by Meg Wolitzer
Leanne’s friends took pleasure in hearing bulletins from the world of the single and multiply sexually active. The people she’d kept in touch with from graduate school were either in long relationships or completely unattached. “Married to my cable box,” a rueful psychologist friend had e-mailed her recently. “We are renewing our vows on a monthly basis.” But all of Leanne’s friends here in Stellar Plains were paired off and set for life. Everyone she knew from the high school went home at night to a husband or wife, or, in a couple of instances, a same-sex partner. It was highly unusual in this suburb for a woman to be involved with a few different men at one time, but this was the way Leanne chose to live. Dory Lang, not one to judge—except when it came to her own newly sexually active teenaged daughter, about whom she was prurient and, basically, deranged—had instructed Leanne, “Your role is to sleep with various men for those of us who don’t.”
By virtue of being beautiful and tiny, Leanne Bannerjee had rarely been alone in her life. She had a budlike delicacy that made men often gasp in delight and strain to speak in couplets. How small and perfect they thought she was, and how ethnically exciting. In bed once, a man had cried out, “Oh, Leanne—oh, fuck—you are . . . vindaloo!” Back in college she had been pursued continually by unusual-looking men. One of her boyfriends was so blond he had practically been albino, and with her black sheen of hair and maple-brown skin, they were a startling couple. People told them, “You guys should make babies someday, just so we can see what they’d look like.”
Leanne liked the broad backs of men, their surprisingly deep voices. She liked how the biggest, strongest man in the world could become passive and awed in bed, or the way someone inarticulate and mute could become operatic. Different men offered different pleasures, and as long as she was physically up to the task—and, actually, didn’t see it as a task—then Leanne could enjoy a variety that most people lacked as they grew older. It would be sad to give up variety, and instead to say, well, I need just one thing. Just one good old thing.
When she’d first moved to New Jersey to take the job at Elro two years earlier, various men had suddenly sprung up from the earth as if through spontaneous generation. No one had ever seen these men before, and Leanne knew that after she left Stellar Plains, which she would probably do in a couple of years, no one was likely ever to see them again. In recent months, a few different men had been in and out of her one-bedroom singles condominium, that place with the harvest-hued carpeting and sliding glass doors and the low-slung futon. There was, among them, a long-faced, mournful man named Malcolm Bean who sold foreign cars. In this slow economy he had time on his hands, and he often called Leanne at night and asked if he could come see her.
They’d smoke a joint together in her condo, which still smelled of paint, and maybe for some reason always would. As she lay with Malcolm in a thinning nest of smoke, she imagined the students seeing her and saying, “No offense, Dr. Bannerjee, but you’re a hypocrite.” It was true that she always counseled them not to smoke weed—“It makes you stupid and boring”—and always, if they insisted on having sex, which she also did not advise, to use condoms. With the joint at her lips, and Malcolm Bean with his sardonic, curly mouth on first one breast and then the other, Leanne found herself in an unambiguous state of ecstasy. He was a good lover, a good fuck, lightly seedy in the way she had always thought of salesmen, maybe unfairly. Like some salesmen, he hustled you and yet gave the illusion that you could take all the time you needed to make up your mind or have an orgasm or whatever was the relevant goal. He spent forever on her, but she was eager to get there, to push ahead, even though no one said she had to. Twice, she was ashamed to admit, she had hurried Malcolm along even though the condom remained vacuum-sealed in its wrapper, in the top drawer of her jewelry box all the way across the room. And if he had any condoms stowed somewhere on his person, he certainly wasn’t running to put one on. She was idiotic in this way, and in other ways too, just like the kids at school whose lives were in her hands.
Also, as of recently, she had begun seeing Carlos Miranda, a part-time bartender at Peppercorns. Once, when Leanne had gone there after work with her friends Dory and Bev, the young man lingered near them, drying a glass for an excessive amount of time. “Someone likes you,” Bev had said, lifting a frozen drink to her lips. Women always needed this kind of drink; maybe life thrust them down so far, Leanne thought, that they needed something bright and sweet in order to lift them back up. This seemed a parallel to how women always needed to sit together in restaurants, pulling apart white-meat chicken and leafy greens like raptors.
“Someone does not like me,” Leanne had said.
Except that wasn’t true; Bev was sharp-eyed about the attractions people had for other people. The next night, Leanne went back to Peppercorns alone, ordering another drink at the bar. Carlos, narrow-hipped, twenty-five, with a fluffy soul patch on his chin, asked her if she wanted to meet when he got off work at one, and she had said yes she did. She went home for a while and yawned a good deal and glanced at some files—almost every student who was tested seemed to have some degree of attention deficit—and then she went back to Peppercorns, where she waited for this man to emerge. He was a virtual stranger and she was probably about to sleep with him. The idea agitated her as she sat in her car with the heater on; it caused a twitch to pop up in one eye. She saw in him a future of easy, beautiful sex—sensation without other ambitions lurking around the border. He would only want to lie with her, and play with her hair after a good, bracing round of lovemaking. She was right. Carlos was a young man and he wasn’t troubled by the anxieties of men the age of Malcolm Bean. Being a bartender wasn’t his whole identity. Carlos was sleepy and affectionate, casual but always courteous. Once, while she slept, he washed the dishes in her sink, even though they were not dishes he had eaten from.
Leanne only found that unalloyed sweetness in Carlos, and not in either of the others. The idea of choosing one person, wearing his ring, putting his art on her walls, owing him the courtesy of telling him her whereabouts, was endlessly depressing. Her parents still held hopes that she would enter into an arranged marriage; they knew of a young man named Robert Gopal who taught at a dental school, and who would jump at the chance to meet her. If only Leanne would allow them to set up a date! But she never would.
Tonight she climbed the front steps to Dory and Robby’s house for the faculty potluck, her covered dish in her arms. Though it was a Saturday night and she had come alone, that would change soon, at least in a private and compelling way, for Gavin McCleary was also coming. The principal hadn’t missed a single potluck in all the years he’d been at the school. Dory Lang was the only one who knew about Leanne and him; Leanne had decided to trust her with this information, because once the affair had started the previous spring, how could she not tell anyone? Sex always needed to be spoken about, though it could never adequately be conveyed. Dory was trustworthy; solid and well married and without jealousy or unhappiness. When Leanne told her, Dory had been surprised and concerned but also, significantly, loving. She hadn’t condemned her, or said in a low, superior voice, “But he’s married, Leanne.”
The front door flung open now and Robby Lang appeared, the warm yellow light of the house behind him and around him. “Leanne, great, you made it,” he said, as if she had traveled far, on snowshoes.
“I come bearing hummus,” was all she could think to say.
“Excellent,” said Robby. He was the kind of man who always made you feel that the thing you’d just said was perfect. He found a way to make the kids feel that they had given an interesting answer in class, even when their answers were off by a century or a hemisphere. He made you understand why other women wanted to have husbands, even though Leanne did not.
She stamped her feet on the mat, then kissed Robby on both cheeks, the way everyone had started doing some years ago. These people, her colleagues, whom she saw every day at school; because it was the evening, she now had to kiss them. It
made no sense, but these were the rules. Leanne carried her dish down the hallway; during the ride here, the dish had sat beside her on the empty passenger seat. Every once in a while, as she’d driven through the frozen streets, she’d reached beside her to make sure it wasn’t about to go sliding off the seat and onto the floor. When you were on your own in life, even a short car trip with a dish beside you became a concern. If you had a steady boyfriend beside you, however, you just handed him the dish and said “Here,” and he sat with it on his big lap, or else you sat with it on your lap while he drove you to your shared destination.
McCleary would not be bringing anything with him; Dory would have told him that there was no need to. His wife, Wendy, who had chronic fatigue syndrome, was too ill to go to parties, and McCleary was much too busy to stand in their kitchen making something to bring to a faculty potluck. “Just come, Gavin,” Dory would have told him. “We’ve got more than enough.”
He wasn’t here yet; Leanne knew this as soon as she walked into the house. She would have felt him already, would have picked up his scent or the invisible feelers he threw out toward her from a great distance. More than that, she would have seen his car out on the street, even though it was small and ordinary and probably speckled with snow. What kind was it again, a Stanza, a Triad, a Dasher, a Prancer? It was some mediocre car that Malcolm the car connoisseur would have mocked. But her eye would have gone to it because it was his. She both wanted the principal here and did not. He was one of the three men who had some claim over her right now; if she knew that either Malcolm or Carlos was going to come here this evening, she would have felt the same kind of mixed anticipation.
Now, in the Langs’ house, stepping under the archway that led to the living room, Leanne Bannerjee looked around at all the faces out of their school context. One by one she took note of them: the two different math teachers; the nurse; the self-confident if grating new drama teacher; the biology teacher and his longtime boyfriend. They were all here, but she already understood that McCleary was not. Not yet.
“Leanne!” Bev called from the couch, where she sat sunken beside her husband Ed, a guarded, bald, thin man in an expensive sport jacket. “We’re like ying and yang,” Leanne had once heard Bev say, and Dory had quietly corrected her: “Yin and yang.” “That’s what I said,” Bev had said.
Together, though, the Cutlers were really most like the Sprats from the nursery rhyme—one who could eat no fat, the other who could eat no lean—and everyone certainly thought this, but no one would ever say it aloud because they wouldn’t have wanted to be offensive in any way. Bev Cutler had improbably become a good friend of Leanne’s. She was twenty-three years older and so unhappy in the thick swaddling of her own body; it wasn’t Bev’s fault that she had slowly gained so much weight and was now bumblebee-shaped at age fifty-two. The other women secretly vowed never to let this happen to themselves.
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 f
oil, 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.
