The Uncoupling

  “Okay,” he said. “Go on.”

  Their baby boy stirred and banged in his bassinet, and Ruth half sat up, but it was a false alarm, and she lay back down. “I may get a lock on the bathroom door,” she said.

  “I could install it tomorrow.”

  “And when the boys are older, a lock on the bedroom door too.”

  “Wouldn’t that make it like a prison?”

  “Our door,” she said.

  “Oh. I see.”

  “I am not interested in women,” she said. “I mean, sometimes I see one who I think looks sort of androgynous and cute, and that’s nice. But it doesn’t pull at me now, because I’m not available. I’m not. The problem is that I never really parceled myself out properly to all of you. I gave everybody everything. I know it won’t always be like this,” Ruth told him. “With everyone all over me, touching me; I know that. One day it will be much less intense. But I just don’t want to wait it out. I don’t want to have to tolerate my home life. That’s not something I ever wanted.”

  The silence continued; the boys slept on, which was a miracle. “What about me?” Henry asked.

  “You. I am here for you. But I have to say—and I mean no offense by this—I don’t think these dates you keep asking for are exactly up to par. For you either. They’re always so rushed, Henry, aren’t they? I don’t want us to rush like that. I don’t want to miss so much.”

  Henry Spangold threw a thick, hairy leg across his wife, and she lifted herself up on her strong arms and towered over him, smiling. And soon, somehow, their war was over.

  Leanne Bannerjee left the school after the play, and behind her in her rearview mirror she could see the lights of Malcolm Bean’s low-riding car. He flashed his brights at her, which seemed to be the equivalent of winking. As she headed toward her home, she thought one final time about the scene she had witnessed in the auditorium, the way the principal’s wife had reclaimed him publicly, and how he had willingly gone with her. Leanne would be fine with this; she wasn’t in love with Gavin McCleary. But still she didn’t want to change her life and become one of the married women of Stellar Plains. She was glad to be seeing Malcolm tonight; she felt crisper knowing he was following her home. She hummed and bristled and stepped a little harder on the gas, thinking of what they would do.

  Briefly Leanne imagined telling her friend Jane that she would quit her job at the high school and come to New York City and join Jane’s practice of teenologists. There were three of them in the suite of offices on Park Avenue and 80th, and they even had a receptionist. All of the women were young and fashionable; that was part of the point. Teenagers related to these therapists and were starry-eyed about them, and somehow some kind of therapeutic transference took place, but it was all dubious to Leanne. No, she wouldn’t leave this town, not yet. Plus, the idea of appearing on reality TV with her clients, which was about to happen to Jane—some show called Families in Freefall II: The Kaplans—was too appalling to consider. Did everybody have to be famous? Wasn’t it enough to be excited by your own life; by, say, sleeping with a few different men, enjoying each one for the pleasures he could give you, and not caring about whether or not other people had judgmental thoughts about you?

  She loved men, that was the whole of it; or anyway, she loved the complement of them, and the way one gave her something that another did not, and still another gave her something else. When she was by herself she could think about all of them, or one of them, or none. Leanne didn’t want to be without male involvement and envelopment, or without action—without screaming in bed with a small rotation of men who each offered something, in concentrate. Who each brought her sharply up toward the rim of extreme excitement, where she could peek over the edge. She wanted all of that, and could have it too; but she didn’t need to be involved with a married man; that was obvious to her now. She could draw the line there.

  And when a girl like Jen Heplauer came into Leanne’s office during the school day and said, Dr. Bannerjee, a blow job isn’t sex at all, it’s just a blow job, Leanne might tilt her head in that bird-on-a-branch way, but she really hoped to be able to say, Well, it depends on the blower and the blowee. It depends on the light in the room. It depends on the kindness of the guy. And so on and so on.

  So do you think the Cumfy will burn to a crisp if I set it on fire?” Dory asked Robby after they walked into the house. “What? Oh, that’s funny,” he said. “I see. A symbolic burning.”

  “I really want to try it,” she said. She was all charged up tonight. The play had been wonderful, and Willa had been brilliant in it, and through the overwhelming, now only partly recalled experience of watching the actors and hearing Robby talk to her from the stage, and then joining him up there, she had come around. They were alone together in the house now, while Willa was off at the cast party for the rest of the night. They both knew that something was about to happen between them, and the anticipation had a highly stimulating, nearly teenaged quality to it. Something was about to happen, and it was inevitable, and they were heading right toward it. Robby wore the soft blue shirt that he’d been wearing forever; it never went out of style. He could wear it to school and he could wear it to bed. It was not new, and he was not new to her either, but his long arms filled the sleeves, and there at the ends were his hands, which weren’t a woman’s hands at all. They were his. Onstage she’d held them, and had kissed his mouth, and kissed it more and more easily. One of the kids in the audience had called out, “You go, Mr. and Ms. L!”

  You go, she thought now. She took the Cumfy out into the yard along with a pack of matches, and Robby followed her. He told her he thought this plan of hers was dopey and unnecessary, but still he accompanied her outside, and the dog came too. Snow was melting in the yard; Hazel peed on the curled, unfrozen palm of a leaf that had been preserved all winter in the ice’s amber. On the patio, near the barbecue in its plastic winter apparel, and near the white metal chairs that were speckled with rust and lacking cushions, Dory tried to light the edge of the yellow blanket.

  Nothing happened. The blanket, even with the match cupped in her hand, would not catch. She tried match after match, but the Cumfy was apparently nonflammable. “Let’s go in,” Robby said. “It’s cold out here.” But this was just a reflexive response; it wasn’t that cold out anymore. The winter had softened. The Langs went into the house, and she carried the Cumfy upstairs in her arms, and then Robby lay down on the bed, and she did too. They took off their clothes and slipped under the Cumfy, which looked to Dory like a big, garish American burqa. Clicks of static could be heard and felt as they turned beneath that yellow, chemical, indestructible piece of cloth.

  They had roared through sex and childbirth and their child’s childhood, and now they were different, and they couldn’t go back there. Or maybe they could go back there, but it wouldn’t look the same. Sometimes they would still want this, just not necessarily frequently. Stirrings would take place, and they would arrange themselves accordingly. Sex wasn’t everything, but it was something. It was something to them.

  She thought of the thing he had been saying when they had first met in the hotel at the conference. He’d been quoting that ridiculous student paper: “ ‘At the time that Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were writing, the world was very much as it is today, though to a lesser extent.’ ”

  Which somehow was even a little true if you applied it to your own life, your own history, because what you knew and felt and wanted now, and the way you could love now, had a long valley of seriousness running through it that had perhaps always been there, though to a lesser extent.

  16.

  On Monday morning, The Campobello Courier described the performance of the Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata as “heady and almost breathless,” and the reviewer complimented Ms. Heller for her decision to go with “a po-mo angle that everyone seemed to love. My parents loved it too!” The review didn’t get into specifics, and nobody really remembered that much from the play anymore. “Ms. Heller
did a great job,” the reviewer went on, “even with all the graphic material that she had to remove.” He called sophomore understudy Willa Lang “fantastic—a performer who compels us with her urgency, integrity, and beauty.” For weeks Willa would enjoy thinking of those three final nouns. But now, before the review had come in, late Saturday afternoon after the cast party—that long, weird night—Willa Lang couldn’t stand that she had let Eli go for reasons that no longer seemed reasonable.

  At the party, a boy on tech crew had gently told her that Eli had texted him and said he’d decided to leave New Jersey and go live with his father in Michigan. When Willa heard this, she felt certain that Eli was gone for real; this wasn’t going to be just one of those brief, moping teenaged sojourns, from which the sojourner returns in a few days, eager for a hot meal and his own soft bed. After she heard he was gone, she drank a lot of beer at the party, and got very drunk, and cried, and was sick in the Petitos’ downstairs bathroom, where not too long ago Carrie had secretly jabbed a sewing needle into her navel and hissed, “Fucking fuck fuck fuck,” as the pain sped through her with its own elaborate stitch. Willa, in her own pain, allowed herself to be helped onto an air mattress in the living room, and she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and listened to the soft sounds of her friends in the other room, and she did not sleep for a very long time.

  The next afternoon Willa came home from the cast party and found that though she was ill from love and overwhelmed by the lurching stops and starts in her life, and though she had apparently been such a triumph in the play, such a star, her house was maddeningly the same as ever. Hazel lay asleep. Her parents were probably in the den grading papers. Her father had put one of his cheese bakes in the oven for dinner. It had been just too much for her to find out that Eli had left. Too much to have been the lead in the play after one day’s rehearsal, and then have everyone swarm her afterward. Too much to have gotten so drunk, and then so sick. Too much, perhaps—though in a supremely good way—to have had actual sex this school year, complete with real orgasms, and joking around afterward, and occasional flute playing. All of it, now, too much.

  So, how wrong it felt then to come home and find her little white house and her family right here, the same as always, along with all the objects that had been constant in her life over the years—the upright piano, the dog—and yet somehow not be able to take them in, because she was different, and something she now needed wasn’t here. She bent down and kissed her dog, who raised her head and breathed on Willa with meaty but delicate breath, as if she’d just eaten a sparrow. The dog was elderly, and would not live too much longer, and Willa was so emotional right now that she could easily, self-indulgently have flung herself down beside Hazel and wept as if the dog had already died. But Hazel, after a moment of affection for this girl who used to tie party hats onto her smooth golden dog-head, and run with her around the yard all summer, returned to her own slow bout of self-love; she knew what she liked best.

  Willa went upstairs to her pink bedroom. At her desk, she lightly touched the space bar on her computer and watched it spring awake. She immediately saw that Eli had written her a short note, explaining that he had left, and where he’d gone: “if u feel like it find me on farrest,” he wrote. “i will be there a lot i imagine.”

  She went straight to Farrest then, even though she hadn’t said hi to her parents yet, and she still smelled like beer, and vomit, and she needed to wash, and then sleep. The uncomplicated green forest awaited her after log-in, and it was crowded now, since it was a weekend and no one was in school. There was Marissa the hawk, Marissa who had only just gotten home from the cast party herself, where she had reassured Willa that she was very happy for her that the play had gone well, and that she wasn’t sorry she’d made the decision not to play Lysistrata. Willa said hi to Marissa again now, then spoke for a second to a few other people she knew, some from school, a couple from Farrest. Several of them were aware she had just starred in a play; others had no idea she was even a high school student in New Jersey. To them she was just a purple female ninja in a crowded forest.

  She had to find Eli, though she had no idea if he was here right now. She looked and looked in the usual quadrant, past pirates and wraiths and little children with enormous eyes. The centaur was pulsating under a tree.

  “there u r,” she said. “r u ok?”

  “yes. how was the play?”

  “isnt that beside the point now? u LEFT.”

  “i couldnt stay. i hope u understand.”

  Willa thought about asking him to come back, but she didn’t want to seem to be toying with him, and he was already so far away now, and she was too tired to think. She waited for him to ask her again if she would reconsider their relationship, but he didn’t. For now, at least, they would be together only here on Farrest. A creature that she had never seen before—a spider—kept circling them and scuttling up to the centaur, for some reason wanting to ingratiate itself.

  “please,” the spider said to Eli. “please.”

  The centaur and the ninja instinctively strode away from it, moving faster and faster together through the grass.

  That night, alone in her living room, Fran Heller made the decision to resign from Eleanor Roosevelt High School on Monday. McCleary would be shocked, of course, because he’d expended great effort bringing her into the district. But Fran would resign on Monday because, really, what was the point in staying here now? She’d done what she’d planned to do, and the most relevant and enjoyable part of it—the big climax, the reason she’d done it in the first place—was over. This was the way it always went. You worked and worked to get the play into shape, helping the actors breathe feeling into those ancient lines. You designed the lighting, you drew sketches for the Acropolis, you assembled the cast at your knee and got them motivated for a long season of rehearsals. “A comedy, yes,” you told them. “But what it’s about is something quite serious.” And on the night of the performance, you had them all join hands, and you let them know that they were a part of something significant, and then you sat back and watched.

  The drama teacher was alone in her adobe-painted house at the far end of Tam o’ Shanter Drive; the paint choice had seemed like a good idea in the summer, when she and Eli had first moved in, but at some point in the late fall, when the sun had set before dinner and the bright house looked a little desperate in the dying light, she had regretted it. She could also admit now that she regretted causing the women and men in this town so much pain, though it had been a necessary step toward making everything better for them. Their pain was gone now, alleviated in the way she had known it would be. All except her son’s pain, which she had never anticipated. Nor had she anticipated that, because of what she’d done, he would end up leaving her. That she would lose him.

  No matter what town you were in, Fran had found, people fell into a rut when left to their own devices, or else they let themselves stray so far from their original desires, or they were sexually reckless, or needy, or built their love lives on a faulty foundation. You could see it again and again wherever you looked. The most well-meaning and loving couples in the world started to let everything get too familiar and erode, or forgot to plan for the future, or made sexual choices that would clearly lead to disaster. Again and again people were mindless or erratic when it came to matters of love and the bed.

  Decades earlier, at the beginning of the great and wondrous bliss that was Fran and Lowell Heller’s marriage, the couple had agreed that they would never allow themselves to become overwhelmed by their domestic life. This, they suspected, would have been their sensual and sexual undoing. They loved to be together in the mornings after spending the night together. They lay in bed, listening to Bach or the Velvet Underground. They walked around the house proudly naked. But how insidious it could all be; familiarity could steal away everything exciting. They swore one night that they wouldn’t let this happen to them. A year and a half after Eli was born, Lowell found a job in Michigan, an
d the specific arrangements were worked out. Lowell would move to Lansing, and Fran and Eli would stay behind in New Jersey. Lowell would miss them horribly; he adored his wife and his baby boy. He would visit his family a few times a year, and Fran and Eli would live with him in the summer.

  Every night they talked. Sometimes Fran took the phone into her bedroom and spoke to her husband about what she would like to do to his body that very minute, and he responded in kind. He was a compact, sandy-mustached man who did not look forty. But had they lived together, he might have easily looked forty now, even fifty. The limited time they spent together was life-enhancing, because domesticity hadn’t diluted it with its liquid detergents and its conversations about car inspections and the like.

  These people here in Stellar Plains and in other towns, they’d had no idea how to conduct their love lives. They let everything fall into comfort or indifference or chaos or disrepair. They’d had no innate sense of how to protect the thing they claimed to care about above all else—and instead they’d found many, many ways to let it rot. Some people seemed fine, seemed happy and contented with each other, and for the moment they actually were. But you knew that it was only a matter of time—months, years, it depended on the individuals—until their relationships began to erode just like everyone else’s.

  So Fran Heller saved them all from themselves. She had done this in Ferndale, New Jersey; and then in Cobalt; and now here in Stellar Plains. She herself had no unusual gifts in this direction, no supernatural “abilities,” of course, and she had never known anyone who did. Such people probably didn’t even exist. She’d only learned about the spell accidentally back in Ferndale, where she’d been the drama teacher in the mediocre high school for a number of years before choosing the play for no particular reason. She’d been in the mood for something classical, and Lysistrata had a lot of parts for girls, and she could easily eliminate the racy material.