The Uncoupling (20 page)

“You’re Jason Manousis,” she said when he approached the counter. “You graduated from Elro with my sister,” she added.

“I didn’t graduate,” he said.

“Well, I mean, you were in her class. Tara Clayborn.”

“Yeah, Tara,” he said without recognition. “How’s she doing?”

“Good,” said Marissa. “She’s still out in Palo Alto. I’ll tell her I saw you.”

He nodded, and they both knew that she would say to her sister,
Remember Jason Manousis, who got that girl pregnant and then went off to Afghanistan? I saw him. God, it’s extremely sad.
There was no way around this outcome, and Marissa already felt guilty about it, as if she had betrayed him in advance, though she had never meant to do so.

“Daddy, I want ice cream,” his son announced.

“If he really wants ice cream,” Marissa said, “I would take him somewhere else. He’ll hate this.”

“We’re fine here,” said Jason Manousis, but it was no surprise when, after he ordered a cup of original regular, the boy spit out the first mouthful with a vengeance, shocked.

“They add the tang chemically,” Marissa explained to Jason. “I’m not supposed to say this, but the taste is basically fake. You’re supposed to think it’s got all these healthy live cultures in it, but it’s got nothing.” She insisted on giving him his money back, and then she sent them on their way, but not before hearing a little bit from him about his time in Afghanistan, where he had taken shrapnel to his eye.

The war was a disgusting waste of energy and time and life, he said to her. “No one can ever win it, and everyone knows that, but there we are, acting like we can,” he said. “The war’s intractable,” he told Marissa. “Intractable,” he repeated, as though he’d just discovered the word. “We had no choice at first, but now we do. We shouldn’t be adding more troops like this. It’s going nowhere. It’s a rotten mistake. It all just sucks, it really does.”

He spoke in a soft rush, as though they knew each other intimately, or as though the connection with her sister gave them a reason to be talking. Her sister Tara had barely known him; they’d been in the same grade years earlier, but Tara Clayborn had been an academically fast-tracked girl, and Jason Manousis had been a poor student with no interest in anything at the time but smoking weed, and his girlfriend Cami. When Jason got Cami pregnant, the two of them had headed off into life together like two people holding hands and jumping feet-first into a volcano. They soon became a cautionary tale about teenaged sexual activity: Jason and Cami and their mistake of a baby with that mistake of a name, Trivet.

Then Jason had gone to Afghanistan, and now here he was at the mall, no longer a joke, no longer just the duncey young father of a baby he couldn’t even name right. He was a veteran of war with a face that could not be loved unless you also loved the person inside it. And who would do that? Jason and Cami were long broken up and now shared custody of their son, though Cami had apparently proved to be a less than ideal mother, going off on drinking benders from which she could not be retrieved for weeks.

Marissa ascertained that Jason Manousis was on disability, and that he hoped to find a job in electronics. “If you know anything . . .” he said, perfunctorily. His life, described by him without self-pity, seemed as unreal to Marissa as the life of a character in a play. It was as though he was speaking lines that weren’t really true, except there in front of her was the evidence of his partly ruined face, and she couldn’t imagine how to make sense of it. She whose worst problem was not having spending money or free time, for in addition to rehearsals, three evenings a week she had to go to her job. She whose parents were always anxious about money, warning their children that they had to keep their grades up and take part in an inhumane number of extracurricular activities in order to get college scholarships when the time came. There was no wiggle room in the Clayborn family, but of course, with Jason Manousis’s life set into relief against her own, she remembered that hers wasn’t a tragedy.

So began their friendship. She went to work at Froze, and at some point in the evening he wandered in to see her. Marissa noticed that people looked at Jason’s facial disfigurement in a frank and shocked manner, as if when confronted by such a sight they forgot they were adults and reverted to some primitive child-state in which you were
allowed
to stare and make comments to yourself or your friends, which might be overheard by the man with the half-ruined face.

Jason and Triv returned to the store on Saturday night, when the mall was as crowded as it would ever be—not as crowded as it had been in the old days, but not a ghost town either. Kids from the high school roamed listlessly in packs; from behind the stainless-steel counter she saw Danny Fratangelo and Doug Zwern. Danny had once tried to copy from Marissa’s history exam, and had been angry when she wouldn’t move her hand to give him better access. “Why didn’t you let me?” he’d complained after class, following her down the hall. “I would have let
you
,” he said, which was an absurd idea. She didn’t remember ever having any reason to speak to him after that. Doug Zwern was known at school as a notorious dealer of J Juice, that liquid drug that made people hyper and gave an animated edge to everything they saw. Occasionally people on J Juice lay back happily in bathtubs or pools and drowned; sometimes they didn’t sleep for days. Mostly they had a good time. The J Juice trade was apparently lucrative lately; it was said that Doug Zwern was saving up to buy himself a car by the time he got his license. As Danny and Doug passed back and forth in front of Froze a few times, like a repeating loop of scenery out a car window in a lowbudget movie, Marissa felt a current of wariness.

Triv said, “Dad, I don’t want this.”

“You don’t have to eat it,” his father said. “We are just visiting with our friend Marissa.” Jason smiled a little, which pulled at the skin under his bad eye. He was challenging her, seeing whether two people who didn’t know each other at all could be friends, could strike up something that had meaning. But
why
would they do that? What was the point? Marissa didn’t know, and yet they stood there like friends, talking more about the war, and about Kunar Province, where he’d spent a lot of time, and about the other vets he had become friends with, a few who had been killed, and about fatherhood.

Then, as if the details of her life were remotely close in importance to his, he asked her about school, and being in the play. He emphasized that she should call him if she ever needed anything, and he asked her to enter his number into her own phone, which she did, feeling generous for doing it, for she was as likely to need his help as she was to need an academic boost from Danny Fratangelo. But while Marissa couldn’t imagine needing anything from Jason, she appreciated how kind he was. So much kinder than Ralph Devereux or Dean Stanley. Marissa had her script out because she’d been studying her lines again, and Jason said, “Actually, do you need help with that?”

To be polite, again, she said, “Yeah, I do. There’s this one part where Lysistrata says an oath, and another woman has to repeat the lines back to her. You could help me with that. You could be the other woman, Calonicé.”

“You don’t have a guy’s part for me?”

“This is the section I need to learn.”

“Okay,” he said. “I can deal.” She handed him the script, closed her eyes, and back and forth they went. Her voice, as it always was when she had to read aloud, became full-throated and emphatic:

Danny Fratangelo and Doug Zwern entered the store as Marissa and Jason rehearsed the scene; they watched them from the doorway, then came up to the counter and stood in elaborate scrutiny of the board and all its choices. Marissa put the script down and turned to them.

“Hey,” she said flatly.

“Hey, Marissa Clayborn,” said Doug Zwern. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Do you get free ice cream?”

“It’s not ice cream.”

“No it’s not,” said Jason.

“Hey,” said Doug Zwern. “You’re Jason Manousis.” Jason nodded. “You served. We’re supposed to thank you, man. So thank you.”

Jason paused. “You’re welcome,” he finally said. His son danced around his father, saying, “Can Marissa come out into the mall?”

Doug and Danny looked at father and son, and then, in curiosity, at Marissa. They clearly couldn’t understand this scene—what someone like Marissa would be doing with the physically destroyed Jason Manousis. And they couldn’t just leave it a mystery, they couldn’t just thank him for his service to their country and go. They finally looked at each other in confusion and irritation, and then something built between them; the two boys twitched at each other, gearing up.

Danny Fratangelo said to Doug Zwern, “The school play is Greek. You ever learn Greek things, Doug? Like, mythology?”

Doug just looked at him. “I don’t know where you’re going with this, Danny.”

“Just answer me.”

“Okay, good. Who’s your favorite character from Greek mythology?”

“What? How would I know?”

“Pick one.”

“Oedipus.”

“He’s not mythology. You know who mine is? Cyclops. Just saying,” Danny added.

There was a long pause, and then Doug said, softly, “Cyclops. You
douche,
” but still he began to laugh, and Danny laughed quietly too. Marissa couldn’t even stand to look at Jason during this. Instead she kept looking hard at Doug and Danny, those loser clowns, those
pricks
. Laughing and falling against each other, they left the store before anyone could say another word.

 

 

 

L
ate that night, after her parents and her siblings were asleep, Marissa Clayborn sat on her canopy bed with her laptop open before her. She went online and searched “Afghanistan” and “intractable,” and the results tumbled in. Everyone apparently agreed with Jason Manousis’s assessment of the war, or more to the point, he agreed with theirs. Despite the counterinsurgency, the allies, the whole nine yards, Afghanistan was impossible, a failure. She was embarrassed that she had known so little about the war up until now; that she lived in such a liberal, harmonious town but had thought about the subject so infrequently and lazily.

Marissa went onto Farrest to see who was there, for it calmed her down whenever she was agitated, as she was now. She soon became a hawk, flying around the top of the screen, where the green world gave way to who knew what. Below her was Willa Lang, pacing back and forth in a patch of forest.

“r u ok?” she asked Willa, even though she knew that this would only lead to a conversation about the breakup between Willa and Eli, which was all that Willa Lang could think about or talk about or write about.

“not really,” Willa wrote, looking up at her with those cartoony ninja eyes. “i cant tell u how hard it is with me and eli. and my mom wont leave me alone, surprise surprise. i mean what does she think, i am going to have a breakdown???”

“well r u?”

“of course not. but its very very hard. i knew we wouldnt last, so I had to end it. but i still feel so much for him. i am sure u know what thats like.”

For consistency’s sake, and out of pride, Marissa could only tell Willa that yes, she understood. Then Marissa took off again above the trees into the pale green sky, and as she flew, she thought that soon she might have some kind of hookup with Jason Manousis. It was the right thing to do, and he would be grateful. They would go to his apartment where he lived alone, out on the turnpike, past Peppercorns and past the DVDs and Chinese Specialty Items store, and across the way from a shopping center that used to hold that Ethiopian restaurant that she and Jade Stills had been to once, and had gotten such a kick out of because they’d had to eat their meal entirely with their hands. They had tried to go back, but the restaurant had been gone; they hadn’t patronized it enough. No one had, and they both felt bad. Marissa knew Jason’s building ; it had a sagging outdoor wooden stairway like a motel, and she pictured him standing with his key chain, squinting with his good eye and trying to find the key that fit the door. She hated the idea of him out there, struggling, being alone. She would go to bed with him in his apartment; it wouldn’t matter that she wouldn’t particularly like it. Kissing Jason Manousis would be a serious act of kindness; it would return him to his former self, restoring his eye, and his appearance, and his psyche.

Now, flying around Farrest, she spoke the line from the play:
I will have naught to do whether with lover or husband . . .

It seemed all at once like the most exquisite and tantalizing line imaginable, and suddenly, as she kept flying, she entered a dense, cold patch of air, as though the atmosphere at the very top of Farrest had changed. Her bird-self and her girl-self were now both freezing. Was it the temperature in the bedroom or in Farrest? For a brief and slightly delirious moment, she could not tell the difference between the two worlds, or her two selves. A cold wind slapped Marissa along her shoulders and arms and face, and also struck the chest feathers of her hawk’s body.