Tony and Susan, page 11
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. Afterward, 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.
FOUR
Edward and Susan: how wonderful, her mother said, like marrying back into the family. This was 1965, in chilly March, no change in plans: they kept up their studies, only now Susan lived in Edward’s apartment. They assumed it was happiness.
Susan can remember some of that happiness if she tries. For twenty-five years she has not tried, preferring to consider it an illusion, thereby protecting Arnold and her children. She had no wish to dismantle her disillusionment.
What she remembers now is not so much happiness as places where happiness occurred. Happiness was intangible, place made it visible. There were places in the summer, and there was Chicago. For Edward-happiness she remembers only summers, and of the two Edward summers, only the first, which they divided between her parents’ old house in Maine and his cousins’ borrowed cabin in upstate New York. The Maine house, which goes back to childhood, overlooked a cold harbor with pine trees. It had gables and screened windows and a screened porch around, and it stood over the steep grass down to the rocks. She remembers Edward in the rowboat, for they went out in it when they were fifteen and again when they were married. She confuses the memories somewhat. She remembers Edward the child in the rowboat trying a cigarette and throwing it into the water. She remembers him talking about his stepmother, who divorced his father before the fatal heart attack, and she felt ashamed to see a boy cry.
The other house, his cousin’s cabin in upstate New York, was more primitive. It was in the deep shade of trees by a small river in the woods. It had a screen door and a main room with unfinished walls and exposed timbers, and two small back rooms. She remembers Edward writing with his typewriter under the table lamp while she tried to read by the same lamp in the Morris chair, and she’s not sure if that was happiness or not. They went swimming, running without clothes out the door into the river. All that screwing. Enjoying the contrast to their hostile past, pretending they were still fifteen in the Hastings house, breaking the rules. Then back to the obligations of the present: having finished sex, they wrote a letter to her mother and father signed Susie and Edward. Childhood sweethearts, her mother would say, just like brother and sister.
Memories of happiness in Chicago are harder to find. Edward’s apartment, where they were so busy. Papers and exams to prove how their minds had been professionalized, dredged and rebuilt. As students in different fields, they respected each other’s needs and stayed polite. They finished the first year on their scholarships with help from her father. Later, because Edward did not want to depend on her parents, she taught freshman English in a city junior college. With an interruption or two she has kept that job ever since. When Edward resigned his scholarship in March, her job was their only source of funds.
He resigned his scholarship because he had quit his studies. He could have waited until summer when the scholarship expired, but since he had stopped studying, he thought it more honorable to stop the scholarship too.
He gave up the law to become a writer. This surprised Susan because she thought he should first find out if he could write. But Edward was sure. In long talks he explained his decision and clarified their future and her role. Her father came to Chicago to talk him out of it, but Edward said the strength of his writing compulsion, by preventing him from studying for his exams, proved law school was a mistake. It was other people who wanted me to study law, Edward said. It was I who wanted me to write.
When Susan learned he had been writing all the time, she wondered why he never showed her any of his work. He explained he wasn’t ready because it was still baby stuff. He asked her support, and she stood by him. It was a time of idealism. Her secret alarm was selfish and bourgeois (she had never worried about being bourgeois before). Her expectation of a comfortable house, children, all that, and of pursuing a scholarly career with Ph.D.: that was bourgeois. Do writers make money? she asked anxiously, having heard most poets and fiction writers support themselves with other jobs. Who needs money? Edward said. With your job, which does provide a salary, we’ll scrape by. She would teach, he would write. He would dedicate his books to her, without whom none of this etcetera.
Her father on his visit gently asked. Do you really want to give up so much? But what am I giving up, Daddy? she replied. Brave, determined. What else am I good for? What about your plans, your two years of graduate school? I’m utilizing that, she said. I couldn’t have got this job without it.
The second summer of their marriage, they stayed in Chicago so she could earn more money teaching summer school. Now she read his writing, some of it. He told her to be absolutely frank, but she learned it was better not to be. His poems were short and casual, pieces of nostalgia, memories of places or states of mind, fitted to a word or two. Also some little sexy poems about how amazing it was to screw her, anticipation, performance, and recovery. He had certain phrases for her, especially her soft shallow breasts, which annoyed her. She had a suspicion she could write just as well, if she wanted to. Later she cultivated this thought because it enabled her to regard Edward as a phony, which helped put him behind her, but at the time it was a heresy against the faith she needed.
Poems and sketches. He stopped showing them to her. She hoped it wasn’t because of anything she said. He talked of larger projects. He had been working on a novel but had not mentioned it because it was so unfinished. It was pretty long. She gathered it was autobiographical, with twelve hundred pages so far, and had brought young Eddie up to the age of twelve.
During the second autumn of their marriage, he got rather crabby. Things were not going well. He was working on a project requiring special concentration. What project? she asked. A new novel, a long poem? He wouldn’t say because he worked better when nobody was looking over his shoulder. It was a mistake to show your unfinished work. I need to go off by myself, he said.
Without me? He needed to go to the river cabin where he could write undisturbed. What am I supposed to do? Susan said. You have to teach, he said. You have a contract to fulfill.
It’s hard for Susan to remember the mood of her acquiescence and even harder to transcend her later scorn. How could she give in so meekly? But since he wasn’t unfaithful sexually, she agreed to stay behind. He went off and called her every second night. She wrote letters to her parents making the best of it, boasting of their unconventionality, Edward wrestling in the wilderness, and what a great life. Unfortunately, he came back gloomier than ever. It didn’t work, he said. He’ll have to start over again. Start what? But it was too private for words. Not until later did she register her official verdict: Edward the phony, herself gullible fool. The only good thing about that October, she would say, was that it enabled her to meet Arnold. He was a hospital intern living in an apartment upstairs. His wife had a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized. In the end, everybody except Selena would later say, the whole episode was a blessing for them all.
But twenty years of marriage (no idyll, to be sure) allow Susan to wonder with an open mind what sticking with Edward would have been like. If she had stayed with him, she’d now be Stephanie. With due allowance for Rosie and Dorothy and Henry, Susan is no longer afraid to ask if life as Stephanie would necessarily have been any less wonderful than life as Susan.
Once she asked him why he wanted to write. Not why he wanted to be a writer but why he wanted to write. His answers differed day to day. It’s food and drink, he said. You write because everything dies, to save what dies. You write because the world is an inarticulate mess, which you can’t see until you map it in words. Your eyes are dim and you write to put your glasses on. No, you write because you read, to remake for your own use the stories in your life. You write because your mind is babble, you dig a track in the babble to find your way around yourself. No, you write because you are shelled up inside your skull. You send out probes to other people in their skulls, and you wait for a reply. The only way to show you why I write, he said, is to show you what I write, which I’m not ready for.
She thought it sounded just fine. He made it look like a necessity of life. She was afraid, though, lest he be insufficiently nourished by what he could actually write. When she heard he had given it up to sell insurance, she hoped he had found some way to make insurance equally nourishing.
One thing bothered her about his creed. If writing was a necessity of life, what would her Freshman English students do? Or herself. Except for letters, an occasional diary, some reminiscences in a notebook, she was no writer. How did she survive?
Well, she was a reader. If Edward couldn’t live without writing, she couldn’t live without reading. And without me, Edward, she says, you’d have no reason to exist. He was a transmitter, spending his resources, she a receptor who became richer the more she received. Her way with the chaos in her mind was to cultivate it through the articulations of others, by which she meant the reading of a lifetime with whose aid she created the interesting architecture and geography of herself. She had constructed over the years a rich and civilized country, full of history and culture with views and vistas she had never dreamed of in the days when Edward wanted to make his visions known. How thin those visions seemed compared to the lands she had seen. Generously, in the years since then, she has wished him a good education. Now along comes Nocturnal Animals. Whether it shows an education is unknown, but at least it’s a vision and he’s making that known, and Susan is glad for him.
All through the day as she works about the house, Susan looks forward to reading tonight. She has discarded her contempt for Edward’s folly, which was no more than her own. Take his book frankly and be glad of it. If the Edward who wrote it seems more intelligent and better than the Edward she knew, no reason to be surprised. She looks forward to meeting the new Edward on Friday, twenty-five years of maturity added on. But be prepared for him not to shine. Though some writers as people seem nicer than their books (you like them fine but not what they write), others are not so nice, selfish or surly, though their books are attractive, intelligent, and full of light.
Yet to tell the truth (Susan’s truth), the Edward of this book is still concealed. Hidden in the intensity of Tony’s case, like police invisible behind the spotlight. That won’t last. When Tony, having tracked down his disaster and found his murdered wife and child, steps off the common ground of his misfortune and into his personal Tonyness, then will Edward appear? Susan thinks what to say until then. So far, only this: You begin well enough. If you can’t keep it up, at least you have this. Which is a relief, Edward, you can’t imagine what a relief.
THE SECOND SITTING
ONE
It’s late before Susan Morrow returns to her book. She sits on the couch with the last two hours crashing in her head, of Dorothy trotting down the steps with Arthur to his car, Rosie hunting for her Christmas horses, Henry upstairs with the enormous sound of Wagner at full strength—not rock for Henry but Wagner that she makes him shut his door and lower the volume. She finds the manuscript on the coffee table under the Monopoly board, which someone has dropped with thousands of dollars and green houses and hotels strewn about. She relaxes, closes her eyes. In a moment she will extricate it from that abandoned wealth. In a moment she will read.
Her mind resists focus. If young Arthur, rosy cheeked, is really the nice young fellow he pretends to be, shy, not looking you in the eye, incipient madness, insane boy killer. While Martha settles down on the Monopoly board, money and all, hotels poking her belly, and all that world of Tony underneath. When Susan slips her hand in, Martha spills to the floor, taking modern civilization with her. Murl you, Martha says.
Susan puts the unread manuscript in the box on the couch, finished pages in a pile next to it. Looks for her place, marked by a piece of red and green Christmas paper. She thinks. Tries to remember Tony who lost his family in the woods. Not ready yet. Wrong mood. She dreams a little, thinking herself into Tony. Dreaming, comparing his case to hers, what kind of novel would Susan’s troubles make? How much more terrible his are, except that hers are real, his imaginary, made up by somebody—by Edward. His are simpler too, stark questions of life and death, in contrast to hers, which are ordinary, messy, and minor, complicated by uncertainty as to whether they rate as troubles at all. Troubles are the homeless, people ravaged by poverty, war, crime, disease. Is Marilyn Linwood a trouble? Whose affair with Arnold ended three years ago but might still be going on. Susan doesn’t know if it is, honestly, she doesn’t. And won’t ask. Not after all their talks and the understanding reached, according to which Linwood has no significance, since this marriage, Arnold says, is strong enough to withstand all rival attractions. Not something to bother a marriage counselor about.
