Tony and Susan, page 15
Calm down Tony, take it easy. The house was church, where he prayed his ghosts to restore his soul. Worship service. He put his books on the table and went to the shelf in the living room where he kept the album. Prayer book. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Tableau. She sits on the couch, he in the chair, Helen on the floor leaning against the coffee table, saying “You did? No kidding?”
Bible lesson. “Then I began to wonder why I found myself talking to him every day as we came out of class and suddenly I realized he was waiting for me, and I was thrilled.”
Helen amused. “You sound like a couple of kids.”
“We were a couple of kids.”
Tradition. “Your father is the steadiest of men. That’s worth something over the long haul.” Praise Daddy.
History. The spirit of inquiry, giggling. “You know what I mean? It’s absolutely impossible to imagine you two as lovers.”
“Your Daddy is very loving in his way.”
Mystery. The question Helen wanted to ask but did not want answered, which she never asked because not to answer was as much an answer as an answer.
Ritual. April a year ago on bikes after dinner. Signs of the coming, buds, new birds. Daughter leads the way, changing the route each evening, different turns around different blocks. Daddy goes last, guarding the others through the quiet streets, alert when a car goes by, tense when they come out to the main street between the parked cars and the traffic. When they get home it’s dark. Homework time, no television tonight folks. Peace now, all dangers have been left behind.
The steadiest of men, loving in his way, taking coffee in the coffee shop, waved to Louise Germane in a booth with a student named Frank Hawthorne. He did not like this Hawthorne, it displeased him to see her with him, he wondered how to tell her. Frank Hawthorne had a greasy face and a dirty beard, his hair was tangled and bushy, his eyes looked out like an animal in the weeds, lips bulged through his beard like internal organs oozing through an open wound. He remembered Hawthorne’s cheating case, hushed up to improve his character. Also the pigeon case: two guys with a baseball on the slope below Tony’s office, Hawthorne standing by. “Gimme that,” Hawthorne says, then hurls a fast ball into a flock of pigeons, which would have killed or maimed if it had hit. A girl complains, “Don’t do that. I like them.”
“Dirtier than rats,” Hawthorne, the virtuous murderer, says. In the coffee shop Tony Hastings wondered how to warn Louise.
So he asked Francesca the next time he saw her. She smiled at him. “Why bother? If he’s a skunk, she’ll find out.”
“None of my business, you mean.”
“Unless you have other business you’re not mentioning.”
That was at lunch. He said, “I’ve been irritable lately.”
“I’ve noticed. Do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t get involved with a graduate student. You don’t need that.”
“What do I need?”
There was a moment while she looked at him. The look grew long, it meant something. Serious, no smile, blue eyes speaking. It passed and she was smiling again in her usual way of partial implication, balanced complicity. He thought, I missed something. I have just been told, and now it is too late.
But he ate lunch with her regularly in the Faculty Club. Her look, reminiscent and kind. He thought: She is my only friend. She remembered him as he was. She knew he didn’t want to be this way. He looked at her and thought, lovely, beautiful.
So he said, “Today’s Thursday.”
“What about it?”
“You’re free this afternoon.”
“So?”
Spaghetti, curling on her fork, she avoided his eyes. Leap. “May I take you somewhere in my car?”
Mouth upturned receiving spaghetti, she wiped tomato sauce off her elegant mouth. “Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“All right.”
That’s all. They drove to an overlook above the river, where they could hear the trucks below the bluff. They looked at the view, near another car with a couple looking at the view, and he felt a sexual surge generating steam like nothing he had felt in nine months, not even his night in New York.
He talked about the carbon dioxide shield, the growing warmer, the coming desert under the cancerous sun. He saw his eloquence carrying him away. He saw she was bored. He thought, I’m not a nice person any more, and his sexual feeling died.
He took her home, wondering if she would invite him in, but she did not. She thanked him for the afternoon, and he saw no magic in her routine eyes. She went up to her house, and a little girl came out to greet her.
He drove off abruptly enough to make the tires squeal. Stopped hard for the light, screech, then dashed into the intersection. Feeling something, he did not know what. He went out to the expressway, buzzed ahead of the car in front of him, slipped back and forth one lane to another. Blasted his horn at a car in the middle, nudging him along until he could get by.
When the wildness settled, he drove home and rested in his living room. What was this, Laura still refusing to let go? It seemed like something else. As if he needed a ceremony to return Tony to Tony. He imagined a primitive god, male and savage.
The image made him laugh, but the laughter had no feeling, and the next moment he had this overwhelming conviction that no thought of his had any feeling. He saw all his recent behavior on a screen with light shining through, disclosing emptiness. His wild driving on the road an hour ago, a display to conceal something he did not have. The revelation spread, it delved into the past, all the way back to the catastrophe, and all it found was counterfeit or fake. Phony feelings acted out. It frightened him, not for the abyss but for what would happen if anyone found out, thinking, This is something no one must know. A secret. In the late afternoon inside his house, he looked for his soul and saw only white indifference beneath the calculated displays of grief and, as that became wearisome, irritability and rage. He recognized the privileges grief had given him. What no one knew was how he had fooled them. He was an artificial man, fabricated of gestures.
He paced around the house totally free. A vague anger led him to his desk, where he typed out the following note to Bobby Andes:
Just to say I’m now certain the one I couldn’t identify was Turk. I hope you are not easing up your hunt for those men. I promise to cooperate in every possible way, for I am more determined than ever to bring them to justice.
FIVE
The next page has a notice: PART THREE. Good. A change, Susan Morrow’s had enough of this. She wonders if Edward expects a compliment on the internal organs oozing through the beard. Perhaps the pariah with the turban and the castaway goat was something he forgot to revise.
How far can she read tonight? She looks ahead to calculate. Right now we’re about midway, should finish tomorrow. Take a break.
“Rosie, bed!”
Tiny voice upstairs. “I yam in bed, Mama.”
Jeffrey wants to go out. She opens the door, lets him go. Not supposed to, but it’s late, no one will know. Keep out of trouble, mister. She goes to the kitchen. Snack, a Coke? The kitchen is cold, temperature dropping outside. In the study she hears the voices of a television sitcom, nobody watching, someone left it on all evening.
She feels bruised by her reading and by life too. She wonders, does she always fight her books before yielding to them? She rides back and forth between sympathy for Tony and exasperation. If only she didn’t have to talk to Edward afterward. If you say Tony is going mad—or turning into a jerk—you need to be sure Tony is not really Edward.
Now he’s Tony the artificial man. She wonders about that. Generally Susan is skeptical about words like hollow and superficial. Is she hollow or full? Damned if she knows, but she doesn’t want someone else deciding for her. If Edward is condemning Tony through Tony’s own voice, that’s old judgmental Edward again. When he judges she resist. But she also has a notion of a fairer second reading, later when the soreness has eased and everything is past.
In any case, Part Three. Something has ended. Is it Three of Three or Three of Four? If three, a sonata: A B A. What would that mean, back to the woods? If four, a symphony? Statement, funeral march, scherzo, finale. We have a crime, a victim, a reaction, and a so far unsuccessful search for the killers. She thinks, she thinks: will Tony Hastings be destroyed or redeemed? A bad happy ending would ruin everything, but it’s hard to imagine what a good one would be.
Nocturnal Animals 16
When Bobby Andes did not answer his letter, he sent another.
Repeat: I hope you are actively pursuing these men, not just waiting for something to fall into your lap. I hope you urged Ajax to pressure Adams to name his accomplices. The case warrants the attention of police nationwide, and I hope you have made the proper moves toward getting such attention. This is a matter of utmost importance to me. I hope you do not regard it as routine or insoluble.
In his car driving home late on a flowered May day, he lectured to himself. Other drivers thought he was cussing the traffic. He said, It’s not the clotty rush hour nor drivers tailgating. Not boys throwing softballs at cars. Not the evil editorials of the morning papers, nor greedy students trying to get away with something, nor disgusting Frank Hawthorne. Not even greenhouse or nuclear war. There’s but one crime, one evil, one grievance. It was you who did it to me, no criminals or devils but you. Everything else is distraction.
He thought, if Bobby Andes finds the letter provocative that’s all right. If it annoys him, so much the better. Two weeks passed, and he realized again there would be no answer. Tony Hastings in pain, waiting for word from a detective in Pennsylvania who had the care of his health and hope of rescue in the month of May. The green of his yard was bright and full of yellow, the green weeds invaded the old brown. There were bright sky days, lawns mowing, gardens digging, but not Tony Hastings, resisting with last summer’s business. He preferred the night, when you couldn’t be seen looking out the darkened windows.
Since he knew what he wanted, he could wait. Be less disagreeable to innocent people. He pointed it out to Francesca Hooton at lunch. “I have been blaming a lot of wrong people. I know whose fault it is now.”
“You’ve finally decided to be angry?”
Alone in his big house he talked on, perfecting a rage. He said, You think it’s easy to become Tony Hastings? It takes forty years. It needs loving mother and intellectual father, a summer place, lessons on the back porch. Sister and brother to fence temper and create sensitivity to others’ distress. Years of reading and study and wife and daughter to force pain into habit and make a man.
But it’s even harder to become Laura Hastings. Assembled in the long accumulating day by day as Laura Turner, by Meyer Street and Dr. Handelman, with Donna and Jean, the lake in the mist and the death of Bobo and the studio, Laura Hastings is not completed but just begun in her forty years of life. Laura Hastings is (was) not the life she lived but the forty years yet to be lived, as promised.
Beasts, do you think it easier to replace Helen Hastings? Hers is the longest lifetime of all, fifty to sixty years just begun, extracted from the outgrown child by the growing world, from the original Laura-Tony germ to sleepy song and Little Golden Book, momdad and doggie love with notebooked poems to the unbreakable contract of a grownup Helen-in-the-world.
Nothing, beasts, is harder to build or more impossible to replace than the unlived years of these three. Not your cars, your cocks, your sleazy girlfriends, your own ratty little souls. Tony Hastings imagined those cars, cocks, girlfriends and souls. He lived among them, looking for words to make his hatred overwhelming. A story, an account sufficiently degrading. Of stupid grown men who got this notion from movies or television and school bullies of how to be a man by pushing people around. Let’s go out on the road and scare the squares. No more teachers’ dirty looks, let’s get the prissy girls and the tight-assed schoolmoms, give em a taste. If you get in trouble, knock them off. Tony Hastings looked for words adequate to his rage. Vile, wretched, cowardly. Low, vicious, despicable. Not evil: that word gave them too much dignity. The words he sought were lower and worse than evil. With such rhetoric he tried to replace the soul he thought he had lost.
The telephone in the afternoon: as he went to it he already knew what it was. He heard the harsh distant voice materializing his thought, “I’m calling Tony Hastings, is this Tony Hastings?” He was right, they were both right. “Andes, here.”
He heard. “You want to identify somebody else?”
“Who is it?”
“I ain’t telling. I ask if you want to tell me who it is?”
“When? Where?”
“Soon as you can come. Here. It’s Grant Center this time.”
So he prepared for another trip. Not to fail this time. This time I’ll see and know who it is, Ray or Lou or again Turk. Going overnight, he packed his bag wild with excitement, took one plane and stepped off another, a little commuting one, at a small airport in a valley. Bobby Andes was waiting behind a fence. He got into the car and they drove past fields and woods and under the edges of hills. Return to the land of terror.
“That was a couple insistent letters you wrote,” Andes said. “You really want them guys?”
“What happened?”
“You tell me first. You going to mouse out on me again like before?”
“I meant what I said in my letters.”
“How come the change?”
“It’s no change. I want those guys caught.”
“You don’t want to give no false identifications, you know. I’ll tell you what we got. We got an attempted holdup of a supermarket in Bear Valley Mall just before closing time. We got one guy caught and one killed. We got one guy got away, just like the other time.”
“How did that happen?”
“I’ll tell you. There was three guys, dumb jerks, two in the store, one in the car outside. They don’t see the manager in the back. The cashier puts her hands up like they say, the manager comes down the aisle with his gun, yells, ‘Drop that gun!’ The idiot turns and shoots without looking, hits the Wheaties boxes, Wheaties shower. The manager shoots back. The manager’s a good shot. Got the guy in the chest, knocked him down, out of contention. They operated on him in the hospital. Twelve hours later he died.”
Tony Hastings quiet, wondering who died, not sure if good news or bad. “What about the others?”
“Wait. The other guy in the store, he runs. The manager runs after him. He tries to get into the car, but a cop comes tearing around the corner. Manager calls, cop shouts warning, guy in the car starts up, other guy never does get in. The cop shoots out the tire, the driver of the car surrenders, but the running guy gets away.”
“How did he manage that?”
“Disappeared. Took off running when the cop started to shoot, ducked behind a car somewhere, I don’t know. Not enough manpower to follow, don’t know where he went.”
Tony asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“See if you recognize the guy we caught.”
“You want to tell me why I might recognize him?”
“Later, later.”
They were coming back to where it began, the fields and hillsides, still in early green infiltrating the brown and gray winter that had fallen between. He recognized nothing until they drove into the police lot with the motel across the way.
“You might take a look at the corpse too, though it’s not strictly necessary,” Andes said. “We know who he is.”
“Who?”
“Steve Adams. The one you called Turk.”
“Turk? Dead?”
“Know him by the fingerprints.”
“I thought he was in jail in Ajax.”
“He jumped bail. So I’m told.”
Tony Hastings was trying to figure out the difference in Bobby Andes’s appearance. It was his loss of weight, grooves around his mouth and nose and under his eyes where it had been greasy smooth before.
Tony Hastings checked in across the street. When he came back, Andes said, “I guess you’d like a lineup like the other time.”
“I thought that’s what I was here for.”
“I could take you to see him and ask you who the hell he is, but I guess you’d prefer the lineup, more up and up.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Go get some coffee. If we’re going to have a lineup I need to round up some guys.”
There was something not wholly serious about the lineup when they finally got to it. They had it in the office with the desks. They put Tony at one of the desks. Six people came in from the side door and stood in a row in front of the counter. It was a moment before Tony realized this was the lineup. The first of the six was a woman in brown who had been sitting a few minutes before at the desk where Tony sat now. She was giggling. The second was a policeman in uniform, trying not to grin. He looked familiar, and Tony wondered if they were trying to trick him by disguising the suspect. Later he realized this was the policeman named George who had brought him back from the crime in the woods on that day. The third and fourth people were handcuffed to each other. One was a heavy man with yellow hair, dressed like a garage mechanic, the other was an old man in a dirty open-collar shirt. The fifth and sixth were also handcuffed. Both wore beards and plaid shirts. The beard of one was brown and full. He looked independent and intelligent. The other’s beard was black and clumsily trimmed. His eyes groped around the room in confusion, and Tony Hastings watched in amazement as the unknown face turned like merging binocular images into a face he knew.
