Tony and Susan (18 page)

He was yelling at Tony. ‘Oor gonna get hooed man.’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘He’s saying you’re gonna get sued. Don’t worry. He ain’t gonna sue nobody for a while.’

‘You’re all gonna get hooed.’

‘Ill advised, Ray. Look what you get for trying to escape.’

‘Ethcape? Thit, man.’

Ray handcuffed to George, Andes patted him on the shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Ray, we’ll get you a dentist. You got his tooth, George?’ He gave Ray a handkerchief.

They went back to the car. ‘I’ll drive now,’ Andes said. George and Ray, handcuffed together, got in back, Tony sat in front as before. Bobby Andes looked at him, his eyes gleaming.

‘Pretty good,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you had it in you.’

Tony Hastings, who couldn’t remember ever hitting anybody before, felt extraordinary. Wild and exhilarated, with righteous wrath fulfilled.

Susan Morrow smacks her fist into Ray Marcus’s face and knocks him down against the stove. Ho.

She puts the manuscript down. It’s time to stop for the night, though it seems murderous to quit now. Another painful interruption like divorce, required by the discrepancy between the laws of reading and the laws of life. You can’t read all night, not if you have responsibilities like Susan. And if you must stop before the end, it might as well be here.

Sometime during her reading Dorothy and her friend Arthur came back from their date, well behaved, respecting her curfew. They’ve been watching television ever since. Upstairs a
Wagnerian sound continues behind a closed door, Tristan equating love and death.

She goes to the bathroom exhilarated with the feel of slugging Ray, whatever her reason, which may not be identical to Tony’s. What did she mean a while ago by the enjoyment of a good rage? Who, exactly, is she raging at? Nobody? Susan, who loves everybody, her heart pours out to all.

So she remembers: we’re moving to Washington. Are we? The question has been covered over, encysted like an insect in a cocoon, swathed in the silk of her reading. It will re-emerge soon enough, and then she’ll have to think about it.

Should she tell Dorothy and Arthur to knock it off? She quells a theatrical impulse to scold them for wasting their youth in front of a television set. Television and going to Washington and socking Ray are mixed in her mind, as if it were the television set she wanted to smash. So she imagines an alien visitor asking what’s the difference between Dorothy gaping at television and herself gaping at a book. Martha and Jeffrey her little pets who think it queer to see her stopping there transfixed. She wishes she didn’t have to keep proving that it’s her ability to read that makes her civilized.

Wake up now. Light, blank square, window, the door in the floor shuts off the retreating mind. Gap without mind before another mind, bright and superficial, greets her with temporal data: Good morning Susan it’s the day of the week, hour of the clock, dress and address your schedule for the day.

This mind is full of order and regime. Yet for a while a receding world still dazzles like the frost lines on the window, where everything is connected, Edward, Tony, Susan’s various minds, one leading to another and back, the same and interchangeable. As the dazzle fades differences reappear and once again Susan is the reader, Edward the writer. Yet she retains a curious vision of Susan as writer, as if there were no difference.

That’s interesting enough to stop her in the kitchen after breakfast, pausing with a dish in each hand, trying to figure out rationally what it means. She observes herself. She sees words. She talks to herself all the time. Does this make her a writer?

She thinks. If writing is the fit of thought into language, everybody writes. Distinguish. The words she prepares to speak, that’s speech, not writing. Words not meant for speech, that’s reverie. If Susan is a writer, it’s for other words neither speech nor reverie, words like these now: her habit of generalization. Her way of composing rules and laws and descriptions of things. She does it all the time, crating her thoughts in words
stored for later use. She makes another generalization: it’s saving words for later use that makes writing.

Susan’s writing aspirations have always been modest: letters, an intermittent journal, a memoir of parents. An occasional letter to the editor on women’s rights. Once no doubt she craved more, as she also craved to be a composer, a skater, a supreme court justice. She gave it up without regret as if what she gave up was not writing but something else, less important.

She needs to distinguish between the writer she refused to become and the writer she always was. Surely what she refused was not writing but the next step, dissemination: the adaptations and publicity required to induce others to read – an extensive process summed up in one word, publication. As she works about the house on this bright but darkening day, threatening snow, Susan thinks that’s too bad, because in giving up publication she gave up the chance to be part of a writing conversation, to read the consequences of her words in other words from out in the world. And too bad in a vanity way, thinking of Edward (who started it all), since she knows her mind is as good as his, and if she had devoted years to the practice of a skill, she could have written a novel as good as his.

So why didn’t she write? Other things had a higher claim. What? Husband, children, teaching Freshman English in the junior college? Susan needs another reason. Something in the publication process that subtly repelled her. She saw it in the old days when Edward was struggling. And felt it when she tried to write herself. Dishonesty, some subtle falsification, forced on her, it seemed, by writing for someone else to read. An uncomfortable lying feeling. It infected then and still infects even her most modest efforts, her letters, her
Christmas card messages, which lie no matter what she says or does not say.

The presence of the other person – that’s the cause. The other person, the reader, contaminates what she writes. This reader’s prejudice, taste, mere otherness, controlling what she may say like a Hollywood producer or market researcher. Yet even the unpublished writing in her soul has a misfit between itself and the sentence she can say it in. The sentence simplifies. If it does not simplify it’s a mess, and she bogs in the additional vice of obscurity. She creates a clear sentence by lopping, exaggerating, distorting, and sealing over what’s missing like paint. This gives her such an illusion of clarity or depth that she’ll prefer it to truth and soon forget it’s not truth.

The intrinsic dishonesty of writing corrupts memory too. Susan writes her memories into narrative. But narrative does not flash like memory, it’s built across time with cells for storing the flashes that come. It transforms memory into a text, relieving the mind of the need to dig and hunt. Remembered Edward is such a text, and early Arnold and her marriage, established through many writings long ago. Obliged now to reread these old texts, she can’t help rewriting. She’s rewriting now, as hard as she can, trying her best to bring back an illusion of memory alive, because the orthodox narrative is totally dead.

Susan should have known when she first consented to read Edward’s book that it would have some such effect. Should have foreseen it would bring him back alive, as if no twenty years had passed. And bring with him also the divorce and early Arnold and other questions she would rather not think about. But could she have foreseen such excitement, combined with alarm? She doesn’t understand the alarm. It’s out of proportion to the cause. She wonders if the story itself, Tony’s case, is acting on her in some hidden way, separate from the revival of Edward. There’s a threat somewhere, but she doesn’t know what it is or where it comes from. She tries to find it by researching her memory while doing physical labor about the house.

The situation was this: while Susan was married to Edward who was going insane with writing, Arnold was married to Selena going insane with a carving knife. The problem for Susan rewriting a memory is how to get from that arrangement of marriages to the present one.

Six apartments, two on each floor across the stairwell. Susan and Edward lived in 2B, Arnold and Selena in 3A. There was a lawn in back inside a fence, with one tree and two picnic tables. There was a picnic, hamburgers, and boiled corn in a pot over the charcoal grill. Susan and Edward had never met Arnold and Selena. Arnold was an anxious young intern at the hospital, who had terrible working hours but was free that
day. Selena was the most beautiful woman Arnold had ever seen. She had raven black hair, sea blue eyes, artificial lashes, snow white skin, her smile was both radiant and vibrant, her voice soft and gentle, and she flirted with the gentlemen, ladies, and children like a princess of cats. She was tense as electricity. Arnold on the other hand was big and bearlike and worried, and he hovered around Selena bringing her hamburgers, Cokes, marshmallows. He was respectful and bewildered when Edward boasted of quitting law school to become a writer, and he gazed at Susan in a vague pleasant way. He had dusty short curly hair, a T-shirt, dusty hair on his thick arms, and dusty eyebrows. He worked in the hospital emergency room and was shocked by his experiences, which he described in a shocked voice, while Selena approached the children like the beautiful wicked witch, and Edward glazed over.

After that they met often on the stairs, Arnold and Susan-Edward, though never Selena. Susan never saw Selena, though sometimes she heard an operatic soprano upstairs.

Selena was hospitalized in October, middle of the month Edward was spending alone with his typewriter in the woods. That was convenient: one wife and one husband go away, leaving the other pair to discover each other. Neither had entered the other’s mind, however, and Arnold’s immediate problem was to get the knife away from Selena. Sunday afternoon. Susan all by her lonely self was watching a football game, which is embarrassing to admit because she never watched football, but she was too distracted to read, and she was furthermore ironing and happened to see a touchdown scored just when she tuned in. So she watched the football game with memories not of Edward but of Jake, who used to take her to games every Saturday and slip his chilly hand inside her coat in the bleachers. She remembered this just when
the rapid knock on her door, nervous enough to alert her, introduced her to her future. This was Arnold, big and scared like a child asking her could she come upstairs and help with Selena who was having a spell? Not knowing Selena had spells, Susan recognized emergency and rushed up with him and only later remembered how life with Edward also began with an emergency.

Locked in the bathroom with the carving knife. Be careful what she might do with it, Arnold said. Causing Susan to grab a weapon, which turned out to be a broom. The fixed memory of her first entry into Arnold’s apartment shows her carrying a broom in both hands, prepared to fend off the knife of a crazy woman who happened to be the most beautiful Arnold had ever seen – although Susan actually didn’t learn she was that until later, when he would tell her more times than necessary.

As they came into the apartment, with the cold sun streaming through the lofty windows and the doors open, Arnold called out, Selena, Susan’s here, can you come out to see her?

Susan who? The concealed voice was a metal screech behind the bathroom door in the vestibule, no operatic soprano today. I’m going to the bathroom for Christ sakes. Susan
what
, the neighbor? Did you go get her, you rat?

Come on, Selena.

Let me finish.

Arnold to Susan, aside, I called the hospital. They’re sending someone. The door opened and Selena came out. Blue jeans and dirty white T-shirt, hair disheveled, beauty haggard. Unaware of the knife in her hand while Susan held her broom.

Hi Susan, how are you?

Arnold: What’s that in your hand, Selena?

(Oh shit.) Arnold, you ought to be ashamed exposing your
wife to such humiliation, bringing in a stranger to witness our troubles. (Excuse me Susan.) I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t bring some man to watch and laugh at you.

Nobody’s laughing, Arnold said.

Not to my face, they’re not. Susan, I apologize. I apologize for Arnold. I’m just working in the kitchen and I don’t see why I can’t pick up the knife, it’s just a carving knife. Don’t you pick up knives in the kitchen, Susan Sheffield?

Come on, Selena, Arnold said.

What Susan remembers best through the years is Selena’s voice when the ambulance men arrived, non-operatic and bitter: So that’s what you’re up to. I might have known.

Big worried Arnold, living by himself while his wife was hospitalized, with his terrible working schedule, Susan felt sorry for him. Down the stairs ten-thirty at night, going to work in the emergency room: she stuck her head out to ask how Selena was doing and if she could help. No one on the scene then guessed this was the married couple of the future.

What to do? In line at the grocery store checkout behind her, he explained, a few items to cook himself something to eat. Selena? Maybe she’ll come home next week. She saw the simple friendly bear expression on his face and translated it into a haunted one, shadowed by its indeterminable future with a Selena wielding the carving knife on a periodic basis with years of calling the ambulance men, to leave for a while and then back home to the remains of the most beautiful woman ever seen, until her fondness for the carving knife grew up again. Full of sympathy, Susan thus diverted herself from a writing husband who would be going off with equal periodicity to great works under the spell of the wilderness angel.

That poor man cooking himself something to eat before those emergency nightmares: well, Susan was kind enough to invite him to dinner. You ask, did Susan have any consciousness, there in front of the old passionless cashier, of impropriety, the wife of a man lost in the woods cooking for the husband of a woman lost in psychiatry? This was one of those nodal points in a history, which because of its consequences people like Susan look back to.

Is it wrong, when your husband is away, to do a good deed for your temporarily wifeless neighbor who would otherwise cook for himself or go around to Gordon’s for a bite? There are two sides to the question. One is what your neighbors think. Susan felt free to ignore them, remote in their own lives, even their names almost forgotten since the summer picnic. The other side is what you yourself think, with two options. One, not to think anything. Out of perfect innocence changes will arise that no one need foresee. Certainly Susan made an effort toward such absence of thought. The other option was to go ahead and think. But that means something exists to think about. Her reasoning was that it was an issue only if she and Arnold thought it an issue. Obviously they did not think so, since this was only a natural neighborly service: good neighbor, girl scout, useful friend. Plain roast beef, browned potatoes, brown and serve rolls, frozen peas. Face to face at the little dining room table she shared with Edward. Talk about Selena and Edward. Life in the emergency room. His schedule, to be up all night and tomorrow with killing hours. They scarcely knew each other. She was trying to figure out what he was really like, and how he got tangled up with a woman like Selena. If he got tangled because she was the most beautiful, what did that say about him? She was thinking he’s a rather simple oaf, albeit a nice oaf. She encouraged the
wine-leaked sadness that seeped out of him as they talked, full of mother, father, brothers, sisters, and old hopes from before the time he realized the problem Selena had brought. Reconciling himself to being unable to provide his parents with grandchildren of his own – that kind of sadness. And to periodic hospitalizations, that kind. And to a certain fear, since carving knife equivalents would continue to appear. All this he had to put up with, as she encouraged him to talk.

No thought of you and me. Edward was coming back in two weeks: he was creating his future as a writer. Arnold listened without much attention. Edward’s problems were remote from him.

Yet it was not quite an ordinary dinner after all, you must admit. The candles were a detail she hadn’t intended. She put the flowers (hibiscus) from the kitchen on the centerpiece and brought out her grandmother’s silverware and the good china, trying to think, this is just a good natured neighbor guy in a fix who needs to eat before going to work. Then five minutes before his arrival, with the meat nearly finished, she was overwhelmed by the bleakness of the room under ordinary light, its need for some flickering darkness to conceal the simplicity of things. It was not just simple, this room no different from what it was in her meals with Edward, but it had now a conspicuous absence which made it look barbarously naked, and the only image she could conceive to make up what it lacked was candles. The candlesticks were a wedding present used just once, which she dusted off and filled with a pair of candles from the drawer.

Yet even by candlelight Susan Sheffield and Arnold Morrow retained their disguises, she the wife of and he the husband of. Still, she felt this high pitched noise in her hair or neck or solar plexus, making the moment extraordinary. Electricity,
like Selena at the picnic, Selena with the purring cat’s voice, whose matter seemed fully convertible to energy in the Einsteinian sense: e=mc
²
. Selena the electric, altered into Susan the electric, as if Arnold were a transformer, thinking how easy to be free, what delicious things could be done in Edward’s wonderful absence if you were the kind of person who did such things. Susan was not that kind. Susan was Susan, from Edgar’s Lane, teacher of Freshman English, well organized, coherent, grammatical, unified, with margins on all sides, always ready to revise and improve herself. This Susan had delicious wild thoughts full of mountains and forests and floating streams, with fish on the wing and birds at sea, thoughts concentric and phallic, with penis hunting in the mists and cave exploration in the hermaphroditic clouds, but they were only thoughts, unacted, unuttered, the absent underside of Susan the Good.

Nothing happened that a witness listening or a tape recorder under the table could have reported to Edward or Selena. Despite which, by the time Arnold left for his nightly encounter with blood and bones, heart attacks and mutilations and decapitations, Susan was pitched so high she could hardly stand it. We’ve got to do this again, she said to herself, knowing something she wanted now, though still not allowing herself to think it. As he stood by the door, he grateful and bearlike, she asked, Will you come again night after tomorrow?

She went to bed trying to remember what it was like to love Edward. The next dinner she served Arnold was resolutely austere and functional in the bare electric overhead light, but she had no resistance later to what Arnold wanted to do in the double bed that belonged to Susan and Edward, while Selena was breathing hard trying to sleep
under restraint in her hospital room, and Edward in his wooded cabin was getting depressed trying to find himself. When Arnold later went back to another night of crisis, Susan belatedly tried to grieve.