The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Yes,” said Roz. “It’s like they’ve got their own society.”

  “‘The Soul selects Her own Society,’” Elise recited quietly.

  “What?” said her husband.

  “It’s a line from a poem.”

  “Emily Dickinson,” Roz put in. “I always liked it too.” And the two women smiled at each other now in the mirror.

  But out on the street, the children and their partners walked in a loose pack, Michael and David slightly annoyed that Dashiell had suggested this, both of the men feeling full of food and wishing they could simply say good-bye now, like they were supposed to. But no, for some reason they couldn’t. All right, Michael thought, one quick drink. With Dashiell in the lead, they followed him into a dim and narrow sports bar on the corner, where television sets were tuned to the game du jour, and heterosexual men sat with chicken wings in hand and heads upturned. What an unlikely place for Dashiell to want to be, Michael thought, but he said nothing. Briefly, he thought about Lucy Sherkow, the woman he’d called on his cell phone from the restaurant, and who would be waiting for him now in another bar, one much more appealing than this one, but she would have to keep waiting a little longer. He fervently hoped she wouldn’t leave before he got there.

  The five of them sat at a booth in the front, away from the television sets, and no one wanted to drink any more alcohol, so they all just ordered waters or Diet Cokes, and the talk was subdued for a moment, until Dashiell began to speak.

  “I had to ask you to come here,” he said, “because I didn’t want to say any of this in front of Mom or Dad. I didn’t want them to know. Not now. Not ever, if I can help it, but I don’t think I can.”

  Tom took his hand at that moment, and Michael first thought, Are Dashiell and Tom having a wedding? But within an instant he realized this was not the case at all, and his stomach swung violently.

  “The cancer came back,” Dashiell said. “It’s everywhere. The second transplant stopped being successful. The remission’s over.”

  They were all silent for the brief knockout, seeing stars. Then Michael said, “What? But you said this time it worked for good, and that was supposed to be that. End of story.”

  “It can sometimes happen this way,” Tom said. “It’s very unpredictable.”

  “So they can do a third transplant, right?” asked Claudia in a voice that threatened to break at any second.

  Dashiell shook his head. “No,” he said, and he worked to sound level and steady. “Apparently I won’t respond to it. The disease is too aggressive now. I could get more chemotherapy if I want, Dr. Balakian said, but only to get some more time. Not much more, anyway. Five or six months, he estimates, and we discussed it, and I decided it wasn’t really worth it. Quality of life, and all that.” He paused for a moment, then added, oddly, “If anyone asks you if it was AIDS, I want you to know that you can tell them anything you like. I’ve decided that I really don’t care.”

  “Five or six months,” said Claudia. “Oh no, oh no,” and she began crying so hard that David Gupta looked around the table helplessly, as if trying to find guidance about how to handle a woman in this state. No one could help him, so he just threw an arm around her shoulders and kept her close.

  Are you sure? they all kept asking. Are you sure? Dashiell and Tom individually and patiently said yes, they were certain, this was the way it was, there was nothing to do about it.

  “Dash, do you feel very bad, physically?” Michael asked, and Dashiell told them no, he was mostly pretty tired, but it wasn’t terrible, he could still get up in the morning, and he’d been able to come to New York, after all. It was the strangest thing: He hadn’t even known he had relapsed at first, he explained. He’d gone to the dermatologist because of a rash on his chest, just a pink pinprick spattering, and he’d assumed he would be given a tube of cortisone cream and sent on his way, like everyone else in the world. But the dermatologist, who knew Dashiell’s medical history, had been troubled by the aggressiveness of the rash and wanted to run some tests. Two days later, the blood told the story of the disease, which was swarming, overrunning the body, and would soon be winding it down.

  Michael began crying almost immediately after Claudia, and then Dash followed, and Tom too. David’s mouth was pulled into a tight line, and though he was stunned and aching he didn’t feel he had to cry. It wouldn’t do any good, he knew. He held on to Claudia and rubbed her back, kissed her hair. Michael, in tears, removed his eyeglasses and put them on the table beside the Cokes and waters and Gupta’s earmuffs. The waiter, who was about to ask if they wanted anything else, suddenly hung back, startled by the scene.

  “Oh shit. Oh fuck. I hate this, I just hate it,” Claudia said repeatedly. “I hate it so much.” And then, finally, she asked her brother, “Dash, what can we do for you?” Her voice was so thick it was almost impossible to hear, but Dashiell leaned across the table and took her hand. Nothing was the real answer, but he just shook his head and shrugged and didn’t know what to say. “I love you, Dash; I love you so much,” Claudia went on. “We all just love you, we do.” And she blew her nose into a green cocktail napkin and said, suddenly, “Remember the day we first read the book? And then I rode you around the kitchen like you were a horse?”

  “Yes,” Dashiell said, nodding. “We went around and around on the floor.” He turned to Michael then, and asked him, “Why did you make us look at the book, anyway? We were so young. It could have warped us.”

  “It did warp us,” said Claudia.

  “Because I’d already looked at it,” Michael said. “And I didn’t want to be alone with it.”

  “Someone has to tell Holly,” Dashiell said. “Claudia, you should tell her. She and I basically have no relationship.”

  Claudia nodded glumly and blew her nose. Sure, why not, she could tell Holly; this whole situation was so terrible that nothing could make it either better or worse. She could tell Holly and it wouldn’t matter. Who knew what her sister would say, or think, or do, whether she had any genuine feelings inside her anymore, or whether they’d all been burned out over the years by the corrosiveness of nonstop drug consumption, and then replaced by feelings for a husband and a baby who was now not such a baby anymore, but who none of them had met more than twice.

  “What about your parents?” David Gupta suddenly asked, he who hadn’t said a word until this moment. “You’re really not going to tell them?” There was silence for a moment; each of them pictured their poor parents, and they froze in a tableau of guilt.

  The parents were right now walking along West 57th Street, had in fact moments earlier gone right past the bar where the children sat, not realizing they were all inside. Paul and Elise and Roz and Jack were in a foursome, like two long-married couples out on the town for the evening, taking a stroll after dinner, checking the sky and seeing its strange lightness. It was supposed to snow tonight, Jack had heard on the radio. The sky had that nearly-snow look about it, a pale purplish color, and the wind seemed to be pausing, as if waiting for something to happen.

  Roz fretted about how she’d looked on television and whether she could bear to watch herself later that week on Night Owl. Yes was the answer, of course she could, but she needed to pose the question, even to herself.

  Paul thought about the moment when he’d nodded at Roz during the show, and how surprised she’d been at the brief acknowledgment that, yes, it had been painful to lose her, but he had managed. It had been a long time since he’d had a chance to surprise her, even so slightly.

  Elise thought about sleep, and then stopped herself, thinking: No, think of something else.

  Jack thought about how he used to draw Roz for hours at the studio, back in the beginning, and would then put Paul into the drawing only at the very end, with haste. He thought about the piece of Wagyu steak he’d tried tonight, and how delicious it had been, and he wondered whether such steak was available up in Saratoga Springs.

  As the two couples said good night on the corner o
f 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, going off in different directions toward their separate hotels for the night, the snow, the first of the season, came down lightly at first, then harder. It was covering their hair and shoulders within seconds, though the temperature did not feel very cold. Paul gathered Elise against him; Roz took Jack’s arm and then turned him toward her and kissed him, already tasting snow.

  They thought briefly of their children, as all parents do, picturing a scene of laughter and drinking and jokes with cultural references that neither Roz nor Paul would understand, for references had changed, and jokes had changed, and after a certain age it was just impossible to keep up, and then after a while you didn’t want to try, but left the new references to the newer people and simply kept thinking about the old references, the names from past decades that still rang inside you.

  It was as though, on this first night of snow in New York City, the Mellow family came to life one more time, like an antique wind-up clown toy that’s been sitting untouched and still for decades, only, for no reason at all, to suddenly have a shift in some internal workings and to spontaneously make noise, the clown’s cymbals clapping together in a fever of brief and inexplicable activity.

  “Let’s go to bed,” Paul said to Elise, with feeling.

  “You know, I can’t wait to get into bed,” Roz said to Jack, and she yawned for an extended moment, and the two couples kept walking, one heading east, the other heading west, as the snow came down harder.

  In the sports bar, men roared at a football play, and the crying group sitting at the front booth leaned in closer, as if trying to become one organism. What about your parents? David Gupta had asked.

  “I’m going to have to tell them sometime,” Dashiell said. “But not now. Not this weekend. Not this week. Not while all of this is happening to them.”

  For his parents were as mortal as he was, he wanted to say, and this was their moment, and in a sense they were back in a bed, and there was no end to the things their two bodies could do together. Leave them there, Dashiell thought. Leave them in the bed. Close the door and let them enjoy what remains for them, because the body is temporary, and of course his parents had always known that, urgently touching each other as though they had very little time, knowing that one day they wouldn’t touch each other ever again.

  Which was something every couple knew about, and the future heartbreak was briefly revealed, then by necessity it was banished from the conscious mind. But they all saw it, if only for a second:

  Claudia and David Gupta did; and so did David’s parents Vikram and Preethi; Roz and Jack; Paul and Elise; Holly and her husband Marcus; Ken London and his wife Helene; the Rinzlers from down the street in Wontauket; the kindergarten teacher Doreen Pernak and Russell Corcoran, the AV specialist at the school; Jennifer Wing and her boyfriend Corey Xu; the waiter at the sports bar and his partner Lowell; Warren Keyes and his wife Margaret; Senator Wyman and his wife-in-name-only Susan; the Dibbler twins and their various good-time women; L. Thomas Slocum and his fourth wife Maureen; Ricky Lukins and a closeted young male movie star; Thea Herlihy and Anne Freling; Dr. Ham Kleeman and his boyfriend Douglas; “Hojo” Westborn and his drug-addicted wife Nona; Trish Leggett and her lobbyist husband Todd; the man and woman at the next table in the restaurant tonight who were holding hands in the candlelight; the teenaged lovers who walked the Skidmore campus at dawn; the grandparents of one of those teenagers, lying together in a house in Maine; the men and women, and women and women, and men and men who were about to meet one another for the first time through a chat room, an online ad, at a dinner party, an antiwar march, the Motor Vehicles Bureau, a bus stop, by accident, by chance, and deliberately and stunningly let themselves fall.

  Roz and Paul Mellow were briefly together again tonight after a long absence from each other, though they alone were well past the slightest possibility of shared heartbreak. They were immune to it now, and felt fortified by the idea of their invulnerability to this particular human disorder. There they were, speaking eloquently to various interviewers about love, and sex, and the capacity for intimacy, and the subtle and less subtle shifts that took place over time and across broad cultural landscapes. There they were signing copies of the brand-new, good-looking, and up-to-date edition of their book, sharing a table at dinner, even sharing an imaginary bed, one with a brass headboard that reared back against a wall again and again, as if tapping out a code that no one else could ever decipher.

  Much later that night, Claudia Mellow and David Gupta tried to find a comfortable position in which to sleep, but the bed in her apartment on East 7th Street wasn’t really meant for two people. The routine was that David took the train up from Philadelphia to visit her on alternate weekends, and just last week they had put a down payment on a place in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, while he applied for jobs at various medium-size law firms here in New York. The apartment would be ready in time for the wedding, which was to be held in the Puck Building on May twelfth. They planned to travel to India and Pakistan for a two-week whirlwind honeymoon and meet David’s relatives, all those many Guptas who he himself barely knew.

  Now they turned and turned throughout the night, and at times Claudia fell into sleep only to be awakened by her own crying, which came involuntarily. “Talk to me,” David whispered to her, and she said no, she couldn’t bear to talk any more tonight. At three in the morning, though, desperate for some kind of comfort, she threw a leg over his, waking him, and he put his hands on her waist and braced her against him.

  “Let’s try something,” he whispered.

  Outside, on Avenue A, there was some kind of commotion involving a car alarm and two drunken, shouting men, but it wasn’t too bad; snow softened everything. “Try what?” she asked.

  “‘Electric Forgiveness,’” he said. “You know.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Please, not that. There’s nothing to forgive, anyway.”

  “There’s always something to forgive.”

  “In a general sense, yeah.”

  “Well, fine,” said David. “That’s good enough.”

  He took her copy of the old edition of the book out from a box under the bed, where he knew she kept it so no one would see. The thirtieth-anniversary edition no longer had the position in it, for it had never really caught on after all, despite the Mellows’ insistence, in print, that it was “a wonderful way to achieve climax quickly and lovingly after a scene of anger or stress.” David propped the old book up on the windowsill by the bed, and in the stuttering light from the 24-hour check-cashing store across the street, he found the page where it was explained and illustrated. Claudia had read the description before, but had never memorized it.

  “‘Sit in the very middle of your bed, facing each other,’” David read aloud. “All right, that’s not hard. Hello, you.”

  “Hello,” she said.

  “‘The woman should wrap her legs around her lover in a grasp that is as tight as a hug, and no tighter.’” Claudia did as he said, her legs containing him, and then she waited for further instruction. “‘Then she should take her left hand,’” David said, “‘and place it on his sternum, exerting a gentle pressure, while at the same time . . .’” Here he paused to turn the page, and then continued. “‘. . . she places her right hand on his lower back, at the sacroiliac joint.’” He looked at Claudia and asked, “Do you know what that means?”

  “Base of the spine,” she said.

  They got into position, slowly and carefully, as though building a house of cards that might topple at any given moment.

  “‘The man does the exact same thing to his lover,’” David read. “Oh, now you tell me.” He shifted on the bed, squashing Claudia’s foot briefly, and extricating a hand that had gotten caught in the sheets. “‘He should bring his penis forward into his lover so that the exact degree of slant exerts as much pressure as possible on her clitoris.’ There,” he said, entering her quickly and slightly awkwardly. She felt him poking against her. There was n
othing natural here, nothing familiar, just an odd translation of an age-old tale. “‘Rock together very slowly at first,’” David said. “Okay, I’m perfectly happy to do that. ‘Build up speed and vigor as you remember how much you love each other, and how you forgive each other for the ways that you have accidentally or perhaps even purposefully been unkind to each other. Life is too short to hold on to rage and disappointment. Continue rocking, mouths joined, until both of you reach climax. And when you are done, gently part, falling backward onto the bed.’”

  They continued to arrange themselves as best they could, given the narrow space and the time of night and how much she’d been crying. Claudia’s body fit snugly against David’s; he was so warm, and she was so warm, and it was astonishing to her that they could approximate the mechanics and make themselves actually fit. They did fit, though as they rocked slowly she worried that David would fall right out of her, or that she would fall off the bed, or that the pressure she was applying on his sternum was uncomfortable for him. Their kiss was long and arduous; they were both nervous, but they had done it, they had really done it, and for a few minutes she forgot that simply being able to do it doesn’t mean that it’s at all worthwhile. For the pleasure she felt was minimal; there was friction, an uneasy fluctuation of pressure, and the sense of continually being prodded, told to move along. If she even breathed too hard, she feared he would be forced out of her, so she hardly breathed as they rocked.

  After a while, they both stopped their rocking and kissing, taking a breather. “So, do you like this?” David asked, deadpan. “I mean, does it work for you? Is it everything you hoped for?”

  “Actually, it’s kind of boring,” she said.

  “I know.”

  They stayed in that clumsy stance for just a few seconds more, and finally neither of them could take it. So this was “Electric Forgiveness,” this was the thing the parents had invented, the thing that long ago they had tried and decided other people would like. Claudia hadn’t known how slight and uncomfortable and how ridiculous it would be, but now she did.