The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  It was two days later, but it might have been twenty, or thirty, or an entire lifetime later, with Dashiell a futurist Van Winkle figure in bed with a long beard, that his mother returned, and a few others came to visit him as well. First there was Tom, who was home briefly from the road. Now he was here again in his gown, and Dashiell could see that he had been crying. I must look like shit, he thought, and then Tom said, “No, you don’t,” and Dashiell realized that he’d spoken aloud once again without knowing it.

  Tom came and went, saying he loved Dashiell, and then he came back, and this time he actually brought a gowned and masked U.S. senatorial candidate Robert Wyman with him. A few of the nurses stood in a proud ring around the bed, but Dashiell became aware of his mother’s sudden absence, as though she couldn’t bear to be in the presence of a powerful Republican, as though she might spit on him or something.

  “How are you doing, guy?” Wyman asked.

  Guy. No, he didn’t think Dashiell’s name was Guy. He knew his name; Dashiell had written speeches for him. His words had poured from Robert Wyman’s mouth. Guy was what a man called another man in a moment of drama, when words would fail, when tenderness would have been embarrassing, when other people were listening, when there was no way to express anything with any kind of eloquence, so the best bet was to reduce the world to its sparest elements. Two men in a room: How are you doing, guy?

  And to Dashiell’s amazement, he found himself able to briefly rally, slide upward in the bed a little, and reach out a hand so that Wyman could shake it. This man was the master of the handshake, and Dashiell felt the inadequacy of his own cold, frail hand; the hand of the sick embraced by the gloved hand of the living, the hearty, the man who would be king, and though probably he was imagining this, it felt as though power passed from palm to palm, entering Dashiell through the skin. That was what he thought, anyway, and he tried to explain it to someone, but the next thing he knew, the person in yellow standing over the bed was none other than Trish Leggett, the zealous speechwriter who in Dashiell’s absence had written speeches for Robert Wyman at a fever pitch, staying up all night in her one-bedroom Benefit Street apartment that looked out over original street lamps and cobblestones.

  “Dashiell? It’s me, Trish,” she said, and as she leaned down closer he could smell Neutrogena soap through her mask. She always seemed like someone who had just that very moment stepped from a shower.

  “Hi,” he said. “Is Wyman gone?”

  “What? Oh yes. Hours ago,” she said. “He had to give a speech at a battered women’s shelter in Kingston.”

  “He shook my hand,” Dashiell said. “There was power there.”

  Trish paused. “Yes,” she said. “He’s very powerful. I know what you mean. You can actually feel it sometimes.” She played with the edge of his hospital blanket for a moment, and then she said, “Dashiell, I know the road is hard.”

  “What?”

  “The road you’re on. But keep a steady pace. For there’s a farmhouse up ahead, and a light is burning in the window, and they’re waiting for you.”

  Dashiell blinked. Because she was wearing a mask, he couldn’t really tell what she had meant by this; her eyes seemed to be filling with tears, much as they’d done when he’d run into her in Store 24, and she’d thought he had AIDS. Then it occurred to him that she was saying words that were meant to give him faith, and optimism, and hope. This was her sick-person speech! This was it! She was forming the words for the first time right now, and she was already editing them in her head. Though he could not know this, eventually she would use these very words in a speech that President Bush would deliver at a naval base. It would be about Iraq, and about having hope even in the face of immense suffering. But for now it was simply her latest combination of words designed to elicit a swift response.

  Dashiell thought about what she’d said. Who exactly, he wondered, were they? Who were the people who were waiting for him?

  “I don’t know any farmers,” he said.

  “What?”

  “In the farmhouse.”

  “It’s a metaphor,” Trish said gently.

  “I know that. But for what? For what?”

  It was as though she didn’t want to say, for she backed up slowly, starting to leave the room without telling him. But he had to know. Did she mean that the farmer and perhaps his wife were the embodiments of death? Or were they there to save him, to take him inside and give him a bowl of warm broth and a feather bed to sleep in? He had to know; he absolutely had to know, for he had convinced himself that she knew the answer to this.

  “Trish, come back,” Dashiell said, but his voice was barely a whisper, and the room was dark. It was nighttime; the visitors were gone, and he was alone. Distantly, the nurses shuffled around in the hall, and someone in another room was crying, and someone else was coughing, and still another person was retching; he was able to separate out these strands from one another so that the whole of human misery here in this unit was not just one writhing mass.

  Then, with all the energy he’d ever possessed, and with the new infusion of it that he’d received from Robert Wyman’s hand, Dashiell sat up in bed. The port that delivered the drugs to him was attached to a bag that hung from a hook on a pole, and he was flummoxed by the different tubes that sprouted from his chest, and so instead of disconnecting himself completely he just grabbed hold of the pole, using it like a crutch, leaning against the shaky metal as he took a few steps across the dark, shining linoleum. His chest ached, and he was wearing only a pale green hospital gown, but still he walked, tilting forward into the hall past the nurses’ station, where three nurses were in a football huddle, none of them looking at him, all of them intent as they gave their attention to something in the middle of them, which happened to be a box of Godiva chocolates that another patient’s family had brought. “It says that this one’s praline,” he heard one of them say. “And this one’s nougat.”

  Out of the transplant unit he went, pushing through the doors and into the vestibule, where the light was brighter and where the bank of elevators was. One came right away, and Dashiell went downstairs and wound up in the lobby, which at this time of night was dead. The gift shop was locked, but he could see the things pressing against the glass from inside, the collection of shiny synthetic stuffed animals and jumbo find-a-word omnibuses, none of which had ever saved a single person’s life. He stepped onto the rubber mat of the front door of the building, and the electric eye saw him and permitted egress.

  So then he was outside in the cold winter air of Providence, Rhode Island, and up ahead he could make out the receding form of Trish Leggett, as she wound her way along the sidewalk that bordered the parking lot and started walking toward her car.

  “Trish, wait!” Dashiell called as he pushed his pole along. God, the wind was cold; it shot a column of air up his flapping gown. Trish didn’t hear him, and he had to keep walking, heading forward, his feet in their terry cloth slippers on the sidewalk, going past the Emergency sign, and the fleet of idling ambulances, and the cluster of residents laughing and joking like students, their stethoscopes bouncing as they walked. If they saw him they didn’t show it, and on he went, leaving the gates of the hospital and heading on to the boulevard. It must have been ten o’clock at night, maybe later, and the trees were enormous and black, and the wind became something you just had to get used to, which was pretty much like anything in life: like sex, actually, for in the beginning it hadn’t felt natural to do it with anyone but yourself. You had to break away from that solitude, from the grip of the hand with which you held yourself in the dark, the distinctly unpowerful hand that wasn’t Robert Wyman’s, that was just the hand of a boy, nothing more, curling around something that you were only now acknowledging was your own, was yours, belonged to no one else.

  Sex was joyous, his parents had said in their book, and they rode each other with the unwavering assuredness of heterosexuals at the top of their game. Sex does not need to be shameful or con
ducted in dark, soundproof rooms that were havens for the furtive. But sex was for men and women only; it was not for two women and it was not for two men, and he’d learned that the moment he’d opened the book for the first time in November 1975 and stared at all those drawings, one after the other. There wasn’t a way in, there was no picture that could have been him, for he would never do those things to a woman, never, ever, and in some way he knew it even then. But he had no alternative yet, no way to convert the images so they suited him, and instead he sank back into his anger and his sneaky life of secrets, of cassette tapes tucked inside his jacket with their price stickers still on, of longing, and wanting what he couldn’t have, and being single-minded in his desire to obtain it.

  But now, walking along the side of the road in Providence with the port catheter in his chest and his metal pole, Dashiell thought about the first time he’d entered that room full of other gay Republicans, all of them enraged by the sniveling of the left, the ever-expanding government that could simply go wherever it wanted, encroach upon you like some sort of lawn infestation. He was a gay man and he wanted the government out of his life; he wanted to be left alone to make his money and spend it, to make his decisions and fuck someone of his choosing in a state of exquisite joy.

  But what Tom had been telling him—and what he’d been seeing on the news every night before he went into the hospital—would have created a chill in even a lifelong member of the GOP. The Iraqi war was a drawn-out mess; there seemed to be no plan; the White House was helpless but angry, much the way that Dashiell had been throughout his childhood. Belligerent, simmering, wishing for things that might never happen. The GIs were dying in their helicopters and their convoys, or while standing sentry at a bank or a school or a grocery store, or while lighting a cigarette outside the gates of a compound. They were dying, these men, these boys, including Mary Ann McCullough’s unfortunate son, thus turning his mother into an accidental activist chasing candidate Robert Wyman around the tiny state of Rhode Island.

  So the men of Washington had pulled down the dusty maps with their faded blues and their yellow land masses. The maps were so fucking old, they probably had words on them like “Persia” and “Constantinople.” Quickly, quickly, the men had to learn, and then the world had to be told what the men had learned. Dashiell couldn’t trust these men, he knew, at least not with this particular task. He could trust them with his bankbook, his wallet, with a waterfall of cash, but he would never let them send him out into a world they were too arrogant to understand. The whole country was suddenly loathed in ways that were incomprehensible to Dashiell. We have lost our special place, he thought. We’ve lost the perfection that allowed us to be boyish in one way and manlike in another; we’ve lost the shining maleness that shimmered everywhere, and was sometimes resented but tolerated, and more often than not was loved. We have lost it, and it can never be returned to us. We no longer have our position, our corner booth, our distinction.

  Dashiell knew famous stories of Republicans who’d converted to the other side when they became critically ill. These changes were legendary; bombastic types who for years had been working to defeat the Left now wept with sorrow at the zero hour and asked for forgiveness. He would not become one of them, no he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t change sides merely because he had seen some of the ugliness of his own side. He’d seen it and he could never unsee it, just like his parents’ book. It disturbed him, but he had to live with what he was and what he’d made himself into all these years. He couldn’t conveniently change, when push came to shove. He was a Republican, he was one of them, but he could loudly complain about them too. He could complain when they were boorish and ignorant, and he could keep on complaining for the rest of his life and never shut up.

  Dashiell was tired now, but his feet kept moving, shuffling along the road. For there’s a farmhouse up ahead, and a light is burning in the window, and they’re waiting for you, Trish Leggett had said to him in the hospital room. She was gone now, had slipped into the darkness and couldn’t be found, but up ahead he saw something, and he realized it was a light.

  Of course, he thought, and he lifted the metal pole up from the ground and carried it over his shoulder, the way he’d done with that little hobo stick in his dream when he was a boy. And soon enough he had arrived at the farmhouse. It had a thatched roof and leaded glass windows. I see, this is all just another hallucination, Dashiell thought. I’ve had them before, but this one is different. It was the kind of extended-narrative hallucination that people get when their immune system is turned off and the fevers spike and the drugs are poured in like water on a fire.

  He now knew that this was the case, and that in actuality he was still in his hospital bed, lying there with his legs moving slightly under the extra blankets that the nurses had thrown over him when he’d started to shake. But knowing it didn’t change anything, for here was the farmhouse, appearing before him with clarity.

  He tried the door and found that it was unlocked. Inside was a simple and beautiful room with a wooden table and chairs, and a hearth that was lit. Waiting for him in the middle of the room was someone who was neither the farmer nor the farmer’s wife; neither death nor life, though perhaps both, but the thought was too complicated to understand in his current state. During the bout of hallucinations, his fever, which was being monitored continually by the nurses and by Drs. Chang and Balakian, had now reached 105.2. A special ice blanket was being filled for him right now, and it would bring the fever down to a safer level fairly quickly. Dashiell Mellow would recover from the transplant, and he would go into the remission that everybody had hoped for. But he didn’t know any of this yet. He was still in the farmhouse, and the light was on, and someone was waiting for him. He stepped inside and let his mother take him in her arms.

  Chapter Eleven

  UPON HER return from Providence, Roz Mellow found that her husband had cleaned all the closets in her absence, as much to please and surprise her as to do something with his own anxiety. Deep into the closets he’d gone, scooping out the detritus of this marriage and the one before it. By the time Roz looked, flashlights had been loaded with fresh D batteries and upended on shelves in the utility closet, and old, ignored shoes and boots had been lined up in rows on the floor of the front hall closet, as if waiting for feet that hadn’t come to claim them in many years and maybe never would. The sense of order, even if it wouldn’t prove to be particularly useful, was still soothing to Roz, as Jack must have hoped it would be.

  She had gone to Providence to take care of Dashiell by herself; there was no point in Jack coming with her, she’d said. He wouldn’t be any help to Dashiell, and he wouldn’t really be any help to her either. Besides, after a day spent watching her son be transformed, purposefully turned even sicker than he already was, she had secretly wanted to be alone at night in her room at the Biltmore, watching endless loops of CNN’s Headline News and eating a standard room-service Asian chicken salad with its empty crunch of noodle and canned water chestnut. If she lost Dash, then she would die too, and she knew this but didn’t want to discuss it with Jack, for saying it was so melodramatic, so attention-getting. Instead, she came back to her hotel room each night, slid her card into its horizontal slot in the door, waited for the green light, and was gratefully alone.

  Now it was over, Dashiell would be all right, and Roz was back in the house in Saratoga with its collection of beautiful, deep closets. Jack stood beside her, hands in his pockets, watching as she inspected each one.

  “I can’t believe you took it upon yourself to do this,” she said. “It’s just about the worst chore there is. So how can I thank you?” she asked him.

  “Ah, why even try?” he said.

  She knew that some of her friends at the college saw Jack as a slightly amusing figure, a house-husband whose steady, low-key presence served to counterbalance Roz’s own dynamism and emotionality. Roz was home with him now in this house of clean closets and temporary peace. It wouldn’t have to b
e a place of grieving and suffering, for Dashiell’s Hodgkin’s disease had been forced into remission by his own cells. He’d saved himself.

  On her three-and-a-half-hour drive home today on I-90 and I-95, those flat, dead strips with their rumbling eighteen-wheelers, Roz was manic and excited with relief. She’d walked in, and there had been Jack, and all those closets, with their promise of a new start, a new chance for something good to happen. He’d even put fresh shelving paper down. Jesus, fresh shelving paper. What kind of man did such a thing? Her friend Constance Coffey was right; she was very, very lucky.

  The first time Roz Mellow had ever heard the word “uxorious,” she’d had to look it up in the dictionary. This was way back in 1961, when she was married to Paul, and someone they knew had accused him of being “uxorious,” which had only made Paul laugh. “I couldn’t agree more,” Paul had said. Later that night, Roz had discreetly looked up the word in the dictionary.

  “Excessively fond of one’s wife,” read the definition, and at first Roz was puzzled by this, for how could a husband be too loving? She was twenty-five then, and mostly she still liked the special place she occupied in Paul’s life. When he made love to her she sometimes felt that he wanted to lap her up, to get every last bit he could out of her. This could be exhausting, but often it made her feel valuable, even relieved.

  By the time Roz and Paul posed for the drawings that would accompany the text of Pleasuring, they had been together for almost fifteen years, and she had long grown accustomed to his unwavering attention. Though she found herself irritated by it at times, she had simply absorbed the fact of it and rarely thought about it. But the first day they were to pose for the drawings for the book, she became aware that Paul’s absorption with her would be highlighted in front of the artist. Suddenly she became embarrassed; not just for herself, but also for Paul. During the nine months that she and Paul were his subjects, though, John Sunstein simply sat behind his easel, working and not commenting on the dynamics he witnessed between husband and wife. Roz found herself able to relax. She wanted Sunstein to admire her too, in a way, though he only offered the mildest, most generic of compliments, so different from Paul and how he continually hailed her. Roz loved her husband and was still sexually aroused by him, but she had once read a line in a book that she’d never forgotten: “Women have sex so they can talk, and men talk so they can have sex.” Yes, she wanted to talk more than he did, and yes, he wanted to touch her body more than he wanted to talk. Paul was slightly obsessive and anxious, she realized, and he’d always approached sex with her with the kind of interest that men sometimes had in wines or stereo equipment or cars. How did they taste, sound, run? Which was the best one, and what was the best way to try it out?