The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  She left first, walking slowly with book in hand, like a dreamy girl leaving an afternoon of reading, but when she reached the edge of the woods, where the lawn began, she broke into a run toward the lights of her house. Inside, she walked straight up the stairs, claiming she was ill and didn’t want dinner. Her mother pressed a cool hand to her forehead, but Roz shrugged it off. There would be no more touching today; even the back of a familiar hand, prospecting for fever, was too much.

  Weeks would pass, and she would notice her own shift in feeling almost as though she were charting the progress of a bruise, watching it go from black to blue to brown to yellow, until finally it was only a smudge, a small trace memory. She couldn’t understand whether what had happened was something that Warren Keyes had actually wanted to have happen, or whether he’d been unable to stop himself because he was, as the name of the hospital announced, insane. Should she have felt furious, or should she have felt compassion, as her father would have? She was lost, not knowing, and after a while it became too late to ask anyone.

  Time would separate her from the memory, and other things rose to replace it. She would grow up and meet men who would touch her when she wanted them to, but whose touch would be, to her, too rough and clumsy and charmless. She would want more from them, would want to coax the love and exploration out of their taciturn selves, but found herself unable to do so, for these men were mostly impassive and unyielding.

  But eventually Roz would meet Paul Mellow, and she would talk to him about so many things, including her childhood and then, as if out of nowhere, about Warren Keyes, who sprang up before her like an apparition through the puzzling wonder that was known as free association. Warren Keyes, who had shoved a finger inside her and left her with a strange absence of sensation but a need for more of it, all the time. Eventually she would make love with Paul and would one day be convinced to pose with him for pictures of that love, as though such moments could be captured when still. But movement was everything, she knew; the way your body turned or clutched or curled when it was stroked or entered. A picture could never really show that, and neither could a whole book of pictures.

  But she didn’t know this yet; she couldn’t imagine herself grown, or the mother of children—four of them no less. She was still a nine-year-old girl who had just been forcefully touched by a man in the woods of a mental hospital in the mountains of New York State. Roz would soon forget this day, or at least she would think she’d forgotten, until she went into psychoanalysis with Paul Mellow, and remembered. But that was still a long time from now.

  On the night of the day that Warren Keyes touched her, Roz Woodman pushed up the window by her bed and poked her head out. From the hospital across the lawn, she heard the familiar crying and baying, and without thinking, she opened her mouth and softly joined the chorus. The sound came naturally, and she hung out that window howling quietly in a low, effortless voice, as though it were natural to her species.

  The cell phone in Roz’s bag on the car seat was ringing now, and it was her husband Jack on the line, wanting to know where she was, why she hadn’t come home yet. “I went for a drive,” she said, and the connection was crackled and unstable, for she was in the mountains.

  “I can hear it,” he said. “I know exactly where you are. Your usual place.”

  “Yes,” she said. “My usual place.”

  “Well, don’t get too sad, okay? Come home. I’ve got soup.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  So she put out her cigarette in the ashtray, took another look around her at the place where she’d once lived, and then backed out of the parking lot to head for home. To be wanted, to have someone say Come home, as if you were a runaway, as if you were Lassie, and nothing would be all right until you set foot inside your house—this was what everyone hoped for. She worried that one day Jack would not say it or feel it—that he’d lose his desire but wouldn’t have the heart to tell her. With Paul, she’d never had that worry. For she was so much younger then, and she was beautiful, and she held sway over him as though he’d been hypnotized in his sleep and had never come out of the trance.

  Paul’s overwhelming need for Roz, back in the beginning, was actually a source of power and pleasure. “Baby,” Paul had called her. “Baby,” he said in bed, and sometimes on the telephone. This was a circa-1958 affectation, an implied-hipster word that gave him a surge of independence each time he said it because it was so far removed from the milieu of Ava Schussler and her analytic compatriots. In his training up until then, “baby” had only been another word for infant. Now Paul Mellow had rescued the word and given it an additional, dirty quality.

  “Baby,” he said to Roz in bed in her apartment in the beginning when he arrived there most evenings.

  She would have just come home from her apprenticeship to a midlevel fashion designer who called himself simply “Pierrot,” but who was actually Canadian, not French, a fact that he told no one. Within a year Roz would see that she had no great aptitude for fashion, or even a real passion, and would quit her job and let Paul support them both. And not too much longer after that, of course, she would start having babies and would never look back.

  Paul had a new job by then, having been forced out of Schussler; he was working in a lab again, this time not with mice but with pigeons, which to his surprise was even worse. Mice, he’d told Roz, were disgusting, but at least they had those liquidy, allergic-looking eyes and warm, quivering fur with a fragile puzzle of bone beneath it, and they gave off the vaguest notion of pet, and cute. Pigeons, however, made you think only of dirt and city filth. They brought out no kindness in you; their eyes were perfectly round and perfectly dark and devoid of emotion. The pigeons were a cageful of ciphers, stupid, pointy-faced, unwanted. When he held one in his hands it flapped to get away, and pecked him and struggled, but sometimes, Paul admitted, he thought about wringing its neck, just because he could. He never did, instead transferring the birds from cage to cage, adjusting their feeding schedules, and taking exhaustive notes on their eating patterns and mating behaviors. By the time Paul arrived at Roz’s fifth-floor apartment in the evenings, he smelled birdy and sometimes had a stray feather in his hair, and she always felt sorry for him and gathered him to her.

  Roz’s fashion-student roommate Vivian was often cutting fabric in the next room; they could hear the sound of shears on material, lulling and rhythmic, not unlike sex itself, and when Roz and Paul lay down in the small bed together, Roz felt smoothed over, as though she herself were a large square of fabric.

  It wasn’t that she was exactly sexually attracted to Paul in the beginning; he was undeniably handsome, but he had a little too much hair on his head and on his face and sprouting out the end of his sleeves. He was also so kind and understanding; though these were good qualities for a psychoanalyst, they were less desirable for a lover, at least at first. The men she’d been to bed with had been brutish and sullen, in particular her law student boyfriend Carl Mendelson. The fact that Paul Mellow clearly didn’t possess these traits was puzzling. She didn’t know how to react to him at first, how to create her usual pattern of initial sexual excitement followed by disappointment and then self-pitying sorrow. In 1958, Paul Mellow was sturdy and black-haired with a large head, large hands, large feet, and large penis. It was as though everything that sprang from the main part of his body had grown inordinately. Carl Mendelson had been slightly rough with her, rolling her around the bed, and all the sensation had immediately rushed out of her, as though the stopper in a drain had been pulled. It was only during sex with Paul, who as her analyst had encouraged her to hold nothing back, that she could finally relax and enjoy herself, and feel everything more completely.

  It was thrilling, actually, to be so close to a man. How different this was from her childhood spent on those mental hospital grounds. Now it was all about proximity. This was how, slowly and over time, the idea for Pleasuring came about. When you were that close to someone else, you tried t
o find various ways of expressing it. You tried verbally, using all kinds of words, saying love and adore and no one else has ever. And you also tried with your body, letting yourself be overtaken, or else overpowering the other person as though you might find a way never to let him escape you.

  One night, when Roz and Paul were making love, she heard herself command Paul, Fuck me, and she realized that she’d forgotten that this was exactly what he was already doing; she’d been lost inside the act, and it was like listening to music and thinking, I’d like to listen to some music now, because you were so stimulated that you needed an influx of new stimulation, an overlay of something else. Bring on the next thing, you thought, come on, come on, make it snappy. His body was dark, strong, and his hair seemed patterned, fanning out delicately over his chest and narrowing into a funnel-shape as it went down to his groin.

  Paul, ardent and worshipful and patient, had shown her how their two bodies could be gently arranged so that he could penetrate her from various directions, some of which seemed geometrically impossible until you tried them and found that they actually worked, after a fashion. One day he came home with a worn, paper-covered copy of The Kama Sutra and announced that here in his hands lay the future of Western sex. “The East understands,” he said. “They always have. They’re way beyond American suburbanites having missionary sex.”

  “We’re not suburban,” she said. Not yet, she should really have said, for fairly soon they too would fall prey to the green gold of the suburbs. In 1960, Roz gave birth to Holly in Mount Sinai Hospital on Fifth Avenue, followed two years later by Michael, at which point a house seemed necessary, and houses were in suburbs. By then, Paul was running an animal behavior lab, and between his salary and some money given to them by Roz’s parents, there was enough for a down payment on a large house on a street called Swarthmore Circle in the commuter town of Wontauket.

  But on this night in December 1958, Roz and Paul, still recent lovers and childless city-dwellers, sat in bed reading The Kama Sutra. “‘There are four basic embraces,’” Paul read aloud.

  “Four? I thought there were dozens.”

  “No, only four embraces, but dozens of positions,” he said. “There’s a difference. Listen. ‘There’s touching, piercing, rubbing, and pressing. When a man goes in front of a woman, or next to her, and touches her body with his, it’s called the “touching embrace.” But when a woman bends down and basically “pierces” a man with her breasts, it’s called a “piercing embrace.”’”

  “Pierce? How can her breasts pierce him?” she asked. “Does she sharpen them?”

  “I think it just refers to the fact that it’s an individual body part connecting with skin. It’s not just skin to skin. And then there’s a ‘rubbing embrace,’ which is basically whole bodies being rubbed together. And then finally there’s a ‘pressing embrace,’ where one person presses the other one’s body against a wall or a pillar.”

  “Like you did the other night,” Roz said. “After we came home from the lobster place.”

  “I did? I can’t quite remember,” said Paul, smiling. “Oh wait, wait, yes, it’s coming back to me. I see a wall. A big white wall.”

  They both sat in happy silence for a moment, conjuring up the evening they’d spent at a Spanish restaurant that featured complete and inexpensive lobster dinners. Roz had had trouble getting the meat out, and Paul had taken over, cracking a thick-shelled claw easily, then reaching in with that tiny pitchfork and pulling out a long, tapered column of pink flesh with its vernix of white scum. He’d dipped it in the little butter pool and fed her. Later, when they had just arrived at home and he suddenly turned to her with an elliptical expression and quickly pushed against her, driving her toward the wall, the light switch unfortunately poking into her spine, and then lifted the edge of her gray skirt, Roz thought that lobster was definitely an aphrodisiac, or maybe melted butter was.

  “But then there are other embraces,” Paul continued now. “Listen to this one. ‘When a man and woman are very much in love, and not thinking about anything upsetting or painful, they embrace each other as if they might enter into each other’s body. It can either be with the man holding the woman on his lap, or with her sitting in front of him or on a bed. It is an embrace known as a “mixture of milk and water.”’”

  There were apparently subcategories in The Kama Sutra too, including the embrace of the thighs, the embrace of the jaghana (from the navel downward to the thighs), the embrace of the breasts, the embrace of the forehead. Even giving someone a shampoo could be considered an embrace, because it involved the deliberate and tender touching of the body. Positions weren’t the only things included. Also listed in the book were the eight kinds of crying:

  The sound Him

  The thundering sound

  The cooing sound

  The weeping sound

  The sound Phut

  The sound Phat

  The sound Sut

  The sound Plat

  What did any of this mean? It was mysterious, ineffably Oriental, fascinating, and it made Roz think of the time she had cried when she was in bed with Paul. It had happened the third time they slept together. He had entered her, was slowly moving in that leisurely way he had when he was just starting, and as he moved she realized, for the first time, exactly what she had done: She had become her analyst’s lover, and all was irrevocable. He had thrown over everything for her, and the drama of the gesture was so strong that she’d forgotten to wonder whether it was a mistake or not. But then she looked at his face in the heart of sex, saw his eyes squinted up like those of a baby being born, and couldn’t miss the drunkenness, the pride, the love he exuded, and it made her think that if he was so damn happy, then she ought to be, too.

  Sex would save Paul Mellow, but she knew in that moment that in some way it could never save her, could never be as important to her as it was to him. Roz needed to push this idea aside at once, for here they were, bound together in a bed for good. But how could she do that?

  The next thing she knew, Paul had stopped moving inside her and instead was asking with concern, “Roz? Why are you crying?”

  In later weeks, they learned about the different kinds of kisses: the straight kiss, the bent kiss, the turned kiss, the pressed lips. Paul’s mouth was soft and almost female, or at least the way she imagined a woman’s mouth would feel, but above it were the grains of a mustache that wanted to grow no matter how often he shaved. By 1967, he would give up shaving forever and simply join the party, letting it grow like Jerry Garcia or Paul Bunyan.

  The Kama Sutra was filled with very specific details that seemed quaintly specific and prim, and this was in such contrast with the actual experience of lovemaking—the freedom to choreograph as you saw fit. “‘Once the wheel of love is set in motion,’” Paul read aloud to her, “‘there is no order.’”

  There was no order between them anymore; that had been assured the first moment he met her in the Chinese restaurant, looking up expectantly as she came in with the little bell jingling, and again the moment he kissed her in her overhot room. And through The Kama Sutra, they enacted a historical version of love, lying down on her bed in the “widely open position,” Roz’s head lowered, her body raised, lotion applied with Paul’s slightly shaking hand. They moved through the “yawning position,” and the “twining position,” and the “mare’s position,” following the instructions as though they were children learning to play a new board game. Sometimes, as a favor to him, she picked up the book when Paul was asleep, so that by the time he awoke again she could casually say to him, “There’s something called the ‘crab’s position.’ We could try it.”

  Sex became an activity that she never took for granted or simply incorporated into their time together, like the other things they did: the meals she prepared, the movies they saw at the Waverly, the laundry they folded together on the pink and gray vibrating surfaces of the Laundromat on the corner of Seventh and Charles.

  The Kama Sutra took t
hem to India in the winter of 1966, a full two years before the Beatles arrived with their entourage. Later on, Paul would joke to friends that he and Roz had always been ahead of their time. They had been living in Wontauket for three years by now, and they had left their children Holly and Michael, ages six and four, with Paul’s parents in Queens for a week. Holly had wept as they walked out the door, clinging to her father’s leg and saying, “But Daddy, I need you.” Michael, however, had just coolly looked up from some block structure he was building, and said, “Bring me something from the Taj Mahal.” For already he knew the landmarks of the world.

  During the day in India they traveled with the other tourists to temples and aromatic gardens and bazaars, navigating around the beggar children and cows and entire families camped in the middle of the road. Sometimes at night, they escaped the other tourists in the group if they could. They slipped away from the schoolteacher and her retired husband, the two nuns from Akron, the beautiful, tragic-seeming older woman whose name Roz inexplicably still remembered—Mrs. Delgado—and sat by themselves at a two-person table in a restaurant and ate chapatti that had just come out of the scalding oil. Alone, they could quietly say words to each other that were meant to arouse, to bring them into the sensibility they’d learned from studying The Kama Sutra.

  To this day, Roz wasn’t sure which of them had come up with the idea for Pleasuring. She still liked to think that it had been mutual, although even in the most mutual of orgasms, she understood, there was always someone who sent out a test shiver or wave or tremor that made the other person respond in kind, and one thing would lead to another, and soon the couple forgot where any of this had begun, because the only thing that mattered now was where it led. Most likely, though, it had been Paul’s idea, for he was the one who would have been more authentically excited by it.