The Uncoupling

  They were all out of control, she thought as she looked at the mash onstage. It had been a long couple of months, and now they were desperate enough to interrupt a high school play. The people onstage argued with one another or embraced. Robby Lang had been trying to let Dory know how he felt during these two months, but she hadn’t been able to be responsive. Now she got up from her seat in the rapidly warming room and entered the aisle, then climbed onto the stage too, where she put her arms around her husband and kissed him, and kept kissing him, and wanted to, experiencing the mysterious pull toward physical love again. All winter she’d let them fall into quietude, into lassitude, into comfort. Wasn’t one of the goals of life to be comfortable in your own skin and in your own bed and on your own land? But as soon as you achieved it, you felt an immense sadness, and then you wanted to wreck everything around you, just because you could. Comfort was the best thing, and maybe the worst.

  Another spell had been thrust upon her so long ago, in the big hotel in Minneapolis, looking at the very young Robby Baskin in the lobby bar. She hadn’t been able to see it, but it was real. Otherwise, why would you rise up from your enclosed and well-defended self and go be with that other person? Why would you open your life, the most secret entries into yourself, to someone you didn’t really know? Who would do that unless she had to?

  Over his shoulder as they kissed on the stage in the warming auditorium, Dory Lang looked out at the audience to see who were the holdouts, who remained—not that she could see much of anything anyway, what with all that light.

  Backstage, Fran Heller leaned against a cinderblock wall with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds of commotion and ruination and love. She seemed to be in a stupor, obviously overwhelmed by the interruption and destruction of her play, which had been in rehearsals since December. Now, at the start of February, it was a lifetime later. She kept her eyes closed, and the kids on the tech crew and some of the actors in their bedsheets looked at her with anxiety, not sure what to say or do. They realized that she seemed almost serene.

  In the middle of the madness, Lucy Stupak left the stage and ran to find her. “What is this, Ms. H?” Lucy asked. “Should I call someone?”

  The drama teacher opened her eyes and regarded the girl. “There’s no one to call,” she said. Lucy’s mother and father were onstage kissing as their daughter had never seen them kiss before. Even they couldn’t help her now.

  “But there has to be someone,” said Lucy, and in desperation she grabbed the drama teacher’s arm and pumped it. Ms. Heller shook her off, but the girl whirled around her, and Ms. Heller had to take her by her shoulders and hold her steady.

  “Lucy,” said Ms. Heller. “Lucy, look at me.” Lucy Stupak’s eyes were two little pools of swirling water. Displays of anarchy and expressiveness apparently terrified her. “Someone,” said Ms. Heller in her teacher-voice, “please take her somewhere to lie down or something.”

  Two kind boys from the lighting booth put themselves in charge of Lucy Stupak, shepherding her out. By now the set had partly disintegrated. One of the columns lay on its side, and a teenaged boy and girl sat on it, kissing, as if it were an old log by a country creek.

  The spell had apparently been broken. All of a sudden, the heat in the auditorium kicked in, and a warm wind pushed its way through the wings and the vents and down the ladder from the lighting booth and elsewhere. It was as if the cold draft that had been in the auditorium earlier was reversing itself and disappearing back into its own unseen channels and flumes of air. The spell was done here. Those other spells—love, passion, resistance, a desire for life to return to the way it once was—had overtaken it. The auditorium grew as warm as a steam room.

  The scene onstage broke up and couples walked up the aisle, arm in arm, as if at a mass wedding. Someone on tech crew pressed a button on the sound board so that the bouzouki music from Zorba the Greek came blaring over the sound system, and a couple of people gamely began to dance their way offstage and up the aisle. The doors of the auditorium were propped open and light from the lobby poured in, and everyone moved toward it.

  By the time Willa appeared in her street clothes in the lobby, some of the other actors surrounded her, all arms, everyone happy, and happy for her, all of them at a high emotional pitch. It was as if they knew something big had happened tonight, but already they were a little vague in their minds about what it had been. Someone had floated the idea that Ms. Heller had possibly arranged this whole audience-participation thing in advance, and had decided not to tell the cast and crew about it. They said that she had apparently wanted it to lend the production a chaotic, magical, surprising, life-at-its-extremes quality. And so it had, if that was true. The performance was unusual and emotional; it was all that everyone had hoped it would be. Dory and Robby watched as these teenagers held Willa in a loose web of affection and congratulation.

  The spell had come in cold, and tonight it had been diminished and finally overwhelmed. At its height, it was a knockout of a spell, fortified by a classic work of literature—a play that had lasted since it was written, and which lasted even now, in this age of very different gratifications. Like any really good book, the play had held the people who ventured into it, and then, when it was over, it had released them. The play was done now and the audience returned to themselves and their lives and the brightness and chatter of the lobby. They remembered only some of what had happened onstage, and they were starting not to feel it so acutely anymore. What stayed with them was a sense that the night had been a great success. Everyone felt generously and ardently toward spouses, partners, lovers, and everyone blinkingly returned to the real world.

  Dory and Robby congratulated their daughter for her excellent performance, and Robby handed Willa the bouquet of yellow roses that he had earlier stashed in a supply closet down the hall. Other people gave Willa roses too, and she was like a pageant winner, her face beyond happy. There was to be a cast party tonight at the Petitos, one of those teenaged all-nighters, and Willa had told her parents she would sleep there and come home no sooner than tomorrow afternoon.

  “Be careful,” Dory had said to Willa, whatever that meant. But Willa was already looking past her, and thinking of something else.

  In the car going home, Dory yawned and leaned against Robby’s shoulder in his parka. He blasted the heater, and she said again, “Willa was terrific.”

  “She was,” said Robby. “The whole thing was really good, wasn’t it? I give Fran a lot of credit.” Their memories of the evening were already shifting, blurring, sliding a bit so that they all made sense. It had been a strange production, and yet strange could be good. And what, they wondered later, had been so strange about it anyway? After a while they weren’t sure. The details of the night no longer mattered, but the outcome still did: a moving, brave daughter; a partnership that had the ache of possibilities restored to it.

  “I hope the Petitos keep close watch tonight,” Dory said. “You know what goes on at cast parties. You remember the parties when you used to direct the play. Drinking. Weed. That kid who put those things up his nose. That couple in the hall closet.”

  “Eli won’t be there, will he?” Robby asked, and Dory said no, she didn’t think so; he hadn’t been at the performance tonight. They were silent, weighing this and trying to decide whether his absence was good or bad.

  They didn’t know that Willa, now released from the spell, surrounded by friends, and being complimented to the point of over-stimulation, was preoccupied by how to find Eli and tell him that she had been wrong. To say that it didn’t matter how long they lasted as a couple. She’d called his cell, but it had gone straight to voice mail. She’d started texting him then, simply writing:?

  ?

  ?

  But her parents didn’t know any of this. They also didn’t know that Eli was at that moment in the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City with his phone turned off, waiting for a bus that would eventually take him to Lansing, Michigan, where his fat
her lived. He sat in a molded plastic seat and tried not to make eye contact with a disturbed-looking man who was trying to make eye contact with him. Finally, Eli just closed his eyes. The bus wouldn’t leave for another half hour, and he would be traveling all night. He’d called his father earlier and said, “Hey, Dad, it’s me. This has not been preapproved by Mom yet, but I am wondering if it’s possible for me to finish up the school year in Lansing.”

  “Did you and Mom have an argument?” Lowell Heller wanted to know, and Eli had assured his father that no, there had been no argument.

  “It’s other things,” Eli said. “I’d rather not talk about them right now, if that’s okay with you. I’d rather just come.”

  His father, to his credit, did not push. He finally said yes, Eli could come to Michigan, at least for a little while, and they would see what was what. He couldn’t make any guarantees about the rest of the school year; that was a tall order, and it wasn’t the way this family had been set up. But he said of course sometimes in life there were emergencies and you had to adjust. He told his son he missed him very much, and that he hoped he could help. And he said that when Eli arrived in Michigan, he would be waiting.

  Eli had some cash, a backpack of freshly laundered clothes, three novels with bookmarks in them, his textbooks just in case he ended up coming back to Stellar Plains this school year, and his cell phone and laptop. As he sat in the bus station, he didn’t know what had really happened over the winter or the course of the evening ; and he had no idea that Willa had been trying to reach him. She hadn’t tried to contact him in so long; why should he think she would try tonight? He’d shut off his phone because he didn’t want to hear from his mother, who, when she eventually read his e-mail telling her he was gone, would flip out and definitely demand that he return home. He just didn’t want to have to think about her feelings or needs right now. He didn’t really want to think about anyone at all.

  In the parking lot outside the high school, someone pulled Willa into the caravan of cars driven by newly licensed senior-class drivers, and they all headed for the cast party. Soon the actors and crew were lying around the Petito house with their heads in one another’s laps, stroking one another’s hair. As they played guitar and sang songs and drank warm beer and smoked joints and cried and kissed and felt one another up and did whatever they did, Willa told herself not to think of him, because it would ruin the night for her, but she couldn’t help herself.

  The drama teacher never showed up at the cast party, and no one could imagine why. “Ms. H should at least have put in an appearance,” someone complained. “That’s what Mr. L always used to do. He’d come at the beginning, and then he’d make a toast to the cast and crew, remember? And then he’d leave after a little while, and the party would go on all night. That’s what the director is supposed to do. Lysistrata was a hit. Why didn’t she come?”

  “She’s a freak,” the props master said, and no one disagreed, but it wasn’t really a criticism.

  “Maybe we can get her to do A Streetcar Named Desire next year,” said Carrie Petito. “Some crazy, improvised version. Willa, you’d be great in that. You and Marissa both. There are two great female parts in that play.”

  At around one in the morning, Marissa Clayborn came to the Petito house; beside her was that boy blogger from The Campobello Courier. He had been sitting faithfully beside her bed, and he was there when she suddenly sat up at some point early in the evening, and said, “Alex, this is absurd.”

  “What?” He’d been blogging, typing very fast.

  “My sex strike isn’t taking off,” she said. “I’m just one obscure person in suburban New Jersey. News Eight made a video of me in the bed, but it hardly went viral. I’m not like those women in Kenya who got worldwide coverage. I’m just one teenager, and basically no one else seems to be joining this sex strike. Maybe they don’t want to give up sex, or maybe they don’t know enough about what’s going on in Afghanistan to be as outraged as they should be. Whatever it is, it’s not getting attention. I think I’m going to call it a day.”

  “But what about the war?” Alex asked.

  “I’m planning to attend an international war resistance conference for high school students over spring break,” she said. “It’s in Helsinki, and I’m going to have to get the school district to pay for it somehow. But the first thing is that I feel like I need to leave this bed.”

  “Oh,” Alex said, and she could see that he looked very upset that she was going to get up and go, and that their time together was about to end. He looked like he wanted to lunge forward and smother her face with kisses, and she didn’t want that at all. Even with the spell lifted, Marissa Clayborn did not want to have sex with Alex or anyone at the moment. But she didn’t have to; no one would make her do that now or ever. She would have sex again exactly when she wanted. She didn’t know if it would be because someone smiled at her across a room at a party, or because she admired his big brain or his shoulders. She had no idea what would precipitate sex or love; all she knew was that she wanted to experience desire, however brief.

  Across town, parents and teachers and assorted other adults were coming back together, picking up where they had left off earlier in the winter, or even earlier in the night. Men and women threw themselves upon each other. Laughter bounded around rooms. Wine bottles were opened, buckets of spicy chicken wings were eaten, candles were lit, and meaningful music was played. It wasn’t all giddy and easy, however. Over at the Cutlers’ big house, although glad to be reconciled, and lying on their backs in bed side by side, holding hands, Ed and Bev were silent. It had been a long time not only since they’d touched, but also since they’d talked about themselves with any seriousness.

  “That thing you said,” she suddenly said to him. “It hurt me so much, you know.” She kept looking at the ceiling, not at him.

  “Please look at me, Bev.”

  She didn’t want to, but she did. Their heads were close, and there was his handsome face, a few capillaries broken in the nose—each one perhaps representing some vicissitude in the stock market—and the strong chin. He put a hand on her face, which felt to her as if she was being given a glass of water after a fever: relieving, but almost too much.

  “It was stupid of me,” he said. “It just came out. What can I say? You’d changed. But hey, who was I to talk? I had no hair anymore. My ass sagged like an old man.”

  “But Ed, this was building up. You were obviously not all that interested in me anymore. Your heart wasn’t really in it; I could tell.”

  “What was I going to do? So many times you turned the other way. You faced away from me.”

  “I did?” she said. “I didn’t realize. You could have said something.”

  “I probably should have. I figured that this was what you wanted, that it was easier for you. I wasn’t going to beg you, Bev. And,” he added, “I was distracted too. I had things on my mind. The numbers were horrific. Everything was out of my control.”

  And for the first time in a long while Bev could imagine finding some way back, though the particulars of how that would happen remained obscure. She knew that Ed had always been a little bit dickish; that was the word she’d heard a couple of students use, and it had stayed with her. He couldn’t just cast off this quality when he was at home with her. It was part of him, though the world no longer supported it in him, or cared about him very much. The world now cared only about the young and dickish. He was an aging, fairly aggressive man who was also a decent person, she knew, and who had been partly misunderstood, and humbled, and loved her.

  Maybe she would always be fat, and if that was the case, then at least, she thought, she could try to use her body for the things she’d always liked doing. She could move around more; she could start walking. They had so much property, and Bev could ask Ed if he would go walking with her; and while they walked they could talk about whatever bothered them—all the slights they’d felt, the betrayals—as well as what they still liked, and lo
ved. But she wasn’t sure yet how to be in this version of her body, how to inhabit it and have sex in it; how to feel that it was hers, regardless of whether it was the one she wanted, or would ever have chosen.

  She thought about how she had let herself go. He had let her go too, though he hadn’t meant to, or wanted to; and then she had let him go as well. Tonight, in bed, Bev had talked to him, and it was a kind of foreplay—almost as good as talking dirty in their bed, which they used to do, and which maybe, at some point, they would do again. She remembered once talking this way to him, and how his whole head—already balding at the time but still with some silky light brown hair—had responded by blushing, glowing. Now he rested his head against her, and they stayed like that for a long time.

  Three miles away, in the Winik-Spangolds’ house in the middle of the night after the play, Ruth and Henry lay poised, waiting for a child to cry or need to be held or brought into the bed. But for some reason, as though they’d been given knockout drops, the children slept, while the adults were both wide awake. “Listen to me, Henry,” said Ruth. “The problem, for me, was that I was never very protective of myself. I thought I didn’t need that, but apparently I do.”