Synopsis
Book by Wolitzer Meg
Extrait
Chapter 1: Brown-Eyed Girl
What a couple they made, the heterosexual woman and the homosexual man! Not just this particular couple, but all others like them, men and women freed from the netting of sexual love, from the calamities that regularly plagued their more predictably coupled-up friends. They felt sorry for those friends, who always seemed to tangle together in unhappy beds and who fought viciously in the dead of night, the men clattering down flights of stairs, Nikes still unlaced, belts still lolling unbuckled, the women standing at the top in tears, calling out vaguely, "Wait!"
Sex led to crying; this was a universal truth. There were tears in the beginning, when you were young and frightened by desire, and then there were tears at the point of impact, when you realized you had irrevocably begun a life of sex and all its complications. And much later there were tears after you had grown accustomed to sex and understood that it might someday be taken from you. People left each other all the time; people who swore they couldn't live without each other left each other. They managed; they survived. They ate nuts and berries in the wilderness, lived among wolves and crouched by streams to wash. They took classes, adult education workshops in car repair, pottery, perhaps a Romance language. Some of them fled their echoing apartments, the places where he had been and was no longer, cashed in their frequent-flier mileage, upgraded to business-class, and flew somewhere madcap, like Italy. They were in the process of frantically forgetting, and could do what they liked.
Once in Italy, they stared at Titians and Tintorettos with a kind of zeal that would have won them good grades in their college art survey class, although during that class they had mostly slept, for the room was dark and the chair was soft, and life at age twenty held other interests, mostly sexual ones. But now they tried to fall in love with the nonsexual parts of the world, the details that they had never noticed before. They attempted to adjust; they called their friends late at night, and the other newly single ones were grateful for the distraction, taking the cordless phone across the apartment to grab a spoon and a jar of Nutella from the kitchen cabinet (for this would be a long, leisurely, sugar-and-shortening-propelled conversation), while the married friends were magnanimous, silently signaling to the husbands beside them, with whom they had probably just been clashing: Our depressed friend is needy tonight. I'll be quick.
But the heterosexual woman and the homosexual man would be forever exempt from lovers' woes. No lust snapped in the air between them, making them behave like odd, shifty teenagers who have just had sex for the first time and can't believe their good luck. Nothing could ruin what these two had, because what they had was built on a simple foundation of allegiance and relief.
When Sara Swerdlow and Adam Langer rode in the car side by side, they were as contented as twin babies in a double stroller. They listened to tapes and they made themselves right at home. Hanging from the rearview mirror was a little plastic smiling Buddha that Adam had bought for Sara for good luck, and it swung on its silk rope as the car moved. They talked about men, how disappointing they were as a group, agreeing that neither of them liked the floral stink of aftershave, or the puzzlingly popular aesthetic of boxer shorts, which transformed all men into their uncles. They were great friends and had been for many years, during which time his hairline had retreated coastally, and her whippet-thin body had thickened at the hips, as though to ready her for the inevitable task of childbirth.
Everyone who knew Sara and Adam understood that their friendship was something to be envied, something lofty and sacred. They would never fall into a heap in bed, although they had, on occasion, accidentally seen each other naked. He thought she had startling but beautiful breasts; she thought he had the whitest legs in the universe. Friendship was a thing of extraordinary value, ever since it had become clear to both of them that lovers never lasted, and that families were the traps you walked into on major holidays and emerged from the next day, stuffed with carbohydrates and seething. But friendship, at least a friendship such as this, stayed put. It didn't matter whether one person was more successful than the other; what they had seemed outside the arena of mean little jealousies.
Everyone but Sara was jealous of Adam, who had become famous at age twenty-six for his play Take Us to Your Leader, a light comedy about a Jewish family on Mars. When the play moved to Broadway, several of the other students in his playwrights' workshop developed unexplained intestinal ailments and sleep disorders, and tacked on extra sessions with their therapists. The huge and wildly positive review in the Times opened with the line "What if Neil Simon were gay?" and as a result the play ran and ran. Busloads of theater groups and temple sisterhoods rolled in from the suburbs to see it, leaving matinees clutching scrolled Playbills and muttering favorite lines, still weepy with laughter.
The other workshop members despised Adam's flagrant display of commercialism, yet cursed their own bargain-basement Sam Shepard noodling. They would never have expected this to happen to Adam Langer, of all people; he was the shy, forgettable person hunched in the corner of the classroom, the one with the nails bitten down to tiny smiles. Why hadn't fame tapped someone else among them, such as the thin man whose plays were all set in cruel British reform schools, or the pale, freckle-chested redhead from Keetersville, Georgia, who gave her Southern characters colorful names like Jehovah Biggins and Lady Fandango?
As it turned out, Adam was the perfect receptacle for fame. With his boyish unease and long, studious face, he seemed modest and he photographed surprisingly well. He became a popular and natural interview subject, speaking easily and at length about everything from the changing shape of the American family to the role of the gay person in society, casually referring to Rimbaud and Verlaine and Oscar Wilde as if they had all worked on the high school literary magazine together. Adam represented a certain mainstream brand of gay culture that was bookish and appealing and highly presentable. People were always asking him questions -- in print and in person -- and Adam Langer loved to answer.
He had been an awkward adolescent, unloved by anyone but his mother and father. Adam's ears were perpetually red-hot, like someone who seems to have just come back from the barbershop, and he was a jiggler; a crossed leg often went flapping like a wing, and if a pencil happened to make its way into his hand, it would soon be put into service tapping out a rhythm that no one in the otherwise silent coffee shop or classroom wanted to hear. But after his play reached Broadway and stayed there, Adam developed an instantaneous and nearly alarming sexual popularity. Suddenly, other men wanted to sleep with him, he who had been turned down often throughout college, managing only a few brief liaisons, including one with a mutely shy exchange student from Nepal. Now he had a handsome boyfriend named Shawn Best, who would be riding out to the beach house this very afternoon on the bus line whose young female attendants gave all passengers little bottles of Squaw Creek spring water when they got on board.
Sara had had a series of disappointing lovers. Most recently, there had been an environmental lawyer named Sloan, who came around a few nights a week, folding his pants over the back of her chair and letting a spill of coins hit the floor; Sloan was affable and shaggy and was, as her mother, Natalie, might have said, "fun in the sack." But then he had gone up to British Columbia for some complex logging legislation, and that had been that, which was just as well, since after several weeks of sleeping with him Sara still hadn't been able to imagine what this overflow of sex might lead to. And besides, there were details about him that she didn't like; he had admitted to her that he had changed his name from something more ordinary -- either Steven or John, she couldn't remember which -- and Adam pointed out that this was a suspect and pretentious thing to do.
Sara was a graduate student at Columbia, and had made her peace with the fact that she might be in school forever, a program in Japanese history ambling slowly toward a doctoral dissertation that would grow to become biblical in length, with footnotes jamming up the bottom third of each page. She didn't mind the prospect of being an eternal student, although she pretended to; school offered a familiar swaddling, and Sara wasn't really sure if she would ever be good enough at what she did to snag one of the very few academic positions available. A friend of hers from Columbia who had completed the program a year earlier had given up looking for a teaching post and had taken a job translating the instructions for the assembly of Japanese-made toys sold in the States ("Your new Turbo Robot-Pak is easy to play with, and will delight you and your friends for hours!!!"). Sara was terrified of winding up with such a job. If she tried to imagine herself somewhere ten years from now, she was unable to picture herself doing anything at all. The screen was simply blank and unrevealing. When Sara was deeply immersed in the text of a Japanese book, she loved the intricacy of the language, the thrill of the chase as she tracked down the meanings of unusual phrases. But when she objectified what she was doing, she understood that the world would not welcome a scholar of Japan with open arms. She would probably have to translate the folded instructions inside toys someday, or else marry well.
Sara and Adam continued to take the house in Springs every August along with Maddy, who was a lawyer, and her husband, Peter, a teacher in a public high school, even though there were better deals to be found, bigger houses with wider lawns and higher ceilings. Even though, after anyone took a shower in the downstairs bathroom, a few slender, bobbing mushrooms often pushed their snub noses up between the aqua tiles. They continued to take the house even though Adam, for one, could have certainly afforded his own place by now. The house made them feel unhurried, dumbly caught in that vague nebula of the late twenties/early thirties, when you don't yet feel frantic to own property or to breed, when you can lie around smoking cigarettes and eating an alternation of heavily salted snack foods and sweet, spongy packaged cupcakes, and no one cares.
In previous summers, they had all slept until noon every day of the vacation, but the shape of this summer would be somewhat different. Seven months earlier, Maddy had given birth to a baby named Duncan, who would certainly change the atmosphere this month. The baby, with its endless, insatiable needs -- and with its own portable infant monitor that its parents toted from room to room, lest they miss a single coo or explosion of gas -- was both an advertisement for fertility and a deterrent. Sara wasn't remotely ready to have a baby; she hadn't even started to scale the walls of awareness of her unreadiness, yet was vaguely worried that an abortion she'd had a few years earlier had rendered her infertile. Although she'd had almost no ambivalence about the abortion at the time, she had still known that an older, more mature and focused version of herself would probably want children someday. But the actual thought of being a mother was still so unpleasant that she held her diaphragm up to the light before sex for an extended moment of squinting inspection. No pinholes, no apertures. She had no idea of what kind of mother she'd be: Would she behave the way her own mother had -- overinvolved, frenetic, or would she find her own style? There was no way to know. She couldn't tell if it would be worse having a baby now, like Maddy, or never being able to. At this point in her life, sex was for energetic body-slamming and the kind of yowling, cats-in-an-alley orgasms that made the neighbors long to be young again.
Now Sara stopped the car in front of a lunch stand, and she and Adam ate at a picnic table. "This taste," Adam said as he swallowed the first bite of a crab roll, "is like Proust's madeleine. When I'm not young anymore, this taste will bring every sensation back to me."
"No offense, but you're already not young anymore," said Sara. "Young was two summers ago. Last summer was the cusp. This summer it's all over."
"Then I guess I should get on with my life," said Adam, as a clump of crabmeat tumbled down the front of his shirt. "I should start writing about different things. Not set all my plays in my parents' paneled rec room. I should write a play called Bosnia. I should write about oppression, or cruelty." They both laughed, because he was no good with such material; it would have been a huge stretch. Instead, he sat here wiping a mess of crab off his shirt, leaving an oblong stain behind. His clothes were full of old, faded stains. "Shawn is cruel," Adam added. "At least, he has a cruel mouth; you'll see what I mean. Do I get extra credit for that?"
Shawn Best had recently pushed his way across a crowded reception in the city to get to Adam at a meet-the-playwrights evening. In a clutch of admirers, Shawn stood out as particularly striking and aggressive, inquiring whether Adam would listen to a cassette tape of songs from his play, and then, even though Adam politely declined, sending it to him by messenger the next morning. The tape, as far as Adam could tell -- having listened to only a few songs and not particularly liking musicals -- wasn't good, but at least it wasn't truly terrible; he remembered that it had to do with the plight of two American spinsters in Rome. There was a passport mix-up in the second act, and one of the spinsters fell into a fountain and sang a long ballad about all the missed opportunities in her life. A few days after he had sent over the tape, Shawn telephoned for Adam's response, and arranged to pick up the cassette in person. Adam, dazed and passive, had let this stranger into his apartment, where he made himself instantly at home, wandering into the kitchen, where he took a peach Snapple out of the refrigerator without asking, popped it open and drank. When he was done, he sat on the couch in the living room, put the bottle down on the coffee table, then suddenly produced a condom from his wallet.
"What are you doing?" Adam asked, slightly frightened.
"Oh, you don't want to?" said Shawn.
"Well, I don't know...," said Adam. "I hadn't thought about it. I don't even know you. This is very confusing." Actually, he had thought about it; he'd imagined being wrapped in Shawn's arms, inhaling the vaguely brothy sweat-smell of him. Shawn seemed to know all of this without being told; he took it for granted that other men had these thoughts about him.
Shawn tore the packet open with his teeth, then stood up and led Adam to the bedroom. "Wait. Wait. No," Adam had said on the way, because his knee-jerk reaction to sex was always "No." But now there was no reason for "No." It wasn't as though he was a teenager with an impending curfew, frantically making out with someone in the azaleas beside his house, while nearby his parents lay in bed as innocent as children, lulled by the gentle tedium of The Tonight Show. With Shawn, who was a complete stranger, there was the question of safety, of HIV status, but he held a condom in his hand like a peace offering. "Are you, a...
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