The Uncoupling

For a second they continued to look at themselves in the mirror; it occurred to Bev that he hadn’t even meant to say this aloud. This was what he really, really thought, in the deepest and most uncensored part of himself. She disgusted him. She was disgusting. Bev stood, and then dashed to the bathroom in tears.

  “What?” he called, but he probably knew he had gone too far. “Would you come out here, Bev?”

  Finally, after several minutes, Bev came out of the bathroom and silently stepped into her dress. Ed returned to the pursuit of his cuff links, and then, after trying for a while longer, he asked her, flatly but perhaps sheepishly, “Can you help me?”

  She went to him and pushed the little silver T-bar through the ungenerous slit in the hard white cotton. She remembered the night of a previous senior banquet, two years earlier, before she had entirely “let herself go.” On that particular night, the Cutlers had also looked at themselves in the mirror, but they had still found enough to be pleased with. Bev made that sucked-in face that women make in mirrors, and Ed, who didn’t even know about that face, observed their reflections, and they both thought: we’ll do. Then, somehow, they were in bed, his tuxedo shirt off, her pantyhose scrolled down. Their chairs at the table in the banquet room remained empty that night; the leaves of their salad, hosed down with raspberry vinaigrette, remained uneaten. Abby Means, who chaired the event every year, had probably primly and piously regarded her watch, wondering where the Cutlers were. She hoped they hadn’t been killed in a car accident. She hoped they weren’t dead, though she was mad at them for being late. They’d better be dead.

  But they weren’t dead, not at all. They were conscious, eyes wide, breathing each other’s best, sweet scent. A cuff link might have rolled away into the carpet, lost like a ball in long grass at twilight.

  Back in the early 1980s, when Ed and Bev had first started dating in Philadelphia, he had just been coming into his own. He was one of those Wharton School grads who wore suspenders with his white shirts—a brief and unfortunate trend. That era now seemed to Bev as quaint as anything, entirely gone, trampled over. If she was ever in danger of forgetting about that time in their lives, she still kept a photograph in a drawer to remind her. In the picture she showed no hint of the weight to come as she sat on Ed’s lap. She was slender and limber, and Ed had hair, and they shared a cigarette.

  Bev remembered that they’d been to bed shortly before the photograph was taken; they’d joked in the past about the fact that his fly was actually still open. “Open for business,” Ed had remarked once with a little laugh. They were at some yuppie finance guy’s party in the picture; they had shown up late, and there was a strong bowl of blue punch that everyone called “antifreeze.” This much Bev knew, and she had the picture to prove it. She had sat in her husband’s lap, and she wasn’t too heavy for him yet, and she wouldn’t have broken his femur or sterilized him or disgusted him, and she had fit there perfectly.

  Originally, he had pursued her the way he pursued everything, and at night in bed he spoke to her about his ambitions for himself, then later on his ambitions for them. She had never known someone who cared so much about doing well in life, mastering everything he tried. She’d always known she would work in a school, and she liked the environment, and the energy of teenagers; she liked helping them along, shuttling them gently from this part of their lives into the next. It was a good job, and she was lucky. But Ed was anxious and wound-up and crazy about work, and she was the only one able to soothe him. In those early days she enjoyed being the person he could talk to, and the one who said, “You’re really hyper,” and “Shhh.” She enjoyed the way lovemaking could be both an antianxiety agent and an antidepressant at the same time. Her small, nimble body pulsed and chimed.

  But later on, less small, it pulsed and chimed more slowly; after giving birth she tried to fight the change the same way that everyone did, but soon it was too demanding, and she didn’t know how to do it, and she couldn’t bear to talk about it to anyone. During sex her body began to feel cumbersome; she closed her eyes so she would not have to see parts of herself suddenly rising up—thighs that were too wide and white, breasts that seemed like flan, belonging to someone she didn’t know. She wanted sex to take place under a blanket, and then she wanted it to take place in darkness. They still made love, but less frequently. It was difficult for her, and she didn’t know what it was like for him.

  Over time Bev Cutler had let herself go. Ed had expressed his disgust at her physical self in one single, eviscerating line, and he could never take it back, no matter what. Their sex life had shut down as soon as he said it that night the previous spring, and it hadn’t revived itself since then; it had just never been discussed again. Privately, secretly, shortly after that evening took place, Bev enrolled in an expensive program called Susie Sanders’ Wait-Enders, whose name didn’t even really make sense, if you thought about it. What “wait” were you supposed to want to end? The wait between fatness and thinness? The wait between now and dinner? On the program, you were sent diet supplements in the mail and frozen meals that arrived in hampers of ice. But the supplements made her heart race, and the meals were as desiccated as astronaut food, as if Susie Sanders herself—if she was even a real person instead of a taunting, perfect idea of a person—didn’t really want those women to lose weight. After one month, Bev canceled her subscription. It wasn’t only that she hated the program; she also didn’t like seeming so reactive to Ed’s unfeeling words.

  So her weight did not end; it kept going up and up until she hardly resembled herself at all. Ed had made his remark, and their sex life ended with a shudder.

  Bev was positive she was not alone in this. Surely there were other women in Stellar Plains who had given up what they’d had with their husbands. Not her friends, though; her friends were really happy. Dory and Robby were just so fantastic together; you could picture them delightedly stripping for each other and having sex, and then reciting to each other from, oh God, Mrs. Dalloway. And the gym teacher Ruth Winik had that big, messy sculptor husband Henry, and all those children as proof of their robust bedroom activity. And Leanne, well, she had broken up with a car dealer and a bartender, but it was hard to feel sorry for her because she could have everyone she wanted. Even Fran Heller the extroverted drama teacher had a long-distance husband whom she loved—as well as, for all anyone knew, a secret giant vibrator in a drawer at home, designed to look like a warrior’s jumbo phallus from the Peloponnesian War.

  Everyone Bev Cutler knew was probably having tons of sex. But there had to be other women nearby who had “let themselves go,” and whose love lives had become unhinged. Some women became Manchurian Candidates of midlife married abstinence, barely remembering much of what they were missing. But Bev remembered. And though she had been the one to “let herself go,” Ed was the one who had said those words to her that you should never say to a person you love. Oh, the words tore at her; they ripped her up. They made it so that he was the one who had set the gears of abstinence in motion. Before he’d said it, she’d obviously known that her weight was out of control, and she didn’t like it either. But the comment about how she had let herself go was unforgivable. In saying it, Ed had taken control of their marriage and their bed.

  Months had passed, and Bev seethed. At dinner they talked about their grown children, and sometimes about the economy. Once in a while, if it wasn’t too boring for him, she talked about school. She’d said to him, recently, “That boy Eli, the drama teacher’s son—you know, the son of Fran, the one who sang those funny songs about Lysistrata when we were at Dory and Robby’s for faculty potluck?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, he took a few SAT IIs, and his scores were perfect. He’s going to go really far. And I’m going to call him into my office and tell him. I’m certain he could go to Harvard or Yale. His teachers love him too; he’ll get great recommendations from everyone. They’ll all go to bat for him.”

  “Nice.”

  “I’m going to
enjoy helping him with colleges. I bet he could get a big scholarship. I doubt that the Hellers have a lot of money.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Also, I told Fran I’d lend her some bedsheets for the play. Well, not lend, give. The parents who are volunteering to help out are going to cut them up and make them into Greek costumes. Chitons. Fran probably figured we have lots of spare sheets in this house, what with the kids gone, and how big the place is.”

  “Sure, go for it,” Ed said.

  After dinner, Ed did what he always did: took the day’s papers, the regular ones and the financial ones with their fruity, ediblelooking colors, and sat in the living room with all of them spread out on the coffee table. The newspapers covered the table’s surface, draped over the sides, and he sat in his shirtsleeves with a glass of bourbon, peacefully reading.

  Bev Cutler went upstairs and entered the walk-in linen closet to get the sheets that Fran Heller had requested. Being in this room, with its smells of laundry in the air, pushed Bev back into an earlier time, when her family was in one piece, everyone still living in the house. Suddenly unusually nostalgic, she sat down on a stepstool and put her head in her hands, and soon she found herself crying a little.

  Bev recalled giving her son Jeremy some sheets to take to his spoiled-boy’s zoo of an apartment in Red Hook. She couldn’t imagine him buying sheets for himself, or even knowing what size his bed was. He was helpless that way, just like his father. Julia, up in college, needed extra-longs to fit on her bed, as Bev had once needed them too. Buckland was the same small, progressive liberal arts school that three generations of her family had attended. The school now boasted a coed touch-football team, a lute band, and a transgender dorm. Julia had said—and Bev didn’t know whether she was just teasing her—that she was considering taking a seminar next semester called “Dogs and Film.”

  When Bev was a student there in the late 1970s, back when she was called Bev Bracken and was skinny and tart and open to everything that the world displayed, poetry was forever being set to music in the concert hall. A soprano would stand alone onstage and sing, “So much de-PENNNNNDS upon a RED wheel-BAR-row w w . . .” her voice shooting up and down in erratic calliope fashion. The library at Buckland was modest and understocked, and the endowment laughably tiny, but still the college stayed proudly alive.

  Every winter afternoon these days, the sky at Buckland took on a blue-bottle complexion, and the students walked in packs like reindeer, inseparable. On weekends they sometimes went night sledding, drunk, down a perilous hill. The students were eighteen to twenty-two years old, beautiful or homely, with faces painted or studded, or open and full like unplowed fields; but most of them, male or female, felt equality pulsing through themselves. To them, neither men nor women ruled the world. Julia did not understand that her own father treated her mother with contempt.

  Or if she did understand it—if, when she had still lived at home last spring, she’d seen the shift in her mother after her father had said, “You’ve really let yourself go, haven’t you?” she didn’t let on. Children were narcissistic to their core, and Bev’s children had been spared knowing the pain of their parents’ marriage. Julia, in her e-mails from college that were often sent in the middle of the night, wrote to her mother, “I can’t believe the conversations we have in class, or even at night, hanging out at The Kiln. And the classes are so much better than at Elro, no offense.”

  Only a freshman, or a “year one’r,” as they called them at Buckland in all seriousness, Julia was moments away from officially declaring herself a Queer Studies major, also in all seriousness. Julia had hinted that in her bed, upon the extra-long sheets her mother had given her, she was sleeping with a boy named Holden who lived in the transgender dorm. It was difficult for Bev, from this e-mail, to tell if the boy was really a boy, or else if he was a girl, formerly named, say, Hannah. (Idly, Bev wondered why so many transgender people elected to keep the first letter of their names when they made the switch. It wasn’t as if they already had a lot of monogrammed items at home.) Bev couldn’t ask her daughter about the original gender of this boy, and God knows she couldn’t discuss it with Ed, who had wanted Julia to go to Penn; specifically, to Wharton. Julia was free-thinking, completely independent. She had a good mind and a solid, chunky body that she apparently enjoyed fully. Ed didn’t approve of her interests, but he was proud of her, and not in the least disgusted by her.

  To have a husband who was disgusted by you was unbearable. All around Stellar Plains you could see men who were unabashedly in love with women, and boys who were wild about girls. Tenderness and love flowed everywhere between them, but it did not flow here. Men worshipped women, were made humble by them. Once, Bev, Leanne, and Dory were out at a kebab house for an early dinner, and a waiter had come over and placed a sizzling metal plate in front of Leanne. “Lady, this lamb platter is from the owner,” he said quietly. “He would like you to enjoy it, for you are a very beautiful lady.”

  Lamb for Leanne, but none for Bev or Dory. “When I’m actually the only one of us who would really enjoy it,” Bev had said. They’d all laughed, and then they’d dug into the charred and spitting meat meant for the very beautiful lady, but Bev understood not only that Leanne was desirable to many men, but also that they treated her in a way that Ed no longer treated his own wife.

  Bev Cutler had gained sixty-five pounds between the day she and Ed got married in Philadelphia and the evening he said, “You’ve really let yourself go, haven’t you?” The weight gain had been slow and sneaky; she’d held on to some of the weight she’d gained when she was pregnant both times, and as the years passed she’d continually added to it. She’d let herself be humiliated by what he’d said, and they’d turned away from each other in bed every night since then.

  Bev had been crying hard in the linen closet and her face and neck were now wet. She stood up and took an armful of sheets from the shelf, using them like a bloom of tissues that a lonely giant might use, blotting all her tears. She took another load from the shelf above it; she was piling her arms high with sheets for Lysistrata. She would give them all to Fran Heller in the morning. Marissa Clayborn, naturally, would play the leader of the women who went on a sex strike against the men. Marissa’s mother would cut armholes in Bev’s sheets, and that charismatic girl would slip her arms inside and stand tall on the shining stage.

  Bev grabbed yet another sheet, and that was when the cold air almost knocked her back. She staggered under the pile, aware that she was freezing, dizzy, shivering; then Bev straightened up and held herself in defense against the windless wind that seemed to have entered the small space through some unknown source. She was so cold, she was being surrounded by cold. The spell spent quite a while enveloping her. In the closet, the wind was so strong that the sheets and towels lying folded on their shelves actually lifted slightly at the edges. A washcloth flapped a few times, as if waving for help. Bev Cutler felt the strange and shocking cold air rush up through the bottom of her elastic-waisted pants, flying up her body close to her skin, freezing every part of her as it went. Now a thigh, now the place where leg met crotch, now the field of her stomach, now the cresting swell of her bosom. She was frozen; she was dumbfounded; she was thoroughly enchanted. She hugged the sheets tighter against herself, and they were very cold now too, like a new bed she was about to climb into.

  She thought: I weigh a lot more than I used to, but so what? So fucking what? He’d had no right to speak to her this way. The spell had taken her over, and she was done with him, done.

  Bev Cutler carried the stack of sheets back downstairs and went into the living room, where Ed was still reading the papers. Newspapers were going the way of everything else from the castoff twentieth century. Why not give him this moment of pleasure, he with his dying papers spread out and draped over the table like sheets themselves. But she couldn’t do that. “Ed,” she said. He didn’t respond. “Ed,” she said again, and he looked up. “I have to tell you something. Our se
x life is over.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Our sex life. It’s over.”

  He softly closed his newspaper. “I know that, Bev,” he said. “It’s been true for quite a while.”

  “Yes. It’s been true ever since that terrible thing you said.”

  “What thing did I say?” he asked, but she ignored this.

  “It’s been true ever since then,” she went on, “but I am not letting you have the last word. I am not letting you be the one to have done this to us.” His face flushed; his entire bald head flushed. “This time, I am the one doing it, not you,” she said. “So I am telling you: starting now, our sex life is over, really over. And I am the one who has ended it.”

  10.

  The entire Chorus of Women had been a real disappointment, Ms. Heller told them, and they all deserved to be replaced. “February is much sooner than you think, people, and just look at you,” the drama teacher said in a frantic pitch as she paced back and forth before the stage. The girls stood in a row, slouching and yawning from general exhaustion and being yelled at. They didn’t want to displease their drama teacher, who could be very difficult, but whose opinion mattered to them. Willa Lang, second from the right, had given up on getting Eli’s mother to really like her. Ms. Heller was not particularly nice to Willa, and various cast members had noticed this and mentioned it to her. She had made her peace with it, though, for what mattered to her was only that Eli still liked her. She thought about him all the time; it was debilitating to think about someone so much.

  Even now, at rehearsal, it was as if they were together the entire time, for while Willa stood onstage under the hard white lights, he was there in her brain, observing her onstage, taking in the full length of her. Willa was among the girls who were “a real disappointment.” Though she had been to every rehearsal, her attention was only intermittently in ancient Athens; more to the point, it was here in Stellar Plains, on the old sofa in the furnished basement of the Hellers’ house, with Eli.