Everything Happened to Susan (7 page)

“The industry is at a turning point,” Phil says to her, stirring his coffee. He looks down at the table, inscribes small circles with the free hand. “It is at a crucial instance. The next year will turn the tide. This is something that I firmly believe.”

“Yes,” Susan says, taking some more coffee of her own and trying to look attentive for Phil although he has not looked her in the eyes yet even once. “I think I know what you mean.”

“Pornography will either become an art form within the next year or it will collapse,” Phil says. “The market has been overextended, it has been overexploited by the worst kind of people, and now it is being reduced again to its natural audience which, as we all know, is composed of freaks. It will not be legislated against; it will merely wither away like the leaves on the branches from winter trees. Unless it can find and hold the larger audience which is now its opportunity. If it can break the limits.”

“I agree with you absolutely. I know just what you mean.”

“These people for whom I’m working believe that the ship will not sink. They are not along for a fast buck, they are serious, they wish to do meaningful work. Pornography can be a meaningful art form and can break forth into new areas of experience. That is the intention of this film on which you’re working.”

“Yes,” Susan says. She feels drowsiness overtake her, shakes her head, braces herself in the seat. What she wants is to go to sleep but this is impossible; she is in no position, after this day, to risk Phil’s disapproval. “I happen to agree with you.”

“The first reports, however, are not good. They are extremely discouraging, in fact. The level of performances are not what they should be. Needless to say, it is hard to find and develop a good level of talent in this kind of film. Nevertheless, there are standards and we try to meet them.”

“Well, I tried — ”

“They are not good at all and in particular you are not acting up to your potential. I hear unhappy news about you. I am extremely disappointed.” Phil rubs his hands together, looks at her for the first time, lowers his eyes and switches the gears of his rhetoric so that once again he talks as he did when she first met him. “This can’t be,” he says. “We got to keep up to standards. You are a particular disappointment because you begged me for this chance.”

“I didn’t beg you.”

“Don’t argue with me!” Phil says and waves his arm with a flourish. A glass of water is upset. Two waitresses, murmuring, appear from the sides to wipe up the water. He says nothing, sits sullenly, hands folded until they are gone. “Trouble is we can’t teach you kids nothing these days,” he says. “You think you know it all.”

“I’m tired. I’m so tired — ”

“Don’t give me your problems! I got problems; I got to get this thing out. The hell with it,” Phil says. “I could tell you things that would make you sit up straight but your whole generation is so selfish that you won’t even listen. What do you care? All you can do is take your clothes off and get in front of a camera. You think that’s acting? I’ll tell you what acting is. Incidentally, I’m not trying to put the make on you. Get that right out of your mind, if you think that that’s why I’m seeing you tonight. There is nothing going that way at all because I got other plans. This is purely business and, to tell you the truth, I’m not so hot to put the make on you, if you know what I mean. Of course, if you want to come up to my place to talk — ”

“Please,” Susan says. She feels that her personality is slowly being pulverized under his weight. She has the peculiar feeling of seeing oneself running out like water upon the table. Of course her father used to make her feel that way; so she has some familiarity with the sensation. “I’m just so tired — ”

“I didn’t force you to come along. If you don’t want to go up to my place, that’s perfectly all right; it doesn’t make any difference to me at all. Of course I don’t know how long we can keep you going in this film. You don’t even show any interest in getting advice. You can’t even take direction. How long can we ride with you? So it’s your decision,” Phil says and takes his wallet out of his pocket, beginning to lay bills upon the table. He stops at three, looks at the clock behind them and stands. “So I guess that’s it,” he says. “You come around tomorrow morning and we’ll see if we got anything for you or not. Of course if we don’t, we can’t guarantee any pay for today because we’ll have to scrap everything in which you’ve appeared; it would be ridiculous to have an actress in a couple of scenes who wasn’t woven through the film. I can’t tell you people how to live; it’s a wholly different life-style.”

“You remind me of my father,” Susan says. “In many ways, you’re just like him.”

“That’s an old problem. It don’t mean nothing to me.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I got no time to lose,” Phil says standing ponderously, weaving behind the table. “I got things to do so you got to make your move now and not later.”

“All right,” Susan says. “All right. I’ll go to your place if you want me to.”

“Not exactly my place,” Phil says, putting his arm on her. “No, not my place. There are reasons I can’t take you there. We’re going to the same place as the other time, the hotel. But I think of it as my place because I’ve had that room for years and I even sleep in it sometimes and once for three months I even lived there due to certain circumstances which I won’t go into now. At a different period of my life now best forgotten. Actually, I am a very complex man.”

Under Phil she momentarily forgets the day: he is heavy, he is insistent, there are polarities to his need which force her to split high and low. Bisected she feels like two Susans driven on different courses toward simultaneous ends but as his climax nears it becomes fucking again, simple fucking, heavy and necessitous like everything she has ever known and the feeling of partition goes away. Life is becoming routine, she finds herself thinking: just two days in the film business and she is already in a rut: appear at the loft, participate in scenes of sex for eight hours, fuck Phil, and go back to Timothy. She has always been a person of regular habits; it is astonishing how under any circumstances they seem to reestablish themselves. Phil, predictably, falls away from her in the aftermath, all of him turning inward. He breathes shallowly, looks at his hands, sits. “Well,” he says. “I got things to do; I guess I’d better be going.”

“I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

“We already talked,” Phil says. “Listen,” he says after a pause, “don’t think that you got any claims on me just because of this thing. I go my own way. I’m an independent operator; I got responsibilities and I can’t afford to get tied up in any involvements. Your performances are unsatisfactory, you’re going to have to do better.”

“All right.”

“Everything has to be sacrificed for the film, which is the important thing. If you can do the job you stay; otherwise you have to go. I have business,” Phil says. “I got to be going. I already spent more time here than I should.”

Mumbling he pulls on his clothes, his back toward Susan. Reconstituted he turns toward her, adjusts his tie, says that he guesses that he will see her tomorrow and without any further words goes out the door, reminding Susan to lock up when she leaves. “And don’t touch anything around here,” he adds. “Don’t disturb any of the arrangements. I got things set up a certain way here.”

Lying naked on the bed Susan wonders what she could possibly touch; what arrangements Phil could have made in this room. It is spare, ascetic: it contains a bed, a dressing table with a chipped mirror, two chairs, and a tattered rug on the floor. It looks like any one of the rooms she remembers vaguely from college; the kind of motel rooms that dates would take her to although those, for the most part, were much cleaner and had a television console built into the wall. This is definitely an older-generation room. It has no pretensions whatsoever; it appears to be a place for sex and nothing else. She stands, goes curiously to the dresser, and begins to pull open drawers. Under a number of papers with figures jotted on them under columns saying INVENTORY and PRODUCTION SCHEDULE, she finds a stack of pornographic pictures; couples posed in positions of simulated sex, their eyes staring through the camera. The couples appear to have taken little interest in their work; on the back of the pictures Phil or someone else has scribbled names, addresses, and telephone numbers, none of which are familiar to her. She thinks that she may recognize a couple of people in the pictures but on the other hand, people in sexual positions have a way of looking pretty much the same. She replaces the photographs underneath the inventory reports, closes the drawer, puts on her clothes and leaves. She resolves that she will never come back to this room again but, by the time she has reached the lobby, fortunately empty, the edge of that resolve is already blunted and without any strong convictions she takes the subway home.

In the subway, hunched into a seat in the corner she is afflicted by a fantasy: everyone in the car is similarly an actor in a pornographic film. As ugly or expressionless as most of them are, they have specialty roles and are coming back from a hard day’s work promoting sexual liberalism and an extended consciousness. The tall man carrying a suitcase and mumbling to himself at the edge of the car is a whipmaster in a sadistic film; the heavy old lady banging intermittently on her left elbow is a seamstress for a pornographic film company and makes occasional appearances in perverse segments. Three adolescent girls, chewing gum have performed as a triumvirate in someone’s extended fantasy; the conductor, almost invisible his damp cell, specializes in buggery. It is much easier for her to come to terms with the world in this fashion; it may even be true, for all she knows. The car rockets in darkness through the thin, spreading tube of the underground opening before them; it is all lights and mystery, signals flickering in the void, workmen scuttling like technicians on the tracks to clear-the way for the train as it surges uptown.

At home she finds Timothy in an ugly mood, eager to talk. They are, it seems, on the verge of an emotional crisis. He has done some serious thinking during the day and has decided that they must define their relationship to make some commitment to one another once and for all. Also, he has arrived at the decision that he does not want her acting in the pornographic film business after all; for reasons, which he will not go into, he finds it threatening to his masculinity. “I won’t have it any more,” he says gesturing rather wildly, knocking some manuscript pages of his novel from the desk top behind which he has been sitting. “We can’t just drift and drift! We have to decide right now what we’re going to do for the rest of our lives and whether these lives involve one another.”

“I’m tired, Timothy,” she says. “Can’t we talk about it later on or tomorrow?”

“No, we can’t talk about it later on or tomorrow. I know why you’re tired; I can imagine exactly what you’ve been doing today. We have to make decisions, Susan, decisions! We must come to grips with our lives.”

“Do you want to get married?”

“Married? Who said anything about getting married? Marriage is an archaism; it’s only a device through which society entraps us by putting a label on a natural state. I don’t think there have been any marriages between intelligent people for five years. I’m talking about an emotional commitment, a commitment to oneness, a feeling of union — ”

“I thought we could just go along this way, couldn’t
we? You were the one who said that we had to maintain our freedom of choices.
I don’t want to discuss it, really Timothy,” Susan says. “I
should be relaxing and trying to concentrate on my roles. I’ve got to
prove that I can bring conviction — ”

“Conviction! I know what kind of conviction you’re bringing! Don’t look at me that way, I’m not naive. I deal with the most dispossessed, demoralized, alienated, dangerous, and asocial segment of the population: I have their case records right in front of me and I read things that would turn you white. I used to go to their homes and try to rehabilitate them! I want you to get out of that film, Susan. Emotional commitment is one thing and the film is another. I won’t have it! You have to get out of that business.”

“You said it was perfectly all right for me to go. You said that each of us was entitled to lead his separate life.”

“Well,” Timothy says, “that was before I had to come to terms with the effect of this upon my psyche. It’s shattering. Tell me what you did today. No, I take it back, don’t tell me what you did. It would upset me terribly. Just stop doing it.”

Susan looks around Timothy’s apartment carefully. She knows it very well; furthermore, every corner of it seems to lurk with sexual memory. There is not a single area of this apartment, it seems, where in one form or another they have not had sex. Say what you will of Timothy, things have been intense in their way. She takes it all in carefully, as if for the last time and then stands. “I’m leaving,” she says.

“You’re what?”

“I’m going to leave you, Timothy. I can’t come back to this. You have no idea of what I’ve been through today.”

“Oh yes I do!”

“All right, maybe you do. I can’t take this any more. I can’t take any more
scenes.
Probably I’ll go into the Barbizon for a while. There isn’t that much of my stuff here anyway.”

“Now listen,” Timothy says, moving over, putting his hands on her shoulders. “There’s no need to be hasty about this. I mean, you can express your hostility in some other fashion, I think; you can channel it more reasonably. No one here is asking you to leave.”

“I don’t care about that. I can’t be put through any more scenes, Timothy. I don’t have the stamina.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

“I wanted to be an actress,” Susan says. “I still want to. At least I’ve got work. It’s a start and an opportunity. I won’t have you stopping me.” She listens to herself with interest; she sounds passionate and dedicated. “You have no right to interfere in my life that way. Am I stopping you from writing your novel?”

“My novel is an extension of myself. I’m not selling myself — ”

“You know something, Timothy?” Susan says. “I’m going to tell you the truth. I can’t read your novel. It just doesn’t make any sense. I may be wrong; I don’t know a thing about writing, but I don’t think that you’re very good. Which is all the more reason why you have no right to tell me what to do.”

After that things get very bad; it is their worst fight yet, which is saying a good deal, and at the end of it it is not Susan but Timothy who walks out, grabbing his coat and saying that he is leaving on personal business and when he comes back at midnight he does not want to see her there. On the other hand, if she wants to be reasonable she can stay, but, if he finds her, he will assume that she will take the relationship on meaningful terms. He leaves, comes back to remind her that she owes him twenty dollars for a personal loan and that she is not to touch the pages of his novel under any circumstances. Then he walks and returns again, picks the manuscript off the desk, slams it into his attaché case, and closing it with difficulty staggers out, this time not closing the door. Susan decides that she feels sorry for him but then that she is not. She thinks about breaking up his apartment but decides that behavior like this is not worthy of a college graduate. She thinks about leaving instantly after scrawling foul notes to him all over the walls and mirrors but does not have the energy. Happily she is saved from all of this by a sudden call from Frank, the Ph.D. candidate who says that he has, with much difficulty, and a few bribes been able to track her down, is right around the corner, and would be delighted to take her to dinner if she has no other plans. Susan says that she would be happy to do this but ‘sex in their relationship is now completely out of the question because of other circumstances. Frank says this is fine; he never had much luck with girls anyway until he got started in the pornographic film business and now he is unable to conceive of sex apart from certain postures made before cameras, a problem which he hopes a psychiatrist will someday help him alleviate. They arrange for him to meet her outside in five minutes and Susan, throwing her clothing into a suitcase, leaves Timothy’s apartment pretty much as she had found it, the only difference, in fact, being that his novel is not on the desk where it had dominated the room from the first time she had walked in.