Authors: David Leavitt
“About the school,” Danny says. “I’ve decided I’ll go.”
A few days later, Danny boards the train which snakes along the Jersey coast to New York. He is riding to visit his father. An old couple is sitting across the way from him, a gnarled little man and his taller, white-haired wife, her white-gloved hands clasped calmly around each other. Like Danny, the couple is not reading the paper, but looking out the green-tinted windows at yellow grass, small shops, warehouses.
“You’d better get your things together,” the husband says. “We’re almost there.”
“No,” the wife says. “We don’t want South Amboy. We want Perth Amboy.” The husband shakes his head no. “South Amboy. I’m sure she said South Amboy.”
The wife is quiet for a few seconds, until the conductor shouts, “South Amboy, South Amboy next!” Now she cannot control herself. “I’m
sure
it’s Perth Amboy,” she says. The husband is buttoning his jacket, reaching for his hat. “Will you listen to me for once?” he says. “Its South Amboy.” The wife shakes her head. “I’m sure,” she says. “I’m sure.”
Gradually, and then with a sudden grind, the train comes to a halt. The husband lumbers down the aisle, knocking past Danny, shaking his head. “I’m getting off,” he says. “Are you coming?” The wife stands, hesitates, sits down. “It’s not this stop,” she says. He makes a violent motion with his hands, and walks out the door, onto the station platform. She stands to follow him, but the doors close suddenly. His fist appears, as if disembodied, rapping on the window. Then the train is moving again.
For a moment, she just stands there, shocked. Then the train’s lurching forces her to sit down. A look comes over her face first of indignation, then of fear and confusion, then finally, of weariness—with her husband, with the train, with their lives which will go on like this. She bends over and pulls herself into the corner of her seat, as if trying to make herself as small as possible, and picks at a loose thread of her dress with one of her white-gloved hands.
Then she comes to consciousness. She realizes that she is not alone on the train. Her eyes narrow, and focus on Danny. Late afternoon, almost dark. He is singing a song about comedy and fun and musicality. He tells her it’s going to be a perfect night.
Although just barely—without
laudes
, without distinction, and from an academy which is third-rate at best—Suzanne Kaplan’s son, Seth, has managed to graduate from prep school, and Suzanne is having a party to celebrate. The party is also a celebration of Suzanne’s own “graduation into life”—her thirty pounds thinner body, her new house, and her new marriage to Bruce Kaplan, who works in real estate. Of course, Suzanne has been planning for the party to take place outdoors, since Seth’s graduation coincides with the brief, fragile season of wisteria, and the pool looks gorgeous in sunlight. Unfortunately, it’s been raining every day for a week now, and Suzanne’s spent a lot of time by her kitchen window, reminding herself that she should still be counting her blessings.
“It’s a drowning spring,” Suzanne’s mother, Pearl, told her the day before the party. “Don’t count on outdoors. Move everything inside to the nice family room.” But Suzanne was optimistic, and sure enough, this morning, the morning of the party, the sun has risen brilliantly, and the wet grass promises to be dry by noon. In her new bathrobe, she stands in the living room, and watches Bruce drive his power mower. His children, Linda and Sam, are playing a game she doesn’t recognize, and she raps on the window to get their attention.
They stop jarringly when they hear her, as if they have been caught in the act of defacing something. They look at her; it is a look she calls the “wicked witch” look, because her own daughter, Lynnette, used to give it before running off to her room, screaming, “You’re a witch.” Suzanne isn’t privy to the secrets of Linda and Sam’s lives; they are polite, but keep their distance. Of course, to them, she is the new, alien thing.
She pushes open the sliding glass door and walks out onto the patio. “What are you playing?” she asks, but even now her voice trembles. She knows they can see right through her nonchalance.
“Nothing,” Linda says. “Come on, Sam.”
Her brother gives Suzanne a helpless glance, and then they are off, to another part of the yard.
The yard is spacious, green. To the north is a huge meadow where cows might still graze, if there were any more cows in this part of the world. The part of the Bronx where Suzanne grew up is now a vast region of housing projects, but when she was a child, living in a two-family house, there were still wild patches of countryside, and farmhouses, and even some farmers. These days, when she drives to visit her mother, she stops sometimes. Off the highway there are occasional plots of what used to be farmland, grown over with wild grasses and gnarled trees. The farmhouses which are left are rotting, and only squatters inhabit them.
Of course, Suzanne doesn’t live in the Bronx anymore. She has moved “up” in the world, as her mother might put it, though “up” has always seemed the wrong word: it’s struck her as a more lateral movement. Now, in her mother’s mind, she is on some sort of summit, having recovered beautifully from the horrific fall of her divorce. In her mother’s mind, Suzanne is in the clouds. She herself feels more on earth than ever before, but she is happy to know (if nothing else) that she has perhaps finally arrived somewhere.
It has been just over a year since Suzanne’s first husband, Herb, informed her that he was in love with a lawyer from his office. At that time they were living in Rockville Centre, in the third of what would probably have been four houses, and Suzanne was fat. Herb, she remembers, had recently gotten a substantial salary hike, Lynnette had finally moved to Manhattan, they were out of eggs, and the dishwasher was broken. When Herb said he wanted to talk to her after dinner, she hoped he was going to suggest that they now move to a posher suburb, with larger lawns, for he had been skillfully avoiding the subject of a move for months. Instead, his announcement confirmed all the suspicions Suzanne had been trying to talk herself out of since the second house. The inevitability of it was something like relief to her, but that did not make it easier to bear.
Herb said he wouldn’t leave Suzanne. He said he believed in responsibility and commitment. But he would not give up his lover, either; everything must be aboveboard. “What is it?” Suzanne asked him that night. “Is it that I’m fat and depressed and a bitch? Is that all?”
“It is simply that I’m in love with someone else,” Herb said. She supposed he meant these words to be soothing, because they included no attacks, and she was amazed that he could not know how much they pierced her. Still, she wanted him to stay.
“Fine,” he said. “But two nights a week—probably Tuesday and Thursday—and some weekends, I’ll stay in the city with Selena.”
The first Tuesday night he was gone she thought she would go mad. She was so angry at Herb that she seriously feared losing control, doing him some terrible violence, and she resolved to tell him the next evening that he must move out. She resented even more his insinuating trick of making her kick him out when it was he who wanted to leave. Up until that night, in the recesses of Suzanne’s self-hatred, there had rested an incurable sense of being blessed, an assurance that there awaited her some pleasurable vengeance against all this suffering, which gave her pain an anticipatory edge. Now Herb had shaved that edge clean off. She knew there was no guardian angel to make sure he got what he deserved, or suddenly revitalize his love for her. And she wished that Herb had simply, swiftly died in his car on the Long Island Expressway, rather than do what she most dreaded, and confirm every terrible charge she had made against herself. Wednesday night, when he came home, she told him not to bother to come back.
The human body, Suzanne remembers, seemed at that time impossibly ugly; aging, mortality, its capacity to fall apart were all part of a sick joke, played by a vengeful God. She did not want to kill herself. She wanted to last forever, rotting, like Miss Havisham in
Great Expectations
, or like the farmhouses in the Bronx. She wanted to always remind the human race of its talent for shame and ruin. When she woke up each morning, however, some irritating instinct for survival and pleasure nagged at her. She wished it would go away, but it would not, and finally she got out of bed, and washed her hair, and walked into the living room to survey the damage. Lynnette was in New York, Seth at school. The thought of continuing to live in this room made her nauseous, and for a moment, the emptiness and the loneliness of her house threatened to drive her back into bed. But this was her lot, and whether she liked it or not, she must make something—perhaps the best—out of it. And so she cleaned up. And, trembling a little, went to the grocery store and bought herself some food to make for dinner. The television set pulled her through the first week. The second week she tried to curb how much she watched, knowing that “Saturday Night Live,” like an addictive drug, might lose its effectiveness if she overdosed. The third week she signed up to join a depression therapy group.
Herb and the lawyer broke up three months after he moved into her apartment, but he decided to stay in Manhattan and get his own place. At that time, Suzanne had just met Bruce, whose own wife had left him a few weeks before. Her life seemed quite suddenly enormous with possibility, and the news of Herb’s break-up filled her with a kind of vengeful glee. Of course, she told herself, if he asked her, she would not take him back, not now. But he has never asked her. Instead he says he is extraordinarily happy for Suzanne, absolutely delighted that things worked out so well for her. He expresses no resentment, no jealousy, only a kind of relief, as if a burden of guilt has been lifted from him. When they had lunch together last week, to discuss Seth’s graduation, Suzanne tried to enjoy the fact that she, the loser, the victim, had come out on top in the end—better than ever before. But Herb seemed to enjoy Suzanne’s happiness as much as she did, and she left the restaurant feeling choked inside. She was miserable because Herb was not miserable, yet her own victor-status demanded that she not be concerned with that. Still, she raged at his uncanny talent for happiness.
Herb says that he wants to be Suzanne’s friend. He speaks to her in intimate tones unheard through the long course of their marriage. “It’s amazing,” he told her at last week’s lunch, “but I’m beginning to realize why it bugged me so much when you used to talk about getting a new house. It wasn’t just that I was planning to ask you to let me out of the marriage. It was the thought that the next house was going to be the last house, the house we’d probably die in. We were rich enough that we could finally afford the best, and that meant there was nowhere left to go. I felt like my life was over. But now, I don’t know about you, Suzanne, but I’ve had to reassess my whole value system. I’m seeing a counselor. I’m realizing all the things I did wrong as a father. Really, for both of us, things are just beginning.”
Suzanne looked at him and thought, How dare he speak like this, now? It was as if he believed the old Suzanne—the woman who would have been crushed by such a statement—had simply ceased to exist. This was a new model, in whom he could confide the ugly truth about his shrewish, fat wife and their wretched life together. And though on good days, Suzanne would almost agree with Herb—she imagines that she has been reincarnated, that the old Suzanne lived in a different age, and had a life utterly distinct from her own—on bad days, it is as if almost no time has passed; as if her marriage to Bruce, her weight loss, her new house are all simply part of a dream from which she will awaken, to find herself in the old bed, the old house. Those days, she feels like an earthquake survivor who carries around the rubble of her home in a bag, refusing to let go her buried children.
Now, coming back in from the porch, Suzanne looks at the clock. It is already eleven, and Seth is still asleep; sunlight is leaking through the crack in the guest-room door. Suzanne stands before her son’s room and knocks cautiously, but she gets no answer.
“Seth,” she says.
There is a sound of thrashing inside the room.
“Seth, wake up,” Suzanne says. “It’s already eleven.”
“All right, all right,” he mumbles, “Give me ten minutes.”
“Seth, it’s your party, you’ve got to get up.”
“Leave me alone!” he shouts. Suzanne smiles, knowing that if she gets him angry enough, he’ll be too riled to sleep. It’s what she calls a mother’s secret.
Now she pushes the door open, and the leak of sunlight engulfs her. Seth is splayed diagonally across the double bed, in his underwear, wrapped in a tangle of sheets and blankets.
“Come on,” Suzanne says in a singsong voice. “It’s time to get up!”
He sits up in bed quite suddenly and stares at her, furious. “Do you know how much sleep I got during finals week?” he asks.
“How much?”
“Maybe ten minutes. Can’t I make up for it now?”
“Do you still want to?” Suzanne asks. Seth looks at her with the confused expression he often had as a child, when he would come into the kitchen in the morning, bleary-eyed, and slurp down the sweet milk in which he had drowned his cereal.
“Happy party day,” she says, and walks out of the room.
But when Suzanne gets downstairs, she finds that her quiet kitchen is suddenly ablaze with activity. The caterers have arrived—a crew of large, stubbornly bourgeois black women, all related to each other in obscure ways, who have recently been earning an impressive reputation in this part of Long Island. The women are dressed in various combinations of black-and-white polyester which look to Suzanne like military uniforms, and seem to indicate a complicated hierarchy. Suzanne’s mother, Pearl, has also arrived; she is now talking to a particularly large woman of middle age whose black hostess dress (without a strip of white) signals supreme authority. They are going over the hors d’oeuvres.