Tony and Susan (10 page)

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.

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.

Dreaming on brings up floating Mrs. Givens, and through her Mrs. Macomber the professor’s wife who sued Arnold for malpractice because her husband got a stroke after heart surgery. Whose anger and bitterness (understandable in human terms) made Susan cringe, responsible by virtue of wifehood for Arnold’s hand with the scalpel and the clamps and precautions in an operating room she has never seen. Doctor’s wife equals doctor, which Arnold takes for granted while she relies on his estimate of himself. Such a good surgeon, brilliant, skillful, careful, trustworthy. She knows without having to ask that poor Mrs. Macomber’s suit was ignorant if not malicious or frivolous, and that’s what she told nosy Mrs. Givens. If the wife doesn’t believe her husband is right, who besides the husband ever will? The truth is, Susan doesn’t know how good a doctor her husband is. Some people admire him: patients praise him, a few colleagues, certain nurses, but what does she know? He works hard, takes it seriously, studies. He never seemed especially bright to her, but his reputation must be good or he could not have become a candidate for Cedar Hall
(Chickwash). Patients die. He says it can’t be avoided and takes it stoically. Sometimes when he talks about dead patients she wants to cry, though they are only strangers, for someone ought to cry besides those who have an interest. But she doesn’t cry lest it look like a criticism which she has no right to make. Enough. This is time she’s wasting, unhealthy. A whiff of self-pity, like body odor. The book will restore her, that’s what it’s for. She looks at the page on top. Puffs on her glasses, tries to remember. Tony Hastings, the crime, the clearing with the mannequins. And more: the return home and the funeral. At last she remembers, he’s flying to the Cape with Paula his sister. She wonders what new things will happen to Tony Hastings, now that his family is dead, already written in those still unread pages.

Tony Hastings did not want to recover. He kept energy low to avoid the danger. He came to the Cape so as not to argue with Paula about going to the Cape. Merton met them in a station wagon, touched his arm, long face in his beard, expressing the inexpressible. Tony saw the intent, and realized he didn’t like Merton. He never had, which was a surprise because he had always liked Merton. He didn’t like the kids either. They sat in the back seat, solemn so as not to get shushed.

They drove through scrubby sandy woods. The flat middle land of the Cape, you could tell from the pale mist in the sky that the sea was near by. Paula and Merton talked. He saw Peter and Jenny trying not to be caught staring.

The house was in the woods a half mile from the bay. A
dirt driveway with grass in the middle climbed up from the road. They gave him the same room he had occupied with Laura. From the window you could see over the tops of the trees to the bay dazzling blind in the afternoon sun beyond the line of dunes. The room smelled of pine, the floors were gritty with sand.

They went to the beach, deserted in the late afternoon. A sharp breeze blew off the bay from the west, and it was chilly. In their bathing suits Peter and Jenny put their sweaters on. ‘Aren’t you going swimming?’ Tony Hastings said with effort.

‘Too cold!’ Jenny said. Peter had a frisbee, and he and Jenny tossed it back and forth, to avoid having to talk to him. They didn’t know what to say because they were afraid to ask about the big thing they knew about him. The wind chopped up a ragged surf. The beach showed remains left by the crowd that had been there, the big rusted trash can was full with papers and plastic food cartons blowing out of the top. A large seagull walked on the sand, gawky with orange legs, an evil eye, a vicious beak. Another came down out of the sky and hung in place on the wind two feet above the sand with great motionless wings, looking things over. Remnants of a sandwich. Empty egg carton. Someone’s sweater, half buried in the sand.

‘I’m shivering to death, let’s go home,’ Peter said.

Plenty of animated conversation at dinner that night. Tony Hastings knew he should take part if he could keep track of what it was about. Later he thought, I’m a dead log, I should try harder, I mustn’t forget who I am.

In the morning he slashed off his mustache, which disgusted him. The beach was bright. The air was fresh, the bay green and calm, the water warm, and the children swam long. He swam with them for a while, and wondered if it was doing him good. He noticed a query on Jenny’s face as she came up
out of the water, bubbles in her face and soggy hair, looking at him and diving away. He knew what she was thinking. She was remembering Aunt Laura the underwater swimmer who used to prowl like a submarine among the surface waders, nibbling and dunking. Or water cavalry with Uncle Tony and Aunt Laura. He thought, if they ask, I’ll play horse, but no one asked.

Since he felt little pleasure in either water or land, he came out soon and sat on a towel. When the children returned, he made an effort. ‘Would you like to walk to the inlet?’ he said. It was hard to ask questions like that, for words sat on his chest like lead.

They walked toward the inlet. Now (he knew) they were thinking of last year’s walk, Aunt Laura looking for shells and pebbles, Uncle Tony identifying shore birds, Helen digging out the little holes in the wet sand, wondering what was down there, a clam, a crab? Silently he defended his pain, refusing to care about pretty stones or delicate crab shells, indifferent to sand dollars. He did not want to distinguish gulls from terns. The sand was thick around his feet. The children walked quietly. Then Peter muttered something to Jenny. She ran ahead and he threw the frisbee to her. They broke loose, circling with the frisbee the rest of the way, while he marched on.

He spent two weeks at the Cape, trying to be depressed without being uncongenial. Paula said, ‘Tony, you have every right to be depressed.’ She suggested he go to a psychiatrist when he got back.

When he got home two weeks later, arriving in the empty house alone in the afternoon, this house absolutely and only his own from now on, he found a letter waiting from Grant Center.

The picture trembled. Mug shot, front and side, a gaunt man with long black hair, full black beard like a prophet. Tony Hastings stared, trying to see into it. Who? Crooked nose, sad eyes. Not Ray, not Turk. He tried to remember, warding off the keen disappointment, Lou’s beard, Lou’s hair? Lou’s beard was not so long, his hair different, though Tony could not remember how, and the eyes in the picture flashed nothing. This was a picture of no one he had ever seen. He tried to imagine Ray with a beard, but the picture made it hard to remember what Ray looked like without one.

The letter stirred motion in him, a desire to punish. He thought, What difference does it make whether they catch them or not, yet at night he had murderous thoughts. They made him bite his lips and bang his fist on the sheet. But he forgot to answer the letter, and after a few days he got a telephone call from Bobby Andes. He heard the voice weakly, a poor connection.

‘Did you get my letter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well?’

‘What?’

‘Do you recognize the face?’

‘No.’

‘No what?’

‘I don’t recognize it.’

‘Aw shit, man.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘God damn it, man. This is the guy whose fingerprints are on your car. What do you mean, you don’t recognize it?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’

‘Ah hell.’

Depressed though he was, Tony Hastings did what was necessary to stay alive. He cooked his breakfast and made sandwiches for lunch. He went to cheap restaurants for dinner. Sometimes when he felt less apathetic than usual he cooked his own. He went to his office, but it was hard to keep his mind on his work and he came home early. At night he tried to read but he could not concentrate, and he spent most of the time watching television. He could not concentrate on that either and usually did not know what he was seeing. Once a week Mrs. Fleischer came to clean and do the laundry. In between, the house got messy, newspapers and books and dirty dishes. He was impatient for the summer to end so he could resume teaching, though he was not eager to teach.

One evening, having decided it was time to get ready for his fall classes, he went to his study and tried to think where to start. But his thought went in other directions. He wanted to perform a ceremony, but he could think of none that would
do. He went to the window, but all he could see was his reflection in the glass. A person outside could see in better than he could see out. He turned off all the lights, so that the house was completely dark. Why am I doing this? he asked. The dim illumination from outside, from the streetlamps and the neighbors’ houses and the glow in the night sky, came in through the windows and cast patches and shadows on the walls. He went to the side window looking up at Mr. Husserl’s house all lit up, and around to the other windows, the black night over the bushes and choked gardens. He walked around the darkened house from room to room, looking at the night outside and the patterns it made inside.

Then he went out. He walked up the street to the shops. He looked in the windows at people in the restaurants, the open stores, Walgreen’s, Stu’s Deli, the lighted windows of the closed stores, the hardware store, the bookstore. He went into the park down a slope under huge trees, so dark he had to hold his hand in front of his face against invisible branches. Why have I come out here? he asked.

They must have thought of it while fixing the tire. When they went over to Ray’s car and had a conference. Let’s take them to the trailer, have a ball. What about him? Shit guys, we gotta get rid of him. Okay, here’s what we do.
Separate
em. Him in one car, the dames in the other. Him you take, Lou. It’s dangerous, man. Shit boy, everything’s dangerous.

He tried to remember, the iron which they used to change his tire. Was it lying on the ground when they finished? He could have picked it up. With the tire iron in his hand he could have prevented Ray and Turk from getting into his car. He could have held it in front of him with two hands. If he had to, he could have swung it and hit Ray on the head.

In the park he lost the path. He saw a light through the
lacework of the trees and used it to guide him back to the sidewalk. The light was a sign in a beauty shop, closed for the night. He was trembling, and his face was scratched.

In the darkened house he sat looking out. Take me back, he said. Start over,
undo
this thing. Change one moment, that’s all I ask, then let history take its course. Stop me at the trailer where I did not stop. Stand me by the car door to fight Ray and Turk, give me that, no more, just one link in the logical chain. Pick up the Bangor hitchhiker, listen to the sweetness of my daughter for the man with the flowing beard, idiot father.

The house was an empty tank full of grief. Their empty ghosts floated everywhere they were not. Not the box of jewelry left open on the dresser. Neither the drawers nor the closets where her dresses hang, where he fingered their textures. He wrapped her heavy gray sweater around his head. Sentimental and pious, he watered the hanging plants she had left in the vestibule. Pick up the blue and white china. Not using the Hitchcock chairs, nor the electric can opener in the kitchen. Nor typing a letter at her old rolltop desk in what she does not call the sewing room though she does no sewing there. Nor her easel, her crazy palette, unframed canvases against the studio wall.