The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  “It’s Paul.”

  “Who?”

  “Mellow? Paul Mellow?”

  A long, meaningful, oh Christ pause. Then the buzzer rang and the door lock clicked its permission, and Paul trudged up the wide, sagging wooden steps, his poor cuckold’s heart rising. By the time he reached the door of the studio, Jack Sunstein was standing there shirtless, and Roz, in a robe, was right behind him. She’d had no time to change into clothes. She was frantic, desperate, her skin pink and splotched; she could feel it even without looking in a mirror. She hadn’t wanted to say anything to Paul yet, but here he was. If he hadn’t come here, would she have ever told him? Would the affair have simply died off? She never found out, for here was Paul, blustering and falling apart in front of them.

  “What are you doing?” he said to Roz.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “All right,” he said. “So I’ve seen it. Great. That’s fine. Can you please come home now?”

  She nodded to him, wordless, threw a look at Jack, and went to get her clothes. She and Paul drove their separate cars home, and it was a wonder neither of them crashed. Roz felt as though she were hyperventilating during much of the ride, and had to talk to herself to stay calm. Once inside the house, they fended off the children and disappeared upstairs into the bedroom. His questions to her were relentless, battering, justified. “How long?” he thundered. “The whole time? The whole time we were posing for him? You were screwing him then?”

  “No, no, of course not,” she said. “It’s new. It’s very, very new.” It’s so new, she could have said, that I don’t know what I’m doing, and I am simply improvising even as we speak.

  How often, he persisted, and when, how, why? Why? She was unable to answer, so he tried to. “You need to do this, you need to get it out of your system, and you want me not to make a big deal out of it, is it something like that? A midlife crisis?”

  Paul was desperate and grasping. They sat on the brass bed; from somewhere up above them came a thump of bass and a shriek of music, a slamming door. The children were roaming, restless, ignorant of the drama taking place below them on the parents’ floor, or maybe not so ignorant. Roz kept sighing throughout the conversation and looking down at her hands. “I’m in love,” she finally told her husband, testing out the new, shocking words and feeling a small, proud, shameful thrill upon hearing them and realizing they were true.

  Paul was so stricken by this that he began to clutch at his heart, his hand buried under his shirt, deep in the curls of his chest hair, Napoleonic, struggling for dignity and composure. “Oh no,” he said in a soft voice. “Oh no.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Can’t you just keep fucking him until you get tired of it?” he wailed. “It wouldn’t be the end of the world. I’d live with it; we’d go through it, and that would be that. Everybody would come out okay in the end.”

  She was shocked to see him so desperate. “I didn’t mean to do this,” she said, and at this point, predictably, she began to cry. “I didn’t mean it,” she said, her face collapsing. “I didn’t mean it, Paul. I didn’t ask for it. It just happened, the way these things happen. There was no . . . premeditation on my part. There was no anything, if you want to know the truth.”

  “So then stop it,” he said. “Just have your little thing, your affair with him, your fling, whatever it is, and then just stop it. Just come back home to me.”

  But she shook her head. “I can’t. It’s already started. It won’t stop. I love him now.”

  “And what, that means you don’t love me?”

  She closed her eyes. “Of course I love you,” she said carefully. “That doesn’t just end. But it’s different.”

  “How long has it been different?”

  She thought of Paul on top of her, then below her, guiding her hands, arranging their two bodies, regarding her with a gaze that was relentless, and that he’d always thought she liked because she’d never told him she hadn’t liked it. She thought of all the configurations their joined bodies had made, like two people using semaphore signals. They had let their bodies attach and detach, skin clinging to skin with suction-sounds, ingenious moisture and friction and texture, and for her to pull away now, after he’d done so much with her, after she’d let him touch and explore, and had gamely done it to him as well, after he’d looked and looked at her for so long a time, was an aberration, was a crime.

  “I’m going out,” Paul said. His face was hard now. His face and beard and mustache were wet with tears, but he was no longer crying. “And I’m taking the kids with me.” He found his keys and started out of the room.

  “What are you going to do?” she said, hurrying after him. “Are you saying something to them? Paul, don’t say anything to them. I’m not ready for this!”

  “Yes, well, I wasn’t ready, either!” he called back to her, but he didn’t stop. She was still shouting entreaties as he stood at the foot of the stairs that led up to the children’s floor. He himself was now shouting to them: “Kids! Come down here! We’re getting Carvel!” One by one they straggled down.

  “Paul, don’t go out,” Roz begged. He looked at her now with an expression that she’d never seen, for it strove to be the opposite of the way he’d always looked at her. Hatred mixed with loss of interest. He was saying something to the children as he herded them down the stairs and out the door. Only Michael paused in the front hallway and looked up at his mother, but Paul ushered him outside into the car.

  They were gone for more than an hour, and at first Roz sat on those front hall stairs with her head in her hands, and she assumed that she’d still be sitting there when they returned. But then she remembered that she could call Jack now. Her heart unexpectedly lifted. Roz Mellow left her perch on the stairs and went to call her lover.

  The Mellow marriage lasted for one more week, choking and dying. Roz spoke to Jack each night on the telephone, and once Holly heard her and then Paul walked into the room too—and Roz found herself at the terrible center of her family’s unhappiness. Something would have to be done, and done quickly. Roz and Paul sat all four children down the following Wednesday night. Michael attempted indifference; Holly was clearly stoned, her eyes boiled and red. She had been spending a lot of time at the railroad station, and sometimes at night in recent months Roz and Paul would drive by just to have a look, for this was the closest they could come to checking up on this wayward child, the way they used to do when she was young and lying in bed at night. Back then, they would come home from one of their days in the city and walk upstairs, going from room to room, checking on the children, but really, more importantly, supping freely of the pleasure of ownership, treasureship.

  The two youngest ones were restless as they sat on the brown couch. Dashiell bounced up and down, as though the velvet were hot underneath his body. “Look, you know things haven’t been very happy between Dad and me,” Roz began. Paul didn’t say a word. He didn’t have anything to add; this was Roz’s show, and he let her talk. He was numb and defeated, his face slack. The older children just sat sullenly, and Dashiell seemed to be humming to himself. Was he even listening? Only Claudia seemed affected by what Roz said.

  “What?” Claudia said in response. “You’re getting a divorce? Oh no, you can’t. You can’t. Ariel Spitzer’s parents are divorced, and she says it’s terrible!” Claudia wasn’t jaded, Roz realized. Unlike the others, Claudia was still capable of shock and outright sorrow.

  The Mellows separated two days later, a fact that was published in the newspaper and snidely referred to in print for months, and it was furiously discussed among all the people who knew them. Paul moved out of the house, renting a tiny place on the water in nearby Marburne, close enough to allow him to see the children every weekend. Slowly, over the following year, Roz allowed Jack Sunstein to come and visit her in Wontauket once a week. She didn’t want him to live with her, to pretend to be a father. He wasn’t their father; they alr
eady had a good one. She would keep Jack separate, just for herself. She would not be sexual with him in front of the children. She would just be a mother to them.

  But the children knew about their mother’s lover, and it drove them deeper into their own lives. They knew, and she knew of their knowledge, and no one ever said a thing, except for Paul, who in his despair and rage at suddenly losing his wife sometimes said inappropriate things to the younger children about their mother.

  Roz later heard that over a sloppy-joe dinner at Paul’s rented house (the sloppy joe being his signature dish, his only dish) he had called her “a common whore,” and then immediately burst into tears and said to Dashiell and Claudia, “I take that back. It isn’t true. I don’t know why I said it. Your mother is a wonderful woman.” Over time he grew used to the separation, even though it had effectively ended their career as a couple. It ended the run they’d been on, the nearly two years of being known as “those Mellows.” It was over, it was over, and Roz had caused it. Paul still couldn’t understand why, and as the years went by, though he remarried twice, he could never figure out what that quiet, inarticulate artist possessed that he lacked, and he never could accept it. Sometimes Paul Mellow just shook his head, thinking about it.

  In 1986, when Claudia graduated from high school and enrolled at Hampshire College, an experimental school in Massachusetts with its share of students like Claudia, who seemed eccentric or internal or even just a little lost, Roz put the house up for sale, and she closed the deal with the Chinese couple named Feng soon after. It was a sad time of continual activity, as all of the children except Holly came home to help their mother dismantle the past, each of them taking some of it into their own dormitory room or studio apartment. They all pored through the books from the den because Paul wanted none of them. To Roz’s mild surprise, the children seemed to feel sentimental about items that she’d never thought they would. Michael, for instance, wanted Diet for a Small Planet, even though he was a real carnivore, and Dashiell asked for that oversize book about golden retrievers.

  Roz put most of her belongings into storage when she finally went to live with Jack in the city. Two years later, when she was offered the tenure-track job at Skidmore, she took those things out of storage and was reunited with the life that had been packed away in boxes for so long. Now that earlier life partly filled the house in Saratoga Springs, but it had been meshed with her life with Jack. The closets here were crowded with life upon life: his old boots, her shoes, a daughter’s rain poncho, a son’s summer-camp flashlight, another son’s ukulele, a former husband’s umbrella, something whose provenance no one remembered anymore, and then something else, and something else too, and so many things that might have belonged as plausibly to one life as the other. Because the truth was that there were just so many ways you could spend your life; though the characters changed, and the rooms and the objects, if you had been married once you knew what it would be like to be married again. It involved being next to, being near, just the way that being in any family meant being among. You waded through slowly, and along the way things drifted past, and some of them you recognized, and a memory was sprung.

  Roz knelt before the downstairs hall closet now. Here was a red plastic lunchbox from the Cenozoic era. Immediately she remembered that it had once belonged to Dashiell. “The Six Million Dollar Man,” it said on the front, and there was a crude picture of the hard face of its star, Lee Majors, scowling. How proud Dashiell had once been of this lunchbox, she thought, and she saw him carrying it to and from Bolander, his fingers curled around the handle. It was almost impossible to connect that boy with the man in the hospital bed—almost, but not quite, for the trajectory that any child made was free of angles and turns. It was one long curved line that led from there to here. You knew them then as best you could, and you still knew them now. They didn’t even have to tell you much about their lives, they could keep it a secret because it wasn’t your business anymore, but still, somehow, you knew.

  She had left Dashiell with Tom in his apartment in Providence, left him there to carry on, to have visiting nurses stop by periodically, to let the transplant continue to do its work inside him, his immune system to continue growing and returning, like a baby dinosaur stumbling out of its shell. He would be okay, his doctors had told her, and therefore, so would she. All right, there would be no reissue of the book. Michael had made no headway with Paul; none of them had. The book was dead; she’d have to accept it once and for all.

  Fuck the book, Holly used to say. Yes, that was about right: Fuck the book.

  Roz closed her eyes for a moment, and then she let them fly open, wanting to be surprised all over again at the way Jack had sifted through their things and ordered them while she was gone. She also wanted to look more closely at all the things they had gathered over time, or that had incidentally gathered around them. It seemed that Roz Mellow was looking at time itself now, which had somehow expanded so greatly that it had managed to fill every closet and room and hallway of this house.

  Chapter Twelve

  FATHER AND SON were going out on the town together. They were going because Dashiell had pulled through his transplant and would be all right, and because it was Michael’s last night in Florida, and because they needed to drink jumbo Blue Floridians and eat fried things from plastic baskets, and grow tearful and sappy with relief, and talk, and talk, punctuating their conversation with occasional expressions of their manhood in ways that fathers and sons occasionally do, like a mutual inspection of automobiles.

  Michael would leave in the morning, after what had turned out to be a fifty-four-day stay in Naples. He’d taken every vacation day and every personal day he’d ever had coming to him; he’d also called DDN and asked for a leave, and his superiors had granted it because they couldn’t afford to lose such a gifted person in the long run, and they wanted him to do what made him happy. Still, product manager Rufus Webb had emailed Michael with frantic regularity over all these fifty-four days, and for a long time Michael had written back to him immediately. “THE TWINS HAVE LANDED,” Rufus had written on the day that the owners had arrived; he always typed in upper case, as though to convey the sense of emergency he felt. “I AM DEAD.” To which Michael had responded, lower case, gently, “You are not dead. Relax.”

  Relax. This was a new idea. After the initial, ferocious withdrawal from the Endeva—the charging anxiety, the dizziness whenever Michael stood, the sweating that woke him at night in the guest room, and the strange zhzhzhzh sound he heard whenever he turned his head either to the right or the left—he started to detoxify, to come down. One morning, about two weeks into his stay, he realized that the drug was gone from his body. He would be going it alone now. No antidepressant, no help with his misery. No net. Just himself, alone, here in Florida. Being alone, unglazed, unprotected, was like lying naked in wet leaves. Not unpleasant, just very, very strange. Feel the leaves, he ordered himself. Roll around in them.

  He telephoned Thea one night close to midnight because she liked to stay up late and he wanted to tell her about the wet leaves analogy, and also that he loved her. The telephone rang and rang, until finally the machine picked up. There was his own awful voice, sounding nasal and robotic, and Michael just hung up quickly without leaving a message. He thought about calling back the next night, just to see if she was there, but he decided that he really didn’t want to. He remembered his father, bellowing like a moose in the house in Wontauket after Roz said she was leaving him. There was nothing worse than a man in pain. It was worse than a woman in pain, if only because it was so much louder. Relax, he told Rufus Webb, and perhaps for the first time in his forty-one years, it was a concept that Michael could comprehend. He wasn’t cured of depression, not at all; his brain chemistry left him vulnerable to it, but for now he liked the idea of being on nothing.

  So the twins had landed, and so what? After a while, Michael stopped replying to all the hysterical urgent chirps and squeaks of his PDA. There was one day wh
en he actually ignored all his messages from Rufus, and then another day, and another. He wondered how he could bear to go back to work there, for though he liked the company and the fact that his work, astoundingly, seemed to do some good somewhere, whether it was Kenya or Chechnya or Appalachia, the idea of being in those muted offices among that same group of intelligent but anxious people threatened to bring back his despair with the force of the waterfall that poured its noisy, pointless heart out in the Strode Building lobby.

  The trip to Florida was a failure, at least technically, though it didn’t feel that way. He’d tried many times, but he hadn’t been able to get his father to agree to let the publisher reissue Pleasuring. But he and Paul had been through so much here, what with Dashiell getting sick and having the transplant, and everyone worried to death about him. So now, at the end of the stay, Michael and his father would unwind and have something to celebrate.

  Tomorrow morning, he’d be back on a plane bound for New York and Dimension D-Net and Thea Herlihy, whatever that might mean. His father would return to the condominium, where right now his wife Elise/Elisa was sitting in bed watching the nightly news and applying cracked-heel cream to her feet, the scent of peppermint infusing the bedroom like potpourri. Elise/Elisa would put fresh Wamsutta sheets on the bed in the guest room where Michael had slept for fifty-four nights, and there would not be another actual guest there for months, or even years. His father and stepmother would take another class in the Gathering Room; maybe they’d learn Italian, like many people did, stirred by the lilting syllables, the olive oil poured from a ceramic decanter, and the Annunciation paintings with their delicate crackage. A sense of calm, almost a loneliness, would steal over Paul, and there wasn’t a thing that Michael could do about it, because he knew it would steal over him as well tomorrow morning as he headed home.

  Michael felt a sense of dread at the thought of returning to his apartment, putting the key in the lock, entering the clean, high-polished place. “I don’t know what I’m going home to,” he told his father in the dark bar after one Blue Floridian, which was served in a glass the size of a dog’s water bowl. Suddenly, the night before he was going home, he wanted to talk about this.