The Uncoupling (30 page)

As she sat touching it now, she looked at the words “
You Can’t Take It with You,
” and she laughed aloud, once, at the fact that, in this instance, oh yes you could. After she’d removed it
,
she’d rearranged all the photos and objects in the dusty showcase so that no one would notice something was missing, not that anyone ever really looked in there anymore. She almost imagined for a moment that the silver cup had been given to her and her cast, in honor of this wonderful production tonight. “Thank you,” she heard herself saying, and the memory of the entire play from start to finish should have been deeply satisfying to recall right now, except that she could not stop thinking about her son.

It just hadn’t occurred to her that Eli could be a casualty of her actions. In the past he had been too young, or not interested enough in girls, and the play wasn’t relevant to him. Fran had assumed it would always be that way; why hadn’t she realized that one day he might get involved with a girl in the school where she taught; even a girl in the play? And that by entrancing a girl he loved, the spell would bring him heartbreak, even the temporary kind. And then—what were the chances—that the love between him and this girl might be the rare one that didn’t recover.

Eli was independent and intense; he’d always had his own mind, and that was still true now. When Fran had returned home after the play with a do-gooder’s feeling of accomplishment, and the loving cup pleasingly heavy in her shoulder bag, she had sat at her laptop and read her son’s e-mail, in which he told her he’d left. Her head had pounded as she read it. “I’m not running away, per se,” he wrote. “I just want to get on with my life w/o Willa, ok?”

She understood that he had left before the moment of Willa’s dis-enchantment, and before the reunion that Fran had always intended. “Don’t take it personally, Mom,” Eli wrote her, but of course she did. She had raised him alone, basically. They had been incredibly close, and she wasn’t ready to turn him over to Lowell full-time. She simply couldn’t bear it.

But maybe she wouldn’t have to, she thought. Once Eli found out that Willa now wanted him back, he would come home. “I just know that you and Willa will work things out,” Fran wrote back to him. “I can tell she has changed her mind.” But Eli didn’t write back.

Fran had panicked. She’d called his cell, and the voice mail picked up immediately, so she left a message saying, “Please, Eli, take the next bus home. Your dad will pay for your ticket. Call me when you get this. Please, honey, give a call.” When he didn’t call back within ten minutes, she left a second message, feeling ill from the stress of it. God, she thought, she’d become as needy as one of the men who’d been begging the women that winter.

Above Fran Heller on the wall of the living room, the ceramic masks of comedy and tragedy grinned and frowned, just as they had done that night in Cobalt, when the production was over and everyone had scattered, and she’d pulled the masks with pliers from the wall of the auditorium for another keepsake, then put them in her bag and kept walking.

Listen, fair woman
, she imagined the masks saying as one voice, as one chorus.
Do you really think so many men and women benefit from the extreme intervention that the play brings?

Yes,
Fran would have replied,
I do. Not everyone is enlightened; not everyone knows how to live.

But Fran Heller didn’t want to think about her son anymore tonight. She had figured out how to adjust and correct the couplings of virtual strangers, but when it came to her own teenager, she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. No one ever did. Always, he would be one step beyond her; this was how it was supposed to be, but it was as sad as anything she could think of, as sad as the saddest tragedy. Fran Heller made her way down the hallway to her bedroom, and dialed the house in Lansing. Lowell answered, and she said to him, keeping her voice casual and light, “It’s me, babe. Everything okay over there? Yes, yes, good.” She lay down on the bed, for she hadn’t slept in a full day, and she was so tired. Her husband’s voice spoke to her from across a great distance, but he might as well have been right there beside her.

In the weeks to come, she would circulate her résumé, hoping that a drama teacher was needed somewhere not too far away. And when she was hired, she would move there and settle in, and it would all begin. Some of the women who lived in that new town, both the younger ones and older ones, would begin to feel puzzled that desire had fallen away from them so suddenly and easily. That for reasons they didn’t understand, they had given up what they’d loved. That everything was different now. But they wouldn’t know what to do about it, and for a while at least, they would just have to let themselves remain suspended and powerless—waiting, as we all do, for the spell to lift.