The Uncoupling (11 page)

Coming in from the kitchen was Ruth Winik, here without her sculptor husband, Henry Spangold. The strong, buoyant gym teacher had three young children at home, twins and a baby, and she and her husband split shifts and tag-teamed each other in order to have something resembling a social life on weekends. “Henry couldn’t come. He’s home nursing,” Ruth repeated cheerfully tonight whenever someone asked after him. They were kind of an odd couple, Leanne had always thought. Ruth had a rawboned Nordic look, and emitted an androgynous lesbian vibe. By all accounts she was wild about her equally strapping husband, who used a blowtorch to make metal environmental sculptures, and was always applying for grants from the State of New Jersey, begging for funds to support his copper and his tin and his constantly rusting, crusting iron ore. Like Dory and Robby, the Winik-Spangolds seemed to be a happy couple, though the happiness of others was still a mystery to Leanne, who was made happy by excitement and friction much more than by ease.

The principal had made her uneasy from the start, if only because he himself was an uneasy person. Unlike most of the men she’d been attracted to, Gavin McCleary did not seem aware of himself as a body in space, nor had he seemed aware of her. So of course she had wanted to make him aware. He was handsome in a regulation way: solid, well formed, with a boyish, flattish face and a bristle-headed haircut that gave his pale hair almost a see-through look, like the cross-hatching of a window screen. He was a former high school wrestler, filling all his suit jackets, always tugging at his cuffs before he got up to speak at an assembly. He was far straighter than the men she usually liked, but what could she say? She liked him.

The school psychologist and the school principal had become involved shortly after a meeting last spring about a troubled, silent boy named Howie Cox, who had now moved away from the district, thank God. Howie had been found writing notes to himself during math class. When Abby Means loomed over him and demanded to see what he had written, he’d handed her a piece of graph paper on which were the words “
There will be retribution.”
Abby Means had freaked out—all teachers feared the worst these days—and the boy had been sent down to Leanne’s little chlorinated office, where they talked for a while, and he explained that he was merely writing lyrics to a song he’d been composing, and so she nervously released him.

When she went to see McCleary to discuss the episode, the principal, in his starchy shirt and striped tie, sat across from her and played with a few whimsical items on his desk: a stapler in the shape of a pig, a set of wind-up dentures. He saw her looking at his hand moving the objects, and he said, embarrassed, “When you’re principal, they give you the pigs. And the wind-up dentures.”

“And you have to act like you think they’re funny.”

“Exactly.”

One day when she went into her office she saw that his little pig stapler now sat on her desk. He had been down here to see her, and had left this as a calling card. She immediately went upstairs to return it to him. Gavin McCleary stood up from his desk and walked around to where she stood. The blinds were half-closed, the slats down-tilted, and the room had a sleepy, private-eye’s office kind of light.

He reached out to push the door shut. “I may be really misreading this,” he said quietly, and he put out both his hands and held Leanne’s face, which immediately heated up, and he kissed her on the mouth. She was shocked at how warm and appealing his mouth was, how unbureaucratic.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she heard herself say after they’d both pulled back. She rubbed his head, which felt like velour. Soon she would begin calling him “velour head,” and he would call her “my dove.” He was solid, and he made Malcolm Bean seem like liquid, and made Carlos Miranda seem like some hovering, floating cloud of gas. Gavin was as solid as a slab, a chopping block, and this quality too could excite her. Her tastes were diverse and multiple; she was quietly proud that she hadn’t become only one way, interested only in one thing. She sighed as the big block of principal gathered her against him, and she heard him gasp a little, as if he couldn’t believe his own good luck, as if he’d tricked someone like her into being attracted to someone like him.

Now Bev Cutler, unambiguously fat in a green Chinese silk jacket, came over in the Langs’ living room and whispered to Leanne, “I’m sure you have somewhere better to be on a Saturday night. What time does that nice bartender get off?”

“I have no other plans,” said Leanne. “I’m glad to be here.” But later, actually, she was supposed to see Carlos. They had agreed that she would call him after the potluck was over.

Bev said, “I tell you, I wish I had somewhere else to be.” She motioned toward Ed, who, bored, was playing with his glass of ice. He sucked some of it up into his mouth, then let it fall back into the glass. This happened a few times, like someone rinsing and spitting. Ed Cutler managed a small hedge fund, and though he had been damaged considerably by the downturn, he and Bev were still very rich. They lived in a house far bigger than any other in Stellar Plains, with much more glass, on a road that did not have a sign.

Dory came over and took the hummus from Leanne, stripping it of its foil, then placed it on the dining room table beside an elaborate bouquet of crudités. Purple and cadmium-yellow cauliflower and pale green, pyramidical broccoflower blossomed out like the results of an experiment with irradiated vegetable seeds. All the food that had been brought to the house tonight was gaudy and enticing, except for Leanne’s dumped-from-a-supermarket-tub hummus, which seemed to say:
The person who brought me is the young, sexual one who is involved with three different men. She has no time to spend on potluck. Please excuse her.

Dory said, “You have to try this excellent wine. We just got a few cases.”

“Thanks,” Leanne said, taking a glass. Idly, drifting around the small room with the warmth and cloud of drink in her head, the evening passed, and when she noticed that no one was eating her hummus, she felt strangely protective of it, as if it were her child, and he or she was being ignored on the playground.

“I think it’s going to be a winter of big drinking, at least for me,” Dory said, coming back over.

“Why? Because of Willa and Eli and that whole thing between them? Because you’re worried about her?”

“No, no. Not that.” Dory looked around to see if anyone was listening. “I can’t explain it,” she said. “But things haven’t been great.”

“Talk to me,” said Leanne.

“Just for a sec,” Dory said. The two women went to the window seat and perched there. Leanne looked at Dory expectantly, and her friend’s dependable, maternal face seemed about to fall into unhappiness. Dory began, “You know that Robby and I, we have a great marriage.”

“Of course,” said Leanne, and then she waited. Sometimes, you just had to wait and wait until the other person was ready to speak. It could take a while; it could take forever. Dory had never, in the two years that they had known each other, told Leanne anything particularly dire. Recently, when Willa had started seeing Eli Heller, Dory had had a strange hysterical fit, as if her daughter were twelve years old and sexually active; but beyond that, Dory had always been even-keeled, reliable, constant, content.

“It’s like something came over me,” Dory said with difficulty. “One night, all of a sudden, I just couldn’t do it. And I still can’t, Leanne. It felt so familiar to me. So depressing! And I felt the need to sort of destroy it all.”

“‘
There will be retribution
,’” murmured Leanne.

“What?”

“Just a phrase I heard.”

“I don’t want retribution, that’s the thing. I was happy. And now I’ve just said, okay, goodbye to all that, no more of it. And there’s nothing now, not even as a release. You’d think I’d want that, wouldn’t you? Even just to get rid of tension? I feel twinges still, but I swear it’s only like . . . what do they call that? Phantom limb pain? Why would I act this way?”

“Act what way, exactly? I don’t understand.” Leanne reflexively tilted her head like a bird on a branch, the way she did when someone came into her office to talk.

At that moment Abby Means approached, wearing a cherrybright skirt with squirrel trim, and she said, “Look what I just discovered I can do,” and then she bent her thumb backward so that it touched her wrist. Leanne and Dory just looked at her. Dory, who’d been about to express some specific and real unhappiness to Leanne, forced her face into improvised amusement.

“How did you
just
discover you can do that?” asked Dory. “That’s the kind of thing you discover when you’re nine.”

“I guess I just never tried it before,” said Abby with a little laugh, and Leanne realized that Abby Means was sort of drunk, and that most of the other teachers in the room probably were as well. Maybe Dory was drunk too, and that’s why she seemed so miserable; maybe she had been having a sad-drunk moment, the kind that Carlos told Leanne he witnessed all the time at work, and which had very little significance. People became expressive and full of regret, but as soon as they sobered up, they returned to their inexpressive, regret-making ways.

Drink was in the air now, falling hard upon this party. Usually the high school faculty barely drank, but tonight, because of work, or the snow, or the darkness that had begun to descend each day before the afternoon was technically over, the crowd from Elro guzzled down bottle after bottle of the Langs’ pleasingly decent wine, both red and white. Robby, Leanne saw, kept going over to a carton and pulling out more bottles.

“Screw tops,” she heard him say to Mandelbaum.

“Ah,” said the Spanish teacher. “That sounds dirty.”

“Dirty would be nice,” said Robby.

“Where’s McCleary?” Dave Boyd asked the room. “He get here yet?” Leanne whipped her head around so sharply that something in her neck cracked like a gunshot.

At sometime past nine, Leanne went over to the table and had a look at her hummus, which, still untouched, had formed a pitted, lunar surface. Robby Lang tapped on a glass then and said, “Everyone, listen up.” He liked to make announcements and small speeches, Leanne knew.

“People!” called Dave Boyd, and the other teachers laughed.

“Yes,
people
!” said Robby. “We have something really special for you tonight,
people
.”

“A quiz,” said Dory.

“Actually, a little musical interlude,” Robby said. “It turns out that Fran Heller basically knows every show tune ever written. So please come to the piano, if you’re so inclined.”

The Langs had a small upright, which sat flush against one wall in their living room. It was made of blond wood, roughly the same color as their yellow Lab and their floors and their sofa. A few teachers headed to the piano and consulted seriously with Fran about what they might all sing. Someone begged her to play Sondheim—anything by him at all.

“That might be out of my league,” Fran said. “Robby’s definitely oversold me.” She tried to sound modest, but it was easy to tell that she wasn’t really modest at all.

Soon, with their wineglasses on all surfaces, the assembled faculty of Eleanor Roosevelt High School began to sing. They sang songs from
Guys and Dolls
and
My Fair Lady
, and even the shyest among them could be heard. Abby Means became less detestable when it was revealed how terrible her voice was. She had been going through life wearing garish vintage skirts and singing and speaking thoughtlessly, and as a result being thought badly of, but she really had no idea of her effect on people. Maybe, it occurred to Leanne, she had Asperger’s syndrome.
Yes,
maybe that was it, and it explained so much—the moment in the teachers’ room with Fran Heller and the Diet Splurge, and many, many others. Leanne suddenly felt tender toward Abby Means, and slightly irritable toward Fran Heller.
Go back to where you came from,
Leanne would have liked to whisper to the drama teacher. But the aggressiveness of this thought made her understand that she herself must be as drunk as everyone else.

Outside, snow fell heavily, and in here, the teachers sang and sang. Leanne Bannerjee leaned against the piano and heard her own voice threading through the others. During a pause, when everyone was trying to come up with another song for Fran to play, Mandelbaum said, “It’s too bad that
Lysistrata
isn’t a Broadway musical.”

A few people laughed, and Dave Boyd, in his beautiful gray Shetland sweater, said, “Come on, sing it, Fran. Sing something from your own musical version of
Lysistrata
.”

“What am I supposed to sing, exactly?” Fran asked.

“Oh, extemporize,” said Dave. “Make something up.”

The drama teacher, lively, zealous, and given a chance to show off, ran her hands up and down the keys, stalling for time. “They never asked me to do this at the faculty potlucks in Cobalt,” she said, and then she paused, closed her eyes, and began to play the galloping opening strains of “Oklahoma!”

When she started to sing, her voice was pure and piercing. She had changed the lyrics on the spot, and now she squeezed syllables to fit properly, and she sang,
“Lyssssssss-istrata, where the women go turning down the men . . .”

The laughter was immediate, and everyone insisted she keep going.
“Till the war is stopped
,” she went on
, “there’ll be no cherries popped . . .”

Here, everyone laughed again and clapped, and Fran finished off the line, shrugging, singing,
“And . . . da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daaa . . .”

Then she segued into a standard doo-wop chord progression and began to sing:

The teachers helped her along, and they all offered giddy new lyrics, some of which made no sense at all. Abby Means sang a line about Lysistrata wearing “a feathery hat and lookin’ mighty proud.” Fran Heller, poised on the piano bench, seemed composed, almost rhapsodic in the middle of this attentive crowd. She had an interesting marriage, Leanne knew from Dory. Fran almost never saw her husband, who lived in Michigan. You didn’t need an on-site husband to be happy, Fran Heller seemed to suggest, and of course Leanne agreed with this. You could be a feisty little drama teacher and move to a suburb in New Jersey where you knew absolutely no one, and you could swoop down upon everyone there, and soon you would be directing the school play and gathering the theater crowd of the school around you. They would admire and worship you, and maybe fear your wrath, and then you would have a similar effect on the faculty, and you would sit around a piano entertaining them on a Saturday night. Some of them would be helpless before you.