The Uncoupling (2 page)

Inevitably, on the last night of the conference, they slept together. There had been a closing party in the hospitality suite, and they stayed as long as they could, until finally they were pinned in a corner with a few other young teachers while an old, distinguished Southern education pioneer grew agitated about the state of the American high school. “Come,” Robby said when the man went to get some cheese. Many flights up, in Dory’s hotel room, she lay back with her head squarely on the pillow, and Robby Baskin sat above her, both of them smiling as if they’d won something. There, where the walls were covered with a twiney fabric that probably rendered them perfect vessels for sound transmittal, they discovered that their long, similar bodies worked well together. Robby was fervent, effective in bed. He buried himself in her; his heart worked so hard it seemed like a thing that might leap away. She thought that she could do this with him forever, watching as time and life slipped away, as other people went to jobs and made dinner and ironed and talked.

In bed, at first and then later, when he visited her in Brooklyn, and even much later, when he left Vermont for good and moved in with her, they shouted in big voices, or squeaked or hummed with industry and focus. They both noticed that they perspired roughly the same amount, and it was never overpowering, but instead more like a delicate broth.
Chickeny
, Robby commented once.
The bouillon of love.

Robby was a quiet man, straightforward and reliable, and when the time came, he flexibly transformed himself into a good husband and father. None of it was much of a stretch. Together they decided to change their last names to something invented and new. They were casting off their old families, their old lives; why not cast off their names too? “Lang” was decided upon in the middle of the night. It was a neutral, appealing name; the single syllable seemed easygoing, much the way they imagined themselves. They free-associated to various good-sounding “lang” words:
“lang
uid,”
“lang
uage,” even
“lang
oustines,” those tiny lobsters they both loved and had eaten by the bucket that summer. The name was chosen, and the old names fell away, just as their old, unattached selves did too.

At Elro, Dory Lang was looked up to and beamed at. Robby Lang was often asked to direct the high school play, and he also served as the faculty liaison for the literary magazine,
The New Deal
. Before school, he would sit and talk earnestly with the kids about their poems and stories and the lithographs of their grandmothers’ hands. Students often confided in both of them, and so did other faculty members. Fifteen years passed, and everyone knew the kind of marriage the Langs had, the stability and reciprocity, the lack of sexism, the love and the passion.

Women admired the way Dory and her husband loved each other, and she knew this because they occasionally told her. Once, after seeing the Langs quickly kiss goodbye before Robby went off on an overnight field trip with his class, Dory’s friend Bev Cutler, the guidance counselor, seemed to redden slightly. It was as if she had been caught observing the Langs in an explicit moment. Or maybe she had been caught longing for something of her own, explicitly. “Oh, you two; it’s really something,” was what she said. Everyone understood that, although the Langs were past forty, they still often wanted to do various elaborate things to each other. They were entirely free to do whatever they wanted, sensation hitting them,
pow, pow, pow
, like light hail popping against their bodies.

Unlike Bev and her hedge-fund manager husband Ed, Dory and Robby had a good amount to say to each other at the end of the day. Because they worked in the same building, in the same department, they always enjoyed the time at night when they could slowly go over all that had happened to them, beat by beat. “Tell me about lunch with Leanne,” Robby would say as they arranged themselves in their bed, bodies close, and she’d tell him what she and her closest friend, Leanne Bannerjee, the school psychologist, had talked about.

“She’s still threatening to leave and join a practice with her friend Jane in the city,” Dory would tell him. “To become a teenologist.”

“That is not a real word.”

“I know, but they make a lot of money. They make house calls to ‘talk to teens.’ They go on reality TV as experts. It’s pretty disgusting.” Leanne was twenty-nine, almost absurdly beautiful, tiny, vulnerable but confident, and the girl students in particular desperately attached themselves to her.

“And what about McCleary? That’s still going on?” Robby would ask quietly, as though afraid their teenaged daughter Willa might hear them and be given information that only they knew: that Leanne and the married, astonishingly stiff school principal, Gavin McCleary, had been involved since last spring.

“Yes,” Dory would say. “Still going on. Also, that foreign-car dealer, Malcolm. And the bartender, Carlos, from Peppercorns. But yes, McCleary; she’s still seeing McCleary.”

“I see him in the halls,” Robby would say, “and I think:
That’s who she chooses?
These things are always such a mystery.”

“Attractions.”

He would nod. Sometimes when McCleary stood onstage to speak at an assembly, Dory imagined him in bed with Leanne. That same wooden, formal voice that said, “Girls’ field hockey, Team B, will meet out front after school for team pictures,” also certainly spoke intimate and startling phrases. She agreed with her husband about how mysterious it all was.

“Oh, and next topic,” Dory would say to Robby. “What happened with
The Odyssey
? Did they respond at all to the part where Telemachus says that line . . . what is it exactly; I always get it wrong.”

Robby would recite, “‘
I am that father whom your boyhood lacked / and suffered pain for lack of.
’” Then together they would finish it off
:
“‘
I am he.
’”

They had these little routines, which were all part of the patter and rhythm of their full home life. Rounding it out was Willa, who, at the time, was a high school sophomore, self-involved, uncertain, spending her time noodling around on different websites, or frequently in the deep, cool, virtual landscapes of Farrest. The Langs lived in a small, pretty white Colonial on Tam o’ Shanter Drive in Stellar Plains, with an upright piano and walls hung thick with artwork and photographs, and with their twelve-year-old yellow Labrador, Hazel, who had resolved the potential problem of loss of desire by lying curved on the front hall rug each day and licking the brambles of her underside until she was soaked and zonked. She needed no one else for love; she was satisfied by her own long and faithful self.

The Langs had waves of students who stayed in touch for years after they graduated (“A Shout-Out to Ms. Lang,” they wrote as e-mail subject headings, or, “Yo, Mr. L!” they bellowed from across the parking lot at Greens and Grains). The students lurked on the edges of their teachers’ lives for years, and brought bulletins from their own lives, which over time began to include lovers, ambitions, an upward trajectory. It was only when everything settled down for them and became permanent and maybe disappointing that their former teachers never heard from them again.

Robby and Dory were fixed in place themselves, but all was well. It might have gone on like this for a long, long time. It might never have changed. They might have remained one of those miracle couples who never stop, never quit, and whom everyone regards in head-shaking awe. They might have stayed at an impressive pitch, sexually, even after so much time had gone by. But one night in December, a school night, a strange and unnoticed but also undeniable spell was cast. At least, this was when the spell was cast upon Dory Lang, though of course she did not know it. And since she did not know it, she had no idea what had set it in motion either. Robby had shoveled the snow and Dory had made dinner, and then they’d sat down and eaten it with Willa. Dinner-table conversation ensued, then came to a natural close as they stood to clear the plates. Finally they said goodnight to their daughter, and then they climbed the stairs and got into bed.

For a while, under the pale gray duvet, they talked, murmured, coughed occasionally, made the kinds of remarks they always made, some tender, some dull. And then Robby put a hand on her shoulder to turn her toward him, as he often did, and what she felt was a stunning bolt of cold air strike her body. A formidable wind seemed to have flown in through the half-inch of open window, but had then immediately found its way under the duvet and under Dory Lang’s old, thin, stretchy, skim-milk-colored nightgown.

It was the cold air of the spell, come to claim her. Other spells were far more dramatic, accompanied as they were by lightning, or a sizzling clang of thunderclap. This spell was more subtle, but still when it first came over a woman it was shocking, perhaps even grotesque, and she didn’t have any idea that she was under it. Dory Lang simply felt as if she was freezing, and then she was aware of a mild disgust, no, even a mild horror at being touched. Certainly not pleasure; none of that for her anymore. Her body momentarily shook—a brief death rattle, a
death-of-sex
rattle, technically—and then stopped.

Robby turned her, and she faced him, and his hand was upon her and his mouth was on her face, her neck, and instead of being drawn toward him as usual, all she knew was that she had to find a way out of this moment. Obviously, it wasn’t the first time she’d ever wanted to say no, or had ever said no to him, in bed, but she thought it may have been the first time that she’d felt the need to lie.

Other times, entirely truthfully, she’d said:

Or:

Or:

Or:

And all those times, she had been telling the truth. The excuses were real. If Dory Lang said she had a thing in the morning, then she certainly did; there would have been some legitimate event that she needed to rest up for.

Now, though, under the power of the spell, all Dory could think was that sleeping with your husband after so many years was not at all like sleeping with him when you were young. It was no longer effortless; it was
full of effort
, and now that she was aware of that effort, how could she ever ignore it again? She was irritated by the realization, and angry. Suddenly she wanted to shake everything up, to take the sweetness and constancy and even the conscientious effort that was apparently now a part of their love life, and throw it away. Destroy what they had.

Robby was touching her, and she was meant to touch him back, but she couldn’t bear it. She had to say something to him, for he was patiently waiting. “I have that thing in the morning,” she said to her sweet and lovely husband, who had done nothing different, nothing wrong. It was as if the words had been supplied to her by some hidden prompt.

“What thing?” he pressed, for he also didn’t understand what was happening to his wife.

Dory paused for a moment. She actually did have something in the morning, she remembered with relief.

“That conference with Jen Heplauer and her mother,” she said, settling into this alibi, making her voice serious and responsible. “The plagiarism thing.”

They shifted in the bed, moving apart. All around Stellar Plains, the same low, hard wind was starting to blow in and out of bedrooms, under blankets, nightgowns, skin, and it would keep doing that for weeks, making its circuit, taking its time. That night and over the days and nights that followed, other women, newly enchanted, said to men, “I have that thing in the morning,” or “Sorry, I’m kind of out of it,” or “I can’t see you anymore,” or simply,
“We’re done,”
or else they just turned away, giving their husbands or partners or boyfriends the long flat of the back like a door in the face.

Robby sighed and then scratched himself somewhere beneath the blanket; the timbre of the scratch made her think it was the inside of a thigh. It was true that Dory had a conference in the morning—though “conference” was a lofty word to apply to a brief and uncomfortable conversation that would be held in the classroom before school with Jen Heplauer and her mother. She pictured their hopeful, unimaginative Heplauer faces; the gap between Jen’s front teeth, her hair still lying wet from a shower; the mother’s gum-colored pocketbook with all those buckles and knobs. Dory heard the daughter’s defensive, rising voice, and the mother’s echoes, and her own tolerant but ultimately insistent words, repeating herself as many times as it took: “Ms. Heplauer. Jen. Ms. Heplauer. Jen. Listen. I appreciate that you worked hard, Jen, I really do.”

“I did work hard,” the girl would say, her lower lip on vibrate. “You have no idea how hard I worked, Ms. L. I stayed in when everyone else was going out. I stayed in on a
Wednesday night
.”

“You don’t have to keep saying that. I understand that you put in a lot of effort.”

“And did footnotes,” her mother would murmur.

“Yes. Footnotes,” Jen would add, mother and daughter looking at each other and nodding, a unified front.

“That’s not at issue,” Dory would say, and she would try to get them to understand. Eventually they would give in, the way people always gave in to teachers, those bullies. She’d shepherd them from the classroom just as the first bell was ringing and the rest of the students began to gallop and flood toward her, wanting something, wanting everything.

In bed, Robby understood that this was what awaited his wife in the morning. It wasn’t as if Dory needed to fall asleep immediately so that she could be in fighting shape for Jen Heplauer and her mother. It wasn’t as if she needed to rest up for some kind of Ironman Challenge, and they both knew it.

He looked at her in slight confusion. “Oh, okay,” he said, remembering. “The plagiarism thing.” He was trying to figure out the link between the conference in the morning and the inadvisability of sex right now. He was stumped.