by Meg Wolitzer
So nothing was wrong with him, and that was still true. Sara had always insisted that he was extremely normal, much more so than she was. “I grew up raised by a totally narcissistic mother and no father,” she had said. “Where does that leave me?”
“My parents were extremely boring,” he had told her. “So middle-of-the-road and docile and boring that it probably warped me inside.”
“No,” she said, “you don’t understand. No one wants interesting parents. Interesting parents are a curse.” She paused. “My mother is very interesting,” she added pointedly. “Parents should be completely dull and ordinary and predictable. You want their relationship to be stable and incredibly boring, as though you would kill yourself if you had to be in that marriage.”
Neither Sara nor Adam wanted a boring marriage for themselves, nor did either of them want one of those Bloomsbury-type marriages that involved lots of furious letter-writing in lieu of sex. Sara wouldn’t settle for such a thing; she was deeply attracted to men—men who were attracted to her right back—and she would always seek them out and then report back to Adam. He, in turn, would sleep with men and report back to her.
A few weeks after initially meeting the Normandys, Adam was invited to a dinner party at their Manhattan home, and he brought Sara as his date. The Normandys and their friends were so unlike the people he and Sara knew, whose idea of a dinner party was often potluck, with guests bringing falafel and brownies. But the Normandys had invited dozens of people, who were seated that evening around small, formal tables lit with rosy candles. He and Sara walked in arm in arm, and their mouths opened at the same moment. The opulence was too much for them, too stimulating.
Paul Normandy was squat and friendly and seemed to be waiting for his first heart attack to happen, while his wife was built like a praying mantis and draped in jewels. “Look at the way their skin shines,” Sara had whispered that night. “That’s not oil or sweat glands. It’s wealth; they’ve got the money glow.” Artwork could be found everywhere in the apartment, which was adorned with giant cracking canvases of eighteenth-century milkmaids and recent, disturbing oil paintings of dogs with their throats slashed. When canapés circulated, Sara and Adam tried to engage the waiters and waitresses in conversation, for who else was there to talk to? Who else was in their league?
Eventually, when Sheila Normandy came over to say hello, Adam became overcome by discomfort. “Hey, thanks for inviting us,” he’d said, giving his hostess’s hand a shake and crushing her fingers with their hard, pointy rings. Sheila winced, and Adam pulled back in apology. Then he proceeded to drop a piece of salmon-and-chervil roulade down the front of his dinner jacket, and excused himself to go clean himself up, leaving Sara to fend for herself.
In the Normandys’ bathroom, frantically dabbing at the stain with a wet yard of toilet paper, he’d looked in the mirror and seen himself as he was: not the gay Neil Simon at all, but instead an ordinary-looking person who had no business here in this bathroom that was as big as his entire apartment, with gold faucets shaped like fish. All he could think of, looking at the fish faucets with their wide-open mouths, was fellatio. He fantasized about lowering his pants and letting some man—the Normandys’ butler, perhaps, a cute British guy—take Adam’s penis in his mouth. When he emerged from the bathroom, embarrassed by his own thoughts and spattered with water, Sara pulled him aside, yanking him into an alcove beneath a lesser Seurat; they were so close to it that all colors had separated into a field of discrete dots, and they couldn’t even see what the image was supposed to be.
“You’ve left me here for hours,” she said.
“It hasn’t been hours.”
“Yes it has,” she said, her voice petulant, but he decided to forgive her. Everyone always forgave Sara.
“Well,” Adam said, “I’m here to rescue you.” He took Sara’s arm, feeling the reassuring brush of velvet sleeve against his wrist as they went in to dinner.
Now, walking up the driveway of the Normandys’ summer home without Sara, Adam thought of how, if she were here, she would quiet his anxieties. He was barely half himself without her; he was small, shriveled, joyless, abstracted. Her mother was beside him instead, and everything was out of alignment. He suddenly felt on the verge of weeping as he glanced over at this woman who was like Sara but not—this woman who had given birth to the woman he loved. All around them, valets directed cars into parking spots and guests approached the house, the women dressed in pale linen and clutching purses no bigger than summer fruit, the men sauntering casually up the steps. Just as reluctance threatened to overtake him, Natalie turned and said, “I don’t want to do this. I want to go home.”
“Me too,” said Adam. “So let’s go.”
“No, wait, it’ll be fine, you guys,” Shawn said quickly. “We’ll have drinks. We won’t have to talk to anyone but ourselves.” He was almost pleading, so much did he want to be at this party. “Please,” he said. “It’ll do us all some good.” And so they kept walking. As they headed toward the house, Adam gazed at the grounds. Somewhere out back, he had heard, there was a helicopter, resting silently on its own launch pad. He mounted the wide porch steps numbly, wondering if he would ever take pleasure in anything again, if he would ever feel comfortable in the world without Sara.
Inside the house, a butler quickly appeared with a tray of peach bellinis, and a sprightly female caterer appeared with a tray of hors d’oeuvres cut to the size of nickels. The living room was as big as a beach, and filled with people. In the corner, at a massive white piano, a well-known cabaret entertainer was playing standards; the word “love” kept trilling into the air. Unnoticed, Adam, Shawn, and Natalie wandered lost through the room. No one noticed them, and no one showed an interest in talking to them.
Suddenly there was a distraction in the large room, a rustle of interest elsewhere, and Adam looked upward to see Paul Normandy and his wife, Sheila, descending the wide stairway. Clasped around Paul Normandy’s left ankle was a thick metal manacle. Having been convicted recently of a securities swindle, he had been placed on house arrest all summer, which meant that he was forced to remain in the splendor of his beach home until the fall, an electronic monitoring cuff attached to his ankle. In September, back in Manhattan, he would begin a certain number of hours of community service. The house was undeniably a good place to be imprisoned. Except for the fact that Paul Normandy was unseasonably pale, he seemed none the worse for wear now, making the rounds of guests, shaking hands and slapping backs, while his tanned wife gave other wives air-kisses, not even attempting to touch lips to cheek but simply aiming for the approximate vicinity of the other person.
“Look, Adam, the wife is coming over here,” Shawn whispered. “She seems to be coming right over to us. Oh, Jesus.”
“What’s wrong?” said Adam.
“What’s wrong is that I don’t know what you’re supposed to talk about in situations like this. I practically grew up in Dog-patch.”
“Well, I don’t know what you’re supposed to say either,” said Adam. “Sara always said I should fake it,” he added, as Sheila Normandy strode directly toward their little cluster. Adam and Shawn turned and gave her identical party smiles. “Adam Langer,” she said, positioning herself before him and taking his hands in hers. “I heard that you were involved in that terrible car accident. I’m so sorry about your loss.” Before Adam could answer, he saw that Sheila had moved her gaze over to Natalie, and that the two women were observing each other in a peculiar, narrow-eyed way. For a long moment neither of them said anything.
“Wait a minute,” Natalie finally said to her. “I know you.”
“And I know you,” said Sheila.
There was another pause, and then Natalie began to sing in a tentative voice, “Sit around the campfire … join the Campfire Girls.”
“Sing wo-he-lo, sing wo-he-lo,” sang Sheila.
“Work … health … love!” the two women sang together.
After the song, they shrieked and l
unged for each other, embracing furiously. “Sheila Carmucci?” said Natalie.
“Natalie Wall?” cried Sheila. “I can’t believe it. You look exactly the way you used to look; I can still see it in your face.”
“I don’t have braids anymore,” said Natalie.
“And I had my teeth straightened,” said Sheila. “And later on I had everything enhanced with collagen, but that’s another story.”
“It’s still you,” said Natalie.
“Yes,” said Sheila. “It still is. I don’t think anything can change that, can it?”
The women regarded each other with astonishing tenderness. Natalie later explained everything to Adam and Shawn: how she and Sheila had been Campfire Girls together as children, going on overnights to the woods just north of the city. The shriek and the embrace were visceral on Sheila Normandy’s part; in truth, she didn’t want anyone to know of her modest background, that she was the daughter of a man who ran a poultry warehouse in the Bronx. But she never lied about her past on the odd occasion when it rose to the surface, and when she saw Natalie for the first time in almost thirty years, it was a moment of true pleasure.
“I had no idea you’d become so prominent,” said Natalie, gesturing around the room. “This is unbelievable.”
“And you,” said Sheila, leading Natalie by the arm away from the now-forgotten and bewildered Adam and Shawn. “I want you to tell me everything.”
LATER, AFTER the party was over and Natalie was driving them down the gravel road of the mansion and back to their own house, she suddenly asked if there was anywhere to get a drink. She certainly didn’t need any more alcohol, but Adam felt that he could hardly deny her something that would deaden pain. Besides, it seemed especially bleak to return to the house right now, having just come from such splendor.
“A drink sounds great,” said Shawn. “You know what’s around here, Adam. This is your territory, not ours.”
“I can’t think of anywhere, really,” said Adam. “I mean, there’s the Gangplank, but obviously we wouldn’t want to go there.”
“What’s the Gangplank?” asked Natalie.
“A gay bar,” said Adam. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I think you’d feel kind of uncomfortable there, Mrs. Swerdlow.”
“No I wouldn’t,” she said, and so he directed her there. The street in front of the bar was packed with cars, some parked the wrong way, a few even on the grass. Men leaned against trees, smoking and flirting. From inside the bar came the tinny drone of technopop. Adam had never thrown himself into dancing, or into the excitement that accompanied it. Instead, he had always been there on the sidelines, watching crowds of writhing dancers like an anthropologist doing field work. The music belonged to them, not him. It had belonged to extroverted men in gay bars, and it had belonged to Sara, who sometimes spent evenings with men Adam never met. Her independence had sometimes defeated him, left him feeling like a child lost and quietly suffused with panic in the middle of a department store. She had not belonged to Adam: she had had her own tastes and desires that had nothing to do with him.
What they shared was often a general sense of the hopelessness of love, its near-unavailability, as though love was a rare bird spotted in a wilderness preserve only one day in any year. You had to stake it out with binoculars, quiet and patient; if you moved too soon, or leapt up in excited pleasure, it would fly off in a shudder of feathers.
“I don’t think I even know who the supposedly contented people are,” Adam had said to her. “I mean the truly and consistently contented ones. The ones who aren’t walking around with some artificial happiness manufactured by Prozac or Paxil. I wish the genuinely happy people would just raise their hands and identify themselves, and then we can ask them what their secret is.”
“You know something? I really love you,” Sara suddenly said.
“I love you too,” he had replied, something he’d never said to a man.
The way it was supposed to have gone, this joint life of theirs, was like this: Sara would complain a lot but ultimately marry one of her dashing boyfriends and have children with him. Adam would complain a lot and date men occasionally, but would always live alone. He would be the godfather to Sara’s children, dedicating plays to them, becoming a delightful Sunday uncle who would be eternally playful and indulgent in ways that their own parents could not be. And throughout Adam and Sara’s separate but deeply interlaced lives, they would both feel longings for a merged life, for perfection and union and lying in bed again without the problems that sex always brought.
He looked around him at the various men now, feeling himself withdraw, changing into a meek reference librarian in a movie, his shoulders becoming rounded, his chest seeming to turn concave. Men came from all over the area to this bar, crowding into the cinderblock building and drinking and talking intimately in corners. From inside now came the persistent and persuasive thump of dance music.
Once inside the door, Adam paid for himself and let a strange man jam a rubber stamp that read ENTER onto the back of his hand. His hand blazed from the touch of the stamper; that was all it took to excite him. That, and the music rising and the hordes of men he could glimpse inside, all of them presumably men who had sex with other men. Adam felt himself grow tense and alert the way he always did when he entered a room full of men. Instinctively, he put an arm on Natalie’s back, as if to link himself up with her, the way he had always done when he had come here with Sara, as if to say: Save me from the world of men.
“God, look at you,” said Shawn as they walked down the dark hallway and into the main room.
“I’m not good in bars,” said Adam. Shawn, however, seemed right at home here, having spent hundreds of nights in gay bars of all kinds, and when they arrived in the main room he leaned over the warm, sloping glass of a jukebox and dropped in quarters. Immediately, a man came over to Shawn, ostensibly to see what songs he had picked. Adam felt defeated as he walked to the long bar and ordered a Sprite. But then Natalie appeared beside him, tapping her foot to the music and trying to look as though she remotely fit in. There were no other women in the bar. She was as nervous as he was; together they were like two freshmen at a college mixer, both waiting to see if anyone would be attracted to them, if they would ever be loved. Natalie ordered herself a Stinger and drank it quickly.
“Look,” she said, peering over the top of her glass, “I think you have a couple of admirers.” Adam looked, noticing two men in their late thirties in tank tops who actually seemed to be staring intently at him.
The men approached. “Excuse me,” said one, “are you Adam Langer?”
“Yes,” said Adam, feeling heat in his face.
“It’s the gay Neil Simon,” said the other man. “We thought so. We just wanted to tell you how much we like your work. My mother even likes your work. I took her to your play, and she actually laughed. And this is a woman with no sense of humor; they removed it with her thyroid.”
“Well, thank you. Thank you,” said Adam.
“Are you working on something new?” asked the first man.
“Oh, he works all the time,” Natalie said. “Nonstop, all day. I can hear his little computer clicking away. It sounds like a dog’s toenails on linoleum.”
He cringed at her lie. His work was going poorly; he couldn’t focus on writing at all, but still it was pleasurable to have these men admire him. On his own and unknown in a bar, Adam usually felt miserable, but once someone knew who he was and allowed him to be excused from the normal requirements of true attractiveness, he did very well. The two men, whose names were Henry and Armand, seemed genuinely excited to be in his presence. Natalie had begun a conversation with Armand, and she was now advising him on making hotel reservations in Greece. He looked interested as she talked, and after a while a couple of Armand’s friends came over to join in the talk. It was as though she drew them to her with her otherness, her solemn and older femaleness in the midst of all these men. “There’s not much choice on Crete,” sh
e was saying. “You might do better on Corfu.”
Tonight she seemed to be the mother these men hadn’t had, the one who was understanding and tolerant of who they had become. She was standing and chatting with a whole group of men, her eyes bright as she offered sound, motherly advice, answering their travel questions and telling them details about herself. The music grew very loud and Adam could no longer hear much of the conversation, but he could read her lips as she spoke to a tall man with nipple rings. “Her name was Sara,” he saw her tell him. “She was thirty when she died.” Soon the man asked her to dance. She reached out a hand for Adam to come join in too, as if this were a three-way dance, a game of ring-around-the-rosy, but he vigorously shook his head no. He wasn’t a good dancer, and never had been. Everyone said dancing was like sex; if you made two characters dance in a play, then that was always a symbolic prelude to their lovemaking. He saw the tiny lights of joints as they were inhaled and passed among shirtless dancing men. For a moment he saw Shawn, who was now dancing with the man from the jukebox. And then, startled, he saw Natalie, who was now inhaling someone’s joint, her eyes closed, her body loosely moving. She exhaled and passed the joint to someone else, her expression newly dreamy. Adam marveled at the way she was able to give in to the cluttered warmth of the evening and make herself comfortable in the midst of all these limbs and the heat they generated. As the dance floor filled, the place smelled like a locker room, the peculiarly sour smell of large groups of men which, for some reason he couldn’t explain, he really liked.
In the middle of the dance floor, Natalie was trying to become someone else, someone who could actually dance without thinking of death. She was a surprisingly good dancer, flexible and fluid. Then Adam was startled to see that Natalie was taking her blouse off, joining the shirtless crowd, undoing her buttons and tossing her blouse to the side. Soon there she was in her bra. He felt tremendously sad and anxious for Sara’s stoned, dancing mother. But in this mass of half-naked bodies she seemed merely another eccentric, throwing an interesting and even exotic female note into the mix. She was the lone woman in this sea of men. More men pounded into the bar, pushing in a group out onto the dance floor. Unlike Natalie, Adam would never take off his shirt; he would continue to shuffle through life all covered up.