Michael glanced over at Holly; her fair, dotted skin was now universally flushed red—even the tips of her ears seemed to be aflame. She had a flexible, gymnastic body, and it was possible for him to imagine her arching up on a bed in a year or two, being fucked by a faceless boy in some spectacularly gymnastic way. But what could it possibly feel like to be fucked? He was incapable of imagining it, for you had to see yourself as hollow, receptive, and he was neither of these things. His sister’s image tenaciously stayed with him now. No. No. Stop. Don’t think about her like that, Michael thought.
The page had been turned during his brief, dreamy lapse, and now the mother and father were doing something involving scarves attached to the mother’s wrists and ankles.
“They should be lovingly tied,” read the prose, and as the children stared at the illustration, Dashiell thought: Oh no, my mom’s being . . . ostracized!
All the children imagined the parents on a bed that had been set up in that New York City studio where they’d gone a couple of times a week over a period of months, “to work with the artist,” they’d said, and none of the children had ever inquired as to exactly what that work entailed. Instead, they had often just looked up, bored and unconcerned, and let themselves be kissed good-bye. They’d said yes, we’ll take care of lunch; yes, we know the Rinzlers’ number in an emergency; yes yes, we’ll be fine. And then they’d returned to their own states of self-absorption. But if they’d known then what they knew now, would they have tried to stop the parents? Maybe they could have barred the front door, keeping the parents captive in the house. Maybe they could have said, Don’t do this, for it will change everything.
And it did change everything eventually, it did.
But for now, in the first flush of the book’s grand success, its quick leap from money-maker to phenomenon, the parents were without either prescience or remorse. They were a good-looking woman and man in excellent shape for ages thirty-nine and forty, respectively. The father’s unruly dark hair and beard gave him a slightly Satanic but artistic look, though in fact he was quite gentle and hardly an artist. He was thoughtful and playful and an excellent listener. He nodded his head slowly while the children talked, and he stroked his beard, and he remembered the names of their teachers. All told, he was an inordinately kind father who made banana pancakes on Sundays and taught his children how to sing “Norwegian Wood” in Pig Latin and how to whistle using two fingers. He wore turtlenecks, particularly black ones, and a thick, hand-tooled leather belt with a large square buckle of the sort you might find on a Pilgrim’s shoe. While he loved his children thoroughly and sentimentally, this was nothing compared with the way he loved his wife, and all the children knew it, for the force of it was so strong that everyone could feel it as it traveled the house.
“Your mother,” their father said once as they all sat at dinner in a seafood restaurant, “even looks incredible in a lobster bib. Just look at her. Winner of Ms. Sexy Lobster Bib of 1972.”
“Oh, stop it now, you’re being stupid,” she said, waving a hand, her mouth bright with butter, as if to highlight this part of her that was particularly erotic to him. But he would never be able to pick a particular part; as far as he was concerned, the whole thing just worked.
It wasn’t that the children felt ignored, for their father did turn his attention to them, too, and their mother never seemed entirely comfortable inside their father’s gaze. At times she seemed as though she were irritated and trying to flutter away. It was a mating dance the two of them did: the worship followed by the pleased, proud, squirming response.
“Look at your mother,” he instructed them. “See how graceful she is with a pair of chopsticks.” Or “Look at your mother. She is an amazing woman.” Or “Look at your mother. She is the most interesting person I’ve ever known.”
So they looked. They looked across restaurant tables, across supermarket aisles, across the den at night, and across the kitchen, where their mother stood at the sink, tearing apart a head of lettuce under a column of water. Her deep red hair, pale skin, and large breasts rendered her vulnerable, motherly, welcoming, but also, apparently, seriously desirable. She was louder than he was, moodier and more dramatic, prone to tears that filled her blue eyes and made them look luminous. Her nose grew red quickly when she cried, complementing her hair, giving her the look of a fetching drunken Irishwoman with a deep, guarded secret.
“I know your father gets carried away,” their mother sometimes said to them when he was not around. “But he’s a very expressive man, which is a pretty unusual thing.”
Certainly none of their friends’ parents seemed to be so actively in love with each other. Most mothers and fathers coexisted like boarders in a rooming house, sharing the same space, trying not to aggravate each other, but essentially living separate lives, one involved with spreadsheets and the home office, the other involved with the children. The Mellows were different, and the children had long ago recognized this with a certain pride and unhappiness.
Their parents exercised every day at a time when exercise was not yet in fashion, performing the Canadian Royal Air Force’s recommended count of sit-ups and push-ups each morning, keeping their abdomens from softening to that dreaded pocked-dough consistency that indicated surrender. Here, they were flaunting their self-preservation. In one drawing, their mother—“the woman,” the children preferred to think of her—crouched on the bed, slightly bored, angling her head back as though to see what all the fuss was behind her, what “the man” was doing, as though she really had no idea, as though he might be back there folding a map. In another, she sat above him with her head raised, the segments of her throat carefully delineated by John Sunstein, who several years earlier had been the most stellar student his teacher had ever seen in his anatomical drawing class at the Cooper Union School of Art. The mother’s eyes were shut, ostensibly because the pleasure was simply too great to absorb with them open, or perhaps because she knew her children would soon be seeing this picture, and she didn’t really want to make eye contact with them.
“This can’t be happening,” Holly said as she flipped through.
“Well, it is,” said Michael. “Obviously. So deal with it.” Immediately he was sorry for the tone he’d taken with the sister whose trust and love he needed now even more than usual. He’d been the one to cause her to need to deal with it, though she would have had to deal with it on her own anyway. There was no way that she would have allowed the book to stay unread in that house. Like him, she would have had to know.
“I am dealing. Obviously. But are they totally sick? Whose parents do this?” she asked.
“Ours,” he said. He needed to seem slightly unaffected now. He needed to seem casual, as though he wasn’t to blame for having seen it, and, even more to the point, for having pushed it on the others.
All the action in the drawings seemed to take place during the daytime, the white pages serving as a sunlit or floodlit background. This was no bout of nighttime fucking; in the nighttime, specifics would likely be lost. Someone might touch someone else and the sensation would be wonderful but fleeting, and that combination of pressure and exactness could never be replicated. But on white paper, the white sheets of a bed let nothing be lost. A man’s hand found a woman’s nipple in just such a way, the thumb and index finger cradling it the way a photographer might reduce a shot to its essentials, leaving everything extraneous out of the circle. A woman pushed herself against a man, the surfaces of their bodies forming some kind of human grassland.
The man and woman in Pleasuring were presentable, very much so, though everything they enacted—every movement, every finger insinuating itself into folds, every cock tip, every hand, foot, abdomen, spine, opening, clavicle, swirl of hair, dew-bead of sweat, mouth pushing into giving flesh, silent scream, garter, handcuff, flowing purple scarf, stiletto heel on naked leg—was a new source of astonishment to their children, a series of faster and faster ball-peen hammer strikes, not all of them unpleasurable,
some of them painful in the exquisite way that lifting the crisp little edge of a knee-scab is painful, and some of them arousing, though the younger children didn’t even know they were aroused, for the sensation hadn’t been defined for them yet.
The younger ones just felt ramped-up, heightened, the way they felt when they chased someone across the blacktop playground at school, or when they stayed awake until midnight on New Year’s, or when they swam all day in the water at Jones Beach and then emerged, dripping, lips blue and scalps burning, inevitably wanting more, though their mother and father always told them Enough.
None of the four children could stop looking at the book; they had all been given orchestra seats for the primal scene, and now the heavy maroon curtain had gone up on the mysteries of love, which no child on earth has the privilege or the right to see.
Can I try that with Adam Selig? Holly wanted to know.
She would find out the answer sooner than she might have imagined.
God, I hate them, thought Michael.
He would learn to keep it in.
If I grab the book and take it to the Wontauket dump, will it disappear? thought Dashiell.
Sorry, no. The book would have many lives over the years. Nothing could kill it.
I will live a life alone, with my trolls, thought Claudia.
For a long time, some modified version of that vow would be true.
For this is what they do in bed, the children now knew. This is why the door gets locked sometimes at night. This is who your parents are, this is why you’re not allowed in, this is who the world suddenly knows them as, this is what it’s like to be human, to want, to be fully grown in America in 1975, to be in possession of body parts that move and react individually and startlingly; this is what it’s like to be them, to be your parents, so don’t turn away, keep your eyes popped wide, all four of you Mellow children, even the youngest one, six years old and overwhelmed with excitement and horror, for it’s already too late now, the pictures may be pen and ink but they’re anything but soft, and they will stay with you always, like that chipmunk in the yard that was frizzled in death and yet still clinging to a wire, for this is what it’s like to cling to each other, a man and woman holding on tight, this is what it’s like to be them, this is what it’s like, and the most unbelievable part of it is that one day, this is what it will be like to be you.
Chapter Two
SEXUAL UNHAPPINESS was its own city, with windows blazing long into the night, and inside them, men and women delicately or tediously or angrily sat up in bed and discussed what had gone wrong, who was to blame, how to “get back on track,” whether to try again tonight or just to give in to how tired they felt, how beaten down. Inside one of those windows, on the twenty-third floor of a high-rise fortress on Amsterdam Avenue, Michael Mellow was making love with Thea Herlihy, his girlfriend of two years. At age forty-one, he was an ardent, focused man, and though he was putting all his effort into it, this bout of sex was interminable. He just could not finish. Still, Michael felt the need to continue, to wear them both out with his diligence, sanding them down to a pile of fine shavings, a pyramid of human dust, before he could admit that once again he had failed at this simplest of human tasks.
It wasn’t his fault, he knew; it was the antidepressant he’d been taking, and he supposed he ought to switch to another one, but it took time for a new drug to build up in your blood, and he couldn’t bear the idea of returning to that earlier state of gloom. He had gone on his first antidepressant six months earlier, having become distracted at work, ineffably worried in the quiet, artful offices of Dimension D-Net. Though Michael Mellow was considered a self-effacing but authentic software genius there, he had found himself suddenly and surprisingly indifferent to the siren-song of the desktop monitor and the oval maple lake of the conference-room table. Indiscriminate images floated through his head, all of them given equal, anxious weight: Islamic terrorists blowing up the entire city; a gaffe he’d made at lunch by making fun of Scientology, when it turned out an important investor at the table was a longtime follower.
At the recommendation of a friend, Michael went to see a psychopharm guy named Snell who prescribed an SSRI that flushed his brain with the serotonin for which it begged. But that first drug had left him feeling coked up and manic in the middle of the night when he was supposed to sleep. He’d go online at 2 A.M. and stay for hours, sending out emails to his brother up in Providence, his younger sister in her walk-up in the East Village, his mother in her house upstate in Saratoga Springs, his father in the condo in Florida, and even his needy coworker Rufus, who lived God knew where, probably under the desk in his office, and who wrote right back to him regardless of what time it was.
Snell switched Michael to a new drug, whose name was Endeva, a disturbing name that was almost a word but not quite. The near-word implied that if you took this drug, you would start to become involved in “endeavors.” Or, at the very least, “endevas.” The latest generation of antidepressants had names that sounded like cars, like things you would want to be inside. What would happen, Michael wondered, when they ran out of all the hopeful, expensive names? What would they name the next generation of SSRIs? Torpitor? Minion? Fazzle? Three months into Endeva, life did in fact have meaning once again, but sex lacked an ending. He felt ashamed each time this happened, as though he’d been caught cheating on a test or found to possess the remnant of a dorsal fin.
Michael hovered above Thea now, looking down at her in the dim light of the halogen lamp whose switch he’d earlier nudged with his toe so it gave the room a warm, jack-o’-lantern kind of light, something conducive to love, and, he hoped, to orgasm. For the irony of the situation hadn’t been lost on him: For the past month or so, he, Michael Mellow, the son of those forever-famous sex Mellows, couldn’t finish what he’d begun, couldn’t finish the sex act, couldn’t, to put it bluntly, have an orgasm, a fact that both embarrassed him and made him feel reflexively ironic. Neither of those states was any good; embarrassment froze you over, and irony only gave you a running commentary, a little soft-shoe patter to accompany your failures and make you feel that somehow they didn’t matter, even when they did.
And this one did. In the pumpkin light of the bedroom, angled into Thea Herlihy, he saw that her arms were now thrown above her head, as if in surrender, her fingers digging into the dough of a goose-down pillow. As he pushed in and then receded and pushed in again, he felt waves of excitement that rose and fell each time his head met the slate gray cushion of the headboard, thudding against it like a boxer doing rhythmic practice feints into a sandbag. “Nnng,” he heard himself say, and was self-conscious about the sound of his voice in this sparse, modern bedroom, which always seemed to echo during arguments or sex. “Nnng,” he kept saying. It sounded like a Vietnamese name: no vowels.
Thea’s eyes fluttered open and then shut. She was discreetly checking, he realized, to see how close he was, and whether he was possibly going to finish up at any time in the near future. She didn’t want him to see that she was doing this, but it was too late, he’d already seen, and now their eyes met in an awful moment of awareness that momentarily broke the rhythm, stopping it for a second like a skipped heartbeat. Now neither of them knew what to do, how to proceed. Think, he told himself, think.
“You okay down there?” he asked, and tried out a smile.
“Yup. You okay up there?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m just being leisurely. Taking a little stroll.”
He stroked Thea’s forehead, pushing back a few strands of hair that had fallen in her eyes. She looked preoccupied, he suddenly saw, but as if in a sudden change of plans, she drew him down to her and kissed his mouth hard, and then everything started up again. In a few moments Thea made her own quiet noises low in her throat and Michael had to wonder whether this was caused by arousal, or else simply done in order to speed up the process, like a growth hormone dropped in so that he would become more excited and finish already, and this could be
over with, and they could lie side by side and talk about work, and her rehearsals, and his travel itinerary for tomorrow, and the latest news from their friends and from the world at large, which was what Thea really seemed to want to do.
It had been going on too long tonight, as had been the case for weeks now. At first, this evening, they’d had a good dinner that they’d cooked together in their miniature New York kitchen, using ingredients that Thea had picked up at Fairway on her way home from the theatre: tagliatelle, olive oil, slightly bruised basil, pecorino. They stood shoulder to shoulder, hands moving in bowls and drawers, and as they did, they sang that ancient Carly Simon and James Taylor duet “Mockingbird,” his voice so deep, hers so sweetly and correspondingly high.
“Mock,” he sang.
“Yeah.”
“ing.”
“Yeah.”
“bird.”
“Yeah.”
And on and on. He was pleased she knew the song, for she was twenty-eight years old and it was well before her time. It was slightly before his time, too, and he’d had contempt for easy-listening songs like that back when he was younger, but who knew that one day he’d be standing in a tiny kitchen making dinner with his girlfriend, and he’d want some quick and snappy thing to sing with her, and it wouldn’t turn out to be by Pink Floyd or Yes or any of the other bands he’d studied with Talmudic intensity when he was a boy, and whose songs he sang only when he was positive he was alone.
During dinner in the dining alcove, looking out across the avenue and the Hudson River and the distant strand of lights, eating off the lemon-colored plates they’d picked out when they first moved in together, Michael and Thea were entirely without tension. And even later, after he’d been online for a little while—first with his sister Claudia and then with Rufus from the office—he was still content. When they finally got into bed at 10:30, both of their bodies were the right temperature and texture, easily made responsive and excited. After kissing and touching and tumbling around a little, Michael ran a hand between Thea’s legs and she reacted in her usual way, the contemplative quiet first, then a kind of shivering, and it was all good, it was all exciting, and she tightened both legs around his hand and craned her neck away from him, toward the window, as though she were shy and didn’t want him to see her face as it contorted with its thrust-forward F.D.R. jaw.