The Uncoupling (23 page)

“It can be depressing,” Dory agreed. “But you—you should do exactly what you want, Leanne. You should sleep with whoever you like.”

“One day it’ll all look bad, Dory. Me and my different men. People will say things about me.”

“Who cares what they say?” said Dory. “Really. You need to just live.”

“I guess I can’t,” Leanne said.

While they’d been talking, a wave of people had arrived at the restaurant: a group of men in jackets and ties beneath opened parkas, fresh from work. The hostess moved the men to a table, and behind them in the doorway Bev Cutler and Ruth Winik were revealed, standing with Abby Means, who held herself slightly apart. She had never come here with any of them before.

Dory didn’t want the other women to see her and Leanne; this wasn’t meant to be a group conversation, so she tipped her head away even from her good friend Bev. The hostess marched the three women to a table in a different section, but Abby saw Dory and Leanne and spun around and waved, and the three women in their dripping winter coats headed for the booth. Someone said to pull up a chair; it might have been Dory, or it might have been Leanne, and it was spoken in an unconvincing voice. It would have been rude not to invite them. It also seemed as if, given the events of the day, and the quest for midafternoon alcohol, that there was an implied theme to these separate visits to Peppercorns.

“We’ll just sit for a second,” Bev said. It was decided that the three women would have a drink with the two, and then they would take their own table for dinner.

Everyone, it was quickly determined, could relate in some way to Marissa Clayborn’s bed refusal. Bev said that maybe it was only because it was winter, and the days were short and the nights were long, and during this time of year it was easy to take full measure of where your life had brought you at this point in time—but oh, she felt unhappy about what had happened between her and Ed.

“What happened?” Ruth asked. “I don’t think I know about this.”

So Bev told them what had happened, and she said that Ed had always had a pirate’s cruelty in him, and she’d known it was there, but he’d also had other, dear qualities that her friends couldn’t see. She’d felt that she could never complain about him, because she had made her bargain. “It was as if, in the early days,” she said, “he was doing battle with money, and then he’d come home and we’d both be all hopped up about it. I participated in that. I lived in that house. I still live there. And the money was made the way it was made, and now the world’s in trouble, and I suppose my marriage is too.”

She told them that for the past six weeks or so, since she’d confronted him, Ed literally no longer spoke to her. They now occupied separate wings of the house. They took meals at different times too. She had no idea what he was thinking, and she told them that she was so lonely that all she could think about was her loneliness, or food. She’d been eating Froze more than usual, driving to the mall sometimes twice a day. Ed didn’t say goodbye when he left for the city in the morning, but moved past her showily, in sharp and ungiving profile. “And I keep thinking,” Bev said, “how did this happen? For a long time, it wasn’t like this.”

“You love someone,” said Ruth Winik, “but it changes over time. Hormones kick in, or maybe it’s that they kick out. We’re all held hostage by what’s in our bloodstream.”

“You think that’s what it is?” Dory asked. “Just that?”

“Why, what else?” said Ruth.

“Oh, what isn’t it? It’s everything,” Dory said. “The minute you realize it’s no longer exactly the way it used to be, from then on it’s even more different.” Her voice sounded despairing, and they asked her to tell them what she meant. So she told them about that night in bed in December, when she had felt the need to make up an excuse to Robby about her conference with Jen Heplauer and her mother, and how it had all flowered from there. She described the way celibacy had become a refuge, a revenge, an obscure, perhaps female, necessity.

Around them in the restaurant came laughter and the sounds of dishes and silver. “We should go get our table,” Bev said, but she didn’t get up to leave, and no one else did either.

“Just the other day,” said Leanne, “I heard two women talking in Greens and Grains, and one of them actually said, ‘I would pay someone to have sex with my husband.’ They were
done
with sex, they told each other, and they laughed a little. They weren’t even old at all. But here’s the kicker. Another woman was wheeling her cart past at that moment, and she heard them too, and said, ‘Amen.’ ”

“I saw a really old movie on TV once,” Bev said, “in which Lionel Barrymore, who plays the grandfather of a little boy, finds a way to trick Death into climbing an apple tree. And as long as Death is up in the tree, then no one in the world can die. Not even a little fly.”

“So what happens?” Ruth asked.

“Death is apparently more cunning than humans are. Death does his own trick. The little boy, whose name is Pud—”

“Who would name a little boy Pud?” asked Leanne.

“Who would name a little boy Trivet?” said Ruth.

“—is convinced by Death to climb the apple tree too,” Bev said. “And he goes too high, and he falls and breaks his back. He’s lying there crying and in pain, and all Lionel Barrymore wants is for Pud to die. But of course he can’t, because Death is still up the tree. So Lionel Barrymore has to agree to let Death come down from the tree, and then the little boy dies. So Death takes Lionel Barrymore too, but don’t worry, the boy and his grandfather go up to heaven, where the rest of the family—who already died at the beginning of the movie—is waiting for them.”

“So you think that’ll happen here?” said Dory. “Sex will come down from its tree?”

The gym teacher took a drink. “I don’t know how to make it do that for me,” she said. “And Henry is really disappointed in me. Not angry, he says, disappointed, but I know he’s angry too. He says he wonders if I really am a lesbian after all. If that’s still what I want. And yeah, I get attractions, but I am not thinking about women. Seriously, I just want to be alone.”

“When you’re young,” Dory said, “sex is this startling new thing. And it gets easy, and you do it as much as you want. And then if you want to have a family, you don’t have to think about birth control, and it’s like this big, shared project. I loved that time,” she said.

They were all thoughtful and sad. It was decided that Bev, Ruth, and Abby would stay at the table and they’d all order some dinner together. When the waitress reappeared at the booth, innocent with her skirt and white blouse and little pad, they rattled off the names of entrées and side dishes, and then she retreated.

“I still have these generic moments of longing occasionally,” Bev said. “I don’t know if I’m alone in that.”

“No, no, you’re not. I’ve lost interest in my boyfriend too,” said Abby, “but I look at porn every once in a while these days. Only on my phone, though; not on the computer, because he might see it there.” She took out her cell phone, and then they all leaned in around the booth in the darkness, the candle in the middle giving the gallery of images the stuttering quality of a silent movie. They sat in contemplation as Abby Means scrolled through the slide show.

Dory thought of Robby’s body when he was young, the first time he’d taken off his clothes for her. She thought of how, one time, they had kissed and kissed in a movie theater in their twenties, back when screens were single, not multiple, and were as big and silky and open as beds.

“Perimenopause did me in,” Bev said. “I couldn’t remember how to fall asleep at night. And during the day I got really hungry. I needed chips, fried things, salt. And milk chocolate, not heart-healthy dark chocolate. My body changed, I just lost control of it, and then Ed turned against me and I was humiliated. I miss what we used to do!” she said with a cry. “I miss it so much. What we did, and who I was. How I felt. I didn’t feel that shame. I liked what we did.”

“Maybe sex doesn’t even belong to us anymore,” Dory said. “It belongs mostly to the kids, and we’re just hanging around too long.” But sex, for the kids, she’d noticed, was different from how it had been for her at their age. For the kids now it was part of the everyday landscape, and they had grown used to it. Sex held great interest for them, but so did everything else fast, transmittable. They needed to see what was happening, to find out what came next, or what came simultaneously. Everyone seemed to have abbreviated focus, and Dory wondered: How could you make love if you couldn’t pay attention?

The women all looked again at the tiny screen of Abby’s cell phone, where a man’s penis had now gotten out of his pants like a tiger escaping a zoo. Their faces adopted studious expressions. They were mesmerized by the ferocity of these random sexual images—a quality that they no longer had in their lives but still longed for
—
and no one realized that the waitress had returned with two big trays of steaming items.

“Here you go, ladies,” she said. “I hope you have an appetite.”

They all pulled back quickly, except Abby, who kept looking, not at all self-conscious. Leanne reached over calmly and shut off Abby’s phone for her, and the very last image, all muscle and pore and hair and lip and breast and testicle, disappeared into a single point of skin-colored light, and was then snuffed out like a star.

 

 

 

I
n the parking lot after dinner, the purplish-white sodium lights snapped and buzzed in the cold air, and everyone said good-night, see you tomorrow, I am so glad we met up, it turns out I needed this, I think we all did. Dory walked to her cold car and sat for a moment. She looked over toward the turnpike and the raft of stores that lined it, and their lit-up, chaotic signs. Beside Peppercorns was the windowless building with its offering of DVDs and Chinese Specialty Items. Gavin McCleary’s formerly unwell wife, Wendy, had rhapsodically told of going in there and being given a dose of autumn lotus root powder. She was now up and about; she was now a member of the living.

Perhaps it was because Dory had been drinking, though she wasn’t at all drunk, just a little loosely strung; or because she was full of food and had talked and talked. Perhaps it was because she was entirely out of ideas, but Dory Lang got out of her car and stood in the parking lot again. The other women’s cars were already gone.

It would make an amusing story to tell Leanne tomorrow, she thought as she walked toward the windowless store, but she wasn’t going in there for the anecdote. She walked into the store with a galloping step at first, an ironic gait, but soon she slowed. The ominous DVDs and specialty items store did seem to be, as Wendy had said, actually two stores in one; up front was the DVD part, where a young white guy in a feed cap sat behind the counter eating dinner from a Styrofoam box. High on a wall, an action movie played on an old Panasonic. Two men stood flipping through the thin collection of DVDs, but Dory thought they barely seemed to be paying attention. They were waiting for something; and then she realized, oh, maybe they were waiting for her to leave. The man behind the counter inclined his head.

“Help you?” he asked.

“Chinese. Herbs,” whispered Dory, awkwardly.

He nodded. “Go on through.”

She walked across the room and through another doorway. On one wall was a laminated reflexology chart; on another were views of Asian sunsets. The shelves lining the far wall held bottles of powders and herbs along with some unrelated and unconnected items: an electric shaver in its dusty box, a dusty blender not in its box, and jars of hoisin sauce and cold cream side by side, just as Wendy McCleary had described. Dory felt a need to flee
,
but still she allowed herself to move deeper into the store. In the back room, by a small space heater that glowed at her feet, the old Chinese woman pharmacist sat at a table with powder and a scoop.

“Hello,” Dory said. “A friend came here a while ago? She said you helped her?”

The woman nodded, accepting this assessment.

“I have a different problem from her,” Dory said, and she was dying here, dying. She had revealed herself tonight at dinner, and now she was doing it again before a stranger. “I’m just at a point in my life,” she said to the old woman, who looked at her impassively, “at which I’ve lost the ability to be . . . ” Her voice faded. “I guess, intimate,” she finally said.

“Desire,” the pharmacist articulated.

“Right.” Then, with the abruptness and intensity of a junkie, she asked, “Do you have something?”

The woman nodded. Probably other women had come in, sad and confused by what had happened to them. Now a powder was weighed and measured; Dory was weighed as well. The bill came to thirty-six dollars for a single pill, and she was shocked by the price but mutely paid. The pharmacist handed her a glassine envelope with one capsule of ash-gray powder inside.

“Is your husband home?” she asked Dory.

“Tonight? Yes.”

“Take this now and go there.”

“How long will it take?”

“Right away, if it is going to work,” said the old woman. “No guarantees. You know,” she added, “you need the mind too.”

“Pardon?”

“You need to want it.”

“Oh. Well, I do,” said Dory.

A paper cup of warmish water was produced, and Dory Lang swallowed the pill. She walked back into the DVD room, which was very dim now, almost dark, and where, in a corner, partly blocked by a standing carousel of DVDs, two young women were softly talking with two men. One woman’s face was spackled with circusy makeup. Dory realized that Wendy McCleary could be right, and the DVDs were probably just a front, or else a minor business compared with whatever else was going on here. The Chinese pharmacy was legitimate, but this was not. One of the men stood up after the made-up woman motioned that he should follow her through a side door. Dory saw only the back of his head, the baldness with the clipped hair around the edges; and then, for just a moment, she heard his voice, and she thought: God, is that Ed Cutler? Or maybe it was someone else. The man had gone into that room, and she couldn’t follow him in and find out. Even if it was Ed, she couldn’t hate him. What was he supposed to do? What were any of them supposed to do?