Tony and Susan (9 page)

The writer’s economy, using what you know: Tony lives in Cincinnati, like Edward. It gives Susan an odd feeling of knowing something she shouldn’t know. Never mind. That’s enough for tonight, Edward old friend. What’s there to say? This book has her in its grip, she can say that truly. The long slow plunge into the evil night and Tony trying to brace himself by being civilized. The notion that being civilized conceals a great weakness. With that tension or irony, taut cold surface, she can’t tell whether it reflects a sadness her own imagination has contributed, or emits a sadness of its own. The irony makes her think of Edward, which interferes with the sadness, for Edward’s irony always did make her uneasy.

She puts the manuscript in the box, and even that seems like violence, like putting the coffins into the ground: images from the book moving out into the house. Fear and regret. The fear is mirror to the fear with which she started. Then she was afraid of entering the novel’s world, lest she forget
reality. Now, leaving, she is afraid of not being able to return. The book weaves around her chair like a web. She has to make a hole in it to get out. The web damaged, the hole will grow, and when she returns, the web will be gone.

Once she has left the book, living room to kitchen, refrigerator, lights, going upstairs, Tony settles in his pages. She recalls as if it were a long time ago, ages, the vague terror she had felt about Arnold away, but it seems remote now, like Arnold himself. It’s Edward on her mind. Childhood things revive. When we two sat on the porch looking across the river to the Palisades while the younger kids played hide and seek, and we talked about topics of importance, like brother and sister. Then what?

He went off to school. And met her again years later in graduate school. Why, you’ve been childhood sweethearts all along, her mother exclaimed, ignorantly.

So what went wrong? Her mother forever asked without asking. Was it that Arnold appeared, no more than that? But there must have been something wrong with Edward, for no one can believe Susan Morrow would simply trade him in for a better model. What evil thing did Edward do?

The official registered explanation. There never was but one thing wrong with Edward, it says. His personality. After all the old grievances had been weathered away, his personality remained. Only the most intimate would know, because on the outside he was fine: responsible, considerate, reliable. Shy. Modest. Nice. You have to live with him day and night. That’s when you’ll find him getting in your hair.

Edward was prissy. He was prim. He was fussy and neat. He pursed his lips. He tapped his foot. He said to the traffic cop: What seems to be the problem, officer? He refused to watch television in the late evening. When they were fifteen,
out in the boat with the big Maine house up on the shore, they were idling, going nowhere, and he asked her not to drag her hand in the water. No one was rowing, and still he asked her not to drag her hand. He was like that from the beginning and was probably born that way. Isn’t that true, Stephanie? She wished she hadn’t thought of that. She didn’t want to think of Edward’s pursed lips while she was trying to do justice to his book.

Every night before descending into her mind, Susan Morrow performs rituals. Dog walk, kitty kitty, lock doors. Three children safe with a nightlight for the stairs. Teeth and hair, bed light, make love sometimes. Roll away from Arnold to the right, puff the pillow up, wait.

Tonight differs because no Arnold. Freedom, the possibility of something wild. She puts the wild impulse down, and makes tonight like the others, except that instead of turning right with her back to Arnold, she sprawls left, enjoying the husband-less state in the husbandless space. A horrible thought occurs to her about Arnold in New York, but she puts that down too.

Then like every night she waits for her mind, rumbling under the door in the floor. She puts her head into the pillow and waits. Biological sounds distract her, heart changing speed in her ear. Breathing unsettles her. Sometimes the intestinal lab works late, preparing a shipment to disturb her sleep. Speech from the day liquefies the hard surface of her mind like waves in a windstorm. Time to batten down, pack her plans and arguments. She stows
Nocturnal Animals
for the night.

The storm she waits for begins when the words in her head start speaking on their own. They come up through the trap door, people talking without her. Her mind is down there, and she hears the voices in the rooms with the flimsy partitions. This moment is scary because the danger is unknown. Her mind surges up and sucks her down, expanding then into a
world, and though the country is familiar, she is a visitor. Each night she revisits places she has visited before and meets people, changed since her last visit. She’s ashamed of her faulty memory, knowing what she can’t remember is more important than what she can. With her orders in a sealed envelope which she has lost, she wanders, feet bare, legs paralyzed, she loses her footing and sails into the air, or struggles up the hill to meet the class already half through its hour, or sees her kindly dead father and asks if he minds being dead, or lets some quiet student sit on the desk with his hand approaching her crotch which he will never reach – while she tries to avoid the death room.

White morning assaults her with a moment of absolute blankness. She’s expelled into the empty day. When she recognizes the blue flowered curtains in the window and the maple branches with a thin line of snow, the door in the floor has slammed shut. If she retains a fragment of dream, it will blow away unless she can chronologize it and put it into words. Yet chronology and words kill it. The story that remains is no dream, and the dream remains uncaught, contiguous to the other dreams below the door, constituting one great unbroken lifetime dream all through the oblivious day, to be continued on her next visit down.

Meanwhile, in the empty cool morning light, dreamless, Susan Morrow, lacking at first even her name, gradually constructs the new day. Tuesday. Eight. Arnold gone, the convention in New York. Wake up to that, suddenly, real life like an alarm clock. The sharp memory of Arnold’s reassuring call last night, and what it really means. It means that in New York, Marilyn Linwood, receptionist, either is or is not having an affair with him. Organizing records in his hotel room. Marilyn Linwood waits for Susan to wake up: this prim young woman in her thirties, professional, neat tweed suit, glasses,
hair pinned back, careful little face. Secretive, the perfect telephone girl. Some of whose secrets came out at the staff picnic: yellow bikini, bronze hair flowing loose, white thighs a shade too thin. Who’s that? Dr. Gaspar said. Patronizing. Is that our Miss Linwood?

Things have changed since Susan gave up jealousy. She wakes up again, remembering. Liberated by a decision not to think, accepting the unknown for peace and not having to know if it needs to be accepted. Making for good marriage, stable and steady after sixteen years of doubt.

Return to the day, up you get, Susan. Let the kids sleep because it’s the Christmas break. What must I do today? You must do the laundry, Jeffrey to the vet. Shovel snow? Look out the window to see. By the time she is out of bed with her robe on to look at the snow (only a thin coat on the ground, which will disappear soon), Susan Morrow is restored without a gap. The new day stitches across the night’s wound as if her conscious life were continuous.

She does the following things during the day, along with other things. She showers, dresses, wakes the kids, gets breakfast, drives to the Burridges’ to pick up Rosie. Gathers the week’s laundry to the machine in the basement, makes beds, goes to the supermarket for margarine, lunch meat, and milk. Lunch for three children and herself. To the library to return books, then pick up the living room, carrying Rosie’s presents upstairs, also Henry’s and Dorothy’s who were supposed to do it themselves. A break at the piano, Bach inventions. Back to the basement to exchange laundry loads. Ham in the oven, run the dishwasher, set the table. Her day mind, which knows nothing of her other mind, is full of what’s not there, but knows where everything is: Rosie upstairs with Carol, Dorothy outside, Henry with Mike, Arnold in New York.

And Edward. A long hook-up from the past, grabbing her by the mind. All day she keeps wondering, why am I thinking about Edward? His memory reverberates out of slumber like a dream, it flashes like birds tree to tree. It comes too fast, flits away too quickly. To keep it, she must chronologize it just the way she chronologizes her dreams. This kills it too. Her dead memory of Edward was stored in bound volumes years ago, while the new living Edward flies around outside uncaught.

When Edward and Susan were fifteen, his father died of a heart attack, and her father and mother took him in for a year. His real mother was in an institution, and his stepmother, who had just divorced the father, wanted nothing to do with the son. He had cousins in Ohio who took him later, but her parents took him first so that he would not have to leave Hastings High. There were negotiations and long distance calls and financial compensation, but she always thought it most kind of her parents.

There was no particular reason to take him in. They were neighbors. Edward’s father would ride the commuting train to New York with her father. He came to dinner from time to time. He was a mild amusing affable man who played the violin on the side.

They lived on Edgar’s Lane, a street with comfortable suburban houses under the trees, Edward’s house at the top of a curving flight of steps down where the street dipped below the overhanging branches. The street was historical, there having been a Battle of Edgar’s Lane in Revolutionary times.

She hardly knew him before his father died, or if she did, she did not remember. They walked to school on the Aqueduct, a level grassy path between the backs of the houses, separated from them by a fence and a wide swath of grass. The Aqueduct maintained its level on embankments across all the natural
dips in the land, and wherever it crossed a street people walking had to pass through wooden gates from the old horse days.

His father died on a sunny day in May. On the afternoon of that day, Susan was on the Aqueduct with Marjorie Grabel, the grass unmowed on either side, the path still damp but not muddy. Edward was a hundred yards ahead, indolent with his bookbag, chewing blades of Aqueduct grass. Behind her, Susan’s younger sister and brother lagged, avoiding her. At that time Edward was a skinny kid with yellow hair, thin neck and squinty eyes like a water bird with long legs, and he was too shy to be liked, though Susan did not realize it was shyness but thought it was innate maturity compared to which she was only a child. They came up Edgar’s Lane under the trees. Edward went up the steps into his house. Marjorie turned left at the corner, and Susan went home, with Paul and Penny keeping their distance behind.

A few minutes later he was at the door of her house, his mouth working, trying to say, Get your mother. Then she followed her mother and Edward running down the street, even her mother running. They ran up the steps beside the rock garden to the house, stucco and timbered, her mother stopping to get her breath, while Susan caught up, asking what the matter was. She stayed outside while her mother and Edward went in. Afraid because she had never seen a corpse, she waited on the stone parapet by the front door, with its box of pansies and its view down the street. After a while people arrived, going into the house past her. A fat man puffing up the steps asked her, Is this the place? Her mother came down and told her to go home. By going home she missed the covered body removed on a stretcher, and only later regretted not having seen it.

That night, Edward came to dinner at her house, and she
remembers questions. Do you know your stepmother’s address? No grandparents? No uncles and aunts? Do you know anything about your father’s finances?

They put him in the room on the top floor, where he had a view over rooftops to a section of the Palisades across the river and a smaller patch of the river itself between trees, where sometimes in the summer if he was lucky he would get a glimpse of the day boats going by.

No one dreamed that anything would develop between Edward and Susan. He said, Let’s have an understanding here. You don’t want me in your house, and I don’t want to be here, but what can we do, so let’s shut up about it. You stay out of my room and I’ll stay out of yours.

He said, So there’ll be no confusion later on, just because I’m male and you’re female doesn’t mean anything, agreed? You won’t expect me to ask you for dates and I won’t expect anything from you. We just happen to be boarding in the same house.

Less generous than her parents, she did not want him there, because it took away the family’s privacy. When he first made those remarks she was glad, thinking it cleared the air. Later when he repeated them she was annoyed. When he continued to say them, she felt really angry, but by then she was angry with him about everything, so she didn’t trust her judgment.

He lived with them for a year. When no one invited her to the spring dance he politely took her. They studied together and did well in school. He went with them in the summer to Maine. There were peaceful moments she hardly noticed. He never mentioned becoming a writer.

After that year, Susan did not see Edward again until Chicago, eight years later. She was entering graduate school. He was already there, studying law. Her mother told her to look him up, but she did not want to.

She felt lonely and sad at this university where she went without friends, knowing no one. She was leaving behind a boyfriend named Jake, who took offense at her going away and promised to be unfaithful to her. She lived in a women’s dormitory and had classes in a massive gothic building with thick walls and narrow leaded windows, a building entered from an arched vestibule like a culvert, through which the wind blew. She listened to the message of the architecture in the stone halls, the whispers of the professors keeping their voices down, the wary manners of her fellow students keeping their distance. Intelligently, she tried to distinguish the annual sadness of autumn (the gray buildings a shade whiter as the leaves came down) from her personal sadness (Jake, or childhood, or Susan the free) and both of these from the cloistered intellectual sadness, surrounded by the incendiary ghetto said to be dangerous.

Somewhere in this busy monastery was Edward. Her antagonism had disappeared in nostalgia, but she made no effort to look him up. Instead he found her, accidentally. She was on 57th Street going to the bookstore when she heard behind her: Susan, wait up! How fine he looked, changed, poised, tall
and magnificent, Edward holding out his hand: I knew you were here. Dressed up, coat and tie, glasses sparkling, he grasped her elbow, steered her into Steinway’s. Come have a Coke with me.

Two former children meeting after childhood, their chief care is to prove they are no longer children. This makes them friendly and civil, super-polite. Inquiries about mother and father, brother and sister. Genteel boasts of new sophistication plus rehearsed propaganda to explain our life decisions. No memory how awful things used to be. He was studying law, she English. He lived in an apartment, she in the dorm. His gratitude: I have never failed to appreciate your parents’ kindness.

He showed her around, met her for lunch at the Commons, tested with her the other community eating places: Ida Noyes, International House. He pointed out the secondhand bookstores, took her to the Oriental Institute and the Museum of Science and Industry. He taught her how to get downtown on the I.C. and introduced her to the Art Institute and the Aquarium.

She was astonished by his change, which could be either a new layer or a peeling away. He said it: I’m not the brat I used to be. He was courtly, polite, chivalric. This was before chivalries went obsolete, and his was so careful it got on her nerves: walking on the outside of the sidewalk, holding doors open, holding her chair, the trite old things. Yet she thought it wonderful. Blame it on the earlier antagonism. She had such a memory of his old manner that when his rudeness was replaced by civility, civility looked like glamor.

The most interesting change was his new astonishment in everything. Sharp contrast to age fifteen when he knew all and was conspicuously bored by every wonder and outrage
they saw. Now he was all wonder and outrage. He was amazed by the city, the university, the traffic, the blue of the lake, the haze of the steel mills, the dangers of the ghetto, the wisdom and knowledge of the professors, the complexity of the law, the glories of literature. For a while this puzzled her, since it seemed to reverse the normal order in which innocent wonder precedes jaded boredom. No doubt at fifteen he had preferred to hide his astonishment because it seemed more grown up. Now at twenty-three it was policy instead to be if necessary even more surprised than he really was. On the whole she liked this, though later she got sick of it too as she perceived how practiced it was.

Despite his fine outer manner, she soon discovered he had suffered a crippling injury: his heart was broken. He had been engaged to a girl named Maria, who had jilted him and married somebody else. Jilted: a good old-fashioned word. He did not seem heartbroken. He seemed vigorous and enthusiastic about the future. But heartbroken was a secret state, which she could share. It occurred to her she was heartbroken too, on account of Jake, who was retaliating for her career choice by a program of worldwide travel and picking up girls. She and Edward could be heartbroken together. It gave them something to talk about, and it protected them from each other, like brother and sister: no need to worry about hearts since their hearts were broken.

Chaste and platonic, this was the deceptive situation that led to Edward’s seducing Susan, or Susan’s seducing Edward, whichever it was, the ultimate result being the marriage which made necessary their divorce. To be heartbroken means to have a story, and their stories brought them together, as they told them over, repeating and enlarging, Edward more than Susan, since she didn’t have much to say about No Good Jake. He talked and she listened, with queries and advice, both
knowing pretty well that it was not the story or Maria that mattered but the acts of telling and listening. This went on into the winter. She cooked dinner for him in his apartment, a sisterly thing to do, and they talked about his wounds until three. An engagement to marry. A flighty girl, too young to be tied down. He agreed with everything Susan said.

Looking back from the superior present, Susan sees that Edward’s heartbreak was only the current local manifestation of his normal condition as he always encouraged her to see it. The notion that he had always been and always would be subtly hurt by life and was always gallantly trying to make himself strong. Why he was any more hurt than anyone else she never questioned then. There were enough specifics to make it sound good. The death of his father. The loss of his home with no one to take care of him except her own father and mother. Jilting fit right in.

She spotted a gap in his story, the question of sex, which he dodged as unimportant until the dodging made it important. She asked him outright: Did you have sex with her, Edward?

He was shocked by the question, but it came out: he had not had sex with Maria, because he had not had sex with anyone. He was twenty-three years old, competent paternalistic Edward with jacket and tie removed, admitting this strange inexperience. Actually, it did not seem as strange then as it would twenty-five years later after the revolutions. (They didn’t call it having sex, either. They called it making love or sleeping together, whether or not slumber was involved: her question really had been, Did you sleep with her?)

There were several possible explanations for Edward. Courtesy and respect, his fine sensitive old nineteenth century genes. Unless he was just a child in gentleman’s clothing,
afraid to grow up. Or some difference in the internal compass, a matter of what later jargon would call Sexual Orientation.

Edward’s virginity stimulated her curiosity and made her talk. If his secrets were gone, she had no right to hers. She blabbed. He was shocked again, as disturbed as if she were the heroine of a nineteenth century novel, and his gloom when he said, I’ll have to get used to that, irritated the hell out of her. Rather, it irritates the remembering Susan, who can’t remember if she was irritated then. She was temporarily inspired by zeal for the principle, not exactly worth a crusade but enough to motivate her, that Sex is Natural. The result maybe of her recent battles with Jake. What she saw in Edward was the opposite conviction, Sex is Unnatural. Sex is Natural was Susan’s pre-feminist feminism: it turned her against big breasts, pornographic beer and cigarettes, the double standard for men and women, the equation of romance with lust, and Jake’s notion that there was a difference between good (dark) and bad (blonde) women. (What Jake’s belief meant for Susan was that while romantic love required her to yield to him, her doing so constituted a flaw in her character which relieved him of obligation.) As for Edward, believing Sex was Unnatural was the natural consequence of his astonishment with everything (everything was unnatural). He could not believe real people did the things they wrote about and his imagination embellished.

So she decided to educate Edward. It popped into her head one drizzly afternoon on the museum steps. She said without thought, Edward, get someone to teach you the facts of life.

I know the facts of life.

The idea stuck in her head, and it had serious consequences, because the outcome, which would certainly have deterred her if she had known, was that Edward married her. At the
time, she thought it would be educational and healthy for both of them. Sex is Natural, Edward. It doesn’t mean a thing. Even you and I can do it, and no one else need know. This was early spring, when the campus was wet and the young branches sparkled with a residue of rain, and the gray buildings looked freshly washed under the pale skies. I can slip into your apartment, and no one will see, and when I go back to the dorm, neither my mother or father nor Jake or Maria nor your professors will know a thing.

What a crazy idea. That must have been another Susan because the real Susan remembers being annoyed by such thoughts. She remembers trying to analyze out of existence her fascination with what Edward had become: the combination of his acquired childlike eagerness with his innate jaded primness. She remembers trying to scorn to death her wicked curiosity to see what this correct and careful Edward would be like in the grasp of something uncontrollably intense and physical in himself.

The plot summary of Susan’s memory says she made up her mind to seduce Edward and then went out and did it. The detailed text says otherwise. She gave him hints without any idea what the hints were about. Affectionate impulses. Along the street in the rain, patting and cuffing. Flirty things. She punched him in the chest when he came out of the library. In the University Tavern she came up behind him and put her fingers over his eyes. At dinner in the Commons, after a hard day and before a night of labor with a paper to write, where they ate in silence, her gaze settled on his light hair loosely disheveled, his tired eyes staring vaguely, and she felt a surprising old warmth for this strange young man strangely dear to her, whom she would like to take care of. She did not know she wanted to seduce him.

Was he interested, or was he not? She only thought she was looking in him for signs, whether he was attracted or repelled. At the University Tavern where they had a beer, she said, Let me live with you, Edward. He laughed, resisting by turning it into a joke, and she laughed too, thinking that’s what she meant.

She initiated conversations about censorship and pornography, psychoanalysis and the three stages of development – oral, anal, and genital. She discussed homosexuality in Plato, and the naked athletes in the Olympic Games. She showed him the analysis she was writing about ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ She broke out in the middle of that, I keep forgetting you’re a virgin, and he blushed and hemmed.

She didn’t intend anything serious, she thought, she was just trying to shake him out of his complacency. On a warm spring day they went to the Forest Preserve to look for migratory birds. They had a good nostalgic talk about family life, life in Hastings, and his future. As a lawyer he intended to take civil rights cases no one else would handle and give free legal aid to the poor. She thought what a good man he was, which made her proud as if she had made him good. Then back to the university, late and dark, where he invited her to his apartment for coffee before taking her home. As they went up the dark stairs, and he unlocked the door, and they entered the room, and he turned on the light, she experienced an unbearable excitement of the present tense, the dazzling immanence of now, which was full of her presence and Edward and all life concentrated, making her want to scream or sing. He heated the coffee and set out cookies and went to the bookshelf for his bird book, and they sat shoulder elbow arm and thigh while he looked up the American redstart and warblers they had seen. And all the while present time hummed with
presence until she could hardly stand it, and she heard a voice saying, Go ahead, it’s all right now, and then her own real voice whispering a suggestion into Edward’s ear.

Then was heartbeat time for both of them, tremble and shake, his large eyes staring too close for focus, his voice hoarse: Do you mean it? The belated caution and sanity of her reply: Only if you want to. And his deep wow: Oh grateful God.

There was a single light on his bed table which cast its glare downward and suffused elsewhere through the room. She was wearing a soft pale green sweater, a plaid skirt with pleats, white socks. Underneath, a white bra and white pants. Emerging from these, she was thin and lanky, her cheeks were pale, with no glasses in those days, and her hair hung lightly down her back. She was worried about the smallness of her breasts until she saw the wonder in Edward’s eyes. He was even lankier than she. His ribs showed in his chest, his thighs were thin, his sex was chunkier than any other part of him. The room was chilly and they both shivered and kept shivering.

In the bedroom he gasped and grunted and puffed and roared. Be frank, Susan, she enjoyed it too, a lot more than she was to enjoy some of the repetitions later. He bore down on her and rocked and yelled in a loud voice, You great wonderful thing, I can’t believe how wonderful you are. Afterwards, he thanked her for her generosity.

A long naked conversation followed, while they idly fingered each other. He told her a secret he had not told anybody else. He had taken up writing, he told her. He had poems and stories and sketches, and two notebooks already filled.