The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  His father looked at him for a long time and then said, “Well, what are you afraid of?”

  “That there’s nothing there anymore. Work. My love life.”

  “Was it there before you left?”

  “I’m not sure. And if it wasn’t, then why wasn’t it? DDN does authentically useful things, but I can’t stay there. It lulls me.”

  “Florida,” Paul sighed quietly, nodding.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” said his father. “Go on.”

  “Okay. I mean, as far as Thea goes, here’s the story. I’ll tell you the truth, and you must swear that you’ll never, ever tell anyone, Dad, not even Elis—even your wife.” He took a mouthful of his drink. “I couldn’t come. I couldn’t do it.” He shook his head. “It was the fucking antidepressant I was on,” he said, “and I know I never told you about that either. When I got here I was starting to get off it. That’s why I seemed so wierd, remember? I wasn’t doing well. And it was as if a message was being sent to me, telling me not to come. Because it wouldn’t lead to anything, finally. It wouldn’t become happiness.”

  Paul Mellow shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It sounds like no fun at all.”

  “That’s right,” said Michael. “No fun.”

  “But the thing is,” Paul went on, “not having problems is no guarantee of anything. Even though I never had any overwhelming sexual problem that I can think of, it didn’t really matter in the end. Because in the end, your mother left me for Jack Sunstein.”

  Time for another drink, and fast. Paul formed his lips into a kiss-shape as he drank off the sea foam on the surface of the next Blue Floridian. “So that’s really why you can’t have the book reprinted?” asked Michael. “It all comes down to that?”

  “Pretty much. What can I tell you? I’m not a very complex person. You kids are the complex ones.”

  Michael took another slurping drink from the dog bowl and thought of his father and mother when they were married. He remembered the way they had sat on the couch in the den together, sprawled out like children. Michael often thought of those beginning days, when his father had a proprietary quality regarding his mother, and it seemed so admirable, so affectionate, something to aspire to yourself. But what you really ought to aspire to, he thought now, was reciprocity. That was what he’d thought he’d had with Thea, though mutual absence of feeling apparently didn’t count.

  He thought of his siblings: Maybe Dashiell had found his version of balance over the years; certainly he’d seemed to be looking for it enough. And Claudia—she had been calling throughout Dashiell’s hospital stay, and over the course of the very last call she’d happened to mention shyly that she’d “sort of gotten together” with that person she’d been emailing for a while. “You know, the one from the house,” she added. “The one whose parents live there now.”

  “I know who you mean. Good for you,” Michael had said magnanimously. It had always been so hard for his little sister to meet people, to get along on her own, and he was impressed that she’d actually followed her email flirtation into the actual world.

  Were they complex, any of them? “Only Holly’s complex,” Michael said to his father.

  “You mean because she took off?” Paul asked.

  “No. I always thought so.”

  His father nodded in the melancholy manner of a man calculating his own personal failings. The image of Holly danced briefly between them, tiny as Tinkerbell, then leapt away.

  Maybe, Michael thought, Holly was the only one he would have to worry about. It didn’t seem likely that you could find contentment in your life when you were married to a man like that doctor-husband of hers. The one time Michael had met him, Marcus Leeming had seemed weird and elliptical. Michael couldn’t imagine that much love existed between those two, and it was excruciating to try to imagine them sharing a dinner table, or, even worse, a bed.

  One night, when Michael was twenty-two years old and had just moved to New York City after college, his telephone had rung in the dark railroad apartment he shared with two friends on Riverside Drive, and there came Holly’s voice. “Hey,” she’d said, and he’d been shocked, and even though he’d been reading deeply on the futon in his tiny, hammered-up-Sheetrock-wall bedroom, he’d thrown aside his book and snapped to attention.

  Half an hour later, Holly was shaking when she came upstairs, and Michael’s roommates regarded her with suspicion and interest. She was crying, talking about her failed love life, her general despair. Clearly she was high—the stink of pot was all over her, “a ropy smell,” they’d been taught during drug films in junior high, as though everyone knew what burning rope would smell like. “Shhh,” he’d said to his sister, for lack of much else to tell her, and he lent her a Princeton Ultimate Frisbee T-shirt to wear as a nightgown and gave her the mattress to sleep on. They faced each other in the darkness of his room, on different levels. There were no curtains on his window yet, but he’d tacked up a dark blue sheet that had once graced his bed in Wontauket, and the bedroom felt as though it were an aquarium.

  “I hate myself,” Holly said.

  “Shh,” Michael said. “You’re okay, Holly. You don’t think you are, but you really are.”

  “I haven’t done anything with my life, Michael.”

  “I wasn’t aware that it was over already.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  And all he could say again was “Shhh.” She lay inches from him in his own Tide-with-booster-bleach-smelling shirt. Her hair was long, a little stringy, but still so golden, and her eyelashes had never lost their near-albino whiteness. Holly Mellow was then such a beautiful woman, age twenty-four, on her way to being ruined, and he couldn’t stop her because he couldn’t claim her. He had no rights to her, she would never be his.

  Michael, in his drawstring pants, shirtless, rolled over and faced the wall. “Good night,” he said. “I’ll make you breakfast in the morning.”

  But she was gone before breakfast, and the next time he heard from her, an entire year had passed, and she had moved to Nevada.

  He sipped the big Blue Floridian, now, that pond of alcohol that never seemed to drain. “So, what are you going to do, Michael?” his father suddenly asked, himself soft-headed and unfocused enough to jump into a conversation like this.

  Michael shrugged. “What can I do?” he said. “I can go home and figure it all out. I’ll have some conversations at work. I’ll have a conversation with Thea. She’s all wrapped up in her Dora play. We’ve talked, and she’s written me, but I have no idea what she wants from me anymore.”

  “You know, I feel that way with Elise,” said his father.

  Once again, Michael missed the end of the last syllable in the sentence, wasn’t sure whether his father had said Elise or Elisa; would he ever know his stepmother’s name? It was far too late in the game to ask. “She sleeps a lot,” Michael said carefully. “Is that the problem?”

  Paul shook his head; it wasn’t a yes or a no, and he closed his eyes, fighting tears. Oh no, my father is going to cry, Michael thought, and a kind of panic overcame him, for here would be an awkward moment in which he would have to reach out and pat the upper arm of his father, maybe pat his back too; he would do it with the gracelessness of a young father burping a new baby, wondering, Is this too hard? Too soft? Am I ineffectual? Will it be over soon?

  But Paul Mellow didn’t cry; like most men, he held himself together, then he reached into the basket of fried mushroom caps, each one transformed into an object twice its original size once the breading had been applied, and he ate for sustenance. Michael would have liked to hear more, but at that moment three women approached the bar table with sharklike single-mindedness. Eet eez deeficult to know when zee white shark she weel attack. Michael had been the recipient of such women before, but never in the presence of his father, and not since he had been living with Thea, for he almost never went out to bars anymore.

  The three women were all pretty i
n some historical way, channeling a past that had disappeared but was not forgotten; the 1980s, he thought, with those feathered and spiky hairdos, a bit of henna, and some mousse from a can whipping the whole thing up into a thorny crown, and then some dangly earrings that someone’s friend might have made as a Christmas present. Of the three women, one of them hung back. She was the shyest, the most tentative, and the least pretty, and it was she who in this Darwinian moment did not last, but self-selected and was then sucked back into the room at large, sensing the inevitability of it all. She wound up at the CD jukebox, where she stood with a five-dollar bill, flipping at great length through the stiff metal pages of jukebox choices. This, Michael realized, was the bar equivalent of someone standing by a bookshelf at a noisy party, picking up a book, and starting to read it, actually pretending great interest in order to hide social awkwardness. He felt sorry for this woman, and he thought about going over there and talking to her, but he found that he was really drunk and couldn’t quite get up, and so his burst of sympathy dissipated.

  “We have a bet going,” the blonder-headed of the remaining two said to Michael.

  “Oh yeah?” he said, lifting his head slowly. “And what’s that?”

  “I bet,” said the other one, whose hair was darker and whose entire look was sleeker and less trustworthy, “that you two are father and son. But my friend Sabina here says that’s crazy, that you two are just friends, and that you really aren’t all that far apart in age.”

  “Father and son?” said Paul, joining in. “That’s ridiculous.”

  Michael regarded his father with surprise and new admiration. A look passed between them, like two glasses lifted and clanged together in a toast.

  “I knew it,” said Sabina. “Lindsey, you owe me a drink. That looks good. Is it a Collateral Damage? Because those are awesome.”

  “No. Blue Floridian,” said Michael. The drink was actually sort of wretched, sweet and thin like Gatorade, but the sweetness seemed to try to hide rather than complement the alcohol. It didn’t work, but still he drank it, as did all the people around him, and the cheerful young bartender kept taking a cocktail shaker and a strainer and pouring drink after drink into an endless supply of enormous glasses.

  “So, do you both live around here?” Paul asked.

  “No, we go to college up north. We’re on winter break,” said Lindsey. “But Sabina’s mother has a condo here, right across the highway, and she lets us use it every year. We came down last winter, too, and it was really fun. The weather’s so great, and sometimes I have to wonder why we live where we do, when life is so much easier down here.”

  Paul stood up then, and Michael saw that his father was drunk, even drunker than he was. Paul’s head circled lightly, like that of a boxer in a cartoon. “We’ve got to go,” he said. “It’s late, I think.”

  “Actually, no, it’s pretty early,” said Lindsey. “And to be honest, you don’t look like you should drive. Either of you. You both look pretty plastered. Do you guys want to come across the highway to the condo and hang out?”

  Michael followed his father and the two women out the door of the ferny and mahoganous bar and into the dark balm of the night. They dodged traffic, they held hands with the women and skipped sloppily across the highway, obviously looking absurd, but feeling free, for the first time ever, of their father-and-son-ship. This was a greater release for Paul than it was for him, Michael knew, but it was interesting to see the way his father, though quite drunk, seemed to improve under the gaze of these young and interested women. It would go nowhere, of course; both men were attached to other women, and these particular women were so absurdly and bruisingly young, but there was no harm in the suggestiveness of it all. No harm in sitting in their condo—which, as it turned out, was yellow and green and resembled nothing so much as a patio-furniture store. The condominium was a dead ringer for Paul’s home in Laughing Woods, except this community was called Conch Haven, a name that made no sense, Michael thought, as though conches needed a haven, or that this was a “haven” for conch lovers. Neither image could be easily summoned, and he chalked it up to the general off-kilter quality of many things he’d found here in Florida.

  Sabina put some music on, which Michael recognized as old Steely Dan, and he understood that this was in deference to the two men and their age. Michael was interested but anxious as he watched his father lean back against the couch and appear to be in danger of falling asleep, but when one of the women pulled a tightly rolled joint from a small makeup bag and lit it, Paul Mellow came fully awake, sitting up and leaning toward the direction of the smoke.

  Michael himself almost never went anywhere near dope, though some of Thea’s actor friends smoked sometimes when they came to the apartment to work on a scene. Michael would usually go into the bedroom and shut the door, listening to the muted sounds of people putting on accents and trying on emotions freely and then casting them off again moments later in peals of laughter.

  Back when the Mellows lived together in the house, Michael knew that his parents sometimes got high, and he’d never liked it. They had written about it in their book, a fact that had only increased the scandal level among the disapproving. The drawings that accompanied the section on recreational drug use featured Paul and Roz with, if you looked closely, the vaguest bloodshot eyes, as though Sunstein had applied a faint pink wash to them. Paul’s eyes were quickly turning that way now in real life, Michael saw. His father was drunk and would now be stoned, and Michael, whose drunkenness would abate, would have to drive them home tonight.

  Someone brought out a store-bought chocolate icebox cake, and they all ate, not out of hunger but simply from the stoned desire to graze. We ought to leave soon, Michael thought when the entire thing had been demolished. There wasn’t any danger of Elise/Elisa waking up, but Michael had to go to the airport first thing in the morning, and he was agitated. He knew that this could lead to no good.

  “Paul,” he said, using his father’s name deliberately and archly, here in this place where a father and son were merely buddies and where an actual drink bet rested on the nature of their relationship. “We should go.”

  But his father wouldn’t hear of it. He was listening to Steely Dan with the intensity he usually gave to jazz. At some point, Sabina, whose condo this was, sat down beside Paul and whispered something to him. He laughed and Michael looked away, and he was looking away still when the young woman led his father out the sliding glass doors of the house and into the gated garden. Michael was left sitting with Lindsey, and he shifted on the couch, sitting up straighter. His father had put him in a terrible position. His father, his married father, was off with this girl, this person who could easily have been one of his own children or even grandchildren. You cliché, was what Michael thought, and his jaw felt stiff, so he massaged it with one hand, working his fingertips into the side of his face so deeply that it hurt.

  “So,” Lindsey said, “I guess they’ve gone outside.”

  “I guess so,” Michael said.

  “You don’t look very happy to be here,” she said, and then in that instant her eyes seemed pleading and urgent. “Is it that you were hoping for Sabina?” she asked with what struck him as touching bravery.

  “What? No, of course not. I wasn’t hoping for anything. I’m going back to New York tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s all right,” she said softly. “It’s what I figured. God knows I’m not looking for a relationship. I have a relationship already,” she said, and she rolled her eyes. Michael imagined a sweet but dim stoner boyfriend up in college, keeping her warm for the winter.

  “You want to see the bedroom?” she asked, and Michael nodded as dumbly as that boyfriend would have, and then, without even thinking about whether or not he ought to do this, he followed Lindsey into a room that held two pushed-together beds with floral coverlets. She closed the flimsy door behind him and then turned around, her hands against the door, and smiled broadly.

  “You’re a
cute one,” she said. “Come here.”

  He obediently moved toward her, and as soon as they kissed he had an erection that pushed against his pants. No one had ever said he was cute before. Handsome, yes. Serious. Soulful. Brainy, brilliant, Phi Beta Kappa, “summa,” moody, tense, gloomy, achieving, good-looking. But never, ever cute.

  They climbed onto the twin beds and Lindsey lay on top of him, a lightweight presence like a summer blanket. She nuzzled his neck and kept saying “Mmmm,” running her hands with their curved, manicured nails up and down the length of his chest. He realized that he didn’t really like the way she smelled, that her perfume was something generic, the kind of scent that hit you when you opened a magazine. But even though he didn’t like Lindsey’s smell, he was still excited. It was female; he thought of her breasts and the wet depth between her legs. He realized that if he wasn’t careful, he was going to come right now. He’d shoot out right into his boxers, something he hadn’t done since he was a pubescent boy.

  He could come now; he knew he could. He was convinced of it. There would be no hesitation with this orgasm, but it would simply fly out of him without even thinking. No worries, no nothing.

  “Mmm,” she kept saying, and he remembered his own “Nnng” sound during lovemaking with Thea, and he was aware that he was making absolutely no noise at all right now. He could have an orgasm if he wanted to, yes he could, but he had very little interest in having one. Michael shifted on the bed, wondering what to do, when suddenly the solution was thrust upon him accidentally, for as he moved slightly, the two pushed-together beds separated like seas parting, and as the gap widened, Michael and the college student on top of him fell to the carpet below with a soft and painless thud.