by Meg Wolitzer
Thea couldn’t help but feel: Sorry, Michael, this is not for you.
Or maybe it was more like: Sorry, Michael, I am not for you.
She felt the regret and the acceptance of her own infidelity only secondarily, for how could it not be eclipsed under the cat-weight of Anne Freling, and the idea of touching her? Lost in this, Thea somehow became sure that Michael would understand. He would have to, really, because she wouldn’t be able to stop doing this, she would want to go to bed with Anne whenever she could. Making love with another woman was an intoxicant, an inhalation of all the surface scent until you came to what was below it, the liquid center—unapologetic, vivid—and found to your astonishment that you wanted that, too.
You couldn’t help but be aware of the absence of a penis, that great bluff presence, that thing that always arrived at some point, making its presence known. That thing that did not work well, in Michael’s case, and so you needed to stop and be encouraging and decent and kind. But there was no need for kindness now, the subtle shift to the maternal, in which the beautiful woman comforted the big, muscled, frustrated man. It was as though Anne wouldn’t give her the opportunity to pause and regret or pause and shift the tone they’d already established. They were fully naked, both of them seemingly poreless, with matching skin tones the color of good stationery, with Anne cupping her hand between Thea’s legs, and Thea aroused to distraction, pliant, open for Anne and Anne alone, emitting some sounds that were like sighs but more insistent, thinking how this was like the surprise ending to her life—except, of course, it was far too soon for this to be the end of her life at all. A single finger entered her; women had fingers, after all, and here they were in action. For a second she thought about Michael’s parents’ eye-popping sex book, which she and he had looked at when they first got together. There had been one particular drawing, a close-up of the father’s hand on the mother, and this perhaps had been the most shocking drawing in the entire book, for a finger, used like that, was taken from the realm of the utilitarian, of hand-washing, vegetable-slicing, pen-holding, piano-playing, and on and on, into the realm of contact and exploration and, of course, pleasure.
Thea felt herself clench her jaw and curl her toes, and she was unable to stop herself from these familiar actions; they were encoded into her. Anne, too, responded similarly a little later, and Thea had the startling opportunity to imagine herself in orgasm, to see what Michael saw, and what those other men before him had seen. And as she saw, she was lifted further into a strange appreciation and shyness of the female body, that banshee with its throat sounds and wet center and locked jaw and tree-dweller toes. This was what she looked like too; how amazing to get that view.
But the orgasm that was brought on by Anne Freling was no different than any other with Michael or the handsome actors Thea had gone to bed with over the years; apparently there was a sameness to orgasms whether they were brought on by men or women. It was simply the volume that varied between experiences, the decibels of excitement, and then the recovery from it. Orgasm was such a basic, generic experience, and the one you had was just like the ones that other people were having everywhere in the world at this very moment. It was not unlike death, somehow, for no matter what kind of a life you’d led, there was that great sameness at the end. Making love with a woman, like a life itself, offered possibilities for mutual stirring and admiration and a kind of excitement that required no accommodation to differences. You could be similar to; you didn’t have to complement. There was no furred against hairless, no stark contrast to marvel at. You didn’t have to take care of the other person, and try to resolve their problems, although you could if you wanted to.
She suspected that Anne Freling was not troubled to the extent that Michael was. Anne had a clear, unworried brow; most of her needs were taken care of elsewhere, in the office of her chiropractor and at her yoga class held in a brutally heated room, and in a small workshop she still attended with the legendary nonagenarian acting teacher Senya Orloff, who wore those signature turbans.
Thea wondered if Anne would ever need anything from her, or if what they might do together would involve only mutual competence and gratification and physical admiration. If you let it be about more than that, then there was the possibility of drag-down closeness, the kind you already had with your women friends. The kind that men didn’t understand. Men did things, and women talked, talked, talked. The idea of talking all the time with Anne Freling—complaining bitterly or confiding secrets and even crying—had the quality of a bad foreign film to it. Then she realized that today they’d talked surprisingly little.
Finally, Thea said, “I have to go.” Neither of them wanted to linger on the white couch, which had become their bed. There would need to be some kind of transition now to getting up, getting dressed, acknowledging the sex and seeing how it appeared, as an idea, floating in the open air.
“All right then,” Anne Freling said, and she smiled a little and asked Thea if she needed anything.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” said Anne. “A towel. A drink. Anything.”
“No. I’m good.”
They dressed, for some reason facing away from each other, then kissed on either cheek, as though in Europe and not in fact sudden lovers, and then without another word Thea left, hurrying out to Irving Place and passing Gramercy Park with its curved rails and clusterings of tiny leaves poking out from the frost and its throngs of nannies and young children in snowsuits who were entirely ignorant of love, and sex, and choosing someone, and so much else in life that was still waiting.
Back at home, there was a message on the machine from Michael. “Hey, Thea,” he said. “I swear to God I still exist. My dad and I, and what’s been happening with Dash, I think it’s good that I stay at least—”
Thea clicked off the machine, already impatient, even though his message hadn’t ended. She got the drift; she knew what he was telling her. It was the same thing he had said in other phone calls. He was there in Florida, he was staying there, he was not coming home just yet. She picked up the telephone and dialed Anne, whose telephone number she had memorized from the cast contact information sheet.
“It’s me,” Thea said, enjoying the new familiarity, and how at this moment in time she occupied the central place in Anne Freling’s consciousness. Right now, she was front and center, and this was a position that was enjoyable, like having the lead in a play, even if almost no one went to see it. “I wanted to tell you that you don’t have to feel weird about this or anything,” Thea said. “Because I don’t.”
“Oh really?” said Anne.
“No.”
“Well, that’s good to know.”
“I want to come back there,” Thea said. “Can I come tonight? Can I do that?”
“Sure,” said Anne. “We have all that research to do, isn’t that what Nelson said? We’re supposed to learn all about Dora’s illness, and about her father, and about Frau K., and turn-of-the-century Austrian life in general. So we’d better get cracking.”
And the two women laughed together.
Chapter Eight
CLAUDIA MELLOW returned to Wontauket several times over a period of weeks to film her old teachers, and on the fourth time, David Gupta accompanied her to her interview. They had been emailing each other intermittently since the day they’d met in the house on Swarthmore Circle and she’d nearly fainted in front of him. She had begun to believe, on and off during their exchanges, that David Gupta was flirting with her. Maybe he was, but if so, then surely he’d forgotten who she was in person; surely, in his imagination, he’d replaced her imperfect, squat, and breasty little self with someone better. It didn’t even matter to Claudia that David wasn’t poised or particularly handsome. She hadn’t forgotten who he was; she could still picture his dark, questioning face close to hers as he knelt before her on the carpet in the bedroom where she’d once lived.
He had emailed her the day after they first met, inquiring as to whethe
r she’d recovered from what he called her “recovered-memory Satanic ritual dizzy spell,” and she’d promptly written back to say yes, she was completely fine, and then she’d assumed that that would be the end of him. But three days later another message from him was waiting. “One more thing,” he had written. “Did you ever notice that the floor in your/my bedroom slants a little? It’s like Van Gogh’s Room at Wontauket.” The emails picked up speed; she wrote him between film seminars and hours spent in the editing room, and now she was driving back to Wontauket to see the last of her elementary school teachers, and this time he would go with her.
It hadn’t been her idea that David accompany her to the interview, but when he suggested that he come along and help her unload and carry her equipment, she said yes. Today the interview would be taking place away from Bolander Elementary; Claudia was going to visit the home of her second grade teacher, the once-stylish Mr. Ed Stanton, who back in 1977 had driven a silvery blue fiberglass Corvette and wore synthetic, sherbet-colored shirts that instantly conformed to the plains and valleys of his chest. He’d also worn a large handlebar mustache then, and as a graduation gift that year the children had chipped in and bought him a red leather mustache-grooming kit. He’d been openly moved by the gift, sitting on the edge of his desk and turning it over and over in his hands.
“I’ll never forget you boys and girls,” he’d finally said, and some of the girls had started to cry.
Claudia remembered being one of those crying girls, and she knew then that time did not pause, not even for someone as cool and amazing as Mr. Stanton. As a heartthrob, this had been his brief and shining moment; fairly soon, or at least sooner than anyone could have expected, the tight shirts would have to go, the car would prove potentially ridiculous if not dangerous, and the grooming kit would be rendered useless, for he would brutally sever his mustache from the skin above his lip, revealing a philtrum as naked and vulnerable as anyone’s.
Mr. Stanton lived in the less affluent section of town, where the houses on their fractions of acres stood side by side in defiant sameness. The Wontauket dump was located nearby, this pit of legendary but as yet unprovable toxicity that was often picketed by local concerned mothers. She thought for a horrified moment of Dashiell’s illness and wondered briefly if it might have been caused by exposure to the dump all those decades ago. She pictured her brother—small, solid—trotting around the periphery of the dump, picking through other people’s castoffs.
Yesterday Dashiell had called to tell her that his Hodgkin’s had suddenly started resisting chemotherapy. He was slated for a peripheral stem cell transplant in the next few days—a bone marrow transplant using his own, cleaned marrow. The news came spilling out, so much more chilling over the phone than it would have been in one of his usual emails. Claudia was shocked and overcome, and had palpitations and needed to lie down while she spoke to him.
“Oh, Dash,” she’d said. “Let me come up there this time, okay? Please. Don’t be like this. I mean, it’s just me.”
But no, he said; he still would not let Claudia or any of the family come up to Rhode Island. Right now he was being prepped for his transplant, given rounds of tests and sitting in boredom and anxiety in several different impersonal hospital waiting rooms. Tom was there with him, he reminded Claudia; he was hardly alone.
So she would not go up to Rhode Island, but would instead worry from afar, while trying to find a way to concentrate on her incoherent botch of a student film, which, all these weeks later, still seemed to have no coherence to it. Instead, it was just a mass of teachers speaking into the camera. Claudia didn’t even know what to ask them, so she had just let them talk. In one interview, the school fire alarm kept going off and her sixth grade teacher, elderly Mrs. Rook, had cast her eyes off-camera and repeatedly murmured that “someone ought to do something about that.” But no one did, and the alarm punctuated her words every few moments until Claudia could barely stand it.
Here now, directly in the vaporous path of the Wontauket dump, sat Mr. Stanton’s small blue ranch house. Her teacher came out onto the porch when Claudia and David arrived in the rental car, and he waved to them lightly. “He looks so different,” Claudia said under her breath, still sitting with the engine idling, as though she might decide to make a break for it.
“Different bad, I guess you mean,” said David, and Claudia said yes, definitely, different bad. Mr. Stanton had warned her over the telephone that he’d had a stroke a few years earlier. Though he was mostly recovered now, his face appeared to be half-happy and half-sad, which struck Claudia as the way her own face ought to appear if she were to honestly present herself to the world. Half-happy would be for the times when she was alone and content and unpressured. But in the world at large, Claudia was half-sad, wandering around and timidly entering places where she did not speak the language, forced through the narrow, shape-changing pastry-tube of adult life. It was too fast, too strident, too demanding. Whenever she experienced a moment of true intimacy—if a friend confided in her, as they often did, about an abortion or a love affair or its violent end—Claudia felt afterward that she needed to take some time to be silent and still.
She felt this same way after she slept with somebody for the first time. After the man had gone home, she would be relieved. Sometimes she’d get back into bed and watch a Tracy–Hepburn movie, the fast dialogue soothing her like a clicking, distant rhythm. Now, at age thirty-four, Claudia felt as though she had to engage much more with other people or else she feared they would think, Why is that woman always alone? Why doesn’t she have a boyfriend? Why is she such a stupid, fat cunt?
In meeting David Gupta through the strange bond of their shared house, she had not in fact found her soul mate, her other half. He’d never really lived in the house, for his parents had bought it long after he was fully grown. His own childhood home had been in a suburb of Buffalo, with an entirely different set of associations and memories. David had a sturdiness about him that she didn’t really understand, but was still appealing, as though he were a human tool kit who would know what Claudia might need at different points in time: when he should be quiet, when to laugh, when to offer his help—like now, as they sat in her car in front of Mr. Stanton’s house. He didn’t even know her and still he was here with her.
There had been a stilted but mutually pleased exchange of hellos when she picked him up at the house today in yet another of her rental cars filled with equipment. For all he knew, she was a brilliant filmmaker, an auteur. Coming with her today might have been like helping François Truffaut carry his equipment around France in 1960, and for the rest of your life you could say, “Remember Jules et Jim? I carried that camera.” But amazingly David Gupta seemed to have no expectations; he had come all the way back from Philadelphia for the weekend to stay at his parents’ house and see her, and he was cheerfully sitting beside her in the car, pleased to be even fleetingly involved in a project that had nothing to do with him, and that he might never see completed.
Men like David seemed to exist as concentrated kernels of goodness in the world, or at least they’d decided that this would be how they would present themselves. Usually, Claudia thought, such men were not particularly handsome, and so instead they became cheerful and benign. In his sweatshirt, pressed jeans, down jacket, and Adidas, David looked ordinary; the only thing about him that stood out was the fact that he was Pakistani. His dark skin looked soft and somehow broken in.
They sat in the rental car, a little formal, looking through the windshield at Claudia’s old teacher with his half-fallen face, this man who had been a 1970s Mr. Chips with his Corvette and his cassette tapes of the Who and his love of the boys and girls who surrounded him like apostles—and an as-yet-unknown vulnerability in the brain that would eventually and with no warning cut off blood flow one day, leaving him with an arm that hung loosely and a face that could never express any of the things that he felt so deeply as he stood looking at his old student, his former favorite.
> David said to Claudia, “So, are you ready?” and she said yes, she was, and they began to unload the car.
The house was tidy and tight, like the living quarters on a boat. It appeared overly clean, and its upkeep was clearly maintained by a maid. No wife graced the premises; Mr. Stanton had been divorced for a long time, and Claudia surmised from the absence of framed photographs that he had no children. She took a seat on the sofa and accepted an offer of Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies that had been laid out on a plate. She bit into a cookie and looked around the room for an outlet in which to plug her equipment.
“Strange,” said Mr. Stanton. “This house is very . . . outlet challenged. I never noticed that before.” Soon all three of them were poking around the living room, moving chairs and couches and end tables. “Here’s one,” her teacher muttered, “but it’s all full up. No room at the inn.” Finally a solution was reached; an extension cord would be run into the living room from the small bathroom right beside it. Mr. Stanton dragged the cord with him, and Claudia and David sat watching as it unwound like a slowly waking snake, pulled taut across the green carpet. In a moment they both heard a crash, and then “Goddammit!” They sprang from their chairs and crowded into the bathroom to find Mr. Stanton on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I lost my balance. That happens to me a lot.”
She watched as David held out both hands to Mr. Stanton and pulled him straight up; her teacher wobbled a little as he righted himself. “Are you all right now?” David Gupta asked.
“Yes, thank you.”
“Okay. Good. You really took a tumble.” David helped him out of the bathroom and back into the living room. “Do you have anyone helping you?” he asked. “I mean, day to day?”