The Uncoupling (7 page)

“You are getting repetitive,” she would say, but she didn’t mind. No one had ever spoken this way to her in her life; no one. “Don’t you have any other interests at all?” she asked. “Maybe a team sport?”

“No,” Eli said, smiling. “Absolutely none.”

Early on, the two of them would occasionally go somewhere and toss the topic around like two philosophers discussing the nature of being. They both considered themselves sexually delayed, at least by the standards of most people around them. Both of them were innocent, their mouths having not yet opened onto the hot surprise of any other mouths, their bodies still unfolded and unrevealed. One day, after they had had several conventional conversations about school, and their parents, and the music they each liked (The Lungs, The Simultaneous Urges), he lightly and teasingly began the first conversation about shirt removal, which had made Willa Lang swallow in shock, then quickly recover. After that, the conversation picked up ad hoc whenever it could. Eli spoke plaintively of his desire to see her with her shirt off, “as a start.”

“I just think it would be amazing,” he said as they sat on a closed dumpster behind the school one windless, early November afternoon. “A rare occurrence. Like seeing an eclipse.”

“Yes, it would be amazing for
you
,” she said.

“Maybe there would be something in it for you as well.” They were sitting side by side on the rough metal surface; they didn’t know it yet, but both of them would be marked by where they sat, the asses of their jeans rust- and dust-covered. Both of their mothers, doing laundry in a day or two, would say, “Wait, what’s this?” slapping at the denim with a hard hand and seeing orange clouds fly off. Their mothers would have no idea whatsoever. Later on they would—after the fire drill, everyone knew—but not yet. This was still early days, when everything remained for the time being delectable and hidden.

Willa sat with him and tried to figure out how she was supposed to be, how she was meant to talk, and whether she was supposed to laugh a lot, or just listen with a grave expression when he spoke. She knew nothing about what you were meant to do with a boy. Marissa Clayborn, of course, knew everything; Marissa was experienced, having lost her virginity at age fifteen to a boy named Ralph Devereux, the son of family friends from another town. Though quite a few girls in the tenth grade at Elro were no longer virgins either—soccer-playing girls; girls who hung around the art room; members of the pep squad—Marissa was the only one among their circle of girls who had really had significant experience. Both Lucys and Carrie Petito had all “done things,” as they put it, but the things they had done had involved hands roaming among body parts, even southern body parts, though it had gone no further than that. Mouths did not come into the picture, except to kiss and be kissed; condoms were not required. Marissa had been so calm and sophisticated about her significant sexual experiences: catlike, sphinxlike, impressively mature. Willa knew that she herself would never be able to simply accept sex as her birthright the way Marissa had done. For a long time Willa Lang hadn’t even been able to imagine wanting to sleep with someone someday—but now, since she had met Eli, she imagined it all the time.

He wasn’t good-looking, but she still often pictured his hand accidentally bumping against the side of her breast. “Whoops,” he’d say, pulling away, but the hand would leave a thousand reverberations. Once, thinking about it in her bedroom, Willa Lang let out an actual, tiny scream. She wanted to text her friends to say: “guess what? i understand finally.” Willa was a slow study, but she was, apparently, a study. The fact that Eli, too, had had no experience was part of his appeal.

“I never had a girlfriend,” he said now as they sat together. “Back at Cobalt, anyone who wasn’t a jock might as well commit
seppuku.
The girls were jocks too. Soccer was the big thing. I just kept to myself a lot, and I assumed I’d keep doing that when we moved here too, but as you can see, it hasn’t turned out that way.”

Did this mean he thought
she
was his girlfriend? Willa really couldn’t say.

“It’s sort of interesting, the way you get to know someone,” Eli went on. “The way, at first, you think they’re one thing, but they turn out to be another. Want to know when you started to change, in my mind?”

“Okay,” Willa said, and she waited.

“It was when you put on The Lungs that night in your room, and we sat there.” She recalled sitting with him, the aching music between them. He’d closed his eyes when he listened, and she’d noticed the length of his eyelashes, and briefly imagined taking a tape measure to them. The song had gone on and on, while distantly, from downstairs, came the sound of their three parents, laughing. “And then I wondered about you,” Eli said. “And later on, your dad said I could come over and talk about books. And whenever I came to your house to see him, there you would be. Just walking around in your flip-flops. I’d hear this
thup-thup-thup
in the background. Your dad’s great, by the way. Everyone at school says so.”

“Thanks. He
is
a good guy,” Willa agreed. They sat in quiet celebration of her father and his decency.

“And your mom too,” he added.

“And yours,” she said politely.

“Oh, my mom’s sort of tough,” Eli said. “But she’s passionate about things. She loses it sometimes, but my dad is always amused by her. It’s pretty funny to see them in action.”

“Is it weird not living with him?”

“I’ll live with him in Michigan this summer. I always do.” Eli shrugged. “It’s the peculiar Heller way of doing things, I guess. I got used to it a long time ago.”

The day was mild, the parking lot at the school had emptied, and Willa’s parents and Eli’s mother had all gone home. They watched as some stragglers left, including Paige Straub and Dylan Maleska, the inseparable jockish couple. Paige and Dylan marched together away from the school with matching backpacks on their backs. They stopped at the curb and made out for a few seconds, then continued to walk home. Willa needed Eli to kiss her right then
,
so she could know what it meant to be kissed by someone very nice with soft lips and a moving tongue, so she could have that knowledge and then have more. She’d spent her whole life without the kiss of any boy, and she’d never really minded, even as her friends were introduced, one by one, to some of the rituals.

Since Willa had started to know Eli, she realized that until this moment she had always been a little bit bored. Stellar Plains was supposed to be such a great place, but Willa knew otherwise. Where were you supposed to go in this town, exactly? On Friday nights Elro put together an event they called “Just Chillin’.” People sat around in the cafeteria; a couple of boys stood by the panini-maker and played “Freebird” on their electric guitars. A girl no one liked wore mime makeup and juggled oranges while reciting the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. A few teachers, on chaperone duty, stood at the side of the room and looked around at the whole, dismal scene. “Sad, sad, sad,” Mr. Boyd was overheard whispering to Mr. di Canzio.

Equally sad was Greens and Grains, Willa thought, which, when it opened a year earlier, all the moms raved about as if it were an amusement park or a sex club that had set up shop in town. The leafy, rooty vegetables you could buy there all tasted the same when brought home and steamed. As the leaves wilted inside the microwave, the smell released was like a rotting forest that Willa would never want to visit. She imagined this forest as being far different from the green and layered world of Farrest, which she and Eli traveled to sometimes at night from their separate laptops in their separate houses.

Meeting up on Farrest, they’d already touched lightly a few times, his handsome centaur head bumping against the neck of her shrouded ninja. His skin looked furred, both in Farrest and in life, she saw now in the school parking lot when he turned his head a little. Men had
fur.
She saw Eli each day in the hallway between classes, and he was always by himself. She, of course, was generally with Marissa or Carrie or one of the two Lucys, and she supposed she could have drawn him into their group; but then her friends would have gotten to know him too, and instinctively she didn’t want this to happen.

Willa was afraid, at first, that they would think he was weird. But then, even worse, she was afraid that they wouldn’t; that Marissa would remark, “Oh no, Eli isn’t weird at all. In fact, I would have to say that he’s pretty fascinating.” And that then Marissa would turn her gaze to Eli, who would see that she had so much more to offer him—emotionally, sexually, intellectually, you name it—than Willa did.

As they sat together on the dumpster, the light of the sky began to deepen and Willa said something about having to leave soon in order to be home for dinner. “Ah yes, the family dinner,” said Eli. “That sacred event. Everyone idealizes the family dinner, even my mom. She wants us to
sit there
together. It’s like some study was done, and they found out that people who eat dinner with their family don’t do drugs, or something like that.”

“People who eat dinner with their family become angels in heaven when they die,” said Willa. “Or even before they die.”

“People who eat dinner with their family have the power of
invisibility,
” he said. “Or they wish they did, so they wouldn’t have to sit there at that table.”

“My parents make it into such a big ritualized event,” Willa said. Suddenly family dinner felt like the biggest injustice. “It’s like a goddamn Japanese tea ceremony or something,” she said. “I mean,” she added nervily, working herself up, “who are they to think it’s the most important thing in the world. To think that I have nothing better to do than sit there with them.” She pictured her father’s long and handsome but slightly faded face, and her mother’s pretty, rabbity features, and then she thought of all they had done for her, and she felt guilty. But not too guilty.

They walked in silence back to Tam o’ Shanter, entered their separate homes, said cursory hellos to parents—“Hey,” Willa said, uninflected, not waiting for them to reply—then she and Eli met up again on Farrest. Though other creatures were in their midst, it seemed as if nobody paid Eli and Willa much attention, and so they were able to be alone together. A hawk flew overhead; this was Marissa Clayborn. She often took the form of this graceful, commanding flying animal, and Willa looked up and watched her circle and dip. Luckily, Marissa didn’t seem to want to come in for a landing.

As the days passed and Eli and Willa grew closer, he continued to repeat the remark about wanting to see her with her shirt off. Would she, Willa Lang, a very undaring sophomore who behaved more like a seventh-grader in certain respects, actually take her shirt off for the new boy? Finally, as though an elaborate deal had been brokered between their representatives, it was established that, yes, she would.

One afternoon, when his mother would be staying late after school for some planning meeting about the play, Willa and Eli went to his house. It was there, they both understood, that the removal of the shirt would take place, for a start—the unveiling, the grand moment, the beginning. The living room of the Hellers’ house was fairly conventional, Willa was relieved to see when they went inside. The furniture was puffy and swollen and modern, and there were art prints on the walls, and an unflattering childhood photo of Eli in a shirt with a huge, winged collar. On the far wall of the living room hung the masks of tragedy and comedy, one red and one blue, both of them kiln-glazed and shining. “Those are neat,” Willa said, feeling so strongly that they were actually ugly and almost grotesque that she had automatically thought to say the opposite of what she felt.

“They sort of creep me out a little,” said Eli. “They were given to my mom by the theater department in Cobalt when she left.” He grabbed a gallon of milk and two glasses and a couple of packaged doughnuts. “Come on,” he instructed, and she followed him up the stairs. Only when they were inside the cool blue of his bedroom—a blue version of Farrest, she thought—did Willa Lang feel relief. They sat on his bed, which he had carefully made that morning. Eli was a neat boy, and a pair of pajamas lay folded on his pillow. In the blue light Eli and Willa faced each other, and he poured her a glass of milk and held it out. “My special concoction,” he said. “It’s called Shirt-Be-Gone.”

She drank, then bit into a doughnut, and he did the same, after which they put glasses and plates aside. Willa reached up with a tentative hand and unbuttoned the top button of her pale yellow blouse. She kept unbuttoning until she was done, and then she swiftly opened her bra, which was one of those front-clasp kinds. The two pieces of it just fell away; she had planned this, of course, had wanted the bra to break apart like the sections of an orange, and so it did.

Eli took in a hard breath. “You are so beautiful,” he said in a low, new voice; then, of course, he couldn’t help but kiss her and touch her shoulders, and finally, of course, one of her breasts, which all at once changed texture, and so did the other one. It was as though they were corresponding with each other in some secret, unknowable way, like quarks, and then, to her shock, her vagina became part of it all; yes, “vagina” was the only word for it at this moment, for you couldn’t say “down there” anymore, which was too dumb and vague. Specificity was required now;
precision.

She felt as if she were unfolding, unclasping, being saturated, falling to bits, intensely whirled around like someone blindfolded and about to smack a piñata. Truthfully? It was exceptionally great, though there wasn’t a free moment in which you could even reflect upon the greatness, for you were too busy. Your body just kept experiencing. It was no wonder that people not only liked to do sexual things, but also made entire multimedia presentations of themselves doing them. It was all fun in the way she used to think a water park was fun, or cawing with laughter with her friends at a joke that would have been hilarious to no one else.