The Uncoupling (12 page)

Leanne began drinking more red wine now, and through the big bulb of the glass she saw Gavin McCleary appear in the hallway, snow in his hair and on the shoulders of his overcoat. He was a strangely commanding figure, like the captain of a seafaring vessel whom you would trust even as the vessel ran aground.

Leanne reflexively put her glass down, as though she could rush over to him, but of course she knew she probably shouldn’t even go near him. She watched as he turned to look behind him, so she looked there as well, and then a woman stepped into view. For a moment Leanne let herself think this was a teacher she somehow didn’t recognize; Elro was a big place, and this could be someone from the art department, or even a computer-science person.

“Gavin. Wendy,” said Robby. “Both of you!”

Dory looked right at Leanne; the expression was what Leanne, still not comprehending, noticed, for it was searching, sympathetic. McCleary, Leanne finally understood with a slow awareness, had brought his wife, she who was supposedly too ill to show up anywhere. She who didn’t even really
exist,
except of course she did, and now here she was. Gavin and Wendy, together at last. Didn’t Gavin think Leanne would be thrown by this? Wendy stood in front of her husband in the hallway, waiting for him to remove her coat.

Behind her glass of wine again, unwilling to lower it, Leanne watched. All around her, everyone continued to drink and to gobble bits of food. Abby Means said to Bev Cutler, “I see that Wendy McCleary is here. That’s nice. She’s had such a hard time.”

“I was just reading about chronic fatigue syndrome,” said Bev. “They say it’s one of those silent epidemics, like lupus. And it affects a lot of women.”

“We have reason to be chronically fatigued,” said Abby Means.

Leanne drank and drank. She was surprised at her own anxiety right now; it wasn’t as if she was in love with Gavin, and it wasn’t even as if he was the only man she was seeing. She reminded herself that it was interesting to be able to get a look at Wendy McCleary from across a room. It was like watching wildlife from a distance, and there was no need to leave. Leanne could stay; though if she stayed, at least she would keep drinking.

Gavin had described his wife accurately, Leanne thought as she poured another glass. Wendy McCleary was a
shrimp
; she even resembled one. Her sweater was coral colored; she seemed strange, not quite ready for human company. Now Dory stepped forward to greet the principal and his wife. “Hi, Gavin. I’m glad you came. And Wendy, this is great,” she said evenly. “We’ve got lots to eat and drink. Fran Heller is playing the piano, and she’s cracking everyone up.” After Dory spoke, she turned to Leanne, making sure Leanne knew she was
just saying this
, and that if it were up to her, she would never have said two words tonight to Lady Lazarus-McCleary.

Leanne watched as Gavin and his wife made the rounds; soon they had entered the living room and pierced the circle of teachers. The principal looked over his shoulder and nodded blankly to Leanne. He ate some food and drank some of the Langs’ wine, while his wife stood shrimpily nearby, talking to a few of the other women, who made a fuss over her. Only Dory hung back, and when she went past Leanne on her way into the kitchen, she made sure to brush her hand against Leanne’s shoulder.

“It’s a Chinese herbal remedy,” Wendy McCleary was telling the teachers. “I think it’s made from the ground root of the autumn lotus plant.”

“Where did you get it?” Ruth Winik asked. “The Internet, I assume?”

“That’s where I found a
Diff ’rent Strokes
lunchbox,” Abby Means said pointlessly.

“No, you know that place right next door to Peppercorns?” said the principal’s wife. “That store with no windows, and with the sign out front that says ‘DVDs and Chinese Specialty Items’?”

“Oh, the scary store,” said Dave’s partner Gordon, and everyone agreed that, yes, yes, it
was
scary, what the hell
was
that place? Chinese mafia? An opium den? They’d all seen it, but none of them had ever gone in over all the years they’d lived in this town. “I’m afraid of it. I always think they shoot snuff films in there,” said Gordon. “They have no windows. Why would they choose not to have windows?”

“Don’t you think this is a little xenophobic of us?” Dory said. “Because it’s a foreign place, it freaks us out.”

“Doesn’t it disturb you too?” Gordon asked.

“A little,” she admitted. “But I’m not proud of it.”

“Well, I actually went inside,” said Wendy. “By myself. It’s two stores, really. Up front they rent DVDs and it’s entirely Caucasian, but I swear it’s a front for something else. I told them what I wanted, and they pointed toward the Chinese part of the store,” she said. “It was a separate room. Smaller. There were a few shelves that were mostly empty, except for a couple of old jars of hoisin sauce and some Pond’s cold cream. Then, in the very back, there was a plywood door. And I knocked on it, and a voice said, ‘Come in.’ So I walked in, and inside a tiny room there was a really old woman. She had all these containers of herbs around her, and ginseng floating in bottles of liquid, and things bubbling on a hot plate. It reminded me of a meth lab.”

“That’s because it probably
is
a meth lab,” said Dave and Gordon at the same time, and then they smiled at each other, pleased.

“No, no,” said Wendy McCleary. “It’s a legitimate non-Western pharmacy. I told the old pharmacist what was wrong with me, and she looked into my throat and my eyes, and tested my reflexes, and then she gave me some powder in capsule form, and told me to take it every morning. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”

“I cannot believe you just took it like that,” Bev said.

“Who knows what they gave you,” said Ed Cutler. “It could contain lead.”

“I was desperate,” said Wendy McCleary simply. “I had no life. But now I do.”

Leanne wasn’t proprietary about Gavin, but this was too uncomfortable for her. She went upstairs, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but the first door she opened turned out to be Willa’s bedroom. “Ooh, sorry,” Leanne called out, but no one was in there. Willa was almost certainly out with Eli.

Leanne slipped into the room and first sat, then lay, on the pink bed in the darkness. She could smell some honeydew perfume that had saturated the coverlet. Through the floor, she heard her colleagues talking, and singing, and then a few
plinks
of glass. Someone finally knocked on the bedroom door, and Leanne assumed it was Dory, making sure she was okay. But then the door opened, and framed in the bright hallway was the principal. He ducked into the dark room and sat down beside her, and Leanne sat up.

“I want you to know that I was as surprised as you,” he whispered. “She hasn’t been to one of these faculty things in
years
. I didn’t have time to warn you. I’m so sorry.”

The music kept coming up through the floor, and it seemed to get louder. Fran Heller was once again making up lyrics about Lysistrata and her sex strike; it was unusual to have such a funny, ballsy woman at one of these potlucks, or even on the faculty at all. Gavin bent his head down and began to kiss Leanne’s neck and collarbone, and she took his head and pulled it away from her, then kissed him hard, feeling how easy it was to respond to him, just the way she’d done when she’d come into his office in the spring.

She heard the start of a creaking moan in her own throat, but as it came forward the room seemed chilly, and she wondered if Willa had left her window open. Leanne opened her eyes and looked to the side, trying to see the window, but the room was too dim. Was there an actual breeze flowing through here? No, of course not. But there was. A wind practically lifted Leanne Bannerjee’s hair from her neck; the spell it carried encircled her efficiently, freezing her, changing her, making her realize that one day, not terribly long from now, she would be older, and she would be considered someone a little wild and embarrassing. A cougar, perhaps. “A
Bengali
cougar,” another teacher would titter meanly behind her hand in the teachers’ room.

Men could get away with sleeping with various women, but not the other way around
. Get out now,
she thought, or at any rate the spell seemed to tell her this.
Get away from the men you’ve been seeing. All of them.
She closed her eyes against the cold and felt her teeth snap together once, decisively, as though she were biting down on a rag during electroshock, and then Leanne Bannerjee gave in to the spell without even knowing.

Gavin McCleary’s mouth on hers now felt overeager and brash. A funny song about Lysistrata wafted upward, and Leanne was impatient, and had lost all excitement.

She pulled away. “God, Gavin, enough,” she said.

“What?”

She looked at him and shook her head, knowing what she had to say. She was done with men for a long, long time, perhaps forever. “I know that this is apparently the only way I can do it—seeing a few different men—but one of these days it’s going to look bad,” she said. “And I’ll seem like this predatory person. And that will be terrible and humiliating.”

“What are you saying?” he said. “We enjoy each other.”

“We did.”

“You’re ending it?” he said, and she nodded. “But why?” he asked, shocked.

“I told you why.”

“Is it because Wendy showed up tonight?”

“No,” Leanne said. “Yes. I don’t know. Everyone becomes part of a couple. Everyone. And if I don’t want that—and if I stay one of those women who never marries, how will that look? What will it say?”

“It will say that that’s your choice. Leanne, if you break this off,” he said, “I’m telling you, I’ll lose it, I swear I will.”

But no matter what he said, he could not sway her. The spell had taken her, and she was already under a snow dome of enchantment, lost to him. Gavin McCleary slumped back onto the bed and closed his eyes. If someone were to come into the room now and find them, there would be no explaining what the principal and the school psychologist were doing together on a teenaged girl’s bed in the darkness. But no one came in, and the sloshing, lurching, sing-along party continued downstairs, with the teachers drinking and eating and dropping little pieces of broken chips all around the Langs’ living room; and with witty, improvised songs played harder and harder on the upright piano. In various musical idioms, Lysistrata rallied the women of Greece against the men in order to end a war, and they did what she commanded.

Leanne Bannerjee stood up, her heart fast, and left Gavin McCleary on the bed. She hurried down the stairs, almost stumbling over the Langs’ dog, who lay at the bottom. The dog picked her head up and gazed at Leanne, then returned to her licking; the sounds of wetness were always being emitted from her like a white-noise machine, or a wet-noise machine. Leanne stepped over her and kept walking. Down the hall, she went past the kitchen, where Dory stood sticking toothpicks into small baked and caramelized things.

“Where were you?” Dory asked Leanne, looking up.

“I’m going home.”

“Is that a good idea?” Dory asked. “Maple double-smoked bacon,” she added in apology, as she continued spearing. “You’re upset.”

“I’ve got to go,” Leanne said. Then, casually, “I broke it off.”

“You did? Just now?”

“I am so done with all this,” Leanne said, and she slipped her cell phone from her pocket. “I’m calling Carlos as soon as I get outside. And Malcolm. With his
cars,
” she added snidely, she who had never once minded the cars before.

“Now why don’t you just take a minute—”

“I’ve got to get out of here, Dory. I’m sorry.”

Leanne found the pile of coats on the bed in the guest room. Near the top was Gavin’s overcoat, and below it, intermingled with it, was a coat that could have belonged to a child. She kept digging, and somewhere near the bottom, among the many drifting, floating coats, was her leather jacket, once owned by a man she had liked in graduate school, and she put it on. The entire pile slid to the floor, an avalanche of teachers’ coats, all of them falling, falling. Leanne left them there and walked down the hall. Soon she would be on the phone, telling the two other men what she had decided. “No, I can’t meet you tonight,” she would say to Carlos when she got out onto the street, but he would barely be able to hear her over the sounds of the bar. “
I cannot see you again,
” she would have to shout. Soon she would hear the men’s voices, so small through the phone, and startled.

The principal had come downstairs now, and she saw him walk to the table, standing for a moment in front of her untouched hummus. He knew she had brought it, and so he had gone right over to it, in front of everyone, even in front of his wife, who stood eating nothing. He pushed a baby carrot through the hummus, then put it into his mouth.

As Leanne opened the door to leave, she heard Abby Means ask, “Gavin, are you okay? You’re
trembling.
”

8
.

L
ike the women of ancient Greece, Dory Lang refrained from the male altogether. One night in bed, when yet another awkward confrontation with Robby took place, she recalled that line from the play. “
We must refrain from the male altogether,
” she thought, and she turned away from him again, unaware of the spell, knowing only that she was different. Robby, at first, was simply confused by Dory’s behavior, and seemed to be making an effort not to be too upset or magnify what was happening. Maybe this was a phase, he probably thought. All marriages had them. He remained reasonably good-natured when, in anticipation of what he was about to ask her, or try to do, she would grow tense all over again and quickly say to him, “I’m just so beat,” or else, reflexively, vaguely, a couple of times, “I’ve got that thing.”

“What thing is it now?” he asked one night, very late, and for the first time he sounded irritated. It was Friday, the start of a weekend, and there was certainly nothing in the morning that Dory had to go to. They could both sleep in. Willa could take Hazel out, and the Langs could lie twined and twinned after a night of reunion sex—the resolution to the brief and baffling pause that Dory had insisted upon. The
phase.
“Why do you keep saying this?” he asked her. “Why don’t you ever want to touch me or have me touch you anymore?”