Tony and Susan (11 page)

How detached are her two big paintings in the living room, the one all pale blue like an early morning misty seascape, the other hues of pink and orange, serene and constant, ignorant of future force and rape and hammer. Helen’s stupid stuffed panda, symbol of sentimentality with calculated big glass eyes and oversized head, does to him what it was made to do where it sits on the bed in the room full of the house that Jack built.

In the morning he waited to hear the sound of water in
the bathroom. He expected to hear the screen door and the footsteps on the walk starting off to school. He wanted to say good bye when he left the house but she must have gone upstairs. When he came back in the afternoon, she would be painting in her studio, he would listen at the foot of the stairs. The afternoon advanced, he was waiting to hear the other one come busting through the screen door. After dinner he would wait for her so they could go for their walk.

He plotted these rediscoveries of absence so they would come as pulses of surprise, to maintain the steady flow of grief. They enabled him to realize it again, over and over. He would deliberately forget and then restore the order in which things happened. The strange oblongs covered by white cloth in the church were later than the canvas cocoons carried out of the bushes, which were later than the mannequins in the bushes. These came after they were driven off in the car in the night, which was later than anything that ever happened in this house. Nothing in this house was more recent than what happened by the road, nothing is newer or fresher than their death. The last you ever saw them, Tony Hastings told himself with astonishment, would always be their scared faces in the car driving down the road.

He talked it over with her. He said, The worst moment was when Ray and Turk forced themselves into the car with you. That was pretty bad, she agreed. No, he corrected himself, the worst was when I first saw something in the bushes and realized it was you. She smiled. He said, I wish you could tell me your part of it. So do I, she said.

The other one clumping down the stairs at night, two at a time, thump crash at the bottom, letting the screen door slam. He asked, what should I do with her things, the stuffed animals, the china horses, I need your advice. I know, she said.

Upstairs poor old fat Henry plays
Siegfried’s Funeral March
too loud like rock. Turn that down, Susan Morrow yells, then hears the telephone, which is Arnold calling from New York again. She returns to the manuscript after the call, full of the sound of Arnold’s elation. It jams her reading and obliterates Tony Hastings, wipes him out. The news is Chickwash, and Arnold’s elation is Susan’s dread, though he does not know it. If they must leave this home for the advancement of Arnold’s career. The question sharpens her eyes, makes her look at her life from this spot on the couch. Wallpaper, mantelpiece, pictures, stairs, banisters, woodwork. Outside, a lawn, maple tree, streetcorner, streetlamp. She has friends here: Maria, Norma. To take her children out of school for Chickwash’s sake. They’ll be upset, they may cry forlornly, boyfriends girlfriends and bestfriends lost forever. So may Susan, who said nothing about this on the phone to Arnold, lest she be guilty of selfishness and petty domesticity. She’s had enough of asserting rights and feeling bad afterwards. She has no wish to quarrel with Arnold.

He assumes she’ll abide by his decision. He may even think they arrived at the decision together. They’ll talk about it. She’ll ask the questions he expects her to, to help him decide what he’s already decided, telling him what’s on his mind, reminding him of his interests. She’ll weigh his love for the surgeon’s art and his care for patients against prestige and the
power to do good on a national scale. If she doesn’t like it, she won’t tell him lest it be taken as an attempt to influence him against his best interests. She’ll mention the children and their interests, but if he says children can adapt and speaks of the advantages to them of a Washington environment and a successful father, she’ll support him of course.

His voice like a high school kid. Virtually promised me the job, he said. Isn’t that great? It’s wonderful, dear, she said. We must talk it over, he said, we must consider what’s best for all of us, you and the children too, I won’t accept it without consulting you. All the angles. He made suggestions on how to consider all the angles.

There was more than that in the call. A bad moment, some question she asked which was not a proper response to her husband’s triumph, realized too late. It passed, an error, leaving a soil of worry after the call ended. A feeling of disaster averted, though a danger still remains of bogging down in thoughts. Stop, Susan tells Susan, let it be. It could have been worse. The evening is for reading, and to continue that she must wipe herself out of her mind.

Tony Hastings instead. He grieves, apathetic, obsessed, and she wonders what she is supposed to make of him when he turns off the lights and looks out. He’s become a character, complicated by that hint of Edward’s irony threaded through the style. She wonders if she’ll lose touch with him, if his woe slips into self-pity. She hopes the novel does not prolong his depression, for who wants to read about a depressed protagonist? She tends to be impatient with depressed people, more than Edward, perhaps. She remembers Edward’s own depression when he was trying to write, before their marriage failed.

In the rowboat, on the pebbly shore, with the hiss of Edward’s cigarette, she remembers (even earlier) his refusal to forgive
his long institutionalized mother. When Susan defended her, he tried to splash her with the oars. While now and for twenty-five years every month Arnold has sent a fat check to keep Selena foaming in her luxurious cage in Gray Crest. Susan remembers how he used to say to her with astonished joy, Thank God you’re sane. After all these years he’s used to her and doesn’t say it any more.

In September Paula came to visit. She came to give things away and throw things out. She went into Laura’s closets and Helen’s room, packed up clothes and jewelry, went over letters, paintings, photographs, toys and stuffed animals. Then she left and the semester began. Colleagues and students returned. That was good, though questions having nothing to do with math still intervened. Mister, your wife wants you. Raids on his thought while he lectured or talked to students. And this new habit of turning off the lights and looking out the windows at night. He would look at the dark branches and light squares in the houses and the dim glow of the sky and feel the spacious darkness in the house like a cave, especially exciting when a person went by, unaware of being watched.

He supposed he was recovering. He went to a party given by Kevin Malk, head of Tony’s department. At the Malks’ parties they played games. Charades: Tony pitched in, contributing titles to be acted out: ‘The Sunny Side of the Street’ and ‘The Decline of the West.’ He himself acted out ‘Nocturnal Animal House’ and was surprised by the vigor of the applause.

He drove Francesca Hooton home. She was alone because
her husband, a lawyer, had gone to New Orleans. Tony had always liked Francesca. She taught French, was tall and fair and had a pretty face with fine features and gold in her hair. In the old days he sometimes wondered what if they had both been free. Now he was uncomfortable, because he was an escort, and because of the possibility this was an opportunity, which he did not want in the confusion of being stricken and bereaved. She sat beside him in the car, wearing an elegant light tan dress. ‘Have they got any leads?’ she asked.

‘The police? Not that I know of.’

‘Aren’t you angry?’

‘Who at? The police?’

‘Those men. Don’t you want them caught and punished?’

‘What’s the use? That won’t bring Laura and Helen back.’

He realized immediately this was bravado, while she said, ‘Well if you’re not angry, I am. I’m angry on your behalf. I want them killed. Don’t you?’

‘I’m angry enough,’ he murmured.

At the foot of the stairs to her second story apartment, she said, ‘I don’t suppose you want to come in.’

He felt a wild leap inside and said, ‘I’d better get home.’

In his darkened house he described his evening to Laura. We played charades, he said. I was the life of the party. Then I took Francesca Hooton home. She wants me to be angry and want revenge, but I don’t want to be distracted from you. She also expects me to have an affair with her, but I refused. He turned out the lights and went around again looking out from the dark into dark, saying, I won’t forget. Nothing can make me forget.

He walked stiffly from class to class like a man with a cane. A graduate student named Louise Germane who had soft wheatcolored hair came to his office and said, ‘I heard what
happened, Mr. Hastings. I want you to know I’m sorry.’ He pinched his smile and thanked her. When she left, he said, I must expect to be lonely, my hair will turn white. He decided to write a history of his marriage. He thought writing would make him remember. He was afraid of losing the sense of presence, the vital feeling that the past was still part of the present.

He gathered specific memories to prove things: the Tolstoy evening to show her intelligence, the beach trip to demonstrate her vitality, the jokes and puns which he had such difficulty remembering to confirm her wit, the kitchen discussions about the Malks to show her judgment, the famous evening walk to Peterson Street to reiterate her generosity and kind heart. His memory was recalcitrant, it did not like to be forced. He tried to liberate her from the frame on the table, her eyes frozen into a smile by the photographer, her hair in a fixed wave over one side of her forehead. He looked away and waited for memory to ambush him. It ambushed him often but not when asked. To expose himself to ambush, he recapitulated old habits: she drove him to the university a hundred times on her way to the gallery, liberating a nice moment at the gallery when she asked his advice. Once she ambushed him with a vision of her walk coming up the street to the house, real as life, swinging her arms. How she swung them – but every memory that ambushed him became fixed. He developed a store of images, while memory ambushed him less and less.

Then he got better. He spent three hours at a faculty meeting arguing passionately for two promotion and tenure candidates. Only when he left the building with Bill Furman in the snow just beginning, did he remember he was bereaved. He had forgotten for three hours. Nor did the returning memory, recalled by the empty house and the snow, bring the shock it
used to. This happened often. In the classroom or reading, he would realize he’d been working for hours without remembering his life wasn’t normal. Life goes on, he would say. I can’t grind my teeth all the time.

This was the first snow of the winter. Tony drove through it with Bill Furman, thick flakes swirling around the car in a strong wind, the streets slippery and dangerous. He expected the snow to revive his grief because it was burying the place where they died. He could think of it falling in the woods: a winter they will never see. The snow was peaceful, though. Later he watched it from his house. Once again he went around and turned off the lights. He watched the stream of flakes in the light of the streetlamp. He thought of snow on the mountain track in the woods. And in the clearing, covering it up. He took off his shoes and walked around in his socks. Light reflected by the snow from the streetlamps and city sky came in the windows of the big house and illuminated the empty rooms. He thought how free he was in this house alone, his solitary ownership in the darkness lit by the spooky outside glow. As he had done on those earlier nights, only now feeling quite sane, he went from one window to another, looking up the hill to Mr. Husserl’s house, and to the lawn and snowy oak branches and the garages and fringed cars parked, with a feeling like ecstasy.

When he asked Laura about it, she said be glad you’re alive. Watching the snow filling the front lawn and street, he became conscious of his body, which had been ignorant of grief from the start. The only constant, his need to sleep and shave, brush his teeth, eat and drink and release his wastes. Watching his eating habits so as not to feel greasy, gaseous, or bleak. Wearing clean clothes, underwear, shirts, shoes, and dirty clothes to Mrs. Fleischer to wash. And now with snow, an overcoat, muffler,
cap and gloves, and if he walks out tomorrow he will stamp his feet to restore circulation. He noticed his cock, strapped in, disturbed by the night feeling, which made it move a little, like a ballet dancer impersonating the dawn. That was the only part of his body with a grief of its own, sullen in his pants. But if ever it tried to sprout, he need only remember, like admonishing a dog, and it would shrivel and withdraw.

Yet it had always had independent thoughts. Even in the good days of his marriage, there was always this doggy part of him noticing things, Francesca Hooton and the student Louise Germane and the girls in bikinis with leopard spots at the beach. Always this muffled little anarchic hope which he disclaimed, as if it had nothing to do with him.

Now, though, he thought deliberately about women he knew. Francesca Hooton. Eleanor Arthur. Louise Germane. Sex, not love. Love was out, the idea of another marriage inconceivable, but sex he could imagine. But there was a problem in every case. Francesca was married, and though her lawyer husband traveled a lot, Tony didn’t want a mess. Nor did he trust her signals. Eleanor Arthur’s signals were plainer, and he guessed her husband wanted her to be as free as he, but her nervous edges made Tony edgy, and he could not forget how much older she was than he. With Louise Germane he felt easy and comfortable, but she was a graduate student, and it was not good to get involved with them. Since no one suitable was available, he resigned himself easily.

A few days later the fair haired Francesca Hooton took him to the bookstore to help him get presents for Paula’s children. He liked her reticent smile and implicating eyes. Later he accepted a dinner invitation from George and Eleanor Arthur, buffet, a large group. He sat on the edge of the couch with Roxanne Furman talking about the department, glad Eleanor
was too busy as hostess to pay attention to him. Shortly before Christmas he got a card from Louise Germane, a tactful note in elegant handwriting. It recalled his suspicion, merely academic when Laura was alive, that she had a crush on him.

He had Thanksgiving dinner with his brother Alex’s family in Chicago and managed not to cast gloom over the table. At Christmas he stayed ten days at Paula’s suburban house, twenty miles from New York. He liked Merton now, and could not remember why he had disliked him before. He went for walks with the children on the snowy suburban streets, he put on ice skates with them and watched as they tried their new skis on the hill slope above town. In his bedroom at Paula’s, in the northwest corner of the house, not much bigger than the bed, with a bookcase full of Paula’s books, he felt as if he were starting a new life. The room had new blue mountainy wall paper, it smelled of clean sheets, it looked out on a slope with bare trees. He made a plan.

He left on Thursday after New Year’s, going into New York on the train, refusing to let Merton drive him to the airport. He had a notion to resolve the sex question now, before going home. Once he was alone his nerves tightened up like electricity sparking in his chest. He felt it in the train along the river’s edge. His breath was tight as he signed the register. The hotel was shabby, near the center of the city. He said to himself, My name is Tony Hastings, professor of mathematics. I live elsewhere. I have been through a bad experience.

I will eat dinner in an expensive elegant place. He found a restaurant in a fancy hotel but had no appetite nor patience for the long waits between courses. After dinner he went out, timidly moving through the crowds, glancing at the sleazy windows, like a hunter trying not to be seen. He thought Ray
and Lou and Turk are here, hidden in the crowd, they’ll see me. Record shops, food joints, pawn shops, arcades. He said, I am a sexual creature like anybody, but his mind was full of mugging and being rolled. Twisted into a kink in his mind. He went to a bar and surprised himself (though it was what he had planned to do) by sitting next to a woman on a bar stool. She was in her thirties, she wore a black dress with white flowers and a white bow, she had a round face and looked scared.