Tony and Susan, page 10
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.
FIRST INTERLUDE
ONE
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 husbandless 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 onto 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.
TWO
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.
THREE
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.
