The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  The spaceship lifted up over Providence, Rhode Island, carrying its cargo of passengers, all of whom were in isolation and too weak and sick to peer down through the windows at the city they were leaving. Dashiell, though, managed to sit up and look outside. As the spaceship went up, he saw the roof of the house where he and Tom lived, the wrought-iron gates of Brown University, and in the middle of a park he saw a statue of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, wearing one of those three-corner hats, boots, and a waistcoat. Roger Williams looked up at the spaceship and, with all the effort he could muster, waved a bronze arm as the thing lumbered higher and higher into the night sky. Dashiell would have waved back, but his own arm felt as though it were made of bronze and was unliftable. He turned his heavy head to the side and closed his eyes, going for a ride, unsure of how long it would take before he got there.

  By the time the morning came, Tom was sitting in the single chair beside the bed. He too wore a yellow gown and mask, though beneath it Dashiell could see the cuffs and collar of his one really good suit, the black Armani that had cost so much money that the two men had had to figure out their expenses for the month before they decided it was okay for him to buy it. But in his position he needed to look authoritative and well dressed. Ever since the advent of Bill Clinton, Democrats had had a lock on fashion, and the Republicans had given them a wide berth; for every slim, Italian-suited liberal, there were three bad toupee- and checkered-poly-blend conservatives peppering the landscape. Something needed to be done about this. It was gay Republicans to the rescue, Tom had felt, and Dashiell had agreed that he ought to buy the suit. Besides, Tom looked so good in it that Dashiell sometimes felt improbably proud when they walked down the street together, as though he wanted everyone to know: This is my boyfriend. Look at him and weep.

  This morning, though, in the somber, dim light of the unit, in which all the patients were soon to be recipients of stem cell transplants, there was no sexual heat to speak of, and behind the face mask, Tom Amlin’s eyes looked terrified.

  “Dashiell? Are you awake?” The yellow patch of cloth was sucked slightly into the concavity that implied a mouth.

  “Yes. Just,” he said.

  “They say you’re doing really well so far. I spoke to the nurses, and also to Dr. Chang and Dr. Balakian.”

  “Really? How can they tell?” Dashiell realized, with a great measure of relief, that the hallucinations had subsided. He was not in outer space; he was not on any sort of spacecraft; no orderlies floated past in antigravity, carrying trays. He was earthbound, intact, or at least as intact as someone could be whose cancer was advancing.

  The peripheral stem cells, which had been collected directly from Dashiell’s bone marrow, would, after he finished this new round of chemotherapy, be returned to him in a cleaner, purer state. His own immune system would be turned off, a sudden blackout that would leave him vulnerable to anything: to a careless nurse sneezing and sending out an invisible spider-thread of snot, then touching the edge of a magazine that Dashiell might soon pick up, to the vent under the window that seemed to have a soft accretion of mold on it, much to Dashiell’s disturbance. But he didn’t want to say anything about the vent because he was too tired to complain, and because he feared it would make him seem like a difficult patient.

  “They say you’re tolerating the new drugs really well,” Tom said. “That’s what I mean.”

  “Oh.”

  “Listen, Dash.” Tom shifted and crossed his legs. Even his shining black shoes were covered in stretchy yellow slippers. “I have to travel for the campaign.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, but I mean basically, now. Just a few days here and there, back and forth. I’ll be in and out. There’s really no choice. Wyman’s numbers are down farther and they want me out there. He’s getting a lot of heat because in interviews he was all for the war in Iraq—not that he was actually in a position to vote on it—and now things are not going so well. Soldiers dying every day. You know about that mother?”

  “What mother?”

  “Mary Ann McCullough, I think her name is. She’s from Pawtucket, and her kid was blown up last week in Fallujah. So she’s going after Wyman, of all people, like he was somehow responsible, even though he’s still just a candidate. She follows him around to campaign stops and photo-ops armed with these giant pictures of her son and these pictures of his coffin draped in a flag. She’s even got his first grade picture turned into a billboard, and underneath it are the words “My Boy Died in a Phony War,” or something like that. So she’s been haunting Wyman, and the RNC wants us to control these events more tightly. I can’t really trust anyone else to run the show; everything’s getting out of hand. It will all fall apart without me.”

  Dashiell couldn’t even imagine what to say. He felt dizzy, and he wondered briefly if he really were in space, and if Tom was there with him. They weren’t the Brooks Brothers anymore—they were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, heading for a walk on the moon. Because how could Tom say such a thing; how could he leave him now, of all times, while his own body had been strafed of marrow and infection-fighting cells and lay waiting for the savior marrow and new cells to come riding in and make everything okay? Dashiell had barely enough energy even to move his head, but he swiveled his eyes over to Tom and fixed on him what he hoped was an evil stare. More likely, though, he just looked hangdog-sick.

  He saw, in that moment, that Tom was deeply upset, too, and that clearly he did not take any of this at all lightly. “I know, you hate me,” Tom said quietly. “I mean, who would do such a thing? But they’re making me, Dash. I heard right down from the RNC. The big guns of the GOP are basically offering me the following options: I can either go on the road with Wyman right now, all around the state, putting out fires, and if I do a good job then I’ll probably keep rising and I’ll be able to cover whatever your insurance won’t. Or I can quit now, and be blackballed in the Republican party of Rhode Island forever, not to mention nationally, and then I don’t know how we’re going to pay all your medical bills.”

  “They wouldn’t do that to you,” said Dashiell.

  “Try them.”

  Both men sat and looked at the port catheter in Dashiell’s chest, into which doggedly dripped cyclophosphamide, melphalan, and etoposide. The expense of his illness was something they could barely think about. With Dashiell unable to work, it all fell on Tom, the unrecognized spouse. Still, they managed their lives side by side. They were two men who loved each other and still got really turned on looking at each other coming out of the shower in the morning. Two men who knew how to make each other happy just joking around or talking all night about politics or sprawled across the bed in the glorious freedom that belonged to the well.

  God, that freedom was lost, Dashiell thought, for beds were now places to lie still in, to raise the head or lower the foot. Beds were motorized. They had a thick urine-protector that you could feel even beneath the sheet. This was a far cry from the bed at home, the low bed where sometimes Dashiell lay diagonally, completely naked and hard, waiting for Tom to come into the room and be surprised. And Tom would leap on him like a kid jumping into water, and they would both feel the symmetry of skin, the wonderful rub of parts that even to this day reminded Dashiell of Boy Scouts, trying to make a fire with two sticks. You could feel boyish and scoutlike in bed. Tom Amlin threw off his bureaucratic style, his power and influence and dogma, and became just a really adorable, sexy boyfriend in a bed. Everything was there that they needed: little candles, music, a tub of something vanilla-scented called Luv Butter that Tom had bought as a joke but had been depleted with surprising alacrity, and, of course, their two strong and willing selves.

  Dashiell had left that bed and traded down, way down, for this one, which included an interminable poison drip and no guarantees that anything good would come of this. Sometimes the transplant killed you before you had a chance to see if it would have even worked. “All right,” Dashiell said to the man in yellow,
whose body was hidden from view in a hospital burka as if a punishment for some obscure sin.

  But Tom was not done. “So the thing is,” he went on, “I called your mother.”

  If Dashiell could have yanked the tubes from his chest in protest he would have, but the news only further flattened him against the bed. “No,” he said. “Why did you do that?”

  “Someone needs to be with you while you’re here, to be your advocate.”

  “Claudia, then. She’s offered.”

  Tom shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. From what you’ve said about her and from what I’ve seen myself of her, I don’t think she could do a forceful enough job. And look, your mother really, really wants to do it; you already know that. She’s coming the day after tomorrow.”

  By the time plates of scrod were wheeled in to the patients in the transplant unit at Rhode Island Hospital on Wednesday evening, Tom Amlin was standing in one of the waterfront mansions in Newport, drinking champagne from a ludicrously tall flute. The mansion was filled with heavy-donor buzz and the pleasure that came with feeling that you were close to the nucleus of power, or at least projected power. The hospital unit, meanwhile, was quiet and humming; there was the occasional click of a fork and knife against a Chinet plate and the sound of someone softly crying. Dashiell raised the head of his bed a little higher to try to get a look through the window of his door into the window of the door across the hall, but he saw nothing.

  It was into this sleepy evening environment that his yellow-clad mother came. Dashiell looked up as she strode to the head of the bed, and he said, “Mom.”

  To her credit, she didn’t cry and she didn’t make any loud, startling noises. She simply stood there, suited up for the visit, and she reached out and held his hand in her own gloved one. “Dashiell, hi,” she said. “I’m glad you let me come.”

  He didn’t argue; this wasn’t the time and he wouldn’t have done a good job at it, anyway. Her presence had been foisted on him the way the nodes of cancer had, and in both cases he had no vote. But he found that he didn’t feel angry at seeing her here. Maybe he was getting soft, getting sentimental, but he found her demeanor appropriate, even potentially helpful. Right away Dashiell was impressed with his mother’s lack of hesitation.

  “Are you feeling totally rotten?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he told her.

  Over the next days, as he descended slowly through the levels of hell, Roz Mellow was there with him, not exactly a Beatrice to his Dante, but more like a sidekick. She descended too, though she was able to do it enclosed in some kind of magical glass casing, free from the pain all around her, not so much to save herself, but in order to be strong for him. There were jobs she needed to do: nurses who had to be told and retold with greater emphasis and eventually anger that Dashiell was nauseated and needed an antiemetic right now; doctors who had to be summoned; nutritionists who needed to be advised about what he could eat and what didn’t stay down. Dashiell saw all the insistence and fervor and drama he’d always seen in her now put to good use. And he thought that she would have liked to have his pain, to take it from him and apply it to herself. Was this what mothers did? He’d never thought about that much when he was a boy. He’d been wrapped up in himself the way children are, but not because he thought he was so great, the way Michael clearly always thought of himself, and the way Holly seemed to think of herself too, back when she was a beautiful, arrogant girl. Back when she held sway over the younger ones. Dashiell actually thought of himself as a criminal, and in dream after dream throughout his childhood he was continually apprehended by the police and carted off to jail. In one particularly memorable dream, his parents come into his room before dinner and say to him, Son, the police are on to you. They will be here in an hour.

  But what have I done?

  You know what you’ve done. There’s no time to go into it. Here, we’ve put together some food and clothing and a little money for you. Take it and leave now, before they get here. Head out to the expressway and keep going.

  But I’m just a kid.

  Yes, we know that, says his mother, starting to cry. And we will never be able to see you grow up, because you can never, ever come home again or they will find you.

  We would rather you have a life of freedom, says his father, than one spent in prison. Take care of yourself.

  And then they hug him tightly and let go of him, and they hand him a little hobo stick packed with his things. He slings it over his shoulder and heads outside. It’s early evening, and all around the neighborhood are other families, other kids, and Dashiell thinks to himself, Why do I have to go away when they all get to stay? What is it I’ve done again? What’s the terrible crime? But he can never remember, and off he goes, tears streaming down his face, and his parents wave good-bye from behind the screen door, and he will never see them again.

  As if to make his own dreams more sensible, Dashiell started stealing a few items when he was twelve. In the record store downtown he’d stolen cassette tapes of the Velvet Underground and a compilation of the Doors’ greatest hits, slipping them quickly into his windbreaker and praying that there wasn’t some metallic strip inside them that would make an alarm go off as he left. When he walked out the door of the store he felt a surge of anxiety so powerful that it almost sounded like an alarm, and he was tempted to break into a run. But no, steady, steady, he insisted to himself, there is no alarm, there is only silence, and you are fine.

  He was never caught, though once, when she was briefly home, Holly walked by his room when he was playing a purloined tape, and he was sure she knew. There was a kind of mirth in her expression, but she never said a word to him about it, and he couldn’t bear to ask. He would never find out exactly how much she knew back then, and now, as a grown man, he felt a need to know. But maybe it was just a need to be young again, under the control of a powerful, sultry sister who would one day become diminished to an extent he still found shocking.

  For no particular reason, Dashiell grew out of the desire to take things that weren’t his. His parents gave him a decent allowance, and he took pride in laying out cash for cassette tapes and other sundries. But he understood, when he turned fourteen and started fooling around with Ham Kleeman, the perennial musical-comedy lead, that he wasn’t done with guilt yet, or it wasn’t done with him.

  One night it was dark out and he was late for dinner, and when he left the Kleemans’ and came through the door of his own house and looked at his divorced mother, she knew, and he knew that she knew.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “Out,” he said, borrowing an answer that Holly had used often.

  “Well, all right then,” Roz had finally said uncertainly. “Go wash up.”

  He washed and he washed. He stood in the tiny downstairs bathroom with its basket of clove and dried flecks of tangerine peel and its never-laundered little hand towels, and he thought of what he’d just been doing up in Ham’s attic room with the door bolted. Initially, Ham had put on the album from Pippin, and he had even sung along lightly with one of the songs.

  “‘Everything has its season,’” Ham had begun in his premature baritone, a hand reaching out and yanking Dashiell’s shirt up over his head. “‘Everything has its time,’” Ham went on, undoing the button-fly jeans with eager fingers. “‘Show me a reason and I’ll soon show you a rhyme . . .’”

  Then Dashiell had interrupted, saying, “If you keep this record on, I will have to shoot you.” Ham had simply laughed and changed the record to something he knew Dashiell would like: the drone of boy rock, with its mournfulness and electric keyboards. “Here,” Ham said as the album began, “is this better?”

  “Much. Thank you.”

  Then they’d wrestled lightly on the bed and, surprise surprise, it had turned into sex. Ham was very efficient with his hands and all else; after trying and failing to make it as an actor for a year after college, Ham Kleeman had gone to medical school and was now, apparently, an
endocrinologist in New Jersey. Ham took Dashiell’s penis in his mouth with very little preamble; they were just boys, these two, and they did not know anything about kissing or cuddling or hugging. They had no book to learn from. Dashiell always came back to the fact, astounded all over again, that Pleasuring, for all its extravagant explanations, did not say one word that was meant for male couples. Not one word.

  “Not one word,” Dashiell blurted out to his mother now.

  “Honey? What’s that?”

  She leaned over the bed, and he became aware that she’d been there for hours and hours, perhaps all day, for the light was different and the bustle of the hospital was suddenly different, even the fractional amount of bustle that found its way here into the unit whose isolated patients became less and less animated with each passing day. Meal carts still were trundled through, but no one could eat anymore. Soon, all nutrients would be given through tubes; soon, scrod and chicken and ice cream would be the topography of someone else’s landscape, not theirs.

  “Why,” he asked, “didn’t you put men in the book?”

  “Men? There was plenty about men.”

  “Men on men,” he persevered.

  “Oh. That again. We’ve talked about that.” She sighed. “And you know, I was defensive about it in the past, but I’ve come to see that you’re probably right. It was a mistake. We wrote about our own experience. We weren’t gay men. We were so ignorant of everything, Dash. We thought only about ourselves in a bed. We couldn’t imagine other people’s experiences. I’m really sorry.”

  Even through the fog, he was startled by her apology. “Oh,” he said. “Well, okay.”

  “It’s okay?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

  And then she was not allowed in for a while, not allowed anywhere near him, for his body was missing its essential soup of immunity, and anything could have killed him, it seemed, even an apology.