by Meg Wolitzer
“If we write this thing together,” Paul had said back in 1970, when they were sitting on the brown couch in the den in Wontauket, her feet in his lap, “then we’ll have to include our own experiences, you know. The things we do together. The things we do to each other.”
“Yes, of course,” Roz had said. “That’s the point, isn’t it? It isn’t some third-person Masters and Johnson exercise. It’s us.”
“Can you handle it?”
“Of course,” she said.
“You won’t care what people say?”
“No. I mean yes. Of course I will. But I’ll get over it.”
“We should be the illustrations,” he’d said.
“Oh, right.”
“No, Roz, I’m serious,” Paul said. “It should be us. Us having sex all over the place. Why not? Are you embarrassed?”
“Yes, of course I’m embarrassed,” she’d said, laughing, and he’d dragged her out of the den and over to the bathroom mirror, then closed the door and lifted her blouse. She was braless; this was 1970, after all, and breasts were swinging free like wrecking balls all over America.
“Look at yourself,” he’d said. “Just look. You look so sexy. Those incredible breasts.”
“No one wants to see them. They’re starting to sag,” she said.
“No they’re not,” he said. “I love your breasts, I just love them. I love them equally, I don’t play favorites.” As if to prove his point, he kissed first one, then the other. “But even if they were starting to sag a little, which I repeat they’re not, then so what? This has to be a book about real people, not idealized ones. This has to be incredibly human, so that every couple out there can relate to it.”
The next day, when all the children were safely out of the house, Paul set up a tripod and camera with a timer, which loudly ticked away across the room as they arranged themselves in bed. The photographs were awful, which was no surprise to Roz. As far as she was concerned, she was all double chin and breast, and Paul was a shapeless Monet haystack of body hair. Everything unattractive was accentuated, and everything at all appealing seemed to have been airbrushed out. Their bodies, joined together in standard missionary sex, looked grotesque, their faces screwed up in pain and courage, as though the act in which they were partaking was excruciating and required a sort of personal heroism in order to endure it. The next series of photographs, in which Roz was on top, showed her looking mortified and involuntarily on display. Rising up above him, she was like a woman being carried on a rickshaw high above the action. Whatever was going on down there, she seemed not to know. Her breasts were pendulous and bovine; even a cow would have been ashamed.
“We have to destroy these,” she’d said to Paul after they printed the pictures themselves in a makeshift darkroom set up in a bathroom.
“I hate to admit it, but I agree,” he said, and they burned the photographs in the fireplace, as though their destruction also destroyed the actual fact of how Paul and Roz really looked while making love.
But it occurred to her that this was what practically all people on earth would look like if you captured them during sex. Everyone would possess a certain grotesque quotient, as though Diane Arbus herself had come to the bedroom and photographed them. Roz thought of the shots of aging nudists that Arbus had taken; how homely and proud those people had been, sitting in their colony on metal folding chairs, those people who no one else would love except other nudists, those people who had needed an organization in order to be themselves.
To be captured most lovingly, lovemaking could not be entirely candid. They needed not a photographer but an artist, someone who could provide the essence of the acts and help to dissolve the parts that would not be exciting or beautiful or compelling to other people. It would have to be us, Roz thought, and at the same time not us. It would have to be a better version of us, one that other people would want to see.
They typed up a proposal for the book and sent it to a literary agent who was the brother of a behavioral scientist at Paul’s lab. “Our book will be illustrated with drawings of the two of us engaged in lovemaking,” they wrote. “Among these drawings will be one that shows the new sexual position that we have created.” They went on to describe “Electric Forgiveness,” which was the name of a position they’d come up with accidentally one night after a bitter argument about something that neither of them could remember anymore.
“The ‘Electric Forgiveness’ position is for couples who are trying to repair something,” they wrote. “Whether because of anger or stress, lovers sometimes find themselves in need of a way to forgive each other and express calm reminders of their love and sexual connection. ‘Electric Forgiveness’ provides a means to that end.”
The position itself was complicated and involved a certain degree of maneuvering and friction and discomfort before ultimate success; they described it in detail, along with many positions from The Kama Sutra, recast to be appreciated by American couples.
Their book, now called Pleasuring: One Couple’s Journey to Fulfillment, was sold for $50,000, which was an extraordinary sum back then, and soon they were off into an art studio, in front of a total stranger, posing on a bed.
The publisher had conducted an intensive search for an artist. Three finalists were chosen: a Japanese watercolorist who lived in Northern California and who had illustrated an expensive coffee table book on erotica of the Orient; a poker-faced woman who had worked in medical illustration for years, drawing bodies both healthy and corroded by cancer; and a recent graduate of the Cooper Union, whose work was shockingly lifelike, and who had been chosen a year earlier to illustrate a Rolling Stones album cover. People had sworn the painting was a photograph. Mick Jagger and the band had appeared plausibly sullen and entitled and sexual, lying on chaises on some Caribbean beach.
This Rolling Stones’ artist, John Sunstein, was picked, and Roz and Paul informally met with him in a conference room at the publishing house. This was in May 1973. No one could talk about anything but Watergate, and Haldeman and Ehrlichman had resigned weeks earlier. But inside the studio everything was peaceful and free from headlines. John Sunstein was a shy young man, skinny in the manner of many young men, unchanged by anything he ate or drank, his stomach practically concave in his jeans and the old, pale striped Arrow shirts he favored. His hair was long, parted in the middle, and at the very darkest end of blond. He wore enormous work boots and a braided leather bracelet on one wrist. His face was wide and not really handsome, but definitely intelligent. He showed them his portfolio of drawings and paintings, and Roz understood why he’d been chosen: His work was careful and delicate and extremely detailed. The details, in fact, worried her; would he capture her failings, her imperfections, every crease, every irregularity?
“Don’t worry,” he said in his soft voice, though she hadn’t expressed her fears aloud. “I’ll make you look great. It won’t be hard. You already look great, you both do.”
But still she was embarrassed. The first day that Roz and Paul Mellow entered the studio on West 22nd Street to pose for him, she felt as though she would hyperventilate, and she had to sit on the closed toilet in the cold bathroom with her head between her knees. Paul stood over her. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. “You’ve undressed in front of other men before.”
“But they were undressed too,” Roz said. “Obviously.”
“When he sees you,” said Paul, “he is going to kiss the ground you walk on.”
“That’s ridiculous. The ground around me is already prekissed.”
“What?” he said.
“By you,” she said.
Paul smiled slightly. “Oh. Maybe so. Look, you want me to tell Sunstein to take off his clothes? He probably doesn’t look bad, a young skinny guy like that.”
“Very funny,” she said. “He’d die of embarrassment, taking off his clothes. And so would I. God, we must look so old!”
“You’re thirty-seven. The prime of your life. You’re beautiful, Roz. And me
, I still look okay, I hope,” Paul said.
“Yes, you still look good,” she said.
“So let’s go out there,” Paul said. “We’ll just see what happens.”
He handed her a bathrobe and she slipped it on. Then she stood slowly and let him lead her from the bathroom and back out into the large white room, where a bed was ready. There, in the middle of that sunlit room, she took off her robe while John Sunstein pretended to be uninterested. He seemed to be in no hurry at all. There was music playing on the stereo, something soft with medieval instruments and a female vocalist singing about being in love with a unicorn. John offered tea to Roz and Paul, who said no thank you, and then, when their clothes were off, the artist made a joke that maybe tea wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“My insurance doesn’t cover hot liquids,” he said, and they all laughed a little, though Roz noticed the way laughter made her breasts shake a little, and so she promptly stopped.
The studio was located all the way west by the Hudson River, and sometimes during the day when they were posing, a barge would move past the uncurtained windows. Slowly she made her peace with being naked in front of a barge, in front of John Sunstein. She had never met a man as unobtrusive as he was. From the start he was barely there, barely a presence in the studio, quietly sitting and sketching, not feeling the need to contribute anything to a conversation that didn’t really concern him.
“Is this what you were like with the Rolling Stones?” Paul asked on the first day, as he positioned himself beside Roz, their bodies lined up to match, notch to knob, like the carefully measured, discrete sections of a piece of cabinetry. “Move down a little, okay?” Paul said to Roz. She shifted, then they both waited.
“What in particular?” the artist asked.
“Quiet. Like a cat,” said Paul.
“Well, pretty much,” said Sunstein. “They talked so much, and they were always demanding things.”
“What kinds of things?” Roz asked.
“Orange juice,” Sunstein said. “Vitamins. Bee pollen. They didn’t even seem to notice me after a while. Keith Richard did, once; he asked me for a smoke, but I didn’t have any and he never said anything to me again.”
“See, that’s what I mean,” said Paul. “You blend into the scenery. It’s a great talent.”
“I never thought about it before,” John Sunstein said, and with evident relief at retreat he ducked back behind the easel.
That was perhaps the most extended conversation they had with him for months. Everything worked better if they treated him as not quite a person, and the artist understood this. At any rate, he did not seem all that interested in either of them. Once, when the Mellows were leaving the building, Roz noticed a young woman lurking out on the street. She wore a poncho and had long hair and a green minibike. When John came out a moment later, he climbed on the back of her bike, put his arms around her, and they rode off. He was young but not that young, and yet his singleness made him seem infinitely younger than they were.
Coupling aged you; it was an unavoidable side effect. You formed a couple in order to be in love, to stay away from loneliness, to forge a life instead of a series of days strung together one after another and punctuated by meals and movies and trips to the store. But no one told you that it would add age to you quickly, and that when you looked back on your wedding photographs you would be both moved and stunned into silence. This, at least, was what Roz sometimes felt when she thought of herself as Roz Woodman and then as Roz Mellow, and saw the division between the two lives: the leap, made by a very young girl, into a deep pool that, when she emerged, had turned her into someone different. No one had told her this would happen, that her girlishness would give way to the solid force of wifehood, motherhood. The choices available were all imperfect. If you chose to be with someone, you often wanted to be alone. If you chose to be alone, you often felt the unbearable need for another body—not necessarily for sex, but just to rub your foot, to sit across the table, to drop his things around the room in a way that was maddening but still served as a reminder that he was there.
And now, all these years later, her ex-husband Paul Mellow, once her collaborator, once so gentle and sensual and considerate, once so wild for her, had changed. His black beard was gray and dry as a shrub. His thick and muscular body was softened, and his boundless love for Roz had frozen over and transmogrified into love’s opposite. He loathed her now. He flexed his rage by withholding permission to reissue their book. It wasn’t just the money, which would be modest at first but then potentially big; it was the whole snapping back to life, the zest of being in the light, of being thought of again, and giving lectures—and not just to a room of open-mouthed, hungover, privileged nineteen year olds in North Face jackets. Roz had nearly forgotten how much she had enjoyed that attention, how sometimes she had liked it much more than sex.
She hadn’t realized how much she longed for that attention again until the day last fall when the young editor Jennifer Wing had called to introduce herself, saying that the publisher would like very much to reprint the book. “I just want to tell you that Pleasuring meant so much to my parents, and even—you’re not going to believe this—my grandparents. I come from a pretty progressive family for Chinese Americans,” Jennifer said. “They basically left the Hunan Province and never looked back. Me, I wasn’t even born when your book came out, but now I really love it.”
“Oh, well, great. I’m glad,” Roz said uncertainly.
“We’re planning a huge campaign, with entirely new, relevant sections. And new illustrations,” said Jennifer. “We’ve got a great artist in mind. Someone young, like last time. It will give a youthful flavor to the book, introduce your work to an entirely new group of readers.”
“We can’t use the old drawings?”
“Sorry,” said Jennifer Wing.
It all would have worked so well: the release of the book in an explosion of attention, the joy, the ease, the pleasure. It would have all been wonderful, but Paul said no. No, no, no way, no. He didn’t want to go through that experience again. It was over; Roz had been the one to end it, and he didn’t want to start it up again. She knew now that she ought to just give up, to realize that it didn’t matter now anyway, because all she ought to care about was Dashiell getting better. And that was what she cared about most of all, but in a way the two desires had become joined together. Was she a bad person, a bad mother? She wanted to breathe life into Dashiell and into herself as well, because she suspected that she needed it, that without the book she would eventually be left with nothing.
Roz pulled her car into her driveway in Saratoga. The day had turned to night, and it was pitch black outside. The door to the house was unlocked; people rarely locked doors in this town. As soon as she walked through the front hall she was aware of the smell of Jack’s cooking; it was immediately and clearly so much better than what was being prepared at the Mount Arcadia Yoga and Wellness Center. Cooking smells made you enter a house more quickly, going deeply and single-mindedly inside, tracking down the scent much the way that, in sex, you were drawn toward the locus of arousal, with its inexplicable, jungly imperative.
Roz walked directly into the kitchen now. Jack was at the stove, stirring and peering and adjusting spices. His head was bent over the burners, and she could see how thin his skein of hair was. While Paul’s hair had thickened and blossomed with age, Jack’s had thinned. Most of it would be gone in a few short years.
“I need your soup,” she said to her husband.
“Well, you got it,” he said, and he turned around to give her a kiss.
“I think I need it intravenously,” Roz said. “It’s all just so hard.”
“I know,” Jack said. “Any news from Dashiell?”
“No.”
“From Paul, at least? Or Michael?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You could use some good news.”
Roz took off her coat and sat down at the table
. Their old dog Ginger was underfoot but tired, barely moving, providing a footrest for these equally tired adults at the end of the day. Roz buried a foot in Ginger’s blond fur and waited for Jack to bring over a bowl and a spoon. She felt, in a way, like her friend and colleague Constance Coffey, who came home each winter day to darkness and a low thermostat that would need to be raised, the heat clicking into gear as it prepared to tend to the climate needs of a solitary human.
Roz Mellow needed something else now, something more than soup, more than love itself. She thought she might have to cry, and then, all of a sudden, she did, surprising the dog, who raised its head from under the table to look, and surprising Jack, who replaced a pot lid and came over to her. It seemed to Roz, as she let him hold her, that by the time she was finished she had done all eight kinds of crying.
Chapter Seven
THE DIRECTOR of Hysterical Girl was a thin, lupine man named Arnie Nelson who, by his own admission, had been obsessed with Freud’s case histories for much of his adult life. The chance to direct a play based on Freud’s patient Dora brought out all of his nervous and excited energy, so that as he sat with the actors in a circle on the bare stage, one of his legs went jiggling and the fingers of his left hand played an invisible keyboard on the dusty black floor. Thea Herlihy was to be Dora, who had entered into treatment with Freud in Vienna in the year 1900, and for whom symptoms were like breathing—continual and necessary. Nelson had been walking Thea through the part for weeks now, giving her Xeroxed articles on the case study to read and helping her maintain an erect, corseted posture and a relentless, annoying cough, the kind that would have made people on a streetcar in Vienna’s Ringstrasse send out angry glances at the unfortunate girl who insisted on making those sounds.
At night in bed, lying alone now that Michael was away on his never-ending visit with his father in Florida, Thea practiced her cough, as well as a particular kind of miserable moaning. Michael had been gone for an entire month now, and while he was gone his younger brother had gotten sick, bonding Michael to his father in some new, puzzling way. In his absence she found that she had much more freedom, a state she had been used to in her life, and which she realized she had missed. They had fallen from the heights of their initial love—a slow, unstated drop. How it had happened she didn’t know. After he left she thought of him often in the beginning, and then less often later on. There were still times when Thea wished he were home so that they could be together, and she could try out her lines on him and see what he had to say about her interpretation of the character. Michael had read everything and had studied Freud’s case studies in college, while Thea, who only had one year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts doing scene studies, had read far less than she would have liked. She was undereducated and she knew it, and mostly when she was among her actor friends it didn’t bother her, but now it did.