The Uncoupling

  Robby Lang was a good person, not a cruel one, and he could not keep flirting with another woman in the presence of his wife. After work that day, he came to Dory in the den at home and said, “About us.” She looked at him, waiting. “I was thinking, maybe a bath together. Isn’t that what they write about in those women’s magazines you sometimes bring into the house?”

  Surreptitiously Dory had been reading a couple of magazines for guidance. Lately at Cue Foods all the magazines seemed to feature something on the cover about the topic that was now relevant to her. “Midlife Marriage Blues,” they announced. “Perk Up the Marital Bed.” Or, “Why Can’t I Sleep with My Husband? One Woman’s All-Too-Common Story.”

  She had dropped them onto the moving belt at checkout, but it wasn’t as if the articles ever had much that was new to say. There was no such thing as female Viagra, at least not yet. One drug had seemed very promising, but finally it was found to cause crushing headaches and gastric explosions. Everyone knew that with men, the foul-up often seemed to exist in the mechanics; with women, it more often lay in desire, that inscrutable thing. Sexual studies had been done recently, one magazine said, which revealed that men and women were “different.” Men, according to this magazine, could masturbate forever to an ancient swimsuit picture of the now-dead Farrah Fawcett; but women needed something more. If Farrah Fawcett were a dark-eyed, well-built man, and he reached out from that picture and said, “I would like to spend a lazy, committed day with you, just the two of us,” then women could masturbate to it forever too.

  Oh, but wait! Another article insisted this wasn’t true at all. Women didn’t only want commitment, didn’t only want relationships. Apparently, data had been collected that showed the plasticity of women’s sexual desire. Female subjects had been hooked up with electrodes and tiny cameras on their vaginal walls (They would have to be tiny, Dory thought—yet the articles always mentioned their tininess) and shown footage of bears humping each other, and cowgirl lesbians making out, and an old man eating chocolate fondue. And in each instance, arousal took place. It made no sense; there was no way to explain it all.

  The magazine articles generally ended with the same nebulous kind of line about how a desire-enhancing drug for women without serious side effects was still in the “development stages.” Brain scientists and therapists had to act as though they knew how to treat or think about women who had suddenly risen up from long, happy relationships and inexplicably said no. Women who suddenly felt their disappointment, or their rage, or their ambivalence, or their passivity, or their age, or just the withdrawal from love that biology and evolution and chemicals and male inadequacy and female criticism had yet to explain. No one ever speculated that perhaps at least some of them were under some kind of spell.

  A few of the articles, adopting a hopeful tone even after a depressing array of statistics, suggested that women and their partners might take a bath together. So the night after Robby mentioned it, Dory hesitantly ran a bath and poured in a long squeeze of vanilla-verbena-scented oil, holding the bottle upside down for a protracted moment like syrup over pancakes. She and Robby stepped into the water together, but they were like two big dogs in the tub, and the silky, glistening water rose up quickly, and when they lowered themselves they had to be careful. Their knees banged together; Dory could barely get traction, and her body made a terrible flatulence sound along the bottom of the tub. She grabbed Robby’s leg to steady herself.

  “Oof,” Dory said, her hand paddling water. They laughed at how awkward this was, how ludicrous. Not as ludicrous as The Game of Want, but ludicrous enough. Finally they found a way to lie still, and all was calm, with steam rising up around them, and they both appreciated the comical, tender attempt.

  The water was losing its heat; when the Langs finally stood up, their bodies got chilly fast, and they shivered and tossed each other big towels, and Dory ended up going downstairs in a robe, wet-headed, then microwaving some canned tomato soup, which they ate while watching an episode of that British TV show, The Chief-Inspector Garrick Mysteries, in bed with trays in front of them like invalids. They put the trays aside, the soup cooling in the bowl the way the water had cooled rapidly in the bath. They shut off the light and he kissed her; he smelled of verbena, and his mouth tasted like tomato and tin. They smelled and tasted exactly the same.

  Dory wanted to see if she had lost everything she’d ever felt for him. She thought of Leanne suddenly needing to break off her relationship with all three of those men, chop chop chop, and though of course Leanne had been in a very different situation from Dory, maybe there was a similarity. Both women, in different ways, had just had enough. Damp-headed, soup-flavored, trying hard, Dory opened her husband’s robe.

  “Whoa,” he said. “What’s this?”

  Dory touched his penis lightly, like someone tapping a microphone ; his “penus,” as the spam-senders would have spelled it. She was jabbering away inside her head. Did sex need to take place in the absence of thought? Was that the way it had always been for her? Dory tried to remember all those times when they had simply leaped on each other like pixies, like animals in a nature documentary, like lovers. They had just done it. Their minds had needed to be neither full nor empty.

  She had been too ambitious tonight. Nothing was going to happen between them because she still didn’t want it to. She let go of him, and eventually they moved away from each other, silent, grim. In the evenings from then on, Robby sat sadly in his chair in the den and read for marathon stretches; he wrote more comments than usual on his students’ papers. (“Mr. L left me a manifesto,” one boy remarked to a friend in the school corridor, looking at the sheaf of handwritten notes on his paper called “The Great Gatsby: Good and Evil in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Famous Fiction Novel.”) He sat curved before his laptop for longer periods of time, and when she called to him, he often didn’t seem to hear. Robby was grieving, but Dory wouldn’t come around.

  Then one day she noticed that he just couldn’t seem to sustain this level of unhappiness. He wasn’t like Gavin McCleary, who, ever since the night of the potluck, had become a little unhinged. More than once McCleary stood up before an assembly and started to speak, then appeared to lose his way. “I can’t remember where I was going with this,” he explained to the students. “It doesn’t matter. You can all leave early.” Something was not right with the principal, people said, but almost no one knew what it was. One day, side by side at the urinals in the faculty men’s room, the principal said to Dave Boyd, “I’m not going to last the year, Dave.” He refused to elaborate. He haunted the hall outside Leanne’s basement office, leaving her pleading notes under the door.

  Robby wasn’t like that, and he also wasn’t like Malcolm Bean, the foreign-car dealer, who pointedly roared in his sports car around the perimeter of Leanne Bannerjee’s condo, making his unhappy presence known. Carlos Miranda, the bartender, had seemed to take the loss of Leanne in stride; women were always flirting with Carlos, and besides, he was young. The principal was a wreck, and the car dealer was persistent. Robby was certainly suffering, but Dory hadn’t ended the whole relationship, just the physical aspect. Finally he started to accept the way their marriage was now. The Langs got into bed each night and lay side by side, not talking about whether or not Dory would sleep with him tonight or on any night in the near future, but instead talking about their days in the same old way that they used to. “What did you do and who did you see?” she asked him, and he told her about his classes, his best students, his worst ones. Eli Heller fired up the whole classroom, Robby said. “He’s got life in him. Curiosity.”

  “Curiosity about Willa,” Dory said. “Which is evidently being satisfied.”

  “You sound a little something about that. Ambivalent.”

  “I’m not. I think they’re good for each other, I do. Since they’ve been seeing each other, don’t you think she’s more . . . I don’t know how to say this.”

  “Yes, you do. Interesting.”

&nbs
p; “Interesting, yeah,” Dory said. Sex, or love, or a combination of the two, had brought their daughter into herself. Willa had been tentative before, drifting. But now she was in love with a boy; she was in the school play; she was rising.

  “Now you tell me some things,” Robby said, arranging his pillows and leaning back, and she talked to him gently about the continuing saga of Booxmartz-plagiarizing Jen Heplauer and her mother. Dory talked and talked, trying to make up for what she had taken away from them, and her voice was like a lullaby.

  The Langs were alone together more than ever lately, for on weekends Willa spent all her time with Eli, and on weekdays after school she went to rehearsals for Lysistrata. The house was theirs now. One afternoon in the middle of winter, Robby and Dory drove home together as they usually did. Snow had fallen while they’d been inside the building, and the best of the snowfall, the clean part, the majesty, had come and gone quickly. Salt trucks must have appeared on Tam o’ Shanter at some point, depositing their load of broken crystal, turning the snow and gravel and dirt into a pinky-beige meal that was flattened and churned by rollers by the time the Langs were through for the day. It was four P.M. and the day looked unbeautiful, but they didn’t mind, because all they wanted now was to be home.

  On their doorstep lay a package, medium-sized and plain. Dory looked at it as she stamped on the mat. Ice and salt flew off her shoes like dull sparks. “Another board game,” she said.

  “No.”

  Inside the house, Robby stood at the kitchen table and opened the package. Soon a folded piece of cloth was revealed, the yellow of a child’s raincoat. “What are you doing?” she asked as the enormous bolt of cloth filled the kitchen. Robby placed a corner of it over her head and pulled; she popped through a slit in the fabric, then he worked his own head through a second slit. Together they stood in the kitchen with a field-sized garment all around them, and Dory looked at the packing label, which read “The Cumfy.” She recalled that they’d recently seen an ad for this on television. They had been watching the ArtFlick channel, which was showing a wrenching Italian film that took place in the aftermath of World War II. Townspeople scavenged through a broken landscape; a man quietly called out, “Giovanna, Giovanna . . .”

  Then the commercial had come on, and, without context or any attempt at appropriateness, there was the Cumfy—part comforter, part two-person bathrobe—the whole item postmodern in that it had been designed to be worn by couples as they watched television. The actors in the commercial looked old, having been chosen for their oldness—or anyway, the first couple did. They were retirees; dry climates beckoned out their window. The second couple appeared to be around the Langs’ age—forty or so—an age at which you are still questing and improving, still forward-looking, but even so, an age when one thing might happen, or another. You might laugh at the Cumfy, or you might wear it.

  “I know it’s ugly,” Robby said in the kitchen, “but no one else will see us.”

  He had bought it because of Dory and what she had done to them. He was trying to adapt to this new state that neither of them really understood. He’d given up trying to persuade her back to him; no matter what he’d done, he’d failed. So maybe he wouldn’t try anything anymore. But maybe, too, he now thought he had permission to go farther without her. Maybe he would quietly become attached to another woman, someone much more appropriate than Abby Means. A learning specialist, say, who came into the district a few times a week. She and Robby would fall in love, and when Dory wept in protest, he would remind her that he had tried everything.

  Still she would say, “There must be something else,” for how terrible it was to give up a good and loving marriage because of sex. Because of no sex. Many people stayed married forever in low-sex or no-sex marriages. Look around Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Dory thought, and you could find teachers who had let sex disintegrate long ago, and who thought: good riddance. Just look at Eleanor Roosevelt herself. Dory had once read a biography of that First Lady (people often gave you such a book if you happened to teach at Elro, and they thought they were the only person ever to do so). Eleanor and Franklin had had six children together, but apparently Eleanor had once described sex with her husband as “an ordeal to be borne.”

  But the Langs had always been well matched, and suddenly, after the spell came and enchanted her, they weren’t. He was entitled to have a physical, sexual life. He deserved it, and Dory knew he would want it, and that he would seek it out and find it fairly easily, too, even though he loved her and had never had any plans for that to change. Humans were adaptive. They sought out what they needed. She was certain of all of this, and now she knew they were in danger, and she wanted to cry.

  In English class the Langs both made the kids look everywhere for symbols. They battered them with imagery, metaphor, insistence that they scour a text for something sweeping and big rather than literal and small. Robby Lang didn’t really see the Cumfy as a metaphor for what they’d become. To him, this item was simply what it had been advertised as: a blanket and a robe all in one. He had bought it because they were now in a period of life in which they could use it. They were seeking warmth from someplace other than each other.

  Robby and Dory turned on the TV and got themselves under the thing.

  9.

  You’ve really let yourself go, haven’t you?”

  As soon as Ed Cutler spoke these words to his wife, she knew he could never unspeak them. They were like the comments that kids wrote on walls and boards over the Internet: all the graphic sentiments they threw at one another, not really understanding or caring that college admissions officers and future employers would always be able to call them up and read them. Their words were like skywriting that never fully faded.

  Ed had said the words to Bev one night the previous spring, long before the spell struck her. They were getting dressed to go out to the senior class banquet and awards dinner, held at the Rock Garden Country Club, a large structure that looked liked Monticello except with a sign looming beside it that read CARPET BAZAAR. They had been getting dressed together in the master bedroom suite of their house; Bev was at the dresser and Ed was behind her, toying at length with his cuff links. She looked up and saw both their reflections in the mirror. Her husband was slender, trim, hairless, patrician, and though his hedge fund had tanked along with everything else in the economy, still he kept his head up, and still they personally stayed rich. Ed Cutler had been part of the ruin of the country in recent years, but Bev had never spoken aloud the disturbing thought she had, which was: Look what you did. You and all the others.

  She wouldn’t have been cruel to him the way he was cruel to her. She was a thoughtful, soft-spoken guidance counselor at school and, to a certain extent, a counselor at home. Ed went on each day as though the markets hadn’t crashed, the financial sphere hadn’t been proven to be an improvised concoction of smoke and mirrors and shit. At fifty-eight, he was getting up there in years, and younger men kept coming through, pushing on in, so Ed Cutler needed to keep his ego and sense of self, and his wife Bev didn’t want to intrude on it or hurt him. They lived in a gigantic, polished house that had been purchased and maintained by hedge-fund money, so she really had no business saying a word.

  None of the other members of the Elro faculty lived the way she and Ed lived, not even close. When the Cutlers went to the faculty potlucks in those modest, tidy homes, she was reminded of all she had, and how rare it was. Though at times Bev referred to the house as “the monstrosity,” she privately loved its proximity to nature, and felt pride at owning something so big and glorious. She could have been a guidance counselor for a hundred years, and still she would have been unable to purchase such a place herself. Ed’s hedge fund had bought the weathered redwood and slate floors and skylights; the fieldstone kitchen with its hanging copper vessels. His hedge fund, even diminished, paid for their kids’ college education and post-collegiate loafing. Their daughter Julia was a freshman at Buckland, leaning toward majoring in Q
ueer Studies, though she was not “queer” herself but simply open-minded, she said. And the Cutlers’ bass-player son Jeremy, one year out of college, shared an apartment with a few other musicians in Red Hook, Brooklyn, getting gigs whenever they could, but mostly walking around in their underwear in their fully carpeted pad upon awakening each afternoon, eating bowls of milk with little bits of sugary cereal floating in them.

  Ed had been in a dark, fixed mood for a long time now, angry about the markets but acting as if the crash was something that had been done to him, and not, certainly, something in which he had been complicit. He referred to the men in charge as “they” and “them.” When he and Bev were getting dressed to go out to the senior banquet on that long-ago spring night, and he was in his tuxedo shirt, which plants a man somewhere between murmuring, butter-bearing waiter and captain of the Queen’s Navy, he kept trying to do up his own cuff links, but his thick fingers were baffled, and he muttered to himself.

  Bev was still in her bra and pantyhose; they found each other in the mirror, and he looked so impressive and she looked bloated, the pantyhose catching her flesh, her breasts barely contained in their nude-colored catchall. If you squinted, you would not have even seen any undergarments, but just a vague, blurry, nude-colored woman in her fifties who felt sad about how she looked, but who was still required to stand in front of mirrors once in a while, like everyone.

  “You’ve really let yourself go, haven’t you?” Ed said to her then.