Tony and Susan, page 30
The only definite thing he knew was this: he was free to continue his trip to Maine. After all this time, more than a year. The police told him this when they arrived at last, standing by the door congratulating him as he got into the driver’s seat and strapped himself in. The seat belt was tight around his middle. They shook his hand. Wished him well. Told him the route, estimates of how long it would take.
And so he had gone, and now he was driving fast with a little of the cowboy and the baseball player still in him, almost singing for the joy of it, and in no time at all he was there. He saw the summer house at the end of the road, down the slope. It was a big old-fashioned two-story house with gable windows and a porch. All the windows and the porch were screened, it was covered with screens. He drove down the drive and onto the grass, and saw them in the water waiting for him. He walked down the grass to the water’s edge.
“Come on in,” Laura said, “we’ve been waiting for you.”
“What took you so long?” Helen said.
He asked, “Is it cold?”
“Pretty cold,” Laura said, “but you can bear it.”
“It’s better after you’ve been in a while,” Helen said.
They were standing up to their necks so he could see only their heads. The water was flickering blue and white like sweet milk in the afternoon light, and the fuzzy pine islands out in the bay shimmered with summer joy.
He stepped into the water, icy around his feet. Laura and Helen laughed. “You’ve been away too long,” Laura said. “You’re all out of shape.”
He looked back up the slope to the house standing on the grass, high and spacious and beautiful. The screen door on the screened porch was propped open, and two of the screened windows on the second floor were open, he did not know why. He thought how good it would be to return to the house after his swim, to walk up the grass and go inside and sit in the big empty pine-smelling rooms and enjoy the warming up after the chill. Then they could talk, all he remembered that he wanted to tell them. He wanted to tell her about her arms swinging as she walked up to the house. He wanted to ask if they had ever quarreled. He couldn’t remember and he hoped not. He wondered if he was ever jealous, he thought probably not, and if she was jealous of him, he hoped not, for he did not think he had ever given her cause. He wanted to tell her he remembered the blueberry field and something after that, he had forgotten.
But not yet, first there was this. Only their heads were above the surface, laughing and encouraging him, as he moved gingerly in the bitter cold water step by step toward them. It was hard to move, while they waited with such generosity and welcome he could hardly bear his happiness. With all his strength he pushed on, while the ice kept rising. It rose from his ankles to his knees, from his knees to his groin and groin to hips. It seized him freezing around his belly. It crept up to his chest, it covered his heart, it clutched his neck. Then still rising still freezing it reached his mouth and filled his nose and closed his burning eyes.
NINE
The book ends. Susan has watched it dwindle before her eyes, down through final chapter, page, paragraph, word. Nothing remains and it dies. She is free now to reread or look back at parts, but the book is dead and will never be the same again. In its place, whistling through the gap it left, a blast of wind like liberty. Real life, coming back to get her.
She needs a silence before returning to herself. Absolute stillness, no thought, no interpretation or criticism, just a memorial silence for the reading life that has ended. Later she’ll think about it. She’ll put things together, make sense of her reading, and decide what to say to Edward. Not yet.
There’s a shock of terror in the return of real life, concealed by her reading, waiting to swoop down on her like a predator in the trees. She dodges it—not yet for that, either. The kids upstairs, who came back in the middle of the last chapter: it’s their time now. She hears them laughing and squealing. She puts the cover on the box, the box on the shelf, checks the rooms, the front and back doors, turns off the lights, starts up.
They are all three on the floor in Rosie’s room, Rosie in her pajamas. Dorothy’s and Henry’s faces are unnaturally red.
“Hi, Mama,” Dorothy says. “Guess what?”
“Henry’s in love,” Rosie says.
He is grinning, triumph overruling embarrassment.
“How exciting,” she says. “Who with?”
“Elaine Fowler,” Dorothy says.
“That’s news? Why, Henry’s been in love with Elaine Fowler for the last year.”
Rosie looks disappointed. Henry mumbles. “This is different.”
Dorothy says, “It’s moved into a new phase.”
“A new phase. How wonderful.”
“What did you do this evening, Mama?” Dorothy says.
Susan Morrow is startled. “Me? Why, nothing. I finished my book.”
“How was it? Good?”
She’s not ready for that question. But she’s back in the real world, where it’s time to discriminate and be responsible. “Sure,” she says. “It’s good enough.”
Later, her mind loosens and the book liquefies. It’s impossible to say when. Maybe when she’s in bed, the house dark. More likely earlier, subliminally when she closed the house or while talking to the children. It’s impossible to pin her thought to a time or unfold it in a sequence.
Still conscious that some frightening reality has been planted in her mind, she postpones it still, to dwell longer in the book. She remembers her pang for Tony in the last sentences like a stab of personal grief. The sharpness fades when she thinks about it, as such things do. The water scene at the end reminds her of something. But does she understand why Tony has to die? She looks back, sees the path leading to death, its shape through the woods. He was on the way to Maine, he gets there in the end. She likes the ending better than she expected to, but has no idea if it’s right, or whether it resolves the questions raised. That requires recollection and thought she’s not ready for, if she’ll ever be, for now she’s not even sure it matters. If she asks Edward, he’ll think her dumb.
Forgetfulness follows the trail of her reading like birds eating the Hansel and Gretel crumbs. The path from the beginning is obliterated with weeds. It has buried the bodies of Tony Hastings’s wife and child and will bury Tony too. She tries to remember things. Helen on the rock fifty feet down the road, poor kid. Helen as Dorothy, as Henry too. Ray the weasel, where did he come from? Remember Tony miserable looking up the slope to Husserl’s: what made you name the neighbor that? Tony, man of postures, she’s ashamed of her superiority as she sees him flip from one stance to another, looking to clothe a burning body when it was the icing water he needed. Susan as Tony.
She knows that mountain road as if she had been there herself. Sees it with the same clarity blind Tony saw the tree he shot. The clearing, the mannequins, the trailer by the curve in the road. And Tony staggering over the bulky body of Ray. But around such spots as these the acid burns, the pages crumple.
There’s a feeling of loose ends hanging, but she finds it hard to remember. She wonders what happened outside the story. Back at the camp: what tale did Bobby finally tell his men? Did they buy it? Would it matter? Louise Germane, left behind and forgotten, it’s just as well for her.
The house in Maine with its porch and screens looks like her house, which Edward visited at fifteen and again when they were married. All those screens. She sees Tony looking at it in his dim archetypal blindness, and she feels meanings around her which she cannot see. She wonders if they are real or only her imagination and how long it will take her, if ever, to know.
She wants to talk, she doesn’t want to talk. What can she say? She’s ashamed to tell Edward how blind she feels. If readers could simply applaud and writers bow. She can do that. She can applaud, she can honestly tell Edward she liked his book, and that’s a relief. Postpone the critique. She had fun and felt regret when it ended. That will please him. Would you recommend it to your friends? Depends on the friend. Would you recommend it to Arnold? Sure she would. It would serve him right.
The secret fright she keeps dodging in her mind somewhere: that’s her private problem. It has nothing to do with the book.
AFTER
ONE
Arnold is coming, and then Edward. Susan Morrow is tense enough to take her breath away. She feels the contempt of each for the other as if for herself. Arnold thinks Edward a failure, always has. When they last met, years ago by accident at a play in Chicago, Arnold bought Edward a drink. He slapped him on the back, talked of cultural values and judged him effete. Edward ignored Arnold’s objections to obscurity in art, avoided the contemporary, changed the subject to baseball, and judged him simple.
She does the work of her day, kids to the dentist, groceries, with plans to meet Arnold at O’Hare in the evening. Frightened by what Arnold may be bringing home to her, the possible terrors, she turns her mind to Edward, who comes tomorrow. The critique he expects from her, the questions he expects her to ask, which she has postponed.
She’d rather leave the book where it was last night, to act untended in the sub-basements of her mind, but for Edward she’ll form an opinion, what she liked and what she didn’t. Adjectives. Questions that will organize her reading for tentative answers. To Edward’s question—what’s missing from his book?—she has a mischievous reply.
She meets Arnold at O’Hare in the evening, trying to be glad to see him. Kisses him, takes him by the arm, Arnold the Bear, who always looks disoriented in public places, with his graying beard, his bushy brows, worried about his baggage, distracted by thoughts. Preoccupied. By what, Susan does not know. He does not tell. She waits for his unwanted gift and holds back the urgent questions that are driving her crazy.
She drives him home on the busy expressway. As if nothing had happened, he talks of meetings, people seen, lectures attended. Describes the interview with the Cedar Hall Institute. Chickwash, what an honor for him, if only his mother could have lived. He expects the invitation within a week. She remembers his promise to discuss it with her before deciding anything, but he seems to think they’ve had that discussion already. If she reminds him, he’ll say he thought it was settled. She fears what other news such a reminder might elicit.
Instead she mentions Edward’s forthcoming visit. She describes Edward’s book as she drives but can’t tell if Arnold is listening. She talks in the blast of wind around the car windows, he not saying anything. She speaks of her plan to invite Edward to dinner. Tomorrow night. Since Arnold doesn’t hear that either, she repeats. Oh excuse me, he says. You’ll have to do without me, I’ve got to work tomorrow night.
That night Susan Morrow has sex. With her own Arnold, in their own ways, with their twenty-five year history. She wasn’t expecting it, his fatigue, her irritability, whatever is distracting her. A feeling of grievance, sorry for herself, all the sacrifices she has made. His neglect of her adventures, like the latest, this book of Edward’s, as important to her as Arnold’s New York adventures are to him: his total indifference. So she’s not expecting it and is halfway through the trapdoor to sleep when he puts his bear paw on her in his intimate privileged way bringing her violently back.
Back to an old world of bodies at night, featuring her nipples, throat, hips, and abdomen, along with his sweaty ribs, hairy legs, armpits and beard. Also their mutual tongues, and eventually his vulnerable fat thrusting sausage in the dark wet sensitivities under her pelvic arch. She forgets her grievances with a relieving yelp, approving her policy to be faithful and true whether in Chicago or Washington, while everything else disappears, including Edward and Marilyn Linwood. Or does not disappear. She’s thinking about them while Arnold rocks away, wondering how they would like each other. Afterward, he (who? Arnold, of course) puts his head on her shoulder and moans: Forgive me, oh forgive me. There there, she says, like a mother, patting the back of his head, not daring to wonder what he wants to be forgiven for.
The next day she waits for Edward. His card said he would stay at the Marriott, but there was no specific plan to meet. She expects him to call and will invite him for dinner then. Excited and nervous, all morning and part of the afternoon she waits. Meanwhile daylight drains the glow from Arnold’s night. As it usually does. She’s annoyed by his disregard of Edward. The official dogma for twenty-five years, that Edward is of no importance. She wishes Arnold would read his book. She wishes it as if she wrote it herself. The idea grows: to capture Arnold by the book, send him too through the woods with Tony, let him suffer the shocking loss and the uncomfortable discovery, enslaved to Edward’s imagination for the three days or whatever it requires.
But Arnold would say, this Tony Hastings of yours in this book by Edward, your Tony Hastings is a wimp. That’s Arnold’s language, how he would put it. He’ll say: I appreciate what Tony goes through, but what’s wrong with this man who can’t protect his family or control Ray even when he has the gun? That’s just the kind of hero your Edward would make up.
It irritates her though she’s the one inventing and making Arnold say it. Mistrusting his motives as she invents them, saying, You would never let Ray’s thugs get me, would you, Arnold? Nothing like this could happen to you, because you wouldn’t let it, is that what you want me to believe, my hero? She sees how the sneer at Tony’s maleness intends to certify and augment his own, though her particular recollection of Arnold’s maleness from last night is parched, lost in the memory of stroking his head and saying, There, there.
Her thought is full of rancor. She tries to correct for that, in fairness. In fairness, she too was bothered by Tony’s lack of backbone, which explains how she can invent Arnold’s critique. Don’t do that, Tony you fool, she would say. But never thought of complaining to Edward, because she knew his reply: that’s what he’s supposed to do. If she understands that, Arnold can too. Arnold should understand Tony’s dilemma with the gun. To have it and be unable to use it: for Susan that’s real life, unlike the movies, where the mere display of a gun by anybody confers the powers of God. Susan in the cabin in that situation would have been no more able to use the gun than Tony was. She should praise Edward for that, but hesitates, if the thought contains more than she knows: if in that flash of Tony the Wimp, there’s a spreading reflection of herself.
Well, Arnold would deny that. Patronizingly perhaps, he would assure her: Tony and you, Susan? There’s no resemblance in the least. I know my Susan. If Ray and his pals attacked your children, you’d fight in ways polite Tony never dreamed. You’d jump and grab him by the throat, bite, kick, pluck his eyes. There’s no way you’d let a thug hurt yours as Tony does, as you well know.
Right, Susan knows. She knows her Susan.
TWO
And she waits. She looks forward to seating Edward at her table, serving him dinner, joined by her children without Arnold. To talk about his book. Also, without apology, to say a conciliatory thing or two, like how far behind she has left the old wrangle. How free her mind is now, how friendly at last, how glad she would be to renew him as her oldest friend, to whom she can speak of things her husband can’t know. Don’t misunderstand. This is not an infidelity she contemplates. It’s not the compensation for Linwood her husband secretly wishes she would take. It’s only a freedom to talk in a place where she can say what’s in her head, without secrets.
All this from reading Edward’s book, though less from the book itself than from the return of its author. To confess to Edward what she can’t confess to Arnold. The new Edward, who grew up and gained the wisdom to write his book. This Edward would understand why what Arnold thinks her greatest virtue is no particular virtue to her. He would know what it’s like not to use the gun.
Sometime in the afternoon getting late she wonders: maybe he isn’t going to call. Jolted, she calls the hotel. It’s after 3:30, if she wants him for dinner, they’d better get in touch quick. She leaves a message at the hotel desk, call Susan. Asks the clerk when he arrived. Yesterday afternoon, maam, the clerk says. Yesterday? He’s been here since yesterday?
She considers driving into the city (letting the kids have pizza by themselves), going to the Marriott to catch him when he comes back. Too frantic. Better to cook dinner as planned, with enough for Edward when he calls. She blames herself, stupid. Later, during a time in the preparations with nothing to do but wait for the stove, she has twenty minutes to sit at the kitchen table and think. Time to change course, reverse, shift guilt-in to anger-out. To sizzle with the stove. Why should you take the blame, Susan? He’s free to call. Not to call is a snub. Raise that to insult: three evenings she spent at his request reading his novel in good faith, with so much effort preparing what to say, and he didn’t care enough to call.
Such thought is a furnace, it converts everything, including the novel itself. A fiery question: Why did you send it if you don’t want to discuss it? That he could send it out of spite had not occurred to her.
She eats with the children, tries to join their chat as if nothing were on her mind. By the time they are finished, it’s obvious: it was not her neglect that caused her to miss Edward. Setting her up for the snub, he’s given her a startling new view of himself.
Out of the forgotten she remembers how bitterly he resented her failure to appreciate the dignity of his writing. Like blinding, he said: your attitude blinds me. Evidently he’s angry still. Unforgiving twenty-five years later for an offense equivalent to blinding, and the novel his revenge.
