The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Hey there, this is it,” he whispered. “Ye Olde Homestead.”

  Together they went into the house, enduring the excruciatingly protracted moment of late-night key-in-lock, until the doorknob turned and they stood dumbly in the front hallway like vaguely lost campers consulting a compass. All was silent. A small light had been left on in the living room, and Paul and Roz went up to their own pristine floor, where they briefly dropped coats and bags and lecture notes, and then continued on up to the third floor.

  All of the children were now asleep, little Claudia in her bed, a ghastly blue-haired troll beside her on the pillow. In the next room, Dashiell slept on a beanbag chair in the corner. This chair was practically breaded with hamster hair, but he never minded.

  “Should we just leave him there?” Roz asked, looking down at their small, curled son.

  “Sure. No need to wake him. He looks wiped out,” said Paul.

  Next they visited the rooms where the teenagers slept; Holly with her hair spread out on the pillow, as though the surface were water and she had been set afloat, which in a way she had. Michael, on the other side of the wall, slept with his mouth half-open, as if he were amazed about something, but really it was just adenoids. He was a mouth breather and always had been, though in adulthood his mouth would close.

  All four children looked exactly the same as they had that morning, before they’d looked through the book together. What the parents couldn’t know was that throughout the day, the children had been rapidly and frantically changing. By the time Paul and Roz Mellow had returned home late that night, their four offspring were different, though this wouldn’t be apparent for quite a while, and even then, it could only be seen in subtle ways. The book was responsible for that interior hosing of chemicals, the yogic stretching and pulling of the double helix. Together, by nightfall, the four Mellow children would have shed thousands of old cells, unknowingly sloughing them off and replacing them with newer, in some cases vulgar, ones: cells whose mitochondria contained buried commands that went far beyond “do homework” and “be kind to slow child in class,” and went instead into the territory of “be dominated” and “touch this” and “tell no one.”

  Pleasuring: One Couple’s Journey to Fulfillment had, on that day in November 1975, stimulated cell death and growth all at once, a combination slaughterhouse and labor floor. In a short period of time the four Mellow children, “the kids,” their parents still thought of them back then, picturing an undifferentiated mass of heads and elbows, needy, cranky, but nonetheless heartbreakingly theirs, became overloaded with thoughts of sex and of undraped body parts. Earlier, while Paul and Roz Mellow had driven along the Long Island Expressway toward the city, making excellent time, cruising seat belt–free, air-bag innocent, thinking not of the possibility of a car crash or even, particularly, of sex, their children, as they knew them, were disappearing.

  Their parents, of course, knew none of this yet. They witnessed only the sweetness and blandness of their greatly loved children in sleep, and they mutually enjoyed a moment of silent parental contemplation, feeling the tidal pull toward these people they’d managed to create through four distinct acts of love. Always, over and over, year after year, parents marvel at the idea of this as though they had never thought of it before.

  Paul and Roz were calm, quiet, emotional about their children, satisfied with how the day had gone, the turnout at the lecture, the sales of the book at the reception, and, for that matter, the prospect of enormous sales in the future, both here and around the world, much of which seemed to want and need the lessons that Pleasuring had to teach. They were both pleased with the liveliness of the dinner that had been held in their honor after the lecture today, and then the easy ride back to the home, the hearth, the children. All was well, they thought, all was well, and for now that was incontestably true.

  “Let’s go to bed,” Paul Mellow told his wife, and they descended.

  Chapter Five

  DASHIELL FOUND the lump in his neck when he was shaving, and what astonished him was that he hadn’t found it sooner, for by the time his fingers happened upon it that morning as he angled his chin in the mirror and drew the razor northward, the thing was enormous, a monster setting up shop inside him. When he found the lump, his fingers pulled away as though they’d touched something hot, and then, magnetically, they returned to the surface of his skin, delicately palpating, touching with the tenderness of a lover, though the thing they were touching deserved no tenderness. He touched it on all sides, ascertaining its circumference, its bold rotundity, its discrete marble hardness, as though it were a prize stuck inside a cake in France for a lucky child to find.

  The lucky child would dig up the prize and say, “Voilà, maman!” The unlucky man in Providence, Rhode Island, found the lump and thought, Oh, fuck, because right away he feared he was facing death in the form of something hard, a gift you hadn’t asked for, stuck deep in the soft cake of your body and waiting to be found.

  What had he been thinking all those other times he’d stood there shaving with this thing lodged inside him? That his neck certainly had a kind of interesting roundness to it on the side? How had he missed it before? It was like the way babies behaved when they dropped something on the floor; for some reason they often couldn’t see it even when it was in front of them. Apparently Dashiell had been a baby all this time, happily missing the truth, shaving himself back to babydom, to a time when his face was clean and poreless, and no tiny dots of stubble showed through like printer’s errors. Shaving had always provided him with a rhapsodic state in which he let his thoughts bump around like a boat lightly banging against a dock, and those thoughts were rarely practical or of this world. They were faraway, unlinked, certainly having no relevance to the idea of mortality. He liked to shave; it was the one time in the day when he felt it was possible to start over, to have another crack at the perfection he’d lacked the day before, and the day before that.

  But today there would be no perfection, for here was the neck lump, solid, nonnegotiable. He felt that something was likely very wrong, and his razor-hand jerked upward and he nicked himself on the throat, and then he cried out sharply as the blood began to flow. By the time he’d grabbed the styptic pencil from the cabinet and scribbled furiously up and down his skin, blood had run all over the basin.

  Tom, who was in bed shooting out mass emails to the entire campaign staff from his laptop, heard the whole thing and came running in. “Jesus!” he said. “Jesus, Dashiell, what did you do?” With all that blood everywhere, it looked like a suicide scene. But Tom Amlin was a calm man, calmer than Dashiell, and he quickly managed to ascertain that this was merely a shaving accident of epic proportions.

  The following day they sat together in the waiting room of their mutual internist, young Dr. Adam Forest, he of the rock jaw and fifty-percent-gay-male practice, he of the tiny rectangular-framed eyeglasses and excellent haircut. In that waiting room, Dashiell’s anxiety came back full strength, but because Tom was there, it never had a chance to foam up over the surface and become unmanageable. This had been how, at age fourteen, Dashiell had first understood he was homosexual: When he was with men or boys, various kinds of anxiety became so much more manageable. Whatever the problem was, the presence of a male could make it better: school, sex, money, despair, job, future, politics, parents—even the imagined, glowing lip of the abyss.

  He was seeing the positive effect of a man now, that thready, hopeful light that emanated outward. When Dashiell had to separate from Tom briefly for the physical exam, he felt the loss. Sitting in his boxers on the examining table paper, having the surface of his entire body navigated by Dr. Forest (an experience that, under other circumstances, would have been mildly and secretly exciting), he couldn’t help but feel that death was in the room with them, sitting off to the side on a stool like a physician’s assistant. Dr. Forest was scouring Dashiell for other swollen nodes, and when he found a few of them—scattered casually and deeply in Dashie
ll’s groin and under one arm, embedded in flesh beneath the thick shock of hair—the doctor stroked his strong chin thoughtfully like Clark Kent in a journalistic quandary and said, “Dashiell, I’d like to do a biopsy.”

  “What is it you suspect?” asked the patient, now diminished, now shrunken with fear. Dashiell was HIV-negative, of that he was sure. How he’d managed to escape HIV was something he had never understood, for in the 1980s he had had plenty of unprotected sex with men who were possibly carriers, all before the news about AIDS came crashing down. But miraculously, when he had himself tested at the Gay Men’s Health Center, he’d come out negative. He’d been so convinced he was sick, back then, that when it was time to appear for the results, he’d brought a handful of fresh tissues with him, neatly folded in his pocket. The idea of a stranger, a volunteer counselor no less, pushing a box of Kleenex at him after relaying some life-crushing news was unbearable. He wouldn’t want that stranger’s tissues. He would want to be given good news, and nothing else. Anything more—a tissue, a shoulder, an Altoid, the name of a therapist who specialized in an HIV-positive clientele—would have been grotesque.

  But today, all these years later, Dr. Forest was not saying such a thing; he was preparing a needle for a biopsy. He was buzzing his nurse and saying that he would need to cancel his next patient.

  “Can I call Tom in?” Dashiell asked in the smallest voice.

  “Of course,” said Dr. Forest.

  The three men, all of them strong-bodied and muscled, filled the small examining room, and though Dr. Forest wore an extra layer of white, poly-blend professionalism, still he was one of them in every way. Tom held Dashiell’s hand while the needle was pushed into the side of his neck, a place where needles so clearly should not go. Dashiell thought of how once, on the street in New York, two black teenagers had shouted at him that he was a “faggot” who put his “dick where it don’t belong.”

  He was a small man, five foot seven, tightly constructed and doelike. He did put his dick where it maybe didn’t belong but where, in the heat of love, it ached to belong. You would do this for me? he used to think when he went to bed with a new man and there was the wordless maneuvering toward sex, for it seemed to mean an unspoken trust was there, even between two people who had only exchanged the barest of words in a bar. Sometimes, sensing the desire in the other man, watching it reveal itself in such a way that the man was rendered exposed, Dashiell would think, I would do this for you.

  But of course, no one ever did anything only for the other person; this wasn’t saintly behavior, this was open-mouthed, joyous fucking, the tense, anticipatory, counterintuitive preamble and then the flowering, the depths of unwinding that spread like sonar through the body, radiating outward conically until the waves left your body and entered the atmosphere.

  The needle in the neck, now, this would never turn a corner into pleasure; it hurt like a crucifixion, even though a local anesthetic had been injected first. There was a burning pain as the drug went in, and then a thicker, more wrenching pain as the needle attempted to aspirate something, anything, from Dashiell’s ungenerous lump. The liquid it managed to procure was clouded, bloody. Dr. Forest turned away from Dashiell to bag and seal the specimen, and his mouth was a straight, dry line.

  The news, a few days later, was bad, though not, Tom reminded him, the worst. Cancer, yes, Hodgkin’s disease specifically; treatable through chemotherapy and radiation, which meant that Dashiell would be sickened for a while.

  “You’ll feel pretty lousy,” Dr. Forest said over the phone. “You’ll think it will never end, but it will, I promise you. This is like a dark cloud, and then it will lift. Hodgkin’s is very curable.” An oncologist was already on the case; Dr. Forest was signing off.

  In bed that first night after the diagnosis, Dashiell took stock. “Very curable,” he murmured, lying on his back.

  “Yes, and that’s good,” Tom said. “If you in your twisted way manage to find another interpretation of Forest’s remark, then you’re insane.”

  “I did think of another way,” Dashiell admitted, “but I guess I’ll keep it to myself.”

  “Thank you,” said Tom.

  They lay next to each other in similar pale blue pajamas, arms by their sides, like toy soldiers in a box. “What about the campaign?” Dashiell asked after a moment. “This is an extremely bad time to have Hodgkin’s disease.”

  “It’s always a bad time,” said Tom. “But there’s so many people on the case, we can all cover.”

  “And anyway, who was Hodgkin?” asked Dashiell. “I mean, who was he, getting this disease named after him? A scientist, I guess, but American? British?”

  “No, no, Dash, you’ve got it wrong,” said Tom. “Hodgkins are these little mythical creatures. Small and furry and persistent, kind of like swollen lymph nodes. They were rejects from The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien said, ‘Nah, they’ll just confuse things. I think I’ll take them out.’”

  Dashiell was relieved that there could still be joking here between them, that it hadn’t ended with the sudden wind of this bad news. He shifted in the bed, tried to become comfortable, but found it impossible. Still, he was aware of feeling oddly well, which was disconcerting, considering what his well-seeming body concealed. “If Wyman doesn’t get elected,” he said, “it’ll basically be my fault.”

  “I love that kind of vanity, Dash. Look, if Wyman doesn’t get elected, it’s because people don’t like him, and not because the public didn’t get to hear your magnificent words flowing from his lips.”

  “Trish’s speeches are shit.”

  “True.”

  They both laughed meanly, thinking about Wyman’s other speechwriter, a twenty-five-year-old horsy girl named Trish Leggett, who had somehow won a place in Robert Wyman’s senatorial campaign by writing a sample stump speech for him that Wyman had loved and used all over the state, just because of a phrase she’d put in about “the extraordinary soul dressed in the clothes of the humble”—about how average citizens of this country had risen up as one against terrorism. Trish Leggett was hard-pressed to find real-life examples that postdated the destruction of the World Trade Center, and so she relied heavily on generalized imagery, picked up during a brief stint as a poetry student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was green in the world of speechwriting, but still a visible threat to Dashiell, who had been a political speechwriter for years now, and a good one, having worked for several different candidates: a city councilman, two mayors, and now, most excitingly, a potential United States senator.

  It was in this capacity that he’d met Tom Amlin six years earlier. Both were attending a New York City convention of the gay organization Log Cabin Republicans. Dashiell was living in Boston at the time and Tom had just relocated from L.A. to Providence to work in the office of then city councilman Robert Wyman, the so-called Kennedy Republican, called this only by people who knew him, and mostly because he had unusually large teeth.

  The convention was held at the Helmsley Plaza, with its hangar-size lobby and glass elevator that ferried masses of festive gay Republicans to and from the sky. Some of these LCRs acted as though they’d never been in a glass elevator before, hooting and clapping as the car rushed upward. They were like Shriners, Dashiell thought.

  On the first night of the convention, at the meet-and-greet, the glass elevator opened and the LCRs spilled out into the ballroom, and there they were, the businessmen, the pastel polo shirts, the occasional lesbian, the swath of fringe that cut across the American GOP. Their voices were deep and droney, like the voices you could hear in the bar car on a commuter train. Wulf, lub, guf, yub, all of it punctuated by the meaty laughter they freely gave out into any room. It was likely that many of them were boring, but somehow Dashiell found himself slightly excited by their potential dullness.

  At the entrance of the ballroom was a table covered with name tags, and he found his tag and put it on, while beside him a tall, rangy man with silver hair and a good suit se
emed to be having trouble peeling his own tag from its backing. “Fuck,” the man muttered quietly, and Dashiell offered to help him.

  “Here,” he said, quickly taking apart the two pieces of paper and slapping the name tag onto the man’s chest, taking note, in that moment, of the way it felt when his hand met the lapel of the man’s jacket, so close to the man’s chest, to his heart. When he took away his palm, he read the words: “Tom Amlin—L.A.—I Mean Providence.”

  The men shook hands; there was nothing between them, no electric anything, but that was fine, or anyway it would have to be. Dashiell was young then, just thirty, and it slightly bothered him that he was not one of the youngest members at this convention. There were guys in their early twenties here, and even an entire contingency from Harvard, still undergraduates but already single-mindedly conservative and totally out. The Harvard Weenies, as Tom would come to call them, stood in a cluster by the punch bowl, effete and slightly sneering, like a fraternity for the characters in Brideshead Revisited.

  On the other side of the room stood the most unlikely group to be here: the transvestites, a handful of men in conservative dresses or skirt sets and makeup, so way out there, so much more feminized than the lesbians in their dress-for-success monkey suits. The trannies, with their colorful wigs and perfume, treated this all as a game, as performance art. One of them, hovering at more than six feet tall and wearing a yellow dress with little blue cornflowers all over it, had a sash with a variety of antique GOP buttons dotting it: “Re-Elect Nixon.” “Vote Goldwater.” “Go Dole.” She looked to Dashiell like a demented Girl Scout leader, and it made him feel, for a moment, that he was on Mars, that he needed a drink from a cool, clear Martian stream.

  Tom Amlin, standing right in front of Dashiell, was forty, a lifetime older than he was. That decade was the one in which you proved yourself, and Amlin had already done that. As they stood at the bar with their drinks, Dashiell said, “What’s with your name tag? ‘L.A.—I Mean Providence’?”