in September, the new drama teacher, Fran Heller, stood in the doorway of the teachers’ room, looking at her surroundings. Usually, nothing much happened in that room; it was a place of mildness, often dullness, and the arrival of a new teacher didn’t seem as though it would change that. Dory knew that the students imagined the place to be a kind of first-class airport lounge, blocked off from their view while they were left in the dreary, waxy halls. They pictured soft lighting and one of those perpetual chocolate fountains, and perhaps a scatter of reclining chairs that performed acupressure massages on the necks and shoulders of faculty members during the interval between classes.

Once in a while when Dory Lang was in there, the door would open long enough for one of the kids in the hall to get a chance to see inside. One time the art teacher, carrying a few glazed, lumpy ceramic coffee mugs made by students, pushed open the door with her elbow and held it for a substitute teacher who ducked her head as she came in, unsure if she was even allowed in here. During that suspended moment, a snaggle-toothed eleventh-grader planted herself in the doorway in awe. When she saw Dory, she said in a low moan, “Holy crap, Ms. L,
this
is where you guys go?” as if in disbelief that this plain room was where some of her favorite teachers willingly collected—that this, astonishingly, was
it.

“Yep, this is it!” Dory replied with false cheer, and as the door moved on its pneumatic cylinder and the view narrowed, she saw the girl’s imperfect smile narrow too, for she had been betrayed. Now the girl would have to wonder: what, really, was there to look forward to in adulthood?

The teachers’ room in Eleanor Roosevelt High School was painted the milky green of glow-in-the-dark stars when the lights are on. The chairs were apparently considered ultra-modern back in the Clinton years, when a truck carried them to the doors of the school and then drove off. There was a midsized refrigerator in which the faculty placed items from home, though sometimes it took on a decisive, acidic tang. (“Abby Means must be storing a vinegar douche in there again,” Dave Boyd would whisper behind his cupped hand.) The occasional poisonous smell inside the refrigerator was evidence that something was silently transmogrifying at the rear of a shelf; that putrefaction was taking place behind the traffic of yogurts and soda bottles and plastic tubs that were brought in each day by Abby Means, a thin, ropy-necked math teacher in her late twenties who sometimes wore vintage poodle skirts and other affected consignment-shop finds, and who was generally disliked.

Once, Dave Boyd added, “Abby Means
is
a vinegar douche.”

DO NOT TOUCH—PROPERTY OF ABBY MEANS, she wrote across the tape of her containers and bottles in block letters. Disliking Abby Means actually brought some of the teachers together in that room. Dory got to know not only Dave and his boyfriend Gordon through this connection, but also the new drama teacher. Fran Heller was small, arty, assertive, spiky-salt-and-pepper-headed, vehement, with hammered silver earrings that moved around her head like quotation marks when she spoke. You could picture her stalking the stage in the auditorium, or monkeying up a narrow metal ladder to change a gel.

While she was new, most of the others had long settled into their lives here. A few faculty members had come to the school after having been denied tenure at small colleges or universities. Abby Means had actually filled in for an instructor in a section of a class at Harvard one semester, though Dave Boyd had more than once insisted, “Oh, she probably taught at a college called
Harver,
and she mumbles the name so we’ll hear it wrong.”

Robby and Dory had moved here when two positions in the English department had simultaneously opened up. They joked that there had been a suicide pact between the departing teachers who could no longer tolerate the soul-killing demands of suburban home ownership. The Langs were hesitant to leave Brooklyn at first, where they’d lived since Robby had moved from Vermont to be with her; but after they had Willa, they outgrew their small apartment with its burnt-looking wood trim. At the time, both Dory and Robby had teaching jobs in local city high schools. Supplies were scarce, and once in a while the schools went into semi-lockdown mode, with a whooping siren like at a prison. Then they saw the ad for the jobs in Stellar Plains.

Stellar Plains, New Jersey, was a town that got mentioned whenever there was an article called “The Fifty Most Livable Suburbs in America.” Unlike most suburbs, this one was considered progressive. Though the turnpike that ran through it was punctuated by carpet-remnant outlets and tire wholesalers, and even an unsettling, windowless store no one had ever been to, advertising DVDS AND CHINESE SPECIALTY ITEMS, Main Street was quaint and New Englandy, with a cosmopolitan slant. There was an excellent bookstore, Chapter and Verse, at a moment when bookstores around the country were making way for cell-phone stores. (“
Make Way for Cell-Phone Stores,
a children’s book by Robert McCloskey,” said the wary owner.)

Everyone in town went out for dinner once in a while to Peppercorns. When the economy began to sputter and tank, the restaurant turned quiet, nearly empty, and Dory worried that it would close. She couldn’t bear to lose Peppercorns, with its baskets of snowy, soft rolls and its long, looming salad bar that made you remember that there were choices in life. But then business picked up a bit, and everyone came to Peppercorns a little more frequently, sitting with tall, sturdy menus in front of their faces once again. Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star, as opposed to a movie star, at a restaurant. A tenth-grade lacrosse player from Elro sitting with his parents might raise a hand from the next table, and his parents would glance over with shy smiles, and maybe the father would lift his glass of beer and say, “Here’s to a teacher who deserves an A!” The son would be humiliated by his father’s weird and pointless remark. But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.