The Uncoupling Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part - One

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Part - Two

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Part - Three

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  ALSO BY MEG WOLITZER

  The Ten-Year Nap

  The Position

  The Wife

  Surrender, Dorothy

  This Is Your Life

  Hidden Pictures

  Sleepwalking

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA ● Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) ● Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England ● Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) ● Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) ● Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India ● Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) ● Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Meg Wolitzer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wolitzer, Meg.

  The uncoupling / Meg Wolitzer. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-48651-1

  1. Women—Sexual behavior—Fiction. 2. Desire—Fiction. 3. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.O564U

  813'.54—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Sarah McGrath

  I tell a tale of an unusual enchantment that made women turn away from their men. O Eros! This spell entranced the young ones, glued to their mirrors; the ones in the middle of life, glued to their duties; and the old ones, glued to air. Why did these gentle women withdraw so swiftly, without mercy? Do not cast judgment upon them—they knew not what they were doing, or what had been done to them. Their refusals were made in blindness, in innocence, and in bed after bed after bed.

  Part

  One

  1.

  People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness. The bright points of silver. The butter in its oblong dish. The corpse of a chocolate cake. The leaning back in a chair at the end, slugged on the head and overcome. Dory Lang had always thought there was a little cruelty in such a warning. It was similar to how, when she had a baby, people always tried to clue her in on what they were sure would befall her. Once, long ago, Dory and her infant daughter were riding a bus in the city, when an old woman leaned over and said, “May I tell you something, dear?” She had a kind face full of valleys and faults. Dory imagined she was about to describe the baby’s beauty—in particular, the curve of the mouth—and she made her own mouth assume a knowing, pleased modesty. But what the woman said, leaning even closer, was, “You will never have another day in your life that is free of anxiety.”

  There was a little private pleasure to be taken in the fact that that old woman, though she was of course correct, was now dead, and Dory was not. As for the warnings about the disappearance of passion, Dory recognized the sadism stitched into the words. Because the love lives of the women who said such things had gone soft and pulpy and tragic, they took a little comfort in telling as many women as they could that someday such a change would happen to them too.

  Dory and Robby felt they were exempt from such an outcome, assuming that even when they were so old that they appeared interchangeable—even when his ankles were as narrow and hairless as hers, and her lips were as thin and collagenless as his, and their pubic hair could have belonged to Santa Claus; even when they resembled those dried-apple dolls sold in the gift shops of folk museums—they would sleep together frequently, happily, and not just gently, but with the same gruff, fierce purpose as always. Around them, in other houses in their neighborhood, there would be a terrible pile-up of non–sex-having couples, all bone and tendon and indifference and regret.

  Warmly, hotly, tirelessly, in their own bed they would stay.

  The Langs had been teaching English at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Stellar Plains, New Jersey, for a decade and a half when everything changed. It had been an uneventful school year so far; there had been no deaths, neither student nor teacher, and not even any halfhearted, prankish bomb threats, which had become as common to suburban high schools as intramural sports.

  Robby and Dory Lang began that year at Eleanor Roosevelt—Elro, everyone called it—with the same optimism that they almost always felt. It had grown tempered in recent years, since the economy had tumbled, and certain concrete signs of optimism were no longer as central a part of the school experience: the smell of pencils, for instance, with their suggestion of woodshop and campgrounds and the promise of some precocious kid’s standout in-class essay. Pencils still lurked, fragrantly, but you had to look for them, and they seemed outnumbered by all things with a keyboard. Still, though, the Langs were hopeful; still, they thought it would be a good year.

  Together they were often spoken of in one breath by the other faculty members as Robby and Dory Lang, or just Robby and Dory, or by the students as Mr. and Ms. L, those two married, easygoing, still fairly young English teachers who walked the halls with a genial air. There were some teachers at Elro who lived to crack down on the kids. “Where’s your pass?” they would demand of a boy with a mouth freshly wet and slack from the water fountain. “Wha’, wha’?” said the boy, stammering, dripping. But the kids knew that Dory and Robby weren’t out to get them. Even their pop quizzes were humane.

  At just past forty they were both good-natured, decent-looking, tallish, and as dark-redheaded as Irish setters. Robby wore egghead eyeglasses that had become fashionable in recent years. He had a hard shield of a chest, and he rode a bike on weekends through the smooth streets of the neighborhood. Each morning he unscrewed one of the green glass canisters on the countertop and poured himself a dusty bleat of oat and twig, pious about his intake, wanting to live a long time so he didn’t miss a second with his
wife or daughter.

  The Langs were young, but not too young; old, but not too old. Girls often exclaimed over Dory’s boots, which dated back to her Brooklyn days and were the approximate color of caramel, narrowing to a subtle point—not quite the boots of a snarling female rocker, but not the boots of a hiker with bags of muesli swelling her pockets either. The girls also liked Robby’s pale, much-laundered work shirts, which by third period he had invariably rolled up at the sleeves, revealing arms with a light spatter of goldenrod hair. Neither Robby nor Dory repelled or depressed the kids the way their parents tended to. Nor were they like the kids themselves, who had unfinished faces and piercings that punctured the most tender membranes of their bodies like buckshot—the kids with their energy drinks, their Xtreme sports injuries, and with their restless need to be in touch through some device, even if in real life they’d only been apart long enough to go to the bathroom:“what r u up 2”

  “peeing”

  “when will u be back”

  “look up i am back”

  In the time that they’d spent in the English department at Eleanor Roosevelt, Robby and Dory had both been named Teacher of the Year with surprising frequency. Once in a while an art teacher with a head sprouting dreadlocks, or the unusually lenient Spanish teacher, Señor Mandelbaum, busted up the monopoly, but for years at a time husband and wife had predictably passed the honor from hand to hand.

  It was as if they had each said to the other:

  Okay, this year you be the better teacher. This year you be the one who remains in the classroom tacking up pictures of J. D. Salinger and Maya Angelou, with captions like, “For Chrissakes, Jerry, You Were Never a Phony,” or, “So Why Does It Sing, Maya?”

  Meanwhile, I’ll be the one who ducks out the moment school is over, telling the class over my shoulder, “Don’t forget to check eSignment for tonight’s homework. And for those of you who can’t stand to wait, I’m asking you to read until the part where he sees Daisy Buchanan again.”

  “Wait, until who sees who?” someone would ask, but it was too late; their teacher was out of there, done, gone.

  Robby and Dory gracefully and uncomplainingly took on those roles, and then, the following year, they switched. They had met at a hotel in Minneapolis during an education conference in the earliest, most know-nothing days of their teaching lives. Teachers flowed through the revolving doors, laughing, gesturing, using the words “curriculum” and “curricular.” Robby Baskin, twenty-four years old then, an age when even not really being beautiful falls under the category of beautiful, was in the bar off the polished hotel lobby, sitting on a high stool with his long, weedy legs hanging down. He was talking with two female teachers, all their voices loose and careless, and Dory Millinger of Brooklyn, aged twenty-three, waded closer.

  He was telling the women, “Here is a sentence that one of my students actually wrote: ‘At the time that Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were writing, the world was very much as it is today, though to a lesser extent.’ ”

  The women laughed as if he’d told them something uproarious and filthy. Dory thought that if she’d been sitting there she would’ve laughed a lot too, for she would have wanted him to like her. She’d seen him on a panel that afternoon called “Young Teacher as Mentor/Friend,” and he’d been funny and courteous and brief, unlike the man sitting beside him, who’d held fast to the microphone. Robby Baskin among the women now seemed just as much at ease, and when she came closer and told him she’d liked what he’d said on the panel, that those were the same issues she thought about when she was teaching too, his face became vivid and alert.

  “Oh, no, wait,” he said as she turned to walk back into the crowd, and then he caught up with her, taking his drink and arching and angling among the other teachers, going past the stickthin, Ichabod Crane types and the pigeon-breasted older females with their brooches (for some reason, teachers liked brooches). A table was free at the big picture window with its curtain of hanging metal beads, and they sat there alone, two young, neophyte high school teachers, one from Brooklyn, one from Pettier, Vermont, fingering the already fingered nuts in their little tin bowl.

  Inevitably, on the last night of the conference, they slept together. There had been a closing party in the hospitality suite, and they stayed as long as they could, until finally they were pinned in a corner with a few other young teachers while an old, distinguished Southern education pioneer grew agitated about the state of the American high school. “Come,” Robby said when the man went to get some cheese. Many flights up, in Dory’s hotel room, she lay back with her head squarely on the pillow, and Robby Baskin sat above her, both of them smiling as if they’d won something. There, where the walls were covered with a twiney fabric that probably rendered them perfect vessels for sound transmittal, they discovered that their long, similar bodies worked well together. Robby was fervent, effective in bed. He buried himself in her; his heart worked so hard it seemed like a thing that might leap away. She thought that she could do this with him forever, watching as time and life slipped away, as other people went to jobs and made dinner and ironed and talked.

  In bed, at first and then later, when he visited her in Brooklyn, and even much later, when he left Vermont for good and moved in with her, they shouted in big voices, or squeaked or hummed with industry and focus. They both noticed that they perspired roughly the same amount, and it was never overpowering, but instead more like a delicate broth. Chickeny, Robby commented once. The bouillon of love.

  Robby was a quiet man, straightforward and reliable, and when the time came, he flexibly transformed himself into a good husband and father. None of it was much of a stretch. Together they decided to change their last names to something invented and new. They were casting off their old families, their old lives; why not cast off their names too? “Lang” was decided upon in the middle of the night. It was a neutral, appealing name; the single syllable seemed easygoing, much the way they imagined themselves. They free-associated to various good-sounding “lang” words: “languid,” “language,” even “langoustines,” those tiny lobsters they both loved and had eaten by the bucket that summer. The name was chosen, and the old names fell away, just as their old, unattached selves did too.

  At Elro, Dory Lang was looked up to and beamed at. Robby Lang was often asked to direct the high school play, and he also served as the faculty liaison for the literary magazine, The New Deal. Before school, he would sit and talk earnestly with the kids about their poems and stories and the lithographs of their grandmothers’ hands. Students often confided in both of them, and so did other faculty members. Fifteen years passed, and everyone knew the kind of marriage the Langs had, the stability and reciprocity, the lack of sexism, the love and the passion.

  Women admired the way Dory and her husband loved each other, and she knew this because they occasionally told her. Once, after seeing the Langs quickly kiss goodbye before Robby went off on an overnight field trip with his class, Dory’s friend Bev Cutler, the guidance counselor, seemed to redden slightly. It was as if she had been caught observing the Langs in an explicit moment. Or maybe she had been caught longing for something of her own, explicitly. “Oh, you two; it’s really something,” was what she said. Everyone understood that, although the Langs were past forty, they still often wanted to do various elaborate things to each other. They were entirely free to do whatever they wanted, sensation hitting them, pow, pow, pow, like light hail popping against their bodies.

  Unlike Bev and her hedge-fund manager husband Ed, Dory and Robby had a good amount to say to each other at the end of the day. Because they worked in the same building, in the same department, they always enjoyed the time at night when they could slowly go over all that had happened to them, beat by beat. “Tell me about lunch with Leanne,” Robby would say as they arranged themselves in their bed, bodies close, and she’d tell him what she and her closest friend, Leanne Bannerjee, the school psychologist, had talked about.

  “She’s still threat
ening to leave and join a practice with her friend Jane in the city,” Dory would tell him. “To become a teenologist.”

  “That is not a real word.”

  “I know, but they make a lot of money. They make house calls to ‘talk to teens.’ They go on reality TV as experts. It’s pretty disgusting.” Leanne was twenty-nine, almost absurdly beautiful, tiny, vulnerable but confident, and the girl students in particular desperately attached themselves to her.

  “And what about McCleary? That’s still going on?” Robby would ask quietly, as though afraid their teenaged daughter Willa might hear them and be given information that only they knew: that Leanne and the married, astonishingly stiff school principal, Gavin McCleary, had been involved since last spring.

  “Yes,” Dory would say. “Still going on. Also, that foreign-car dealer, Malcolm. And the bartender, Carlos, from Peppercorns. But yes, McCleary; she’s still seeing McCleary.”

  “I see him in the halls,” Robby would say, “and I think: That’s who she chooses? These things are always such a mystery.”

  “Attractions.”

  He would nod. Sometimes when McCleary stood onstage to speak at an assembly, Dory imagined him in bed with Leanne. That same wooden, formal voice that said, “Girls’ field hockey, Team B, will meet out front after school for team pictures,” also certainly spoke intimate and startling phrases. She agreed with her husband about how mysterious it all was.

  “Oh, and next topic,” Dory would say to Robby. “What happened with The Odyssey? Did they respond at all to the part where Telemachus says that line . . . what is it exactly; I always get it wrong.”

  Robby would recite, “‘I am that father whom your boyhood lacked / and suffered pain for lack of.’” Then together they would finish it off: “‘I am he.’”