Susan and Arnold, later so respectable, committed adultery in the gaps between her teaching schedule and his emergency duties. First in Edward’s bed, the dark back room with alley beyond, full of books and magazines, with laundry hamper, orange crate, small TV set. Later in Selena’s, the tall window with blowing curtain looking over rooftops, the closet open with airy dresses and lingering perfume.
When that young Susan on Edward’s bed saw Arnold Morrow’s alarming penis suddenly come into view with swollen purpose, she heard a gong in her head. She heard another soon after, when she decided to let it in. Gong, her head said, goodbye Edward. There he goes. Shocked by what kind of person she was. It had never occurred to her her marriage was in jeopardy.
She did not mean it to end. It was over and not over. Edward would come back and never know, and Arnold would return to Selena, and Susan was henceforth an unfaithful wife. Against the electric joy of the new, she went bang against the wrong she was doing. Edward aggrieved, their hopes betrayed – if he knew. She was a jaded woman now, with a secret. She asked Arnold, who had it all figured out.
Who’s going to tell, he said, you? He had a philosophy according to which sex, vastly overemphasized by people attaching their egos to it, had nothing to do with his responsibilities to Selena (whom he would never abandon) nor hers
to Edward. Arnold was especially down on jealousy, the stupidest of all emotions, nothing but property and power thinking they’re love. That’s my philosophy, he said while they lay open on the sheets, chatting in the sweaty afterglow.
She remembered having used the same argument (sex is natural) to rouse Edward. That was different. It led to marriage, for one thing. Yet already in this little taste of crime or nature (whichever), she had glimpsed a better life. Even before Arnold showed her his alarming thing, she thought: if I were married to him. For two weeks, during that casual ego-free affair, she compared Arnold’s superiority to poor old Edward.
Thick muscled, plump in face, dusty haired, a mesomorph unlike ectomorphic Edward, he was easier and more natural. His manner was calm, his temper serene (so far). He was unpretentious, intelligent without being intellectual, would doubtless be brilliant in his field and attractively stupid in everything else. She welcomed his non-intellectuality, his deference to her mind. (Later, when the question of marriage appeared, it was easy to talk him out of his philosophy, which he abandoned without argument, a cheerful concession to her brain. So she thought, anyway.)
She felt gypped. Envious of Selena, who didn’t appreciate what she had, which was available to Susan only on a rental basis. As she went about her work – teaching, paper grading, grocery shopping – she was so charged by electricity transferred from Selena that she dreaded Edward’s dull return like Cinderella turned back into a prairie dog. The glamor of Arnold’s magic sex, not that he was such a great lover, just the auspices or the situation or whatever – well, it’s hard for contemporary Susan to remember why Arnold seemed so glamorous.
Feeling bad for Edward, she tried to remember why she
loved him. This is even harder for contemporary Susan because once she married Arnold it was important to make Edward’s memory as disagreeable as possible. She remembers trying to rebuild him like a knocked down castle, stacking together chunks of time and place memorialized by love or something – a castle soon to be knocked down a second and final time. She remembers remorse, as if she were rebuilding not just Edward, but Edgar’s Lane or her childhood or her mother, or something like that.
What went wrong? Susan could not divorce Edward and marry Arnold simply to validate a sexual adventure. She had her grievances. She hadn’t counted on his becoming a writer, giving up everything so that she could support him with her teaching. She hadn’t counted on his going off for a month to find himself. She had lots to be pissed off about, Susan, if you need reasons.
On the other hand, contemporary Susan remembers how, to preserve the status quo, she found and cuddled a frail feeling like a live or maybe stuffed small animal: Edward’s dearness. Like what she has cuddled when needed in more recent times: Arnold’s dearness. Since Arnold’s dearness looks very much like Edward’s, the two animals are perhaps the same and ought to be called Susan’s dearness.
Arnold and Susan planned an orgy before Edward’s return, but it fell through because of a change in Arnold’s schedule. She spent the evening cleaning the apartment. She had to get back into an Edward state of mind, and it was better to be busy. She was also near panic, because they had no plan to meet again, and she didn’t know what their future was supposed to be. They had forgotten to discuss it.
Then Edward came home. He called from a road stop out
of town and arrived at dinner time. Glad to be back, poor Edward, lovely Susan. They had a drink and ate together, while she wondered if he had enough ESP to detect the deep change in their marriage. The unfaithful wife. He didn’t. He was depressed, he had been depressed before he went, he was still depressed. The woods had failed him. Her heart sank. He talked so much it was hard to sympathize, though she tried harder than ever before. He had accomplished nothing. He had thrown out all the work he had done in the cabin. What? Not literally, he had the pages in his suitcase, but he had thrown them out of his mind.
All evening as she listened to his complaint, she wondered what would happen if he knew. He was too preoccupied to notice. They went to bed. She was alarmed by her new preference for Arnold’s way, gentler and slower than Edward’s effortful puffing, while she kept trying to prefer Edward and revive love, because what else could she do?
She never saw Arnold now, not even on the stairs. No messages either. A week later she realized Selena had come home. Concealing her nervousness, she told Edward about Selena’s carving knife. She had to, lest it become a public event. He was mildly interested.
She decided the lack of word from Arnold meant the affair was over. She was confusedly angry about that, but utilized her anger on Edward’s behalf. She devoted herself to his problem. He appreciated that. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a writer, he explained, it was only that he was going too fast. He needed to go through a juvenile period. She tried to give advice without hurting his feelings. His feelings were easily hurt. He got very emotional and dependent. He dug up his old things and asked what was wrong with his style. His subject matter. Be frank, he said, and she tried to be, to
explain what irritated her. That was a mistake. You don’t have to be that frank, he said.
In her heart (contemporary Susan sees this) she wished Edward would give up and settle down to something real. Not that writing wasn’t real, but she thought Edward was caught in a romantic dream for which he was not fitted. At heart he was as bourgeois as anybody else. He had a logical and organized mind, she could imagine him having excellent success running something, whereas writing seemed to be an infection of his ego, picked up somewhere, stunting his growth. She tried not to think such thoughts, which made her feel hypocritical as she gave him the encouragement he craved. Once when he had asked her to be brutally frank, she tried to tell him. She raised the question whether he had enough talent for what he wanted. Do you
have
to be a writer? she asked. That was a mistake. He reacted as if she had suggested suicide. You might as well ask me to blind myself, he said. Writing was like seeing, he said, not to write was blindness. She never made that mistake again.
A note from Arnold to her office: ‘Just to tell you, Selena knows. No problem, everything under control.’
Selena knows. This raises questions. Did Arnold tell, or did she guess? Was there a fight? Would Selena have new notions for her carving knife? What should we make of the fact that this was Arnold’s only word to her since Edward’s return?
The news increased the likelihood Edward would find out. She and Arnold might keep a secret, but Selena had no reason to. While Edward sat at the table as if in disgrace, obsessed with failure, Susan wondered what Selena would do when the mood came. She wouldn’t even have to tell Edward for the
news to spread like a disease in the ivy trails reaching even to recluses in a state of depression.
To forestall the shock of a sudden discovery by Edward with its grief and loss of faith and her own embarrassed humiliation, she ought to confess in advance, so as to put the confession in her own terms. A volunteered confession would assure him it was over. Brief lapse in your absence, the stress of loneliness, telling you voluntarily so you’ll know you can trust and believe me. It won’t happen again.
Time passed. It’s easier to plan such words than to say them. With no sign from Arnold, she wondered if it might blow over. They met Selena on the stairs. Susan and Edward coming in, Selena out. Selena looked fiercely at her, differently at Edward, thoughtful. It left Susan gasping. What’s the matter? Edward said. The heavy grocery bags they were carrying.
How to tell him, break the news? What was she afraid of? Of hurting his feelings? Aggravating his depression? Driving him to suicide? Come on, Susan, don’t be so merely virtuous. Of losing him? Of losing face, more likely. Her status in the house. The new light he would see her in. Not to speak of the plain uproar, the anarchy the raw emotion would release.
At least you should know your position in advance. She meant to cleave by Edward. Love him, reassure him, be humble. The direct approach, picking his most vulnerable time: on the bed beside him without clothes, curling her hair around her nose, he relieved by the distraction from his obsession. Edward love, I have a confession to make. Not that direct. Ease up to it: Edward dear, suppose you had a wife who. Nor that.
Indirect, to smother him with so much love he would know before the words came out that she couldn’t possibly be saying anything bad. To come up behind him at lunch, put her cheek next to his, saying, Edward my sweet, how much I love.
The best way would be by accident when you are in the midst of something else. Day after day, she watches Edward, realizes as he talks, chews, holds his head, groans, belches, that he
still
doesn’t know. The big change is yet to come, the consequences yet to be revealed.
The best way to confess is to be already angry about something, so you’ll have the momentum of your grievance to carry forward against his hurt. And that’s how it finally did happen: in the midst of a discussion about writing – which was the only thing they talked about nowadays. She said, God, I wish you’d stayed in law school. His reply: When you talk like that, it’s like you were unfaithful.
She snapped: You haven’t the slightest idea what that would be like.
Edward full of emphasis: It couldn’t be worse.
It couldn’t? And so she told. Not rancorously, for as soon as she saw her opportunity, her mood changed to humble and sad. All the same, she told and ended by saying, It’s all over though, it has no future, I was not in love.
Edward the child. His staring eyes, which she had never seen so large. His meek questions: Who? Where? Do you want a divorce? Was it worth it?
He groaned, stretched, walked around the room, experimenting with reactions. What am I supposed to do? he said. How am I supposed to behave?
That’s what she remembers. He did not get angry. He kept asking her to confirm she didn’t want a divorce. He didn’t dare ask if she loved him, so she said it without being asked.
Contemporary Susan thinks her confession perked him up. A respite from his depression. The next time in bed he seemed to enjoy thinking about the unnamed lover in the air. He was tactful enough not to ask for comparisons. She figured she
had broken down a wall whose presence she had not noticed until it was gone. Now we know each other better, she thought. Not so romantic, weaker than we thought, which is maybe good to know. Her marriage would be stronger, she thought, believing she was glad of it.
There’s a gap in the saga of Susan’s official memory, almost a year between Edward’s return from the woods and her marriage to Arnold. When she looks back, she finds the time blank. It could not have been totally without event. There must have been daily drives to the college with snow scenes and slushy streets. Also grocery shopping, cleaning, and cooking for Edward. And moods and arguments, movies, a friend or two. She remembers the apartment: dark walls, tiny kitchen, the bedroom with books on the floor and view of the alley.
The reason for the blockage is that the period was about to end in revolutionary change. Arnold would replace Edward with new laws, values, icons, everything. The new regime rewrites history to protect itself, burying Edward’s time like the Dark Ages. It takes Edward’s return to remind contemporary Susan of what is hidden and challenge her to rewrite the old saga through imaginative archaeology.
Rereading the saga, Susan would like to know if it’s the light of later times that makes that interval look so dreary, or if it really was that way. How dark were the Dark Ages? She did her work and wondered. The saga notes change in Edward. Nervous and caustic, edgy with an increase in the irony level. Odd ugly jokes. Reading the paper sneering at the politicians, letter writers, editorialists, advice givers. Criticizing and ridiculing her colleagues, without quite identifying her with them.
According to the saga, he stopped talking about writing.
Surprising, though Susan doesn’t remember being surprised. No more complaints or requests for opinions. Secretive, not even admitting that what he was doing in his study was writing.
What the saga ignores, but Susan now remembers, is Edward’s silence about her affair. He never blamed her, not overtly. Never asked her to explain, after his first tentative questions. Avoided asking for love. Cautious, as if afraid of her.
She has no problem remembering Arnold’s talk, one of the scriptural centers of the saga, though it’s hard to remember where or when they could talk, since after Edward returned the affair supposedly stopped. She thought it was over. But Arnold did insist on talking and she found ways, listening to his urgent low whispering voice in the office she shared with the other composition teachers: Dear Susan, how good, intelligent, wise, who alone could make him feel like a human being again. Hair-raising anecdotes about Selena, rage and jealousy, the carving knife, pills, pliers. Clothes out the window, her broad brimmed hat sailing like a frisbee across the street. Who went out naked at night, brought back by the police.
In the narrative Arnold asked Susan for comfort and help. He was fed up. He wanted to know the right thing, what his duties were. What did Susan say? Only what she ought to, of course. Throw the question back to him. With two sides to it. His side is the release from obligation when love is dead with no children, and the woman he married no longer exists. The absurdity of sacrificing his chances for personal happiness to a crazy woman unable to appreciate it. Selena’s side is the cruelty of abandonment when she is ill, confined, helpless, and alone. Selena banks heavily on the vow about sickness and health. But Jesus, Arnold would say, if she’s going to
be in a loony bin the rest of her life. If not, hard times and fight fight fight.
Asked to mediate, Susan tried to keep a third side out of the case. It’s up to you, she would say, like a heroine in Henry James. Sometimes he would explode. He was not made to be celibate, it was not his nature. Did Selena realize that? Do
they
realize it? Who’s they? Susan asked. You, he said. He compared her case to his: You happily married with your comfortable husband and love and sex and your sane mind and his sane mind and sane conversation full of love love love, and nothing to worry about. She refused to deny it.
One secret leads to another. Because they couldn’t meet where they lived, they used her office phone for messages, trusting a friend of Arnold’s who had a room or else meeting dangerously in secluded corners of the park or in deserted offices after classes, and Edward took her late arrivals for granted. The old saga recreates Susan’s dilemma, caused by not knowing what kind of narrative she was in. A wife resumes an affair with her married lover. Though the husband knows of the earlier affair, he does not know about this one. And though the lover wants to be free of his institutionalized wife, he hasn’t done anything about it, nor has he decided what his obligations are. Susan is therefore once again an unfaithful wife. What is the future if you are an unfaithful wife? Is this transitional to a new life, a step in the dismantling of Edward? Or is it a permanent concession to weakness, one infidelity after another? The issue is hard because she is a person loyal and true. If she is to remain Edward’s wife, even though unfaithful, she ought to defend the Edward castle, protect its icons. If this is transitional, she should dismantle the castle without delay, tell Edward the truth and cut the ties. Love, love. Arnold talked of love. But he seemed happy with things
as they were, and Susan did not know what to do. No doubt she was full of strong feelings, though the narrative remembers only the dilemma.
According to the chronicle, the renewal of her affair caused her to divorce Edward so as to marry Arnold. But when Susan looks now, she sees herself unable to make up her mind, never making it up until others made up theirs. She can’t remember how many discussions she and Edward had, how many turns and vague decisions quickly cancelled, before it was settled. She remembers his silence, which she thought was for the failure of his writing, and she feared he was thinking of suicide. When she came home from her adventure full of exotic guilt, she felt ashamed of her joy while he was so miserable. There was an evening when Edward thought she was checking research papers in the library. And a night during which she heard him sighing and groaning as if he wanted her to notice. In the morning they got up, took turns in the bathroom, got their breakfast, ate together without speaking. They sat silent over coffee, Edward staring out over the enclosed yard to the back of the bookstore in the rain. The first words he spoke were sudden: I finally understand what’s wrong. I expect too much from you.
She said something conciliatory, but he was going another way. Shut up, he said, I’m giving you advice. You should get a divorce, the sooner the better. No one has the right to expect what I expect of you.
The talks that followed were full of confusion. They made decisions and changed their minds often during the next few weeks, which were full of rhetoric and paradox. No one knew where anyone stood. Things went around. Gradually, though, as they kept returning to the point, it simplified. The official cause was her failure to appreciate his writing, which he kept
insisting was serious, really serious. You don’t esteem me, he would say. You don’t
see
me. But since Susan in her heart had always thought Edward’s commitment to writing was temporary, she did not take such complaints seriously. She assumed the real cause was her affair with Arnold, shown in Edward’s reluctance to mention it, as if jealousy were beneath him.
So they divorced, Edward-Susan, Arnold-Selena, to remarry as Arnold-Susan, and, later, Edward-Stephanie, while Selena stayed in the mental hospital. Officially, the divorce was amicable. They were polite and did not dispute the ownership of things, but there was a moody cloud. Speech was hard, especially after she moved out. When they met in the divorce court, though there had been no quarrel, she felt as if it had been all quarrel.
In its place, a new romantic idyll, the second in Susan’s saga and the last. New embodiments of the old forms reduced the triteness. Indiana Dunes. Brookfield Zoo. Museum of Science and Industry. The freedom to be seen in public. Gifts, jewelry and clothes. It was a relief not to judge his work and to look forward to his prosperity. The only drawback was his philosophy of sex and again, possibly, an insufficient consideration of what he expected from a wife. She asked him to revise the sex philosophy. No problem, he said, replacing it with a doctrine of fidelity and truth. As for his marital expectations, she learned these through trial and error.
Although it was a time of joy, Susan cried a lot. The narrative always has difficulty recovering feelings because they have no outer effects, but crying is an event which the narrative can describe. She cried for the honest Susan she would have to rebuild. She cried for her mother and father, for Edward at fifteen, the hours in the rowboat, the myth of childhood sweethearts, and the struggling artist life. She cried when her
mother came to Chicago to persuade her to give Edward a second chance and said he would always continue to be her foster son.
She cried lest Arnold not divorce Selena and cried for Selena when he proved her wrong. She cried for Selena’s crying, and for the doctor who said Selena would never get out and the lawyer who obligated Arnold to support her the rest of her life.
Susan did not usually cry much, but this was an emotional time. The old crying Susan was still a child. The maturing Susan who married Arnold was wiser, but not much, as she entered her second marriage expecting to rectify the mistakes of the first. The contemporary Susan admits rectification occurred, not because Arnold was better than Edward, but through the force of time. It came about. Arnold was different, but much the same, and Susan would never know if the same rectification might not have occurred if she had stayed with Edward – just as she assumed a comparable rectification for him with loyal Stephanie.
But that makes no difference. What the matured Susan knows is this: however it began, in what shady manner or under what clouds, with whatever deceptions and betrayals in good or bad faith, what they have created is a world. That world is hers and must be protected. Sometimes still she can remember imagining a different world. She went to graduate school thinking she would earn a doctorate. She might have been a professor, taught graduate students, written books, chaired a department, gone on lecture tours. Instead she teaches when there’s a slot for her, part-time, auxiliary, not for the money, not for the career, but for the exercise. She might have been, but it annoys her when people like Lou Anne in the English Office speak of her sacrifices, feel sorry for her and
blame Arnold like a tyrant or slaver. For though she never knew for sure whether it was by choice or default (it happened so gradually), this is what she has become: the mother of the family. The family is Dorothy, Henry, Rosie, and it’s Arnold and herself, and she is the mother. It’s the one thing in her life she knows is important, no doubt about that. Like it or not, it’s who I am, she says. She knows it, Arnold knows it. It’s what they know together.
They settled this for good three years ago with the Marilyn Linwood understanding. Their implicit agreement, never quite put into words, established by the events as they occurred. That Arnold remained, that he continued to act the parts of husband and father, that after enough had been said nothing more was said, proved the point, which is that Linwoods come and go. In the long run they mean nothing at all.
She stands by him, that’s what it is. She never thought of it in those words. She always thought of herself as healthily selfish taking care of her interests, but it’s true, isn’t it?, she stands by him and always did. Not because he is Arnold but because once in the past she settled down to become his wife. And then the world turned into a crystal around them. She stands by him through Linwood in the same automatic way in which she stood by him in the Macomber malpractice suit, just as she’ll accompany him if he goes to Washington (selling house, severing kids from school and friends, everything) for the advancement of his career. She’ll do it, of course she will.
It’s not just that they, with their children, house, car, dog, cat, engraved checks and writing paper, have created an institution like a bank, it’s that the world is cold, lonely, and dangerous, and they need each other for shelter. This book she’s reading knows about that. Tony in his plight should appreciate how fiercely she clings. He should. Yet this makes her
uneasy, for she mistrusts Edward’s book. She doesn’t know why. It nudges a certain alarm in her, a fear whose object she does not know but which seems different from the fear in the story itself, something rather in herself. She thinks, if Edward intends, through Tony or in some other way, to shake her faith in her life, well – she’ll resist, that’s all. She’ll simply resist. There are things in life the reading of no mere book can change.