The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  “I had a lot of trolls,” Claudia said. “They were everywhere in this room. Troll dolls, I mean. I had hundreds. The place was totally overrun with them.”

  “With the strange hair,” David Gupta said. “Yes, I’ve seen those. I had Matchbox cars. I lined them up and rearranged them all the time. I should have become a parking attendant. It’s obviously where my aptitude lay.”

  For a moment she imagined them as parallel creatures, both of them slow to enter life, both of them in a house belonging to parents. There was no real reason to think he was like her; the only reason to think so was because she suddenly wished they were similar. The wish surprised her, coming on as suddenly as her dizziness had.

  “So what job did you end up with?” she asked. “You’re not really a doctor, are you?”

  He told her that he was an intellectual property lawyer. He worked in Philadelphia, where he lived, and where he’d gone to both college and law school. Hence the Penn sweatshirt. He was back here now for one week to help his father with some legal matters involving the family restaurant. He expected to be back and forth over the next few weeks. “Oh,” she said. “Right, the Indian place downtown. I saw it.”

  “It’s a little Pakistani, too. We’re Paki on my mother’s side. But we just tell people Indian.”

  “I love Indian food,” she said. “My neighborhood’s filled with those restaurants.”

  “The East Village? I’ve always wanted to live there. You’re lucky.”

  “Not really,” she said. “You should see my apartment.” By which she meant: You should see my life, its parameters, its limitations, the way it encloses me. He asked her a little about herself, and she told him about classes, her film, and the movie she was shooting.

  “Give me your email,” David said suddenly. “Maybe we’ll be out here at the same time—me for the restaurant and you for your movie. You could come to Bombay Café. You’ll need to eat, right?”

  Claudia was startled and pleased, trying to parse his words and figure out whether they were perfunctory or charitable or simply impulsive and unanalyzed and perhaps genuine. She exchanged email addresses with him on scraps of paper; everyone’s pockets and bags and wallets seemed to be filled with these linty slips, and if no action was taken shortly after receipt of such a slip, the address would become a faded hieroglyphic, a key to someone who would soon become forgotten, and lost forever. The exchange of email addresses was routine now, even between people who knew they would probably never hear from each other again. But she wrote hers down, and he wrote his down, and there was a slightly awkward moment in which they traded, and then Claudia slowly stood. He watched her to make sure she didn’t keel over in the middle of his bedroom.

  They walked together back into the hallway, where, in the distance one level below, they could hear the thrum of his father’s voice. She thought of Mr. Gupta in that thoroughly transformed room, sitting on the edge of the bed, talking on the telephone to his wife, who was off on another continent. Even all the way up here on the third floor, his voice came through. The sounds of parents traveled through walls, traveled up stairs, were inescapable. Wherever you went on earth, you could hear them.

  Chapter Four

  “TRY THE CHICKEN, it’s got pine nuts,” Paul Mellow told his son Michael as they sat in the window of a restaurant, and at once he heard the unwanted undercurrent of a magnanimous chuckle that had been planted deep in his vocal cords the moment his first wife gave birth to this man sitting across from him, their first son. The chuckle had never left. Paul Mellow wanted to be a good father, and good fathers were easygoing, so he said, “Try the chicken, it’s got pine nuts,” and, “Save room for the dolce de leche cake,” even though neither of them was really hungry, for it was just noon on a January day in Naples, Florida, and they’d eaten a heavy, gleaming, egg-and-butter breakfast less than four hours earlier. They had been up since seven, two men jogging together on the dewy track that ringed the cluster of bleached-pine Laughing Woods condominiums. Michael was wired, lean, jangly, wanting to be in motion. His father was thicker, gray-bearded, still handsome but softened, forever struggling to catch up. After the jog they’d showered in adjacent stalls at the condominium’s sparkling gym, pumping the fragrant turquoise gel soap from the wall, then taken a small motorboat out, catching and releasing the occasional undistinguished fish, and then they’d returned to the condo by noon, where Elise, predictably, was still asleep, her head on the special pillow she’d bought from a TV infomercial that testified to its miraculous effects. The pillow was stuffed with raw Japanese red rice and supposedly offered a better, richer night’s sleep. Apparently, this was truth in advertising, for Elise slept and slept.

  She kept different hours from Paul, out at her part-time social work job three days a week, while he stayed home trying to write articles for Modern Maturity and the AARP magazine and was interviewed once in a while by representatives from the Council on Aging, for whom he was soon to travel to Miami to deliver a talk called “Sex After Seventy.” There weren’t all that many hours in the day during which his and Elise’s lives really intersected. This, as it turned out, wasn’t a bad thing, particularly now, with Michael here in town. He’d come only for a week, which had turned into two. With his son on the premises, Paul felt suddenly happy, nostalgic, resurrected, as though Michael had lifted him up by his belt loops and forced him to engage in ways he hadn’t done in a very long time.

  Florida leveled you. It didn’t matter who you were. In the beginning you were besotted with the enormous high-colored flowers that looked like they had faces, and by the sauna atmosphere and grilled fish and abundance of citrus and pastel clothes and geniality of everyone you met, who like you had removed themselves from the din and clack of urban life, saying they’d had enough. But after a while you became a little aimless, dreaming at night of subways and coffee shops that stayed open until morning, and of black people, whom you never saw down here. You started to want something more for yourself but knew that that was impossible.

  It wasn’t that your mind had to shut down; Laughing Woods itself, with its array of adult education classes held on the premises, was like a miniature School of Athens. “School of Naples,” Paul had joked to Bart Dombler next door, but the retired anesthesiologist had just blinked and said, “Pardon?”

  Once a week, Paul and Elise went down to the Gathering Room in the C building for their class in American poetry. They were now reading Emily Dickinson, which Elise loved, and sometimes recited quietly to herself when she thought he wasn’t listening. Long ago, Paul seemed to recall, Roz had loved Emily Dickinson too, but he had barely listened when she’d read a poem aloud. Instead, he’d been distracted by looking at her, moved somehow by the sight of Roz reading poetry, yet he was unable to concentrate on the words themselves.

  Yoga classes were also available here, and Szechwan cookery, and an under-enrolled class in political theory, offered by a retired Haverford professor who lived alone in the B building and didn’t seem to know what to do with himself all day. Paul, feeling a little sorry for the man, had attended one of the sessions, at which he’d been given Xeroxed handouts of Marx and Engels from a thick, optimistic stack.

  Everyone in Laughing Woods, Paul was certain, felt this double-barreled awareness of loss and disappointment. Some of them felt it all the time. He wished he could turn to one of his neighbors and say, “Do you feel it too?” But he couldn’t even say it to Elise, for she was the one who had asked that they move down here in the first place. When she wasn’t working with Spanish-speaking families in desperate need of her services or sleeping in bed, she liked to paint. Her artwork wasn’t very accomplished, but it was lively and heartfelt and she enjoyed doing it. In New York she would have had no luck, but here in Naples she had been part of a group show, held in an airy gallery. The local newspaper not only reviewed the show but also ran photographs and interviews with the painters. Elise had sold a few paintings, too, and if you happened to wander into another apar
tment in the complex you might see one of Elise’s “lost girl” series hanging over a sofa, immediately recognizable by the muddy greens and golds, and by her difficulty in painting symmetrical eyes.

  She herself was entirely symmetrical, though she had one of those faces that, months after they’d gotten married, Paul had begun to see everywhere. Eventually he realized it was because she’d had her nose fixed in college, and that many people had such a nose. The slender nose with its little button at the end, coupled with her hair permed into a tangle of loose curls that fell in her eyes, gave Elise the accidental look of a poodle. When she dressed up for the evening and wore the chocolate brown lipstick she favored, she reminded him specifically of a dancing poodle in a circus. What a terrible thing to think about the woman you had married! But he still loved her, was attracted to her as well. It was just that she had become, or he had realized she had always been, a little dull, though he supposed that he was dull as well, age sixty-eight and still wanting love to exist in a pure column of light, still convinced that it could.

  Michael was having troubles with love too. After dinner on the second night of his visit, sitting together in the living room while Elise puttered around elsewhere in the condo, Michael had admitted to his father that things weren’t going well at home. He wouldn’t give any specifics about his love troubles, except to say that he and his girlfriend Thea needed a little time apart, so it was really a good thing that he’d come down to Florida.

  But Paul saw that his son looked shaky and sweaty, and he was in the habit of jiggling his leg while talking. What the hell was wrong with him? If Paul didn’t know any better, he would have thought his son was a drug addict. But of course Michael hated drugs and always had; he was constitutionally unfit for them, and decades earlier, on the occasions when teenaged Michael had seen his parents share a joint, he’d ostentatiously waved his hand in the air and coughed prudishly, letting them know that the smoke offended him.

  So it wasn’t drugs. It was just trouble, love trouble. Yesterday, while the two men were playing nine holes at Hilldale, Michael had given him a little more to go on. He had told Paul that things with his girlfriend Thea were difficult because she seemed not to care about his well-being. “What exactly do you mean?” Paul asked. “Give me specifics.”

  “I can’t,” said his son.

  Neither of them was a golfer, but the day was quiet and the air lightly lifted the hair on your forearms as you stood perfecting your stance, worrying your iron slightly back and forth, setting up the shot that would end up no good anyway, no matter what you did.

  “Well, I’m sorry things are hard for you,” Paul said. He kept his eye on the ball and didn’t look up at Michael’s unhappy face; long ago he’d read that the best way for two men to talk to each other was while they were doing something active—and didn’t actually have to make eye contact and then feel threatened and retreat into their groundhog holes.

  All of a sudden there was a chirping sound, and Paul looked up at his son, who said, “One sec, Dad,” and then reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out his PDA. Paul watched as Michael punched some keys and squinted at the tiny screen. “Oh, crap,” said Michael. “It never stops.”

  “Thea?”

  “No. My job. There’s this guy there, Rufus. He can’t do anything without me. He’s totally dependent, and he’s freaking out at work. The twins are coming, the twins are coming. That’s all he talks about.”

  “The twins, eh? They’re coming to the office?”

  “Yeah. Tomorrow. I reassured him that I’d be there, but I’m not, obviously. Just a second, Dad, okay?” And Michael tapped out a response to the message, then returned the PDA to his pocket. It would ring off and on throughout the remainder of his visit, during golf games and meals and moments of quiet conversation, and always Michael would respond. His son would never be free of work, or of worry, would never be able to just relax.

  “Forgive my bluntness,” said Paul. “But what you were saying before, about your girlfriend. The problem is sexual, am I right?”

  “No. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it is,” said Michael, and he swung the golf club, knocking the ball loose and sloppy into the middle distance. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

  “Why not?” said his father. “I know one or two things, right?”

  “Yeah, you’re the sex god, Dad. I always forget that.”

  “I’m not the sex god. I’m not a sex god. I’m nothing like that,” Paul said. “Your mother saw to that.”

  “I was kidding.”

  Paul found himself blushing, as if a thickset sixty-eight-year-old man with a gray beard and bifocals could in fact be sexually powerful, could knock the socks off women in a serious fashion, the way he once had. And actually, a sixty-eight-year-old man could do that. He could do it, Paul felt certain, if the circumstances were right. The woman would have to make an effort, though. He couldn’t ask Elise to, for what could he say: Can you turn your poodle eyes on me with admiration—no, with worship, please? Can you bring your quivering, hand-shy self into my lap and touch me and stroke me and remind me of why we married each other?

  Just as Michael could not say to Thea, a woman his father had met just twice: Can you forget about yourself for a moment and make it about me?

  Through their problems with women, father and son were bonded now, they were tight. They finished their golf game and rode the cart back to the clubhouse. Stay here forever, Paul wanted to tell Michael. Stay here as long as you want and recuperate from Thea and the stresses of DDN and urban life here in our peach-colored guest room in Naples, Florida, and forget about that actress in New York, who will never give you anything other than grief. Stay here with me, he thought, because I’m your father, and as you may have noticed, I’m unhappy too.

  Miraculously last week, as if reading Paul’s mind, Michael had asked if he could stay a little longer. He was vague about how much longer, and Paul didn’t want to press him. Elise was less than thrilled at the news, though she hid her feelings from Michael entirely. But in furtive whispered asides, she said to Paul, “Just wondering. No pressure, but any idea when he’s taking off?”

  And Paul shushed her and said, “Whenever he wants. He’s my kid, and I’m lucky he’s here so long.” But of course Paul worried, too. What did it mean that Michael didn’t want to leave? And now the twins were coming tomorrow to the New York office; wasn’t that supposed to be a momentous event? Hadn’t Michael told him, in the past, that whenever the twins arrived, all the employees had to rally around them, to show spirit and brilliance and teamwork and vision? Michael seemed unconcerned about being absent, so Paul didn’t press it. He was so excited at the prospect of his son staying a little longer that he didn’t want to say anything that might change his mind.

  As far as Paul was concerned, it had been two great weeks of long, free-associative talks and golf games and jogs and arterially disastrous man-meals, through much of which Elise slept peacefully on her pillow stuffed with rice. And now, here in the restaurant at lunchtime, the ongoing conversation would continue, Paul hoped. It wasn’t that he liked to see Michael so vulnerable—it worried him to see his competent and intelligent son seem so lost—but he knew that a vulnerable son felt closer to you.

  “So, you and Thea . . .” Paul began, when their entrées arrived on enormous plates. Michael had ordered the chicken, as Paul had suggested. It was a breast the size of a man’s shoe, and it had been sprinkled with the advertised pine nuts and calligraphically swirled with a red pepper reduction, whatever that meant. The chefs down here went wild with pent-up artistry. As the waiter receded into the almost silent restaurant, Paul delicately broached the subject of Thea again, by which he would be broaching the subject of Elise as well, and he knew it.

  The subject was women, their women, and how it was that one of them had a woman who didn’t love him enough, and the other had a woman who did love him enough, but only during the brief times when she was awake, and even then, he
had trouble loving her. So the subject was why men and women could not be in concert with each other. Oh God, Paul thought as he miserably poked at his own meal and heard himself speak, I sound like one of those courses they offer down here: “‘Male-Female Communication—An Inexact Science,’ taught by Dr. Nancy Gould in the Gathering Room of the C building, Wednesday nights from 7 to 9. Wine, cheese, and stimulating discussion will be served.”

  “Dad, I don’t want to talk about Thea now,” Michael said. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore. You’ve been really good on the subject. I’ll deal with it when I get home. I’ll work it out with her.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes. But now I want to talk about the book again.”

  Paul shut his eyes. “Oh, come on,” he said, and his voice in that one second had gone completely flat, nearly dead, the way it always did whenever Michael, or anyone for that matter, tried to talk about Pleasuring.

  “Like I’ve said to you, this reissue, it’s not a bad idea,” Michael said. “It’ll bring in money. That’s always a good thing. And attention.”

  “I don’t need attention,” Paul said.

  “Maybe Mom does.”

  “That’s not my business, Michael, is it? What your mother wants now, at age sixty-seven, is something she can discuss with her current husband, not with me.”

  Paul could immediately see how his reply slapped against the grown son of divorce and reminded him that estranged parents were ugly, grotesque, burying entire lives beneath the ground as if they had never existed, and as if the fact that children had been born from that union were beside the point. It was a real talent to bury an ex-wife deep into the bottom of the mind. Paul had been able to do that very well with the wife who had come right after Roz and before Elise, and whose name was, semicoincidentally, Elisa. He and Elisa had been married for less than a year, in 1980, and she was now forgotten, as surely as if she’d never even existed.