The Position

  In turning from them, Dashiell became different from them and from anyone he knew. It was as though he had to give it all up, to cast off this old, soft, boyish self who was the second youngest in the family, the almost-baby, the one with nonsense songs in his head. He became more difficult to read. He withdrew. And in 1993, in an act that was as profound and secretive as the long-ago day in the attic room when an older boy pulled him onto the bed, Dashiell Mellow became a registered Republican.

  It was cold on this early Sunday morning on College Hill in Providence, and the only people out were the occasional Brown students looking for cigarettes or coffee to help them recover from a night of campus debauchery. They walked in couples or trios, scarves around necks, hands dug into pockets. There was laughter; they were young and didn’t yet know that things might happen to them that they couldn’t manage. Dashiell, dressed in a thick down coat, his bald head tucked into the turtle collar, ducked into Store 24 on Thayer Street for some groceries needed at home. He didn’t want to make Tom go out; Tom was still sleeping, exhausted from being a caretaker. Dashiell had been sick three times in the night, and all three times Tom had stayed up with him.

  Dashiell had just gotten off the phone with his mother, having convinced her that he didn’t need her at all, that he and Tom could manage. “Michael is still in Florida with your father,” she’d said at the end, thinking he might be interested in other Mellow family news.

  “I know that. They’ve been calling a lot. Why’s he taking so long?” Dashiell asked. “It was supposed to be a week. Now it’s been, what, three?”

  “He was supposed to get your father to agree to the book, then come home. He’d better get him to do it soon. The publisher has to get cracking.” She paused. “Maybe you could say something.”

  “Mom.” Dashiell’s voice was sharp with her, suddenly. “I’m sick here. Did you forget that?” She hadn’t forgotten, of course, but she was also wrapped up in her insistence on putting this book back into print. “I need to go shopping now,” he said to her.

  “All right,” she’d said, retreating, wounded, and once again he was reminded of why she always made him so mad; that combination of hypersensitivity and pushiness—what could you do with it?

  In the frozen foods aisle of Store 24, as the frost curled from the standing glass cases and Dashiell pulled forth a few packages of Tabatchnick’s soups, if only for their soothing name, he suddenly found himself facing the speechwriter Trish Leggett.

  “Oh my God, Dashiell,” Trish said, and she hugged her own purchases to her bosom. “Look at you.”

  She hadn’t seen him since he’d gotten sick or since he’d had his head shaved. She was a pretty blonde woman wearing a velvet hair band and a down vest, and she observed this wretched bald and ashen man with a kind of sympathy infused with horror that was unbearable if you were on the receiving end of it. He could only stand there, looking bad, looking sick, waiting to see what she would say. Would she speak of his “extraordinary soul dressed in the clothes of the humble”? Would she speak of “pillars of goodness”? But all she said, again, was “Look at you.”

  “Yes, look at me,” he finally managed. “I look like shit, I know that, Trish.”

  “It’s just that you had such nice hair,” she said before she could stop herself. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost my hair. . . .” And here her voice dropped off, as if she’d just realized this was a terrible thing to say to someone. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” she tried desperately.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “You know, there are all these incredible drugs now, aren’t there? Those protease inhibitors? My cousin Mitchell takes them around the clock. You can live a full life, you can.”

  He stared at her, letting the freezer door fall shut with a sucking sound. “What?” he said.

  “With AIDS,” she explained.

  “Trish, who said I had AIDS?”

  She began to fidget with her groceries, moving them from arm to arm. “They said you were sick. In the office. Obviously. Tom came in, and he said you were sick, and that we could send you cards and so forth. I hope you got them. And I guess I just assumed you were one of those really late cases. Oh, God, I am mortified. You mean, you don’t have AIDS, Dashiell?”

  Several seconds passed before he could answer her. “No, just plain old Hodgkin’s disease,” he said. “It’s totally unrelated to my faggotiness.” His voice came out louder and harsher than he’d meant it to be. So all of them at Wyman’s lively, buzzing, round-the-clock downtown campaign office thought that he, Dashiell Mellow, was sick with AIDS, and this misunderstanding was simply because he was gay. Robert Wyman himself probably thought Dashiell had AIDS. Tom hadn’t disabused them of this fact because he probably didn’t know that this was what they thought. These days everyone used shorthand and discreet terminology: Dashiell was “sick.” He was “being treated.” He would be “out for a while.” In the world of Republican politics, a gay man with a sickness was apparently a gay man with AIDS, and though he’d never known this before, now he did.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Trish Leggett tried, and she seemed so distraught that she was actually crying. Jesus Christ, another crying woman! He couldn’t stand to see the brightness of her eyes or hear the new vibrato that rippled through her speaking voice; it reminded him of his mother, which wasn’t fair and made him seem suspiciously misogynist, he knew, as though he thought all women were the same.

  “Look, I’ve got to go,” was all he’d give her, and he turned around and carried his armful of groceries to the counter, dumping it onto the belt with a vengeance. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. People would think what they wanted; you couldn’t control them, couldn’t make them see you the way you needed to be seen. I have no control, he thought, and he paid with a shaking hand and got out of Store 24 as fast as he could, away from that crying woman who would write up a storm of speeches and eventually be invited to work in the White House, while Dashiell would languish at home with his bald head and his frozen soups and a body that was studded with darkness and uncertainty.

  Chapter Six

  EVERY FALL, when Professor Rosalyn Mellow taught Introduction to Human Sexuality in a large, sloping room filled with freshmen, she couldn’t help but be reminded of the auditoriums that she and Paul used to fill. There had been a certain thrill and tang then, too, as though the entire room of two hundred and fifty people had wished they could all leave together and go someplace dark to engage in mass sex. Couples sat close together, arms entwined, listening, talking back, wanting to find a way in.

  But now it was a different world, a different life entirely. At age sixty-seven, Roz Mellow had a smudged but still definitive sexuality about her. Although technically she was a grandmother, Roz wasn’t someone who looked grandmotherly-comical teaching the ways of the flesh. Her own body was rounder and more opulent, if of course more fallen than when she was young, and her hair, which had lost some of its luster over time, now bore expensive, dark color that gave it the look of highly polished Colonial furniture. Roz still spent money on her clothes, too, though each winter the punitive upstate weather made it pointless for anyone to dress well, for you were always forced to zip up into some enormous down cocoon if you wanted to step outside your door. And when you came indoors again, that coat would have created such a field of static on the surface of your clothes that all fabrics clung and pulled on you, and your hair, beneath its Nanook hood or hat, stood in discrete strands away from your head. Still, Roz tried as best she could to look good, and she certainly was one of the more attractive faculty members at Skidmore College—an older woman with beautiful milky skin, lovely dark red hair, and a generous body that looked like it would be warm to the touch.

  Several male colleagues in the Psych department desired her, and the fact that once, twenty-eight years earlier, she had coauthored an international best-seller that featured graphic illustrations of her making love with her husband at the time added to the
appeal. But over the years, as she’d stayed on at Skidmore and made a life for herself in this college town, with its summer ballet season and racetrack crowd, attending faculty meetings and bringing hummus and pita points to potluck dinners for the outgoing department chairman, and once even taking a perilous toboggan ride down a hill of ice with her students, there was a grudging acceptance of her as someone who was, if not exactly like everyone else, then at least was of them. Always, there would be a certain amount of bitterness in her midst, for Roz Mellow had no doctorate or even a master’s, just her ancient, irrelevant undergraduate degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, while the rest of them had worked slavishly for their PhDs and had then desperately grasped for available teaching jobs. Yes, yes, they knew; it was her “field work” that had landed her this easy job and then greased the way to tenure; it was her 1970s sexual pioneering that had brought her from the noise and clatter of that era to here, a perfectly nice liberal arts college thirty minutes north of Albany along the Hudson River. She had been around while a majority of them had not, but it all leveled out in the end. Both she and they had ended up doing their grocery shopping at the Foodtown off I-87, salting their driveways each winter, and sitting, as they were all doing right now, around a long rectangular table for the Friday afternoon faculty meeting, yawning discreetly as the minutes from last week’s meeting were read.

  The fact that Roz had been around was more significant to her at this point than it was to them. She couldn’t forget about her prior life, though it had collapsed; she had collapsed it, in fact, had taken a pin and stuck it in. Still it occupied her mind, especially at moments like this one, when she was both so antsy and so anguished that she feared she might fall face-forward onto the table with a loud hollow sound and a quiet whimper. The personal problems that preoccupied her were vast, and she wished more than anything that she could go outside into the frozen air and have a smoke. That would make her feel better. She wished she could be anywhere but here.

  Today, the acting chairman of the department, Dr. Deanna Stegman, was talking about the new Computer Learning Center on the second floor of the revamped library, and how all faculty members were required to take an evening course there in order to help acquaint their students with the software they would be using to help them with statistics and graphing.

  “And I mean all of you,” Stegman said meaningfully, looking around the room, trying not to stop at any one person in a duck-duck-goose way, though really, everyone understood that this last comment was for the benefit of Roz Mellow. The comment meant: Even if your job description has you standing at a podium each fall saying “fellatio” and “cunnilingus” without blinking, and also has you inching a Trojan-Enz with spermicide onto a Chiquita banana, don’t think that you’re exempt. Because you’re not. You’re one of us now. You’re not special anymore.

  Simon Post raised a hand. “I’d like to say, Deanna, that I think it’s a really good idea. Some of us only think we’re computer literate, when in fact our seven year olds know more about writing code and about Linux than we do.”

  “Speak for yourself, Post,” said Donald Mosher, and all the academic psychologists and statisticians laughed a little, though it wasn’t funny at all; they were just high on the monster box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts that the department secretary, Celeste, had placed in the center of the table. The only doughnuts left in the box were two slightly misshapen plains. The surface was dotted with crumbs, as was Donald Mosher’s thick brush of a mustache. Even Roz had eaten a jelly doughnut, released briefly from her terror about Dashiell and her anger at Paul by the doughnut’s predictable scent and its squirt of sweetness and pectin.

  Finally it was 4 P.M., time for the meeting to end, even though legitimately it could have ended half an hour earlier. The faculty drifted out into the hall, and Roz walked with her one close friend here, a Southerner of fifty-eight named Constance Coffey, who specialized in forensic psychology. Haunted-looking students in Gothwear left over from high school often clustered around Constance’s office to show her their papers on the tragedy at Columbine and what it said about nihilism and young people today. Young people today, Constance had once complained to Roz, slightly drunk on Saratoga Slings at a Christmas party, had no rights to the word “nihilism.” Unlike the youth of the ’60s, these kids hadn’t earned it. They knew nothing about history, Constance railed; they knew very little about anything.

  “Roz, how is Dashiell?” Constance asked now as they headed outside into the cold. “I’ve been so concerned.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Roz told her friend. “Doing all right, I suppose, but he doesn’t want any of us there.” She felt as though she might cry from talking about it, saying the words aloud. “He’s always been like that. At least he talks to me, unlike my oldest, so I guess I should be grateful.” She sighed and clutched herself tighter in the wind.

  “He still needs you,” said Constance. “It doesn’t matter what he says.”

  “Well, I doubt that. But thank you for saying it,” said Roz, and she began to feel irritated with Constance, who didn’t know Dash, who didn’t know what it was like inside the Mellow family.

  “Is your ex-husband involved with the whole medical situation?” Constance asked. They were headed down the path to the parking lot now; the tall lights had just come on, pale violet in the deepening afternoon.

  “Yes,” Roz said. “That’s not one of his failings.”

  Constance looked at her for a moment. “You’re still angry with him about the book thing?”

  Roz nodded. “He still refuses to let it be published. He just wants to hurt me, Con, because I was the one who left him. If it was the other way around, I guess he’d still have his pride or something. But I mean, can you believe it? We’re talking about something that happened twenty-some-odd years ago! Does it never end? Is it going to follow me to the grave? And pardon me, but he’s remarried, too. Why hold a grudge so long, when the reissue would benefit both of us? Why not just grow up?”

  Constance shook her head in sympathy. “It was a landmark, that book of yours. My ex-husband and I practically got twin hernias trying some of those positions. And that one you made up, the position that people were supposed to try after they had a fight?”

  “‘Electric Forgiveness.’”

  “Yes, yes, that’s it!”

  “Whenever I hear that name we came up with,” said Roz, “I want to hide.”

  “It was the seventies!” cried Constance. “Anyway, I guess we did it wrong or something, because—oh, this is so graphic—he kept popping right out! It was like a cork in a bottle.” Both women started to laugh. “What you did was important, Roz,” Constance went on. “That kind of sexual openness and tenderness about the whole thing. Nothing’s tender now. No, wait, that’s not entirely true. I look around the campus and I see these eighteen-year-old boys and girls leaning into each other like saplings. Needing each other. Inhaling each other. And that’s tender. That’s unspoiled. I want to say to them, ‘Oh, you poor puppies, make love now like there’s no tomorrow. Because soon enough you’re going to see the grotesquerie and . . . and . . . the leeringness of the world.’ I know that’s not a word, but you know what I mean. God, Roz, the cheapness of everything! Everything’s a quick feel. Nothing’s hidden. The culture is so fucking ugly.” She took a ragged breath. “Sorry for my raging diatribe,” she said. “I was lecturing for an hour and a half this afternoon. I can’t seem to stop. But I just want you to know how important your book was. You should make your ex-husband change his mind.” The two women had reached the parking lot, where their ice-crackled cars sat side by side in coveted spots.

  “I can’t. He won’t,” said Roz. “I sent my oldest son Michael down there to convince him, and then Dash got sick and the whole conversation got diverted, of course.”

  “Look, at least you’ve got Jack,” tried Constance.

  “Yes, at least I’ve got Jack. He’s been home cooking one of his soups today.”

>   “His soups are excellent. I remember he made one with curry once. Senegalese chicken. In many ways you’re a very lucky person,” Constance said. “I’ve often thought that about you. That you’re blessed. And I still do.”

  “Why exactly am I blessed?” Roz asked sharply. “My son has cancer, Constance, he’s very sick.”

  Constance flushed. “I’m sorry, Roz, I didn’t mean to be cavalier. I only meant because you have Jack. He’s such a good guy.” She shoved her hands deep into her coat pockets and cast her eyes downward.

  “Oh, Con, I didn’t mean to snap at you,” said Roz. “I know what you meant. I’m just tightly wound. I’m basically falling apart here.” Impulsively she put her arms around her friend.

  Constance Coffey was divorced and somewhat pummeled by life. Her ex-husband had been a loudmouth from the Political Science department who embarrassed her at faculty parties, and it was her distinct pleasure that he had been denied tenure. But a single woman in a college town in upstate New York did not have many chances of meeting someone new. It was cold all winter, and you would sleep alone in your bed and perhaps lightly touch your own body in the morning before you had to get up and teach a class on homicidal personality types to your wild and sexual students. Constance had a tragic aspect to her, Roz felt, although it was entirely possible that this was only projection. It was just that Roz couldn’t imagine a life without being touched. Not just a sexual touch; not even primarily a sexual touch. Just some kind of touching.

  “Good-bye,” the women sang out to each other in the parking lot. Good-bye, have a good weekend, enjoy the soup, try to get some rest, let’s get together next week for drinks at the Parting Glass; let’s drink to the new semester and to the defeat of the war-mongering president in the next election. They climbed into their cars and closed the doors with synchronous thumps, and then left the lot at separate exits and headed to their homes, one dark, one all lit up.