The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Why?” he said, and he felt a sudden, terrible, physical memory of the end of his marriage to Roz, and he covered it with a strange little sniveling laugh, one that he’d perfected over the years when asked this very question. “Only one reason,” he said. “Because she fell in love with someone else.”

  “Oh. Oh. I’m sorry,” Elise said, and then she did something that surprised him: She rolled over on top of him and stirred him into arousal again. He thought for a while that this would help him get over Roz in a way that wife number two Elisa hadn’t been able to do. Elisa had actually made him more absorbed in the drama of Roz because she herself was so inadequate that her flaws set Roz’s attributes into relief.

  But Elise Brandau’s sympathy was genuine. When they were done making love again—and he had to assume that she was impressed at his ability to perform so quickly after the first time, and at his age, too—she asked him more about himself. He couldn’t believe his good luck, that this woman was willing to listen, was perfectly happy to listen to the story that he so desperately wanted to tell. And though her good listenership could have been used in dozens of other ways over time, could have been used to speak about his marriage to her, his hopes and his disappointments, it hadn’t been. Nor had he tried to find the flip side of it, either, the side of her that wanted to talk and talk and tell him about herself. Okay, his first wife Roz had been singular. You could not compare her with anyone else. But so what? So what, so what, so what?

  There at home in unit 3A in Laughing Woods lay his wife Elise, his third wife, yes, but his wife nonetheless. Seven years ago on a Friday she had gotten all dressed up in a violet crushed-velvet dress and matching handbag and married him in a civil ceremony in front of a few friends, and then they’d gone out to lunch, and then it seemed he’d promptly forgotten he’d married her, that they were a couple. He couldn’t tolerate being alone. Loneliness swept across him and rattled the windows. He would have been in a state of perpetual terror without Elise, and instead he had remained in a state of perpetual distraction.

  Riding along the highway with his son driving, feeling inert and out of commission, Paul was prostrate with regret. He was a hub of regret, a switchboard lighting up in hundreds of bright and urgent little lights, each one a moment that he could have kicked himself over, he had been so stupid.

  Roz was gone and that was that. He regretted what he had done and what she had done, but it was dead and over. Elisa was gone, too, was barely regretted by virtue of having been barely remembered. But Elise was still there, fast asleep in the home they shared, and that he had chosen to share with her. So maybe it hadn’t been for the right reasons; that day in New York City when they’d been introduced, he hadn’t thought ahead, or even thought back to his history of mistakes and regret, or informed her of this unfortunate history. I loved the first one too much, he could have told her. And I’m afraid my love is all used up now. She’d trusted his interest and his smile and his kindness and his beard—that beard, which women seemed to go for because it seemed to signify a kind of sensitivity, a closeness to the earth or something. You got away with murder if you had a beard. He’d always been kind to women. He’d never raised his voice to them—except to Roz at the end, but that had been different. When your wife says she’s leaving you, that she’s in love with someone else, then you’re entitled to raise your voice, to let it paper entire rooms.

  “Are we almost there?” Paul asked his son now, bringing his head back inside the car. He had lost track of where they were.

  Michael turned slightly toward him. “You’ve got clown hair, Dad,” he said.

  “The wind,” said Paul.

  “Yeah. Why don’t you keep your head inside. We’ve got about ten minutes more. You okay over there?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Paul said, and he flipped down the mirror that his wife often used to look at herself when they went out somewhere. He’d never sat in the passenger seat before, and he had certainly never used this mirror. It had a small light on it, and in the darkness of the car at night he could only see the barest outline of himself, but it was enough. Paul Mellow watched himself smoothing down the loose tangle of gray hair that ringed his head and that, he was sure, only advertised his aging maleness, the inevitable intertwining of his vanity and his mortality.

  In the morning Michael would leave. Good luck to both of them, as they sallied forth toward their women, like knights riding great distances to return to their Ladies. Good luck to them, for you never knew how you would be received until you actually arrived. Oh, he would miss his son so much; he would brood about it after driving him to the airport. He would miss him and call him more often from now on, just as he would call the other ones, too, making a point to force himself outside that fortress of his own battered and solipsistic self. He would haunt them: the steady, newly recovering Dashiell and his dreadful politics; Claudia, who was still a baby as far as he could see; even Holly, who did not need him at all, or at least who said she did not, but it was too bad, she’d get him anyway. He would claim just to want to hear her voice on the telephone. Don’t worry, he would reassure her, nothing would be required of her, no trips back east to be with him or with any of them.

  How did children raised in the same family end up so different from one another? How did they end up away from one another? But he wouldn’t weep on the telephone to his children, for they would only find him pathetic, a sex-educated Willy Loman figure, and he never, ever wanted to be seen like that.

  They thought he was bitter, and this he regretted too. He would not be bitter; that was over. “All right,” he said suddenly. “If it really means so much to you.”

  “What?” said Michael. “If what does?”

  “The book,” said his father, suddenly animated, sloughing off his windblown, drunken self, the sad old Arthur Miller character that he was afraid he’d already become. “I’ll do the book,” Paul went on. “The reissue. Whatever. If it will make you happy.”

  “You serious here?” Michael asked, and Paul said he was.

  “I see,” Michael said. “So the secret was for me to stop discussing it entirely with you. To let it be forgotten. Is that it?”

  “No,” said Paul. “That’s not it.”

  “Well, whatever the reason, it’s great,” said Michael. “It really is. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Dad.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Paul said, and he waved a hand vaguely in his son’s direction. Michael pulled the car into the garage, and the attendant seemed to raise his eyebrows slightly when he saw that Paul had not been driving his own car, but he said nothing. It was almost midnight; the garage here did not see much late-night action.

  Inside the condo, the lights were all off except for the pale bulb they kept on at night for the little plants in the kitchen window, as though to soothe them like sleeping babies. Michael said good night to his father and retreated down the hall into the guest room, and soon Paul could hear the thump of shoe-removal, followed by the rush of water in the bathroom pipes. Deeper into the condo Paul walked, across the thick, sound-absorptive carpet that seemed specifically designed for sheepish late-night returns. When he opened the door of his bedroom, there was no light whatsoever. Elise slept in a bedroom that was little more than a black, airless cave.

  He made his way across the room in the shaft of light that he’d brought in with him from the hallway. On the left side of the bed his wife lay on her back, her hair loose around her head, one breast slightly rising up out of her nightgown, and a round, white knob of a shoulder showing above the edge of the quilt. The pillow cradled Elise’s head; even in the dim room he could see the slightly raised, individuated bumps of grain beneath the surface.

  His wife slept on, unaware of his presence in the room, and Paul Mellow stood over her for a moment, hesitating, before he sat down on the edge of the bed, touched her arm, and said, “Please wake up.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  PICTURE THEM, then, these two estranged lovers of a certain age,
connected through four children who were themselves getting on in years. Picture the man and woman in their best clothes and a light layer of pancake makeup, sitting at a round table separated by a neutral, ageless television host who had sat with them thirty years earlier at this very same table, or one just like it. Back then, during the first interview on Ken London’s Night Owl, it had seemed as though the host was doing his best to keep the husband from taking the wife and bolting from the table to go off and make love in a nest of television cables and klieg lights. The camera had come in tight upon them then, picking up facial cues, marital exchanges, and holding for an extended moment on Paul Mellow’s face as he gazed in devotion upon his wife, then shifting away from Paul and over toward Roz, holding on her blue eyes, her mouth, then moving slightly downward to honor the cleft between her breasts.

  But now the camera was far more chaste and withholding, giving this aging but still attractive couple their dignity, and somehow attempting to ignore the suggestion of animus that existed between them, even here in the dead air of the television studio. It was late on a cold Monday afternoon, not a time for night owls at all, but the show would not appear until later in the week, at 11:30 P.M. Just outside the television studio on the corner of West 58th Street and Tenth Avenue, the street was lit with cars and taxi-hopefuls with arms swaying upward like people drowning, but here inside the studio, all was calm. An estranged husband and wife found a way to sit at the same table, and the host found a way to ask them questions, and the cameras were readied and pointed.

  The tech crew looked too young for their jobs, even collegiate, and if any of them had ever heard of the original version of Pleasuring: One Couple’s Journey to Fulfillment, they certainly didn’t show it. None of the young men in work shirts and headphones looked at all interested in the discussion about sex that was taking place in front of them. There, propped up on the table, was the thirtieth-anniversary edition of the book, with its newly pink cover and its stylized bed, the sheets a subtle shade of rose now, the whole thing weighing a full quarter-pound more than the 1975 version.

  It was amazing to many of the people who knew them that the Mellows had managed to make their way here, to this moment, Roz perhaps a touch smug about her triumph but careful not to display it, and Paul overtly ambivalent and abashed but still here, and the fact that they were here was what mattered. Over the past two years, overseen by Jennifer Wing, the book had been revised and produced, and an entirely new set of illustrations had been created by a young artist named Harris Glynn from Phoenix, Arizona, who could draw perfect reproductions of the human form, but whose abiding passion was for Japanese animé, which perhaps explained the slightly wide-eyed, startled look his depicted lovers had no matter what act they were performing.

  So here they were, Paul and Roz, answering the fairly intelligent questions of Ken London, whose 1970s Prince Valiant haircut and velour blazers had been exchanged for a more softened gray head and conservative black suit that gave him a kind of sudden, late-life gravitas that no one could have expected. The questions he asked were about the old version of the book, the new version of the book, about how sex had changed over the decades, what with the country’s fixation on Internet porn and Internet dating, and violent, graphic movies and video games. He asked how they thought love had changed over these years since Paul and Roz had lain in a bed together and showed other people how it could be done.

  Seeing them together after all this time, it was possible that someone watching the show who had watched them on it thirty years earlier might still wish for a sudden on-air sea change. Might wish for an ex-husband to turn to his ex-wife and tell her he loved her, and for her to say she still loved him, and for the two of them to push a bewildered Ken London away, to shoot him back in his swivel chair with one swift shove, and for them to move together, chairs colliding as they found each other’s mouth, unclipping the raisin-size microphones on their collars so that the audience could not hear the things they had wanted to say to each other all these years, and hadn’t been able to say until now.

  Everyone wanted closure; that was the reached-for word. Closure was asked for during the penalty phase in the trials of child-murderers, closure was required when the new memorial staggered up at Ground Zero. There was closure in every divorce, but a new fissure opened up each time too, a pit that could never be filled in, for just look at those bitter or mournful faces, years later. Just look at those grown-up children, lumbering around the earth with their freight of sadness and detachment. What babies they were, those children, all children, for no one forgets the early pleasure of seeing two parents together; no one forgets the incomprehensible safety and symmetry of that image. For children, parents aren’t a two-backed beast but instead an enormous two-winged bird, each parent represented by a wing, with all the children riding on top, holding on by grabbing tufts of feathers, letting themselves be carried aloft.

  Inevitably Ken London did ask Roz and Paul about the breakup of their marriage, lowering his voice to a slightly mournful timbre, as though the divorce still stung, which it did in a way, and both of them spoke, using the answers that they’d agreed upon during several telephone calls in recent weeks. It was important, they had decided, that their responses be coordinated, that one of them did not seem more wounded or angry or lost than the other. If they were going to go through with the interviews, the articles, the lecture tour redux, then they needed to seem, if not exactly together, then at least equal. So now, when Ken London asked Paul Mellow how he had felt when his wife fell in love with the illustrator of the original book, he knew what to say.

  “It was very painful,” Paul said.

  “A painful time,” Roz echoed before his sentence had been finished.

  They turned slightly toward each other, and in a moment that had not been prepared in advance, he nodded. She wasn’t sure what the nod was supposed to mean, though, and she was flustered. But she had no time to figure it out, for London was now on to something else. He was asking about “the landscape of AIDS,” and how it had changed the nature of sex in America.

  “I think I can speak to that,” Paul said, and Roz sank back slightly in her leather swivel chair, letting him take the lead.

  Afterward, the publisher gave them a dinner at an expensive midtown steakhouse called Plank’s, and the Mellows and their entire party arranged themselves at two long tables that were soon lit with little candles and covered in bread baskets and enormous menus and plates of beef. It was sumptuous, that was the word, Roz thought, when she looked down the long airstrip of a table and saw her family there, or at least most of them. Claudia sat with her fiancé David Gupta, a man she would marry in May. When you have a shy child, Roz thought, you are forever worrying: Will anyone ever see her for her special qualities? Will the world ever get to know her? Will she be trampled on by the louder ones, the ones who ask for what they want, and inevitably get it?

  But last year Claudia had stood up in the front of a screening room at a small film festival in Philadelphia, in which K Through 6 had been entered into competition, and she’d spoken to the seventy-five people in the audience about what it had been like to shoot her first film. No one had mocked her, and everyone had applauded when the screening was through. To Claudia’s own astonishment, the film hadn’t been half bad. David had watched all the footage with her as she was working on it, encouraging her to keep it serious and funny, and never condescending. She felt that she’d salvaged it in the editing room; maybe that was where her real strengths lay. She was taking a class in film editing and hoped to be able to get a job on someone else’s film when it was over; her instructor had given her the name of an independent filmmaker who might be willing to hire her. Beside her now, David Gupta, the intellectual property lawyer, was whispering something into Claudia’s ear, and she was laughing.

  Three of the four Mellow children had made it their business to convene in New York City for the week of activities surrounding the reissue of the book. There had been a vague
possibility that Holly might even fly in from L.A., but after a long, mumbled phone conversation with Claudia two days before, during which Holly had said yes, all right, she would agree to come to New York for this fucking celebration, she would come to see her parents in their last blaze of glory, she freaked out and in the end did not come. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Holly had said to her sister that very morning on the telephone from California. “I can’t get on that plane. I can’t do it.”

  “Why?” said Claudia. “You’re afraid it’ll be blown up or something?”

  “Of course not,” said Holly. “I just can’t deal with it, okay? With the family.”

  “Fine,” said Claudia. “So don’t come.” And then there was silence, and a slightly wet sound that might have been a nose being blown, and Claudia added in a quieter voice, “Just tell me why. Why can’t you deal with it and we can? What makes you so different from us?”

  “I don’t know,” said her sister. “I really don’t know. It just worked out that way, I guess. I have a very toxic reaction to this family. I get too upset; I think about things. I can’t deal with it. Anyway, tell them hi.”

  So Claudia had actually walked up to her mother and father separately before the taping, and said, “Hi,” paused, and added pointedly, “That’s from Holly.”

  Holly, who could not deal with it, was an apparition here. Michael had always been considered the one who understood her, but this was a by-default role, and his understanding was incomplete. It seemed that most families had one person who “could not deal,” to some degree. Holly, he knew, had found an early pleasure in Adam Selig’s hands and mouth, and then in damp, poorly rolled joints, and from there it had been a long collapse. As a teenaged girl Holly had told him long stories about life and her future and what she and Adam did together. Her brother had listened, impressed and jealous and riveted by who she was. His love for Holly had burned on and on, and then it just didn’t burn anymore, giving out with no warning.