by Meg Wolitzer
“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.
Like 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?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She couldn’t tell him about wanting to shake everything up, or about what she now knew, which was that once you realize you are different from the way you used to be, then you can never be that earlier way again. Awareness changes you forever, and instead of being spontaneous during sex, you will forever be a little self-congratulatory.
Look at me; look at us, you think; it hasn’t died yet. It’s still here. We still have it—that exquisite and sometimes excruciating excitement that is so precious. Dory put an arm around Robby, and he accepted it, because what was he going to do, shrug her off, go sit somewhere and stew? They lay together for a long time in a kind of open wistfulness, until one of them, then the other, fell asleep.
The next time she refused him, Robby became sarcastic. “Should I find the public access channel with those ads for escorts?” he asked.
“Stop,” she said.
“Maybe one of them could be dressed up to resemble you. She could carry a curriculum handbook.”
“Come on, please stop.”
“Or else,” he said, “I could go have a lap dance. There are plenty of places in New Jersey where a man can get a lap dance. At least,” he added, “there must be.”
She didn’t worry that he wanted an escort or a lap dance. She had never once worried that he would ever be unfaithful to her, or she to him. They had made a deal and kept it over all these years. They had long ago acknowledged that they were alike, pitched toward each other, neither one in need of outside love or attention, but both of them in need of these elements from the other person. What a coup, they’d always felt.
“I’m not doing this on purpose,” Dory said.
“You’re not doing it by accident.”
This was true too. Her lack of desire seemed neither on purpose nor by accident. The word “lack” was too passive for what was happening; something compelled her, though she was ignorant of what it was. Not wanting to sleep with him was a reverse drive, and he seemed to recognize this, and was hurt and angry. “So, are you part of some kind of organized sex strike?” he asked. His quiet sarcasm extended to much of their conversation. He had also been sarcastic to Willa over the past few days, and when she used the sentence “The two Lucys are going to go to the movies with Eli and I,” Robby said, “Great. And you have English teachers for parents.”
“What?” said Willa.
“Robby,” Dory said. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” Willa said. But Robby could not be even slightly unpleasant to his daughter for more than a moment. Toward Dory, though, he could stay cold, if only because she had been cold first.
“Nothing,” Robby told Willa. “Absolutely nothing.”
Dory quietly endured his sullen remarks. Robby was low-level mean and low-level indifferent. “My lover,” he remarked to Dory in passing, more than once, as he carried a thick Brazilian novel from kitchen to bathroom to bed. Sexlessness had awakened some churlishness in him. Was this all it took in order to find a bad side of a man? Was it like depriving him of an essential nutrient?
Dory had always taken note when a man in power—a president, member of Congress, even a town councilman—got caught in a scandal involving a woman. It was as if such men needed sex to get them through the long slog of leading a country or passing legislation or writing bylaws. They needed constant female stimulation in order to stay interested, and maybe this was true of Robby too, powerful only in the duchy of his classroom, for now he was as fractious as a baby. He was frustrated; also, he was furious.
And then, after a week of this behavior, he calmed down. First Dory thought that he had accepted the new state between them, but one afternoon when they came home from school, a package awaited them on the front porch, addressed to him. Christmas had come and gone in glum detachment this year; this wasn’t a late gift. Robby rarely bought himself anything. “If I think of something, I’ll tell you,” he always said around the time of his birthday, when pressed. Invariably Dory bought him a gift certificate for dinner someplace new and ethnic in a nearby shopping center. If he didn’t redeem it quickly, he might miss out. Recently in the kitchen drawer, between a jumbo pack of AA batteries and the manual to the mini-vac, she’d come across his years-old, crisping, thirty-eighth-birthday gift certificate for dinner at the now-defunct Ethiopian restaurant—a place that had been called, simply, The Ethiopian Restaurant. Subsequently it had become a shoe store, then a nail salon. The Ethiopian owners had gone away, but no one knew where. Robby didn’t need most things, and he barely understood that other people did.
On this cold day, she bent down to pick up the package that had been tossed onto the porch. It was big and light, lacking a return address. Inside t
he house, as Dory took off her coat and went through the uninteresting mail, Robby opened it, revealing a board game that looked off-brand. The typography was poorly done; the silver letters were difficult to read stenciled against the yellow background of the cardboard cover. She came closer and read aloud, “ ‘The Game of Want.’ ”
“Yes,” Robby said, smiling, as though she was supposed to understand what this meant.
“I don’t know this game,” she tried, and then she understood. It was a sex game for couples who were so far gone that they needed to be rescued. The Adult Entertainment Board Games Commission had given The Game of Want four stars. “I hardly know what to say,” Dory said. But she was in no position to make fun of anything that Robby tried to do, or felt, or said. If a board game was introduced into their marriage, she would have to play it.
Willa would be at rehearsal for at least another hour, so the Langs sat on the rug in the den with the box open between them and the dog circling, her tail doing a tentative wag. Robby had taken the notepad that usually sat beside the phone covered with orthodontia appointment times or notes about Odysseus. He was now writing their initials on it in order to keep score. The game involved two players spinning dice and moving their little maleor female-shaped pawns around a ring of squares, all the while answering deeply personal questions and performing deeply personal tasks that were printed on cheap cards in an ink that already seemed a little faded.
“ ‘What is your favorite part of my body?’ ” Robby read aloud.
The question seemed too bold, as though the asker was fishing for compliments. What if the answer was: Nothing. No part. What if the asker had become completely uninteresting to the other person, and when this was asked, the question was met with silence, and both players realized the truth. Lives would be ruined in one moment. The game would be a disaster, even though the Adult Entertainment Board Games Commission had approved of it. Luckily, this wasn’t the case with the Langs.
“Your hands,” she answered, which was true. “You have the longest, most beautiful hands,” she went on. “They’re like the hands of a Madonna.”
“You think I’m effeminate?” Robby asked.
“God, of course not.” She had never thought this, never once in her life. He was as male as she had ever wanted him to be, a male who liked the outdoors, and liked hiking and rafting and putting together a tent with swift, masterful motions. But he was also a nice man, a kind and thoughtful, bookish man, and when she was left to speak without considering her words, Dory Lang had compared his hands to those of a Madonna.
“Your hands, now that I think of it,” said Robby suddenly, “are sort of like a man’s.”
“What?”
“Well,” he said, “I’m not trying to be defensive or anything, but they’re kind of big, actually, and they get red and chapped,” he said. “Like a pioneer’s hands.”
They sat staring at each other; there was no going back now. Love was somewhere far away; it was a land that this pioneer woman had left behind when she climbed into her wagon. Dory spun the dice and moved her little womanly game piece. Then she drew a card on which was written an action she was meant to carry out. She read it aloud:
“ ‘Wearing a bandana tied around your neck, square-dance with your partner, without music, and without clothes.’ ”
The stupidity of the command distracted them both from the mild hostility over the matter of their hands. Neither of them would possibly do the naked square dance, and they both knew it. Dory kept going through the deck, reading aloud to him, and then he to her, their voices arch and condescending toward the creators of these questions. Some cards seemed to have been planted in the middle of the deck as if the writer knew that no one would ever read them, just the way that someone supposedly had once planted money in the middle of various bookstore copies of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, then waited. Because no one announced that they had found any money, obviously no one—so the theory went—actually read the book.
The writer of these cards thought that surely all couples would give up before getting through the deck, and would therefore never even see the card that instructed, “Two people. One can of chocolate frosting. One birthday candle. The possibilities are infinite. Discover them all.”
“But you just said they were infinite!” cried Robby. “How can we discover them all?”
“Jerks!” said Dory.
They were done with the game now for good, and what a relief. It could have been worse, Dory thought; Robby could have bought them a sex toy, a marital aid, something with smooth rubberized surfaces, or even something edible, resembling the Fruit Roll-Ups she used to buy Willa, but with holes for legs to go through. All of it would have been horrifying, she knew, because you could dress love up, but always you would have to confront desire—its absence or presence. Love could wear just a bandana. Love could be frosted. But if it didn’t include pleasure, then it was sadder with a bandana, and sadder frosted.
Her remark about Robby’s hands, and then his counterpunch, had hurt them both. Wasn’t it enough that the Langs had been so much like each other over time? Did they have to be wildly different, each one an exaggeration of his or her gender? Was this why the sex part had finally fallen apart? Dory didn’t believe it. The way they lived, the way they spent their time, was the way they liked it. You were entitled to like anything at all. The only requirement was that you had to like it together, or else you would grow apart.
Sometimes, since the spell had stolen over her and she’d started refusing him in bed, when Robby was alone in a room and the door was shut, she became sure that if she opened that door she would find him masturbating to generic, universal porn. So she fiddled loudly with the doorknob, or even sometimes called to him before she entered a room. “Hello!” Dory sang out one afternoon as she came in. He was sitting on the bed grading papers and eating chips, his hand buried deep in the bag. He looked up at her, his mouth full of bad food, his bagged hand unmoving.
Did she actually want to catch him? She didn’t even understand the door-flinging farce she was privately enacting. She had no right to see what he was doing; she had to get used to the closed door, the husband with his hand in a bag of chips, the man who might think of someone who is not you. And, for that matter, did she want him to catch her? Though she no longer felt attracted to him, once in a while she would have a stray fantasy about a man whose face she couldn’t even picture. The spell seemed to allow for the flotsam of sexual feeling, the blips that very occasionally ran across her screen.
One Saturday morning, Dory looked out the window after it had been snowing all night, and saw that while the neighbors’ houses all had shoveled walks and navigable driveways, the Langs’ front walk and driveway were still covered in snow. Robby, who was not in the bed, hadn’t gone out and shoveled as he usually did.
“I don’t really feel up to it,” he said when she asked him about it a little later.
“Fair enough.”
Dory roused Willa from her bed. “I need you,” she said. Willa was annoyed at being awakened, but Dory suddenly felt as if the walk and the driveway needed to be cleared right this minute; she couldn’t tolerate them left snow-covered like this, as if Robby was saying, Nothing is going to get done around here anymore. She would answer the rebuke with a shovel. Two shovels. She and her daughter, wrapped up against the cold, Willa muttering, pitched the silver metal curves of their shovels into the fresh snow and worked until a path could be followed back to the house.
From then on, shoveling became their job, and this was fine with Dory; shoveling wasn’t just for men. But Robby removed himself in many other small ways too. He didn’t do the dishes with his wife and daughter after dinner. He was separating himself from the house, the home. This was another phase, she was certain, just as the sexlessness she’d introduced was surely a phase too, and so she said nothing.
But then, between third and fourth periods at school one Monday, Dory walked into the teachers’ room an
d found Abby Means sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the room with Robby standing above her, kneading her shoulders. Robby was smiling, his eyes half-closed. While he seemed to be in a light trance, Abby remained open-eyed, composed, like someone receiving physical therapy or getting a haircut. Her body was as slender as a dancer’s, her hair was in a braid that bisected the planes of her back, and her orange skirt fanned out around her.
“Is this the place?” Robby asked her, working his hands a little deeper.
“You got it,” she said. “Bingo.” Then, glancing up, Abby said, “Oh, hi, Dory. Look what Robby’s doing. Can I borrow him once in a while?”
Robby opened his eyes, and without moving his head he looked toward the doorway. “Hello,” he said. It was hard to tell whether he was surprised to see Dory there, or whether he’d been waiting for her.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” Dory said, which was like something one of the high school kids might have said, thinking it was a witty parry.
“You’re not interrupting,” Abby said. “I can talk and get a neck rub at the same time. Even by someone as good as Robby.”
Dory realized that Abby Means didn’t know better than to talk suggestively about someone else’s husband, or ask him for a neck rub in the middle of the teachers’ room, or cause him to fall into a state that seemed somewhat erotic in nature. Maybe, Dory even thought, Robby had asked Abby if he could rub her neck. You look tense, he might have said. Men often seemed to want to rub the necks and shoulders of women, and everyone knew that this was all a little mating dance, but here it was now, in daylight—at least a one-way version of it—in the teachers’ room, with the sun spilling everywhere and Ron di Canzio calmly eating a microwave burrito, and Dory Lang standing in the doorway, watching the show. Maybe Robby was daring Dory to say something, but she had nothing legitimate to say, so she just went to the refrigerator and peered inside, her head lingering in front of the cold and the light.