Tony and Susan, page 22
“I thought you were going to say, woman.”
“I was going to say it.”
She was looking at him solemnly, speaking slowly. He felt as if he was play-acting, she too, in spite of the tension. She stopped looking at him, then looked at him again and said, “Does that mean you want me to sleep with you?”
Catch your breath, man, this was faster than expected. “Is that what I mean?”
“It’s not?” Her eyes were big.
“Perhaps it is.”
“Perhaps?”
“Well yes. I mean it is.”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes.”
Quiet now: “Me too.”
She said, “There’s one problem.”
“You don’t have any—?”
“Not that. I’m not certain Jack Billings won’t come over in a little while. I’m not sure I’ve seen the last of him tonight.”
“Would he want to sleep with you?”
She nodded.
“You’re lovers?”
“He thinks we are.” She opened her hands, empty. “I’m sorry. I just never thought I’d have a chance with you.”
So that was the ban. “I shouldn’t intervene.”
“I want you to intervene.” She considered. “Let’s take a chance. If he comes I won’t let him in. I’ll tell him I’m sick.”
He had an idea. Why not? “Would you like to go to my house?”
“Hey. Great idea.”
Quick, before Jack Billings comes. She ran to the bedroom, brought out a white robe, looked about hastily trying to decide what to take, couldn’t think of anything except a toothbrush. “Hurry,” she said, as if Jack Billings were already at the door.
A car was going by slowly when they came out of the house. “Jesus,” she said, “that’s him.” The car went on.
“Why didn’t he stop?” she said.
He remembered the woods.
“He looked right at me.”
“I don’t want to make trouble for you.”
“Please don’t worry. It’s not your problem.”
In the car she said, “I’ll explain to him tomorrow. I’ll think of something to say.”
He thought, Is there trouble in this? Do I want to be responsible for a break between Louise Germane and her lover? Do I know what public stance to take?
Louise Germane came into his house in the middle of the night. He turned on the lights. She looked around happily. “I’ve always wanted to come here. Even before your wife died.”
She stood in the middle of Laura’s living room, looking at Laura’s paintings, the piano, the bookcases, sofa, chair, coffee table. Violating Laura by not being her. She was not his wife, nor his daughter, he hardly knew her, yet he wanted to take hold of her like an intimate, a member of his family. The paradox made him dizzy.
She said, “I want you to show me everything.”
“Now?”
She laughed, stepped up to him full front to front, and said, “Tomorrow will do.” Then the kiss itself, the first one, already probing, this young person whom he once considered timid, but who knew all about this kind of kissing, better than he, probably. She pressed her middle and lower parts against him and leaned back to look at him, and said, “Where do we go for the festivities?”
“Upstairs?”
“Master bedroom? Great, let’s go.”
He felt a certain irritation. They went upstairs. At the door he turned on the light and stopped. Laura’s ghost. Tony was surprised, for he thought she had lifted the ban, but here she was, still not ready to leave the room. He looked into Helen’s room, also barred, and then the cool neutral guest room.
“Let’s go here.”
The festivities. She crossed her arms and pulled off her T-shirt, then they undressed, looking at each other all the while, her triumphant smile no longer secret. She was thin, her hips cast a shadow over the hollow of her thighs. She touched his cock, this girl who had been his student.
Muffled laughs, murmurs, nuzzles, tickles. Her body was as familiar as if he had known her forever. Go there, it’s okay, I wish you would. I never dreamed I’d be doing this with you. Not to rush things, but the time began to swell, it filled and could not be delayed, and he leaned over Louise Germane, maneuvering to find her, and then he was there. He thought how good to be back.
In his own guest room, under the hairy bone while she clutched, he became aware of someone watching in the doorway. Jack Billings, ousted. The ceremony was moving into its wild stage, the gauge rising. It wasn’t Jack Billings, it was someone in the other bed, while the color changed, sunset blazed on the snow, the solitary skier released to fall raced downhill on the fiery snow and dropped below into the late gray shadow. In the other bed someone was being raped by a man with his back turned, whom Bobby Andes was hitting over the back with a stick. Then Tony Hastings, even as he drew the last rich gold from Louise Germane, felt himself dividing, rising like a spirit from his twitching body to tug at the raping man in the other bed but being a spirit unable to touch him.
It was as quiet in the room as the funeral had been. She was stroking the back of his head. The people were quiet, perhaps they were gone. He looked at the other bed and discovered there was no other bed. There was Louise Germane, sweet and vulnerable, smiling vaguely like a child just waked up, and he relieved she was still alive felt tender toward her. He was confused by the violence they had just been through and the shock of seeing there was no other bed. It seemed to mean that the two beds were the same, in which case the man raping the woman was himself, which they were trying to stop, and the spirit of himself trying to intervene was only a spirit.
He was disappointed, for though he knew the time with Louise Germane had been good in itself, it was not a time in itself, for the case was not closed. He asked, “Will you spend the night?”
“I thought that was already settled.”
In the middle of the night he wanted to wake her up and tell her, hey, remember when she seduced him in the blueberry field behind the house in Maine? When Helen was bike riding with her friend, he and Laura went out with a couple of blueberry baskets. She in shorts and a flimsy shirt, a warm sunny day, absolutely still, he heard her laugh behind him, turned around, saw her with her blouse open and her hands hooked in the waist of her shorts, pushing them down. “Hey man,” she said, “what say?” and afterward a buzzing in the silence on the prickly ground. “Relax,” she said in his ear, “no one ever comes here.” Then the water, chasing her running down to the rocks where she dove in naked and he behind, the bitter cold, quick in and quick out, and, “Jesus, we forgot our towels,” running up to the house with wild stinging skin. Laura the athlete, her arm-swinging walk. Skating in winter, he went with her sometimes to the rink to watch her pirouettes and figures, where she would teach him though his ankles were weak and he had no aptitude. Once she went on a skating trip with her friend Mira to the northern part of the state and was late coming back. He lay awake until five in the morning and she still hadn’t come, and he thought the car had smashed on the highway ice. Not her fault, she had a good reason for not calling, now forgotten. Nights in the dark to tell Louise Germane about. Usually the worry was Helen, while Laura and Tony pretended to be asleep though each knew the other was awake, before Laura would sit up in bed and say, “Isn’t that child back yet?” Marriage and worry, Louise. When the doctor discovered the abnormal tissue in a routine test, they had to wait through the step by step of elimination before they could celebrate with a Chinese dinner, their future free and clear at last again.
Thinking for Louise, if you marry, you will worry. But when she died, the worries ceased, which you might consider a relief. He looked at Louise Germane, a big lump in the bedclothes, and thought: let’s marry you when we get straightened out.
THREE
The next page marks the beginning of PART FOUR. Since there’s no room for a fifth part, it’s four movements, a symphony, and we’re three quarters done. The shape of the book should be clear, but Susan still can’t predict what’s in it.
There was a blueberry field behind the house in Maine, where Susan and Edward went picking with their baskets. No sex, though. It was not she who opened her blouse or pulled down her shorts or said, “Hey man.” Does Edward writing wish she had? She’s uneasy about the sexuality in his novel. The notion that slugging Ray unfurled Tony’s cock. The vision of rape and struggle while making love to Louise. Is Tony’s sex full of rape and death because he was traumatized by Ray, or is that what Edward now believes sex is? If she could talk to Stephanie and ask.
She would tell Edward that Arnold denies violence in his cock. He never wanted to rape anyone, can’t conceive of sex against a woman’s will. Susan Morrow believes him. She wonders, do men really differ, like tribes, the gentles and the roughs? What’s violent in Arnold is meted out in a different arena: in ritual steps, washed hands in rubber gloves, tray and scalpel, measured pressure and delicate cut, concentration and control.
In their version of sex, she comes in after her shower, door shut, bedlamp on, Arnold reading in bed. Undisciplined children loose in the house, television downstairs, Nilsson immolating Brünnhilde through a closed door upstairs. Her short nightie, perfume sweetening her neck and ears. She stands near where he reads. He looks gravely at her knees, puts his book down. His hand, sensitive, moves up the back of her leg, the undercurve of her buttocks before going around to the front. She likes to see her husband the great surgeon’s distended cock, his eyes boylike before the ballgame, and she loves his stubbly head against her cheek, his projection inside her.
While it’s happening, sometimes she pretends they are making love for the first time as they did when Selena was in the hospital, or, revising history, on an early date as teenagers. Sometimes they are divorced but still friendly after an accidental meeting in a restaurant, or they are on a beach at night, or unmarried adventurers sailing around the world in a sloop with the steering gear set, or a pair of movie stars going restless to his house after having just filmed a nude scene, or they are the nude scene itself getting out of hand in front of the stage crew. Or they are political leaders on the sly after the summit protocol, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. She does not tell Arnold, who assumes it’s the excitement of his own thick presence.
Such thoughts make her strangely sad, as if it were all finished. Not so, she scolds herself, stop that. Read, read. She likes this book tonight. It feeds her well. She wonders how someone so self-absorbed as Edward could disperse so easily through a story and take her so out of herself. The book makes her feel better about him, at least she hopes it does.
Nocturnal Animals 21
Bobby Andes called again. The telephone rang Tony Hastings out of the shower before his second date with Louise Germane, forcing him to sit at the phone by his desk with a towel around him, dripping water. Watching the couple in shorts across the street, washing their bright red car.
The voice on the telephone said, “I got some news you might not like.”
Tony waited for it. Static, the tiny dead words, the bad news: They’re letting Ray Marcus go. Who? Ray Marcus, that’s Ray, Ray, they’re letting him go. “What do you mean, they’re letting him go?” Tony said.
He heard the voice explaining, Bobby Andes, thin and nasal through the wires, saying they’re dropping the charges, dropping the case. Mr. District Fucking Attorney Gorman, that’s who, dropping the charges, insufficient evidence.
Tony was wiping his head with the towel, his idle penis exposed in his lap, his wet hairy legs, and across the street the girl in shorts with perfect fair legs leaning over the roof of the bright red car and polishing it dry.
“He needs corroboration,” the voice said.
When the girl leaned far enough, the back of her shorts lifted over the edges of her buttocks.
“What did you say?”
“Well at least you had the satisfaction of socking him in the teeth.”
Other voices on the line, a woman laughing.
“It’s politics, Tony, that’s what it is.”
In the silence the girl turned the hose on her boyfriend, who threw a sponge at her. Louise Germane expected him at six.
The voice of Bobby Andes, stretched thin over miles of countryside, wanted Tony to make another trip to Grant Center.
Tony tried to resist. “It takes ten, twelve hours to drive there,” he said. “I can’t keep going back.”
He heard Bobby Andes saying, “I want you here as soon as possible. Marcus will try to leave the state. Get a head start, spend the night in a motel.”
The military peremptory, not to speak of the intrusion on his privacy, on Louise Germane, on Tony’s bewildered showered penis at rest in his lap. “I have a date tonight.”
Noise.
“What?”
“If you’re satisfied slugging Ray Marcus in the jaw. You find that an adequate punishment.”
So Tony said he would come, but not until tomorrow. He thought, there is no reason to be upset, and I am not upset yet. I will be upset later on, though. I will be shocked and I won’t be able to get it out of my head, later on.
He wondered if he would be angry. It was an affront. He said, You would think they would give at least equal weight to my word against Ray’s and let the jury decide. You would think my status in life, not to mention I was the victim, would give me credence, with that record in his background.
So he started the next morning in the early sunlight at six, and drove with the memory of his abbreviated night with Louise Germane, their second, in which he brought her back to the house and she helped him pack, and he tried to keep his mind on her and enjoy her and keep down the fear. The alarm clock woke him at four-thirty to the shock of having been asleep while something terrible was happening. He woke her beside him, and they had breakfast in the kitchen and he took her back to her apartment, leaving her with puffy eyes in the cheerful birdsinging six o’clock sunlight, where she intended to go back to bed and get the rest of her sleep.
He watched her wave sleepily, then followed the empty streets to the Interstate, which took him out into the flat countryside with mist on the fields. Once she was gone, the fear he had been fighting took over, an invasion. Something terrible is going to happen. A disaster coming. He wondered how he could stand it the whole day ahead with nothing but to drive and drive.
The long tiresome trip began to unfold, which had become so familiar, every detail in the same slow order, step by step, with each curve ahead opening to another vista with no surprises, farmhouse to farmhouse, bridge to bridge, woods and fields, all day long. With the shriek of the wind, the pounding and constant presence of tires that could explode and engine that could burn out and shell that could rattle apart. Impatience rewoke with every mileage sign and back to sleep with the gentle curving of the road. The journey sheltered him for the time, hypnotizing him against its own dangers and keeping all else at bay.
He tried to understand what he was afraid of. He supposed it was Ray. Ray free, vicious, hunting him down to finish what he had failed to complete last summer. Mister, your wife. With additional motivation for the smashed tooth. Later in the morning the fear took a new turn. Ray would go after Louise Germane. Of course, that’s what he does, destroying me through my women. All the more need for speed, to intercept before he slips away.
Passage through a city and the need for coffee took his attention, and when he was free again, Bobby Andes was there, screened through the girl leaning over the roof of her car, the back of her shorts above the edges of her buttocks: “If you’re content with hitting Marcus in the jaw.” Trust him, he had something up his sleeve. Tony thought, It’s not just Ray. He was afraid of Bobby Andes. What, his moral harshness, his contempt? Something nasty, not yet clear, which could get him in trouble if he didn’t spot it in time?
After lunch no explanation seemed adequate to his discomfort. He felt delinquent in some duty. He had contracted an enormous debt, the due date had passed and foreclosure was imminent. It haunted him, I owe something to somebody. It was not financial. It had to do with Ray Marcus or Bobby Andes or Laura and Helen. Possibly Louise Germane, though unlikely, she being too new. It grew dim again. It was like a ghost, supernatural. Something terrible is going to happen. Something terrible has happened. One, the other, or both.
It would be even worse if something terrible was happening right now. Happening because something terrible did not happen. Mr. District Fucking Attorney Gorman has determined there was no case. Because what Mr. Tony Hastings saw was not enough. His identification of Ray, the three guys in the woods, the crime, was judged to be no identification, no Ray Marcus, no three guys in the woods, no woods, no crime. Tony Hastings mistaken. It made him want to howl. If they don’t believe me, who am I? If what I remember is not good enough, what am I remembering? Where did it go, my life, what have I been doing since?
In the late afternoon, in the rolling country of eastern Ohio after another coffee, his mind cleared and the world seemed ordinary again, though not without the feeling he had simply locked up the haunting question in a room and would be hearing from it again. He asked himself the rational question, Exactly what is the purpose of this trip, and was surprised to discover he did not know. Ray Marcus has been released, and Andes wants me to come. To help, he said, but no word as to how. It’s a hell of a long journey for so indefinite a purpose.
He counted up the number of long journeys he had taken at Bobby Andes’s request. This would be his fourth visit to Grant Center in a year. All this in pursuit of three men. He thought, Why I must be crazy. This is insane.
It was the vagueness of purpose this time that proved it. Each of the other trips had a specific end which made some sense. He supposed Bobby Andes had a plan, something secret, not safe to mention over the telephone. Why, he said, that’s mad. It’s not me that’s insane, it’s Bobby Andes.
They met not in Grant Center but in Topping, in a restaurant with a counter, and they sat in a booth by the window opposite the fronts of their cars parked outside. Tony’s dinner was tough gray roast beef under a blanket of gravy. He faced Bobby Andes, who bent over his food, curling his spaghetti on his fork, raising a forkful to his mouth but not putting it in, putting his plate aside, leaving it untouched. Tony Hastings looked at him and said, This man is mad. Adding after a moment, So am I. Bobby Andes said, “If it wasn’t for this cancer.”
