The Uncoupling Read online

  They had these little routines, which were all part of the patter and rhythm of their full home life. Rounding it out was Willa, who, at the time, was a high school sophomore, self-involved, uncertain, spending her time noodling around on different websites, or frequently in the deep, cool, virtual landscapes of Farrest. The Langs lived in a small, pretty white Colonial on Tam o’ Shanter Drive in Stellar Plains, with an upright piano and walls hung thick with artwork and photographs, and with their twelve-year-old yellow Labrador, Hazel, who had resolved the potential problem of loss of desire by lying curved on the front hall rug each day and licking the brambles of her underside until she was soaked and zonked. She needed no one else for love; she was satisfied by her own long and faithful self.

  The Langs had waves of students who stayed in touch for years after they graduated (“A Shout-Out to Ms. Lang,” they wrote as e-mail subject headings, or, “Yo, Mr. L!” they bellowed from across the parking lot at Greens and Grains). The students lurked on the edges of their teachers’ lives for years, and brought bulletins from their own lives, which over time began to include lovers, ambitions, an upward trajectory. It was only when everything settled down for them and became permanent and maybe disappointing that their former teachers never heard from them again.

  Robby and Dory were fixed in place themselves, but all was well. It might have gone on like this for a long, long time. It might never have changed. They might have remained one of those miracle couples who never stop, never quit, and whom everyone regards in head-shaking awe. They might have stayed at an impressive pitch, sexually, even after so much time had gone by. But one night in December, a school night, a strange and unnoticed but also undeniable spell was cast. At least, this was when the spell was cast upon Dory Lang, though of course she did not know it. And since she did not know it, she had no idea what had set it in motion either. Robby had shoveled the snow and Dory had made dinner, and then they’d sat down and eaten it with Willa. Dinner-table conversation ensued, then came to a natural close as they stood to clear the plates. Finally they said goodnight to their daughter, and then they climbed the stairs and got into bed.

  For a while, under the pale gray duvet, they talked, murmured, coughed occasionally, made the kinds of remarks they always made, some tender, some dull. And then Robby put a hand on her shoulder to turn her toward him, as he often did, and what she felt was a stunning bolt of cold air strike her body. A formidable wind seemed to have flown in through the half-inch of open window, but had then immediately found its way under the duvet and under Dory Lang’s old, thin, stretchy, skim-milk-colored nightgown.

  It was the cold air of the spell, come to claim her. Other spells were far more dramatic, accompanied as they were by lightning, or a sizzling clang of thunderclap. This spell was more subtle, but still when it first came over a woman it was shocking, perhaps even grotesque, and she didn’t have any idea that she was under it. Dory Lang simply felt as if she was freezing, and then she was aware of a mild disgust, no, even a mild horror at being touched. Certainly not pleasure; none of that for her anymore. Her body momentarily shook—a brief death rattle, a death-of-sex rattle, technically—and then stopped.

  Robby turned her, and she faced him, and his hand was upon her and his mouth was on her face, her neck, and instead of being drawn toward him as usual, all she knew was that she had to find a way out of this moment. Obviously, it wasn’t the first time she’d ever wanted to say no, or had ever said no to him, in bed, but she thought it may have been the first time that she’d felt the need to lie.

  Other times, entirely truthfully, she’d said:

  I’m not in the mood.

  Or:

  I’m tired.

  Or:

  I’m coming down with something.

  Or:

  I’ve got that thing in the morning.

  And all those times, she had been telling the truth. The excuses were real. If Dory Lang said she had a thing in the morning, then she certainly did; there would have been some legitimate event that she needed to rest up for.

  Now, though, under the power of the spell, all Dory could think was that sleeping with your husband after so many years was not at all like sleeping with him when you were young. It was no longer effortless; it was full of effort, and now that she was aware of that effort, how could she ever ignore it again? She was irritated by the realization, and angry. Suddenly she wanted to shake everything up, to take the sweetness and constancy and even the conscientious effort that was apparently now a part of their love life, and throw it away. Destroy what they had.

  Robby was touching her, and she was meant to touch him back, but she couldn’t bear it. She had to say something to him, for he was patiently waiting. “I have that thing in the morning,” she said to her sweet and lovely husband, who had done nothing different, nothing wrong. It was as if the words had been supplied to her by some hidden prompt.

  “What thing?” he pressed, for he also didn’t understand what was happening to his wife.

  Dory paused for a moment. She actually did have something in the morning, she remembered with relief.

  “That conference with Jen Heplauer and her mother,” she said, settling into this alibi, making her voice serious and responsible. “The plagiarism thing.”

  They shifted in the bed, moving apart. All around Stellar Plains, the same low, hard wind was starting to blow in and out of bedrooms, under blankets, nightgowns, skin, and it would keep doing that for weeks, making its circuit, taking its time. That night and over the days and nights that followed, other women, newly enchanted, said to men, “I have that thing in the morning,” or “Sorry, I’m kind of out of it,” or “I can’t see you anymore,” or simply, “We’re done,” or else they just turned away, giving their husbands or partners or boyfriends the long flat of the back like a door in the face.

  Robby sighed and then scratched himself somewhere beneath the blanket; the timbre of the scratch made her think it was the inside of a thigh. It was true that Dory had a conference in the morning—though “conference” was a lofty word to apply to a brief and uncomfortable conversation that would be held in the classroom before school with Jen Heplauer and her mother. She pictured their hopeful, unimaginative Heplauer faces; the gap between Jen’s front teeth, her hair still lying wet from a shower; the mother’s gum-colored pocketbook with all those buckles and knobs. Dory heard the daughter’s defensive, rising voice, and the mother’s echoes, and her own tolerant but ultimately insistent words, repeating herself as many times as it took: “Ms. Heplauer. Jen. Ms. Heplauer. Jen. Listen. I appreciate that you worked hard, Jen, I really do.”

  “I did work hard,” the girl would say, her lower lip on vibrate. “You have no idea how hard I worked, Ms. L. I stayed in when everyone else was going out. I stayed in on a Wednesday night.”

  “You don’t have to keep saying that. I understand that you put in a lot of effort.”

  “And did footnotes,” her mother would murmur.

  “Yes. Footnotes,” Jen would add, mother and daughter looking at each other and nodding, a unified front.

  “That’s not at issue,” Dory would say, and she would try to get them to understand. Eventually they would give in, the way people always gave in to teachers, those bullies. She’d shepherd them from the classroom just as the first bell was ringing and the rest of the students began to gallop and flood toward her, wanting something, wanting everything.

  In bed, Robby understood that this was what awaited his wife in the morning. It wasn’t as if Dory needed to fall asleep immediately so that she could be in fighting shape for Jen Heplauer and her mother. It wasn’t as if she needed to rest up for some kind of Ironman Challenge, and they both knew it.

  He looked at her in slight confusion. “Oh, okay,” he said, remembering. “The plagiarism thing.” He was trying to figure out the link between the conference in the morning and the inadvisability of sex right now. He was stumped.

  “She doesn’t even understand that she pl
agiarized,” Dory went on, using Jen Heplauer and her mother as a human shield. “She thinks that you can just go on Booxmartz and read a summary of the book, then read other people’s analyses of it—other people’s actual thoughts, the brainpower of strangers who you’ll never meet—and write them down and hand them in. Because why actually just sit there with the book trying to come up with something of your own, right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “And you can take these little pieces of information that you read on these websites, as if you’re building a nest or making paella,” she continued with new conviction. “And suddenly it’s your work. You actually tell yourself that you worked very hard. And you believe it. It’s suddenly all yours. It’s suddenly . . . Jen Heplauer’s! I just can’t get over it. She’s like someone in a dream.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, they’re all like someone in a dream,” Robby said, and they grimly snickered together at the idea of a whole generation prodded by pixels and clicks, and link after link that sent them leapfrogging in search of something increasingly abstract that they thought they wanted. The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.

  Dory thought of Jen Heplauer and her friends, and her daughter Willa and her friends, all of them constantly checking for news or non-news from one another. All of them lately logging onto Farrest, spending many hours in its puzzlingly simple mossy green groves, feeling as if they were getting an infusion of air and sunlight and vitamin D. She thought of Willa’s avatar of choice on Farrest—a sleek purple ninja—and she imagined her daughter stalking silently across the grass to locate a patch that was untrampled by elves or dry-docked mermaids or big-eyed androids or various woodland animals. Dory could picture her daughter’s ninja-self free of the little plantation of whiteheads that grew in a scatter at the hairline of her real self. She pictured Willa standing in one place, pulsating lightly, the way these animated creatures always seemed to do when they weren’t in motion.

  All of which forced real-life parents to make curdled and no doubt ignorant remarks about what their kids were missing, even as the parents themselves were drawn to their own screens, where they sat slack every night before a radiant blast. As the hours disappeared, sometimes they purchased slippers, or read about a newly discovered species of lizard, or about a disease they feared they had, or about the unmysterious wars that quietly continued in Iraq and Afghanistan, as unseen as fires burning underground. Leanne had recently remarked that if you wanted to get to know someone’s unconscious, all you had to do was take a look at everything they had looked at and done on the Internet over the course of a couple of hours when they were all alone.

  After a second or two now, Robby’s hand fell away, openpalmed. He’d had to accept that there would be no touching tonight. The closeness of love had temporarily been replaced by the closeness of railing together, predictably, against this brave new world and all that was shallow or incomprehensible or life-frittering about it. Dory kissed his head in consolation, smelling the tang of the tea tree oil shampoo they both used.

  She said, “I love you.”

  “Love you too,” he said.

  They did; they loved each other.

  She moved farther away from him, as if there hadn’t been the suggestion of sex at all. It was as if he had made it up, and it was all in his head like the desires of a man toward a woman he’s never spoken to in his life, rather than toward a woman whose body he has been in and around so many times that it was staggering to them both. Once, driving home from a faculty potluck, probably a little too wine-headed, they had actually tried to figure out how many times they’d slept together. “Is it even a doable calculation?” Robby had wondered. “Wouldn’t you have to have kept diaries about it over the years, like Pepys?” They attempted to count every sexual experience they’d shared, but by the time they arrived at their house they realized that somehow marriage itself had made it all uncountable. At first they’d been able to think of various episodes that had taken place before they’d gotten married, pinning them to different, specific events: sex the night they’d been to the Spanish place with those good, slippery olives; sex in front of the stuttering air conditioner during that heat wave. Then, though, the marriage began, and not too long after Willa was born the suburban years began. And though those years had still been layered with pleasure and humor and joy, distinguishing one time from another was much more difficult.

  Now, in bed, Dory imagined telling a couple of other women in the teachers’ room tomorrow morning about what had happened here tonight. “It’s strange,” Dory could have said to them. “In bed last night, when Robby touched me, my first thought was, Please, please don’t.”

  Had Dory admitted this, another teacher might have looked up from scraping the last of her yogurt with a plastic spoon, and said, “Funny. Same thing happened to me last night too.” Across the room, by the coffee machine, still another female teacher might have looked up as she flattened and smoothed a filter, wondering if she should also join this conversation, because, interestingly, the exact same thing had happened to her within the past few days.

  Dave Boyd, the biology teacher, might have watched from the side, not really relating to any of it. He was a gay man, and he would never be affected by the spell. Apparently he and his boyfriend Gordon, a landscape architect, would continue to throw themselves upon each other in their restored carriage house without any interruption. Only women were enchanted that winter—specifically, women who were in some way connected sexually to men. The men, it seemed, stayed the same, never changing, only responding to circumstances. But Dory didn’t say a word to anyone in the teachers’ room, and no one else did either. What she had done in bed was private. She had no idea that what was starting to happen to her would happen all around the high school, and that it would keep happening in waves. It happened mostly to middle-aged women, but also to ones who were older or, notably, younger. The spell touched some teenaged girls, who had so recently experienced the first shuddering illogic of love, only to find themselves sharply pulling back from it, leaving boys shocked and thoroughly undone.

  “Really?” a boy might say to a girl, his voice splitting in the middle. “We can’t do this anymore? Never?” How could he have been introduced to all that beauty, only to have it taken away?

  Suddenly, the sex lives of these girls and women caved in and collapsed, just as the women had been warned they would someday ; suddenly, they collapsed them. Dory knew she was obviously much too young for this moment to be considered the someday she had been warned about. She was still on her own upward trajectory. She was only just past forty, after all, and forty didn’t mean sixty. Forty was still rapacious, viable, possibly fertile, in the mix. Forty was way too soon for this to happen. Forty didn’t need to lie on the front hall rug in a patch of sun, licking itself into unconsciousness.

  But the spell had started to come over all of them, seizing them in their separate beds, changing them in an instant. Starting that night, and continuing for quite a while afterward, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped and the windows shook like crazy in their frames, and all over that town, you could hear the word “no.”

  2.

  Pre-enchantment, the only thing at all unusual so far that year was the fact that a drama teacher had joined the faculty of Eleanor Roosevelt. On the first day of school in September she had appeared, quietly and without much fanfare. The other faculty members were aware that she’d been hired, of course, for the principal had sent a memo the previous spring proudly stating that even in these budget-slashing times, money had been found to bring a drama teacher to Elro.

  But everyone, as usual, was distracted and overextended on the first day of school. New teachers were just a part of life; for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else into the homogenizing vortex of 8-to-3 school-day life. Before you knew it, the
fresh new ones seemed to have been teaching there forever, too, or else they didn’t last very long, and were gone before you’d gotten to know them.

  On that day in September, the new drama teacher, Fran Heller, stood in the doorway of the teachers’ room, looking at her surroundings. Usually, nothing much happened in that room; it was a place of mildness, often dullness, and the arrival of a new teacher didn’t seem as though it would change that. Dory knew that the students imagined the place to be a kind of first-class airport lounge, blocked off from their view while they were left in the dreary, waxy halls. They pictured soft lighting and one of those perpetual chocolate fountains, and perhaps a scatter of reclining chairs that performed acupressure massages on the necks and shoulders of faculty members during the interval between classes.

  Once in a while when Dory Lang was in there, the door would open long enough for one of the kids in the hall to get a chance to see inside. One time the art teacher, carrying a few glazed, lumpy ceramic coffee mugs made by students, pushed open the door with her elbow and held it for a substitute teacher who ducked her head as she came in, unsure if she was even allowed in here. During that suspended moment, a snaggle-toothed eleventh-grader planted herself in the doorway in awe. When she saw Dory, she said in a low moan, “Holy crap, Ms. L, this is where you guys go?” as if in disbelief that this plain room was where some of her favorite teachers willingly collected—that this, astonishingly, was it.

  “Yep, this is it!” Dory replied with false cheer, and as the door moved on its pneumatic cylinder and the view narrowed, she saw the girl’s imperfect smile narrow too, for she had been betrayed. Now the girl would have to wonder: what, really, was there to look forward to in adulthood?

  The teachers’ room in Eleanor Roosevelt High School was painted the milky green of glow-in-the-dark stars when the lights are on. The chairs were apparently considered ultra-modern back in the Clinton years, when a truck carried them to the doors of the school and then drove off. There was a midsized refrigerator in which the faculty placed items from home, though sometimes it took on a decisive, acidic tang. (“Abby Means must be storing a vinegar douche in there again,” Dave Boyd would whisper behind his cupped hand.) The occasional poisonous smell inside the refrigerator was evidence that something was silently transmogrifying at the rear of a shelf; that putrefaction was taking place behind the traffic of yogurts and soda bottles and plastic tubs that were brought in each day by Abby Means, a thin, ropy-necked math teacher in her late twenties who sometimes wore vintage poodle skirts and other affected consignment-shop finds, and who was generally disliked.