The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Oh my God,” Lindsey said, laughing. “I can’t believe this.”

  They lay in the dark alley between the beds, and it took some maneuvering to get up again, to stand and get their balance and then to push the beds back together again. Lindsey kept laughing and laughing, and Michael did too. But when she tried to pull him down again and start things all over, he shook his head lightly no.

  “You know, I think I’m too high for this,” he explained, for he felt it was essential that he not hurt her feelings. All he could think about, though, was the orgasm that could have been—the one that was there, waiting for its moment—and the ones that would happen in the future, with Thea maybe, or perhaps with someone else, with another woman, with many of them. He saw himself at his laptop, watching Internet porn and getting off on it and not feeling that he’d committed some act of soul murder. He saw himself corresponding electronically on a personals page with a woman he hadn’t met, and even though he ought not to like this image—even though it was against everything that his parents’ book had once been about, against love and comfort and intimacy, and all that was long lost—he wanted it for himself, for the possibilities were endless.

  “No problem,” Lindsey said, containing whatever degree of hurt she actually felt, and she and Michael self-consciously made their way out of the bedroom and back into the living room just in time for the front door of the condo to open and the third friend to enter, the one who’d been left behind to look through the CD jukebox.

  This friend took a few steps into the living room, staggered slightly, leaned against a wall for support, and then said, “I can’t believe you guys just ditched me like that.”

  “I feel bad about it,” said Lindsey.

  “Well, you should,” said her friend, and then without warning she vomited in a neat blue arc onto the carpet. “Oh Jesus, I’m so sorry,” she said immediately, and she began to weep. “I never do anything right.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Lindsey said, and the two women came together for an embrace. Michael was desperate to leave, and he was grateful when soon enough the sliding glass doors to the garden slid open and Paul walked back inside, Sabina following a few feet behind him. Something had happened, he could see from his father’s slightly shaken expression, and Michael knew that in all likelihood, his father would tell him. But now it was time to go.

  They thanked the women for their hospitality, their pot, the cake, the kindness they’d shown them. They wished them a pleasant remainder of winter break and best of luck in all their studies. This had been such a mistake, such a misfire, a weird evening spent in the company of two people they would never see again, which in itself was enough to give Michael a case of existential melancholia if he let it, but he wasn’t about to let it.

  “Dad,” he said as he trundled his father into the front seat of the car beside him, “what happened to you?”

  The ride home was long, and with the window down and his head leaning out, Paul Mellow felt like a dog being taken somewhere by his master, unaware of their destination, and unconcerned. There had been a great sense of relief merely in handing over the keys to his son and stretching out in the passenger seat, a place he had almost never sat before. This was Elise’s seat. It had been pushed so far forward that it had to be moved back for him. Now it was his seat, and he was letting his son drive him along the highway, and what had happened this evening was something that he would have to talk about, but did not want to, at least not with Michael.

  “I need to sleep it off,” he told his son, and then he closed his eyes with his head tilted out the open window and the wind roving through his hair, the conversation with that girl Sabina still inside him like a song.

  He and Sabina had talked about his life down here in Florida, and about the adult ed courses he was taking at the condo, which then led her to tell him about being a Sociology major in college up north, and how she wasn’t sure what she could possibly do with that degree, but she enjoyed the classes so much that she didn’t want to worry about the rest of her life just yet.

  “That’s a good philosophy,” he said, with a certain natural avuncularity that he was unable to suppress. And then, innocently and politely, he asked her where she went to college.

  “Skidmore,” she said, her voice cheerful and maybe proud, and he felt himself seize up inside.

  Did every road in the world lead to Roz? Was that really possible? Why did this happen, why must he be chased by her for the remainder of his life on earth? But no, of course, even as he asked this perfectly sweet girl Sabina if she had studied with Professor Mellow in the Psych department, he knew what the answer would be, and he knew that he had brought this on himself. Roz was not chasing him at all; he was doing the chasing, and that had always been the case.

  But he wasn’t prepared for the delight in Sabina’s reply to his question, when she turned to him with bright eyes and said, “Oh, I can’t believe it. She’s my adviser.” And she explained that even though Professor Mellow wasn’t in the Sociology department “per se,” Sabina had taken three of her psychology classes and had made a special request to be her advisee. “She’s such a wonderful teacher,” Sabina went on. “Really cares about the students. And I see her all the time in town with her husband, that younger guy who’s kind of bald. Do you know him? They’re always holding hands. They look so happy together. I’ve never seen my parents like that. How do you know Professor Mellow again?”

  This information was revealed in a long unbroken sheet, and Paul reared back and immediately composed himself, saying inside: I will betray no emotion. But all he could think about was that Roz and Jack looked happy together in town, and he felt a completely senseless swell of rage. He turned away from the young woman slightly and put his hands around the sides of a clay pot that was filled with some variety of bright tropical flowering plant.

  “She’s an old friend,” was all he offered.

  Oh, she was his old friend, she was. Roz Mellow, his beloved, the woman with whom he had done everything. He thought about the day they had come up with “Electric Forgiveness.” And later on, re-creating it in the studio, lying on that enormous, blindingly white bed whose sheets were changed daily and that gave a continual impression of sun-burst, gleeful sex, Paul and Roz had carefully arranged themselves the way they had done at home in their own brass bed.

  “It’s like Twister,” she said to him as they tried to get into position.

  “What?”

  “The game Twister. That our kids play.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” he’d said. Left hand red. Right foot green. They interlocked carefully and studiously. He had an erection then; he’d never failed to have one throughout the entire creation of the book. There it was, full, curving, and he slowly and nervously entered his wife according to the plan that they had written themselves.

  “Wait, slow down,” she’d said, laughing a little. “I might fall over.”

  “I won’t let you,” he’d said. “I’d never let you.”

  In his corner, behind the oversize easel, the artist sat with pen and ink at the ready. Paul moved against Roz, amazed and relieved that they hadn’t toppled over after all. At the time, poor old Electric Forgiveness had seemed inspired, with its implied, hot shades of psychedelia, its hint at something from an altered consciousness, one that could be brought on not through a tab of blotter acid on the tongue but through the stroking of skin, the arrangement of forms, the wreathing and suspension of your aging selves, the triumph over death that this certainly was, for without the willingness to engage in difficult, precarious ways, without the bargain struck between you and another person, there was really nothing much left in life to be all that excited about. After all, you’d read the great books already in college, at a time when the mind was open, baby-bird-beak-wide, and you’d listened again and again to the depths of Mahler, and now the rest of life awaited. You still had a body, and it could still do things, perhaps not with the same relentless, no-return vi
gor it once possessed, but here it was for the long run and still it had to run and run, and if you left it to idle, it would be your loss, and it could never be recovered, never.

  To think he might be in bed with Roz again was an idea that Paul hadn’t had in ages, but it wouldn’t happen; she had unwrapped her legs from around him, unwrapped her arms, moved out of the way. He couldn’t remember the very last time they had made love, but he was sure that he hadn’t known it would be the last time. If only he could go back to that salty neck-skin, the heft of breasts—and yes, Roz, they were sagging, Paul thought; I lied a little when I said they weren’t—and the scribble of reddish pubic hair that he had parted with his fingers so many times, which he had loved because it was hers, it belonged to her, was part of the ridiculous and fragile ornament of human beauty.

  “Are you okay?” Sabina the college student asked him.

  “What? Oh yes, yes, I’m fine.”

  He returned from that faraway bed to this strange and unfamiliar garden with this woman he did not know, and when he looked at her now, taking in a few bare details—the slight constellation of acne on her forehead, her spiky moussified hair, the tiny tattoo of a bluebird on her wrist—he instinctively backed away and said, “You know, I have to go.” She was so young, and he had no business here, and he could taste the individual components of cake in his mouth—the granulated sugar, the butter, the egg, the white flour, even the cream of tartar—each one articulated by the marijuana he’d smoked.

  Then he was in the car again with Michael, his head leaning out into the wind, and his thoughts were of lost Roz, lost only to him and to no one else. She was his grown children’s mother forever, and she was Jack’s wife, but she was nothing to Paul. There was no overlap anymore. As the car went fast over dark roads, Paul remembered the night he’d first found out that his wife was in love with the artist whom they knew then as John. Paul had been wild, practically foaming at the mouth, and he’d gathered the kids up and said he wanted to take them out for Carvel. No one was hungry, no one wanted to go, but still he herded them into the car and drove sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour along the turnpike.

  “Oh we’re the Mellows,” he roared. “Your mother’s got a fellow . . .” No one said anything, but he was aware of Michael sitting in the passenger seat and studying him. “We’re not the Rinzlers,” Paul went on, “’cause we’d be . . . Pinzlers!” Then he couldn’t sing anymore, because he was crying. Briefly, he’d imagined cracking that green Volvo station wagon up, driving it into a wall—no, better yet, into the slanted glass façade of Carvel itself, killing himself and all four children, as if to say to his wife: Look at us. Just look at us.

  But of course he could never harm his children, his babies. He was immediately ashamed that the thought had even been allowed to flit through the curves and ridges of his brain. Michael, self-important at age fifteen, had sat beside him in the front seat, and Paul was an endless loop of despair. “We’re just going for a drive, kids,” he’d said. “We’re just going to drive and drive until I run out of gas.”

  “You’re not serious, Dad,” Michael said.

  “No, I’m not serious. I’m just joking. I’m a real joker. Tell your mother what a joker I am. How hilarious. Maybe then she’ll come to her senses.”

  “Are we getting the ice cream or not?” Claudia called out from somewhere in back.

  “Of course, honey, of course.” He pulled the car into the Carvel parking lot, handing the children a bloom of bills and sending them out. Holly shot him a furious look, but off she went. Only Michael stayed behind. “Aren’t you getting something?” he asked his son.

  Michael ignored the question and just said, “What are you doing, Dad?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing, I guess. Nothing that’s going to work.” He sighed and nodded in the direction of Carvel, where three of his children stood clustered under the light, giving their orders to a woman whose head poked through the sliding window. “Go get yourself something. Get me something too.”

  The drive back to the house was quiet, thoughtful, much slower, as all of them ate their cones. Paul fell asleep that night on the couch with the headphones on, Gustav Mahler soothing him to sleep.

  He’d been brooding over Roz for more than twenty-five years now, brooding and muttering: The way she’d once loved him. The way she no longer did. The fact that she’d fallen out of love with him. The fact that she’d fallen in love with someone else. The fact that she used to crack her knuckles in bed. The fact that she had put on weight over time. The fact that she existed. The fact that she existed without him. Paul imagined her traversing a leafy upstate New York campus with that husband of hers, the two of them with their arms linked, talking about dinner, or, worse yet, about sex, maybe even reminiscing about the first time they had gone to bed together. Paul closed his eyes and tried to put on an overlay, a superior image of Roz and himself above the one of Roz and Jack, but the image wouldn’t take; it flew off, would not be smoothed down where it didn’t belong.

  How, he wondered suddenly, had Elise put up with him these last seven years? How had she tolerated being married to a man who was so internally involved with his ex-wife that he spent a great deal of his day thinking of ways to profess his indifference to her? Keeping Pleasuring out of print forever was the least he could do, for she needed the money and she needed the attention again. Roz had always loved attention, even back at the very beginning, when she was his misbegotten psychoanalytic patient. She would lie on the couch in his office and arrange her skirt around her in a girlish manner that she had to have known would be arousing to him. And she would talk about her childhood and tell her dreamy sexual stories, and it was as though there were a spotlight on her and she craved it, and she never wanted to give it up. Maybe she was disappointed to leave analysis and be his lover. Maybe he should have held back. Of course he should have held back, but he’d had no control over that back then; he was weak. Sex made your cranium soft and porous, open to the anticipation of experience. In the beginning with Elise, he’d felt it was possible to be attentive to her and to stop thinking about Roz. Sex was good, and when Elise turned to him in bed sometimes, her breasts were warm through the thin skin of her nightgown. Afterward, she would often cling to him and say, “Paul, that was just great.”

  Her voice indicated that she meant it. So did her eyes. She was a compassionate person, but needful, too. Both sides had been in balance, at least until he came into her life. He had never hidden his ongoing preoccupation with Roz, and as time passed, Elise simply gave in to it, and the degree of her need for him was tempered by a newer desire for sleep. He saw that he had done this to her; that she wasn’t a narcoleptic, that she wasn’t in the thrall of her red-rice pillow, that she wasn’t a zombie. God, he was such a narcissist, such a baby, and still she had stayed married to him. It was almost miraculous.

  Three days a week, Elise drove to the nearby town of Corliss and worked as a clinical social worker, attending to families that had been torn up and demoralized by drugs and poverty and mental illness. She sat in their apartments with her casebook open and she spoke to them in English or in Spanish. She worked for these people as hard as anyone could, and sometimes she changed their lives.

  Occasionally in the evening Elise would tell Paul about a case she had worked on that day. They were illegal immigrants from Cuba, perhaps; the father had lost his job at the Hormel processing plant, the younger child had cystic fibrosis, and the older child, a teenager, was breaking into homes and stealing stereo equipment. How could this immigrant family survive in this country where none but the best, the top, the richest, the most blessed, could even manage to scrape by? Elise had been known to secretly slip money to her families; a little cash here and there for diapers or milk or even just for movie tickets.

  Paul was well aware of her goodness; it had attracted him to her when they’d first met seven and a half years earlier at a cocktail party in New York. “Do you know Elise Brandau?” their mutu
al friend had asked, a woman from the old days who had taught sex education to kids in a variety of terrible public schools, and who had been the subject of a PBS documentary.

  “No, I don’t,” Paul had said, and Elise Brandau had smiled at him with genuine affection. She was extremely pretty in the slightly self-deflecting way that women in the helping professions sometimes were. She wore a calf-length cowgirl skirt, a soft scarf, and a slight, almost accidental touch of makeup. Her rhinoplasty registered with him, and he imagined the previous, less perfect version of her; he saw a bookish though not brilliant younger person with a slightly large nose that she sometimes pressed one finger against when she was thinking, as though trying to push the bump on the bridge back down. The newer, older self, without the bump, was probably less interesting-looking, but also probably felt more relaxed and perceived herself as more attractive to men. And men were often attracted to sameness, he well knew. Paul wanted, in that one moment, to let her see that he wasn’t one of those men; he would have loved her even without the nose job. But all he could do was shake her hand and make eye contact and imagine what she looked like under all those flowing clothes.

  He found out merely three nights later, when he took Elise Brandau out for a steak dinner and then to bed. After the meat and the wine and the perfectly exciting bout of sex, she told him about being widowed young, and he told her about his two marriages, working backward in time so that he could say just a little about wife number two, Elisa. Then he slowed down slightly to lavish a lot of anecdotal space on Roz, as he always did.

  “We were very much in love,” he said. Maybe not a great opening gambit when at that very moment you’re in bed with someone else, although at least, he thought, it would show that you are a man who is capable of being in love.

  “So why did your first marriage end?” Elise Brandau asked, her voice soft but curious, the way it must sound when she asked a client: Why do you want to regain custody of your children? Or Cuántas veces a la semana fuma “crack cocaine”?