by Meg Wolitzer
It was difficult to hold two simultaneous images of Holly: one young and smirking and excited, the other older, harder, lost, furious. She continued on as the missing person in the family, though it packed less punch now. What power her absence had anymore was forlorn and almost touching. Imagine: still, after all this time, being so angry at your parents for their foibles and their selfishness and for letting you think that love could gratify a person forever. Imagine: caring so much that you had to stay away from the family forever. Holly’s isolation was almost religious.
Michael was eating a sixteen-ounce Wagyu steak tonight, one of the highest-priced cuts on the menu. He had been living in Wise County, Appalachia, for the better part of a year, working in the field for DDN. It had been his choice to be transferred, and he’d gone right to the twins with his plea, aggravating his closer superiors. But the twins had been receptive and had arranged for Michael to supervise the operations out of an office in an old, modest building in the town of Norton, Virginia. He had an assistant and a secretary, but some of his day was spent out of the office and in local schools, shelters, and churches. He found himself wading into real poverty, with its empty, abandoned factories and entire dead-eyed families sitting on broken couches that had been dumped onto weedy front lawns. Michael drove around, taking notes, being overwhelmed, but somehow he found it far better than being back at DDN, though of course there were times when his loneliness was spectacular. He had an apartment that took up the top floor of an old frame house in Norton; he had a car; he had few friends. He’d gotten to know a couple of faculty members from the nearby university, and they’d invited him into their homes for dinner, eager for new companionship, new blood, but mostly he came home and ate by himself. Because he was working on a hunger initiative, he could not bring himself to cook meals that seemed too elaborate or vulgar. He’d go to the local Kroger and buy hamburger meat and a sad head of lettuce. Occasionally he’d buy a sack of brown rice and some cheese and lentils, and when he got home he’d pull out Diet for a Small Planet, that relic from his family’s shelf, that book that had been pressed up against his parents’ book year after year, and from its crisp, discolored pages he would create a vegetarian meal for himself, potentially unsatisfying but somehow creative. He’d eat his steaming mass of dinner in front of the computer screen, instant-messaging Claudia or Dashiell, feeling almost as though he were sitting across from them at a dinner table. At night he’d lie in bed and listen to old Pink Floyd CDs and think with astonishment: What have I done? I am living in Appalachia.
But really, he hadn’t done anything all that shocking, for he’d held on to his apartment in New York, and he returned there about once a month for meetings. Sometimes, during one of his trips to New York, he would get involved with a woman, though nothing serious. He didn’t know how long he would continue to live and work out in the field, but there was some talk that he might get to go to Kenya for a while in the spring.
Two years earlier, after Michael had returned home from his trip to Florida, he had found, to his modest surprise, that his girlfriend Thea Herlihy no longer loved him, and that instead she loved the former television actress Anne Freling. They fought in the obligatory way, and he was wounded but not mortally. Thea moved out not long after his return and moved in with Anne Freling at once. The Dora play, Hysterical Girl, opened to respectful reviews, but Michael did not go see it. The play closed after a brief but noble run. The two women still lived together, and occasionally Thea emailed him a few innocuous lines. She’d asked him to stop by their Gramercy Park apartment when he was in town, though he had no desire to do so. Claudia told him she’d seen a picture of Anne and Thea in a gossip column in the New York Post. The two women had been shopping at an outdoor greenmarket, and the caption referred to “former Classic 6-er” Anne Freling and her “lady friend.” He liked that description of Thea, for it seemed to capture some of her aloofness: She was a lady, and a friend, and she’d never been all that loving to him. She was currently playing Peter Pan in front of child audiences. That was a good role for her, Michael thought, the eternal androgyne; it was as though she thought that leaving him could allow her to fly anywhere she wanted. How could she possibly love the self-absorbed Anne Freling? That was where she wanted to fly?
But anybody’s choice of lover was always mystifying: why one appealed and another did not—why a flavor tasted good when another one was repellent. Why, right now in this restaurant with his family, Michael Mellow wanted nothing more than to push his knife into the flesh of a sixteen-ounce Wagyu steak from Japan and feel how easily and deeply it went in, and how sad he felt each time he had to actually chew and swallow the soft meat, losing one more moment of the joy that was found in eating it. There was no Wagyu in Appalachia.
After dinner he’d leave the restaurant and head east, going to a bar on Second Avenue called, paradoxically, Smoky’s; by law no smoke had blown through these New York establishments in years. It was a young-professionals kind of place, with men in shirtsleeves and women in the snappy, tight outfits of young lawyers and marketing executives. A year earlier, during one of his trips to New York, Michael had met a woman named Lucy Sherkow at this bar. She was an assistant DA, ten years younger than he was, and they’d had some drinks and talked and then gone home to her loft in Noho. The sex was easy, playful, and with the Endeva long purged from his system he’d ejaculated without worrying about it. He’d almost wished he could call up Thea at Anne’s place, and say to her, “Hey, guess what I just did,” as if, even now, she would be interested.
Recently, on another visit to the city, Michael had been to see the pharmacologist Snell again. His depression was waving feelers at the edge of his vision, and he was slightly alarmed by it, fearing that it would encroach upon his life and make it unbearable. “But I’m hesitant to go back on anything again,” he told Snell.
“I understand,” the pharmacologist said. “Many of these drugs have sexual side effects.”
“It almost seems to me,” Michael had said, “that in order to neuter the depression, you have to neuter yourself.”
“That can unfortunately be the case. We’ve had luck with a few of the more recent SSRIs, though like most of them they take a while to build up in your bloodstream. But there’s a new drug,” Snell offered. “It addresses these concerns. Doesn’t seem to interfere with sex, and it’s unusually quick to take effect.”
The drug was called Relzon, another strange, futuristic name, and this time, after Michael began to take it, there were no egregious side effects. He had an orgasm on the occasions when he went to New York and slept with Lucy Sherkow, or other women. He could come easily, thoughtlessly, even though he was on an antidepressant, and even though he wasn’t in love. As though love had anything to do with it. When Michael was young and had looked across a room at his sister Holly, he’d seen the way her own eyes were often looking elsewhere, on to the next thing, and the next. Love was a food chain, a desperate gobble, a grab.
“How’s that Wagyu?” Jack Sunstein asked him, and Michael let Jack taste it, passing him the plate in the din of the crowded table.
Jack was a floater here tonight. His feeling of disappointment or even anger at not being asked to illustrate the new edition of the book was something he tried not to talk about, and which he’d been able to accept over the months. Just as, tonight, he was able to accept that for this brief period of time his wife belonged to her first husband again. They sat side by side, those sex Mellows, and both Jack and Paul’s wife Elise knew enough to give those two plenty of room, to let the reissue of the book and its attendant reunion happen in all its nostalgia and discomfort. In the years since the family had lived in Wontauket, their ranks had shrunk and then swelled. Almost everyone here was paired off, as if there would be dancing. Except for Michael, no one had wanted to come alone tonight. When you were with your family—your “family of origin,” people called it—you needed someone from your new life, your replacement life, to provide sustenance and comf
ort. You could not make it alone. Jack was alone, but not really. Across the table, he saw his wife smile and touch her children’s hands and arms, and laugh at something that Jennifer Wing had said.
Later, Jack knew that he and Roz would sit on the king-size bed in their Helmsley-monolith hotel room, and they would undress and talk about everything that had happened tonight, everything that had been said at the restaurant.
“So how was I on the show?” Roz would want to know, and Jack would tell her that she had been beautiful and intelligent, and that it had gone wonderfully. What he would not tell her was the fact that he had stopped listening in the middle of the taping. He hadn’t been planning on it, but before he knew it he was thinking of something else and had lost the thread of the conversation. It was probably hostile that he hadn’t listened all the way through. But there was just so much he could take. For always that earlier marriage was calling from the back of the room, and always its companion text was on the coffee table, a handbook for all the ways a man and a woman could express their love.
Jack Sunstein knew he could never keep up with how Paul and Roz had loved each other and had had sex all over creation; he himself had never been one of those restless, perpetually horny satyrs who women seemed to go for, but who ultimately made the women unhappy and kept them desperate to be alone for a while. He’d been into women, always, but in a more modulated way. And now he and Roz were older, slower, and their sexual life had simmered down over the years. How sad that this had happened, but he knew it happened to all couples; one by one they succumbed, unless they worked at it. And if they worked at it, that meant that they had already succumbed. When Paul and Roz began talking to the TV show host about the sexual climate of the 1970s and how they had come together in it and lain down on a white bed, Roz’s kind and somewhat passive second husband had felt a primitive anger developing in him, and he knew that he could either force himself to keep it down by maybe drinking a lot at the steakhouse after the taping, or else he could simply stop listening.
So as his wife continued to talk, and he heard the lovely, soft scrape of her voice accompanied by the deep complement of Paul’s voice, Jack started thinking about something else: a project he was going to begin on Monday, a CD cover for a New Wave band from the early ‘80s that was trying to make a respectable comeback.
They were all there at dinner, Claudia and David and Michael and Dashiell and Tom and Jack and Elise, she who sat on Jack’s other side, buttering her bread with such an intense degree of attention to something inanimate that it seemed almost autistic. “How are you doing there?” Jack asked, turning to her out of kindness.
Elise looked uncertain and anxious here in the big meat cavern in which they all sat. In Florida she was a social worker, he remembered, but he knew nothing more about her and therefore had no idea of what to say to her.
“I’m okay, thanks,” she said. And then she added, “I think you and I should order a couple of really stiff drinks.”
Jack laughed in surprise. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we really should.” He raised a hand for the waiter and got them two Ketel One martinis. Elise seemed pleased that he understood what she had meant, and that her remark had not been met by puzzlement and silence.
“Thank you,” Elise Brandau-Mellow said when the drinks came. They lifted their glasses and touched them together.
“To marriage,” Jack said.
“To marriage,” said Elise, though each of them really meant To the end of marriage. For those other marriages had had to disintegrate in order for theirs to exist. These two spouses who wanted to be the last ones—the only ones from now on—drank from their martini glasses, and then, after a moment passed and it wouldn’t seem too rude to the other person, they discreetly looked across the table to see what their husband and wife were doing, and what they were saying to each other.
What Paul and Roz were saying was this:
“Is everyone having a good time, do you think?” Paul asked.
“I think so,” said Roz. “Look at Claudia. She’s so in love. I could cry.”
“You can’t cry at this dinner,” Paul said. “Jennifer went to all this trouble. And anyway, people would just assume that we were being overly nostalgic.”
“Well, this whole thing does require a certain degree of nostalgia,” Roz said.
“A certain degree, okay,” Paul agreed. He kept looking up and down the table. “Dashiell looks pretty good. He and Tom keep in shape. I gather they have access to the gym at Brown or something.”
“Is he eating anything over there?” asked Roz. “I haven’t seen him pick up his fork.”
“Who, Dash? Of course he is.” But Paul couldn’t really see whether or not Dashiell had eaten anything. His son was sitting at the far end of the table, and there was food on his plate, but it might have been left there untouched. After the transplant two years earlier, the disease had soon transformed into non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and had been treated successfully with a second transplant. Dashiell had recovered fully, and though he was well, his appearance was perhaps permanently sculptural and elegant, homosexual, Paul thought, though he wouldn’t have said that out loud. He knew that for all his own sexual openness, his own understanding of two men in bed together would always be willfully incomplete. He was still a little squeamish about the matter. Dashiell and Tom did not want to lie down with women; they didn’t want the taste and smell and texture and meaning of women against their bodies. But far more alien to Paul was the idea that Dashiell and Tom somehow agreed with the stringent, coldhearted beliefs of the Republican party. They stood behind those wild tax cuts, the bullying defense policies, and all else, but surely, as they stood there, they had to wince a little, didn’t they? Robert Wyman, U.S. senator from Rhode Island, was planning a presidential run in 2008, Dashiell had said a few months ago, and he and Tom were certain to be high up in the campaign.
Paul looked across the table at his younger son in candlelight and took in the bones of his head, the crispness of his collar, the way his arm brushed against the arm of his lover, but strayed no farther. They were careful, those two, slightly stiff and courtly. Tom and Dashiell were talking to Claudia and David Gupta and Jennifer Wing; everyone seemed to be having a very good time.
Paul felt suddenly tired, and he wanted to go back to the hotel room right now. Elise would be happy to leave when he left; she wasn’t the kind of person to stay on alone at a party. Even down in Naples, when they attended a reception following a poetry reading in the Gathering Room, she would stay very close to him as he circled the room, meeting the people he met, saying good-bye when he did. You would think, from observing them in those moments, that their marriage was as close as any couple’s could be, and that they stayed together because they made each other happier than anyone else could. Oh, I wish that could be true, Paul thought, and he hoped there was still a chance that it might become true. Over the past two years his wife slept significantly less, and they took more walks together and played Scrabble competitively, tried some new things in bed (old things to Paul, but new to them as a couple), and who knew what might happen? There was time.
After coffee and cheesecake were served at the table, and enough fat had been packed into the arteries of the Mellow family to stop all of them at once in their tracks forever, they retrieved their coats and stood in the vestibule, saying their good nights. Always there was an awkward moment at the end of an evening; how much better it would be, Dashiell thought, if you just plunged your arms into your sleeves and grabbed your lover’s hand and rushed headfirst into the night without having to linger, or say pleasantries, or make things worse. This wasn’t really good-bye, for everyone would be together in the city for the rest of the weekend. Roz and Paul were giving a talk at the 92nd Street Y tomorrow afternoon, doing a signing at a midtown bookstore, and sitting for several print interviews over the next couple of days. The family would meet and re-meet. It wasn’t good-bye at all.
“Good night, Mom,” Dashiell said, and
his mother took the opportunity to step forward and kiss his cheek hard. She still wore the makeup from the television taping and so did Paul, rendering them both slightly theatrical, like two old troupers coming together for a benefit performance of some chestnut of a play.
“Good night, my dear,” she said, and then she turned to Tom and kissed him too, with equal effusiveness. “See you both tomorrow. Is the hotel all right? You asked for a smoke-free floor?”
“It’s fine, totally fine,” said Tom, whose life was often spent in hotels, as he shadowed the senator around the Northeast. Often Tom brought Dashiell gifts from hotel rooms: jars of macadamia nuts sealed like crypts, little bottles of Johnnie Walker, pens that read “The Centurion” or “The Inn on Castle Park.” When Dashiell wrote political speeches, he still wrote them out by hand, so the pens were useful. But he hadn’t written much lately.
Claudia and David Gupta and Michael all had their coats on now, and David was even putting on earmuffs—God, who at that age wore earmuffs?—so Dashiell had to speak to them all quickly and casually, but somehow effectively. “Listen,” he said to his brother and his sister and her fiancé, moving them slightly away from the sets of parents. “You want to get a drink before we all split up?”
Claudia and David looked at each other and shrugged, and Michael checked his watch and then said something that sounded like, “Well, okay, I guess,” and then the Mellow children said the rest of their good-byes to the parents, and left in a cluster.
“Look,” said Paul to Elise and Roz, who by sheer chance were standing beside each other, the two women winding long, beautiful scarves around their necks and peering into the mirror in the dark red vestibule for one final glance at themselves, making that sucked-in face that women always made. “The children are all going somewhere together now. I love that, don’t you?”