The Fugitives (15 page)

12

E
VEN
failed romances generate the endless pillow talk, that low autobiographical hum. In my bottomless fascination, I listened. Did I get it all? I got what Susannah intended for me to get. As usual, I made up the difference on my own, filling the trenches separating the discrepant histories she offered me with all the resourcefulness of a working novelist. Susannah was, in fact, my only project for months. Not one day passed when I wasn’t confronted with something different and unexpected; not one night when I didn’t fall asleep trying to anticipate what the next day would bring. For the first time, the chess strategies of writing fiction, the ability to see ahead, holding the whole shape of an unfinished thing in mind despite changes of direction, a dozen daily alterations in tone, became something I was able to project into the three dimensions of real life, although writing, even when it was difficult and frustrating, generally brought me a sense of competency and satisfaction, while real life now only left me feeling confused, and was so complex that it required a kind of edgy wariness at all times. It was when it turned out that Susannah and I were not the known quantity I’d thought we were, that the “whole shape” I’d imagined translating into the real world had existed only in my imagination to begin with, that I began to understand desperation.

Susannah and I began our affair shortly after her husband, a director, started running the undergraduate theater arts program at a small college in Vermont. One day I was receiving a mass e-mail from these two acquaintances, this solid couple, announcing the move as the newest phase of their lives together and seeking to sublet their Union Street apartment; the next, it seemed, I was fucking Susannah on their lumpy futon. She complained about the boring town adjacent to the rural campus, about the unfulfilling role of faculty wife, about how the move would thwart her own ambitions, about how it was time for her husband to carry the load for a while. Susannah was one of those intelligent and well-educated people who establish themselves at the place where art, fashion, and “lifestyle” have their vague intersection, and she had spent her career bouncing from one loosely (or closely, depending on your perspective) related field to another: from fashion merchandising, to sales, to editorial work at one of Condé Nast’s consumption-stimulus rags. The giant publisher had deposited her on the sidewalk that spring like last year’s swag, and Susannah had then met an agent who’d persuaded her—they’d persuaded each other, really—that if she could put together a good proposal for a memoir dealing with her time there they could earn a six-figure advance. This became her cover; the story was that Susannah had decided to remain in New York to “craft” this proposal; one of those forty-page fever dreams in which writers write about what they’ll be writing once someone pays them to write it. Each word must hang heavy from the lowest branches, ripe with the promise of money. But that wasn’t really the reason she’d stayed behind, she said.

“When did you decide you didn’t want to go?” I asked one afternoon in bed.

“It was after I went out there. Out there. I sound like it’s in Montana. It’s three hours’ drive. Super beautiful. But like a totally different planet. The students are all business majors who subscribe to
The Wall Street Journal
. They wear
suits
to class, for God’s sake. He’s expected to head the department and I was expected to be the department head’s wife. I just couldn’t.”

“But you were going to. You were going to sublet this place.”

“I just couldn’t.”

“Didn’t he get mad?”

“No. He was disappointed in me.”

“But you didn’t fight?”

“We didn’t fight.”

I didn’t bother to consider the possibility that I’d wandered onto a battlefield; that these two were interested primarily in damaging each other. It didn’t seem relevant that even a generous interpretation of the arrangement between them signified an approach to marriage to which I couldn’t have imagined reconciling my own sensibilities. I
did
conclude that the marriage was faltering because of some inherent flaw in Susannah’s husband’s makeup. He’d seemed like a stiff to me, frankly; always standing soberly to the side at parties with one eye on his watch, looking forward to leaving at a reasonable hour. Besides, even if he’d been the most wonderful and thoughtful husband, the most attentive and passionate of lovers, he would have been no match for me. Or so I convinced myself.

Reader, I was hooked. In retrospect, I can see all the understandable reasons why my marriage to Rae imperceptibly had grown fragile, why I would have been interested in pursuing an affair with Susannah, and why she would have returned my interest. We deserved each other. Certainly Rae didn’t deserve me. Even Susannah’s husband didn’t deserve me, though I think the affair struck him as
immoderate
more than anything else. What I can’t understand, even now, is the brutal and irreversible course things took. It would have been within my means to have left Rae; found my own apartment and begun my affair as a single man. Alternatively, I could have concealed my rapturous afternoons from her, taking care to isolate them from my emotional life. Instead, Susannah and I quickly fucked each other into that ecstatic, hallucinatory state in which we equated separation from each other with illness and being together with health. After making the diagnosis, I delivered the bad news to Rae, and then abruptly effected the cure. I ran to my lover.

HOW WELL CAN
we know someone? is the question of the day. A worthy preoccupation. Each of my books considered questions of identity—its formation, its instability, its highly contingent state—but they were the happy abstractions of someone who took tremendous satisfaction in knowing what he could expect from his life and from the people sharing it. Live like a bourgeois so that you can be violent and original in your work: how many writers who find themselves choosing among brands of organic milk at the supermarket or mopping the hardwood floors grab ahold of that remark with all the figurative violence Flaubert intended? And I’d liked living like one. Stacking cans in the cupboard, watching manuscript pages accumulate. Clean towels for the kids to dry themselves, clean sheets for them to slip between, a story or two, and then lights out and back to reading and taking notes on a canary pad while Rae finished up the work she’d brought home or watched a movie on TV. Who needed the mannered chaos of “bohemia” when I had the output of my mind at its most focused and creative to show me again and again each day exactly who I uniquely was? Nothing like those twenty or forty or sixty lines each day, there to be refined, scraped out, rearranged, admired, tossed: no stamp in a passport, no photo in an album, no souvenir on a shelf, no notch on a bedpost that resonated with the same satisfying sense of
having done,
that preserved and carried forward the strain of life that went into having done it. The rest of existence was satisfying because it permitted me to do this in peace, without ambiguity or uncertainty: that was all on the page, where it belonged.

About Susannah, my beliefs were exactly the same as those magical ones I’d first formed about another human being when I was seventeen and the sun shone right out of the eyes of my beloved. But we are no longer high schoolers, casually blowing other people’s egos to pieces. As damaging or cruel as teenagers can be, the extent of the destruction is sharply limited by context. When we wake up each morning snug in a room in our parents’ house, we don’t hold one another’s lives in our hands. By the time we’re ready to take a crack at really fucking things up, we hope to have handy some experience—experience and judgment. I had them, I just chose not to draw on them. With everything at stake, I drew instead on a revival of the same magic faith I’d placed in Loralynn Bonacum during the summer between eleventh and twelfth grade.

What did that renewed faith get me? I’d been attracted to a self-possessed, ambitious, witty, well-put-together, sociable woman who didn’t bear the taint (as I probably saw it) of years of domestic stasis. As long as the cat was snoozing in the bag, I basked in my discernment, but then the beast was out, and Susannah began shedding her composure. At first I thought, Why not? There’s nothing in this situation to encourage calm. People who had next to nothing to do with our lives went completely apeshit, as if they themselves had been betrayed; they became filled with the persecuting spirit that has always drawn upon the wanting morals of the impious and the illicit for its fierce energy in this country. It overtook them as easily as lust had overtaken me. Who knew? Writers and artists, editors and journalists, knowing and sophisticated, clusterfucking away in whatever passed for literary New York, and I might as well have been living in Winesburg as imagined by Hawthorne. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race. It was the biggest party of the season. Did I get Crazy Artist credits? Not after crucifying myself on Flaubert’s Dictum for all those years, I didn’t. You’d think after Burroughs had put a bullet through his wife’s head, after Mailer had stabbed his, after Carl Andre had shoved his out the window, I’d catch a break, but Flaubert and I were expected decorously to keep our pricks in our pants.

These crises come to an end, though. The world turned and there was someone else’s misery to use as currency. The toxic aura faded, the sense of imminent entrapment that seemed to emanate from every encounter. Nobody was interested for long. Certainly I wasn’t. We had a new life to get on with, Susannah and I! What a perfect imbecile I was. It may as well have been only the month before that Loralynn Bonacum and I had sat in the park behind Town Hall and discussed the future. I’d gone inside and asked the town clerk about the rules for getting married—supercasual, as if I’d just happened by and, spotting her office, decided to put to rest some academic questions that had been on my mind. With gravely concealed amusement, she told me that with parental consent one could be married at sixteen. It was necessary to wait three days from the time of application. Blood tests were required. I took all this in and then answered her own questions, put to me without a trace of irony, about my plans for college. Then I hustled out to where Loralynn was waiting for me on a bench shaded by sycamores. We had it all figured out: I could keep my summer job at the Creamery and Loralynn could work at her dad’s law office. There were cheap apartments around. You could get a pretty good car for about five hundred bucks, and besides, we both had bikes. It would be a breeze. Turned out there was also the matter of giving Mark Egan a blow job (that special sacrament which, to my mind, had bound Loralynn and me to each other) for Loralynn to attend to, at a Labor Day pool party the next month—but who was thinking three weeks ahead when there was the vast abyss of life stretching before us to consider from where we sat under the spreading trees?

Evidently my way of thinking hadn’t evolved a whole lot in the intervening quarter century. I had plaques and medals. Sat on learned panels and talked about the future of the American sentence. Distinguished Visiting Writer at Columbia. I stood in front of people seeking advanced degrees and they wrote down what I said. All I’d added to my reasoning, though, was the perverse touch that allowed me to consider all my mature achievements—wife, kids, home, reputation—as evidence that I was making a rational decision, notwithstanding that I was going to chuck them aside in order to keep fucking Susannah, that voodoo drumming that was going to pound its magic right into the conjugal structure I was already yearning for.

Susannah didn’t want any conjugal structure, though. She’d mostly needed an accomplice to get rid of her husband. For years, Rae and I had soldiered on, vaguely dissatisfied with each other while never really questioning the basis of the arrangement to which we’d submitted, but the premise of marriage itself made Susannah feel trapped and panicky (she’d been married for less than a year when I first peeled off her clothes: something else I decided to chalk up to my own irresistibility). Vermont had just been the earliest manifestation of For Better or For Worse. And now here I was, asking her what time she thought she’d be home. The excitement in an illicit affair derives from the things that circumstances don’t permit: the pointed irony in seeing this familiar appendage in that banned orifice, in seeing the secret face, lit by orgasm, of someone else’s spouse, and knowing that you can’t hold hands in public, or eat breakfast together. Then suddenly it was one breakfast after another, unfailingly, every ho-hum day—and washing the breakfast dishes, and taking out the breakfast garbage, and grocery shopping to get more breakfast. And Susannah hadn’t even gotten a celebration out of it: no photos, no gifts, no gathering of loved ones, no toasts to her happiness. Just a lot of hokey sanctimony from people she’d enjoyed seeing around at parties, and me hemming her in with the same old domesticating shit. It bored her silly, and the very fact of me on her doorstep, proof that the worst things people were saying about her were true, drove her crazy: on some level, having kept those things secret meant that none of them could be true. Enormous flakes began to scale off her. The person beneath wasn’t around enough for me to realize at first that she had completely replaced the alluring sightseer who had joined me in trashing our lives like a pair of adjoining hotel rooms. This Susannah was forever going out for a couple of hours and then vanishing until late in the evening. This Susannah was obsessively secretive; could sit in silence for twenty minutes, composing the perfect noncommittal answer to a direct question. This Susannah viewed empathy as an attempt at one-upmanship, equated conflict with abuse. Every analytical instrument I had at my disposal as an intelligent and reasonably observant human being registered the same terrible potential, but as with the other Susannah, when this one removed her clothes, when I felt the warm pressure of her body against mine, I forgot everything. The implication of magic in the destruction of men stopped being the expression of a metaphor. What else could it have been but magic? I knew everything I needed to know and it didn’t matter. I understood everything I needed to understand and it didn’t matter.