Arnold is coming, and then Edward. Susan Morrow is tense enough to take her breath away. She feels the contempt of each for the other as if for herself. Arnold thinks Edward a failure, always has. When they last met, years ago by accident at a play in Chicago, Arnold bought Edward a drink. He slapped him on the back, talked of cultural values and judged him effete. Edward ignored Arnold’s objections to obscurity in art, avoided the contemporary, changed the subject to baseball, and judged him simple.
She does the work of her day, kids to the dentist, groceries, with plans to meet Arnold at O’Hare in the evening. Frightened by what Arnold may be bringing home to her, the possible terrors, she turns her mind to Edward, who comes tomorrow. The critique he expects from her, the questions he expects her to ask, which she has postponed.
She’d rather leave the book where it was last night, to act untended in the sub-basements of her mind, but for Edward she’ll form an opinion, what she liked and what she didn’t. Adjectives. Questions that will organize her reading for tentative answers. To Edward’s question – what’s missing from his book? – she has a mischievous reply.
She meets Arnold at O’Hare in the evening, trying to be glad to see him. Kisses him, takes him by the arm, Arnold the Bear, who always looks disoriented in public places, with
his graying beard, his bushy brows, worried about his baggage, distracted by thoughts. Preoccupied. By what, Susan does not know. He does not tell. She waits for his unwanted gift and holds back the urgent questions that are driving her crazy.
She drives him home on the busy expressway. As if nothing had happened, he talks of meetings, people seen, lectures attended. Describes the interview with the Cedar Hall Institute. Chickwash, what an honor for him, if only his mother could have lived. He expects the invitation within a week. She remembers his promise to discuss it with her before deciding anything, but he seems to think they’ve had that discussion already. If she reminds him, he’ll say he thought it was settled. She fears what other news such a reminder might elicit.
Instead she mentions Edward’s forthcoming visit. She describes Edward’s book as she drives but can’t tell if Arnold is listening. She talks in the blast of wind around the car windows, he not saying anything. She speaks of her plan to invite Edward to dinner. Tomorrow night. Since Arnold doesn’t hear that either, she repeats. Oh excuse me, he says. You’ll have to do without me, I’ve got to work tomorrow night.
That night Susan Morrow has sex. With her own Arnold, in their own ways, with their twenty-five year history. She wasn’t expecting it, his fatigue, her irritability, whatever is distracting her. A feeling of grievance, sorry for herself, all the sacrifices she has made. His neglect of her adventures, like the latest, this book of Edward’s, as important to her as Arnold’s New York adventures are to him: his total indifference. So she’s not expecting it and is halfway through the trapdoor to sleep when
he puts his bear paw on her in his intimate privileged way bringing her violently back.
Back to an old world of bodies at night, featuring her nipples, throat, hips, and abdomen, along with his sweaty ribs, hairy legs, armpits and beard. Also their mutual tongues, and eventually his vulnerable fat thrusting sausage in the dark wet sensitivities under her pelvic arch. She forgets her grievances with a relieving yelp, approving her policy to be faithful and true whether in Chicago or Washington, while everything else disappears, including Edward and Marilyn Linwood. Or does not disappear. She’s thinking about them while Arnold rocks away, wondering how they would like each other. Afterwards, he (who? Arnold, of course) puts his head on her shoulder and moans: Forgive me, oh forgive me. There there, she says, like a mother, patting the back of his head, not daring to wonder what he wants to be forgiven for.
The next day she waits for Edward. His card said he would stay at the Marriott, but there was no specific plan to meet. She expects him to call and will invite him for dinner then. Excited and nervous, all morning and part of the afternoon she waits. Meanwhile daylight drains the glow from Arnold’s night. As it usually does. She’s annoyed by his disregard of Edward. The official dogma for twenty-five years, that Edward is of no importance. She wishes Arnold would read his book. She wishes it as if she wrote it herself. The idea grows: to capture Arnold by the book, send him too through the woods with Tony, let him suffer the shocking loss and the uncomfortable discovery, enslaved to Edward’s imagination for the three days or whatever it requires.
But Arnold would say, this Tony Hastings of yours in this book by Edward, your Tony Hastings is a wimp. That’s Arnold’s
language, how he would put it. He’ll say: I appreciate what Tony goes through, but what’s wrong with this man who can’t protect his family or control Ray even when he has the gun? That’s just the kind of hero your Edward would make up.
It irritates her though she’s the one inventing and making Arnold say it. Mistrusting his motives as she invents them, saying,
You
would never let Ray’s thugs get me, would you, Arnold? Nothing like this could happen to you, because you wouldn’t let it, is that what you want me to believe, my hero? She sees how the sneer at Tony’s maleness intends to certify and augment his own, though her particular recollection of Arnold’s maleness from last night is parched, lost in the memory of stroking his head and saying, There, there.
Her thought is full of rancor. She tries to correct for that, in fairness. In fairness, she too was bothered by Tony’s lack of backbone, which explains how she can invent Arnold’s critique. Don’t do that, Tony you fool, she would say. But never thought of complaining to Edward, because she knew his reply: that’s what he’s supposed to do. If she understands that, Arnold can too. Arnold should understand Tony’s dilemma with the gun. To have it and be unable to use it: for Susan that’s real life, unlike the movies, where the mere display of a gun by anybody confers the powers of God. Susan in the cabin in that situation would have been no more able to use the gun than Tony was. She should praise Edward for that, but hesitates, if the thought contains more than she knows: if in that flash of Tony the Wimp, there’s a spreading reflection of herself.
Well, Arnold would deny that. Patronizingly perhaps, he would assure her: Tony and you, Susan? There’s no resemblance in the least. I know my Susan. If Ray and his pals
attacked your children, you’d fight in ways polite Tony never dreamed. You’d jump and grab him by the throat, bite, kick, pluck his eyes. There’s no way you’d let a thug hurt yours as Tony does, as you well know.
Right, Susan knows. She knows her Susan.
And she waits. She looks forward to seating Edward at her table, serving him dinner, joined by her children without Arnold. To talk about his book. Also, without apology, to say a conciliatory thing or two, like how far behind she has left the old wrangle. How free her mind is now, how friendly at last, how glad she would be to renew him as her oldest friend, to whom she can speak of things her husband can’t know. Don’t misunderstand. This is not an infidelity she contemplates. It’s not the compensation for Linwood her husband secretly wishes she would take. It’s only a freedom to talk in a place where she can say what’s in her head, without secrets.
All this from reading Edward’s book, though less from the book itself than from the return of its author. To confess to Edward what she can’t confess to Arnold. The new Edward, who grew up and gained the wisdom to write his book. This Edward would understand why what Arnold thinks her greatest virtue is no particular virtue to her. He would know what it’s like not to use the gun.
Sometime in the afternoon getting late she wonders: maybe he isn’t going to call. Jolted, she calls the hotel. It’s after 3:30, if she wants him for dinner, they’d better get in touch quick. She leaves a message at the hotel desk, call Susan. Asks the clerk when he arrived. Yesterday afternoon, maam, the clerk says. Yesterday? He’s been here since
yesterday
?
She considers driving into the city (letting the kids have pizza by themselves), going to the Marriott to catch him when he comes back. Too frantic. Better to cook dinner as planned, with enough for Edward when he calls. She blames herself, stupid. Later, during a time in the preparations with nothing to do but wait for the stove, she has twenty minutes to sit at the kitchen table and think. Time to change course, reverse, shift guilt-in to anger-out. To sizzle with the stove. Why should
you
take the blame, Susan? He’s free to call. Not to call is a snub. Raise that to insult: three evenings she spent at his request reading his novel in good faith, with so much effort preparing what to say, and he didn’t care enough to call.
Such thought is a furnace, it converts everything, including the novel itself. A fiery question: Why did you send it if you don’t want to discuss it? That he could send it out of spite had not occurred to her.
She eats with the children, tries to join their chat as if nothing were on her mind. By the time they are finished, it’s obvious: it was not her neglect that caused her to miss Edward. Setting her up for the snub, he’s given her a startling new view of himself.
Out of the forgotten she remembers how bitterly he resented her failure to appreciate the dignity of his writing. Like blinding, he said: your attitude blinds me. Evidently he’s angry still. Unforgiving twenty-five years later for an offense equivalent to blinding, and the novel his revenge.
The novel as revenge is preposterous, but the idea won’t go away. In what sense is it revenge, how is its punishment supposed to work? Figure that out. An allegory? She denies the charges. She has not blinded him, hurt him, destroyed his life, has done no damage whatever – as the novel’s own
achievement proves. At the kitchen sink with the dishes, she can resent too, resentment bites her lips demanding gesture and breakage, requiring her strongest efforts for self-control.
Her anger depends on how she phrases it, feeding on the language by which she defines Edward’s affront, like this: his novel as hate. His favor as trap. Her right to read censored. It gets away from her, what she’s angry about, proving to be other than she thought. It comes down to this: the strain, the sheer strain. The strain of maintaining fairness through the humiliation of being wrong. The strain of ignoring love and hate so as to read dispassionately for three sittings. The strain of entering his imagination, of being Tony, only to be kicked out as impertinent. The strain of ignoring the strain, and then to be snubbed.
Irked. Of course, the message may not have been delivered. At 9:30 she calls the hotel again. Edward is still out. She leaves another message. After eleven, she hears the car turn into the garage, Arnold returning late. The thought of what he brings is too horrible to think, and she hurries upstairs, preparing quickly while he eats his bowl of Wheaties in the kitchen, to be in bed and asleep before he comes up so she won’t have to talk to him. The necessity for this makes her fume. As she gets into bed (closing out for good the possibility of meeting Edward) there’s a conflagration of shame all through her mind. A vast image of the world moving, tectonic plates shifting, spreads out like solitude.
Susan as idiot, such a ninny. She lies in bed wide awake, no trapdoor down tonight – it’s shut tight – the floor solid and bitter, thoughts racing and raging. Scolding herself for what she was imagining a few hours ago. She sees herself, fatuous gullible Susan, Arnold’s healthy-faced skier, sentimental as a puppy-dog, leaving messages for Edward like an abandoned
lover, like a groupie, begging for the right to talk, about what? His book, or was it to complain about Arnold? How could she be so foolish? How could she complain about Arnold to a stranger like Edward after all those years when she has scarcely dared complain to herself? Where could she begin? What would she tell him? What would Edward care? How understand? What is there to understand?
She hears Arnold in the room, in the dark. Shuffling, bumping, grunting, snuffling. The bed sags under him. She smells him. He thumps, snorts, turns heavily over, bumps her as he turns again, making no concessions. She holds still, refusing to be waked, holding her breath to tell him: if not asleep, she’s not there either, nowhere to be found.
He has been with Marilyn Linwood. She decides it is true, she thinks it deliberately, lets her mind dwell, turns her imagination to it, visualizing everywhere, New York, Chicago, her apartment, the patient couch in his office, Washington, Chickwash. Does this in direct violation of the mental discipline she adopted three years ago that would enable her to accept the status quo. Enough of that. If she can’t tolerate the imagining, she has no right to the status quo.
The absolutely terrifying question has returned to her mind, and again she can’t face it. She wonders why he is thrashing and sweating so enormously like a guilty conscience, what’s on his mind? She can’t think about it. She thinks of those two snuffling together. Talking about her. Protecting her, poor Susan. Let Susan protect herself. She thinks of Arnold’s pension plan and annuities, which will start paying off some fifteen-plus years from now, for which she is still the sole beneficiary, the children following after. She plans to remain the sole beneficiary, she
intends
that. She’ll insist on that.
She turns in the dark to face Arnold, opens her eyes, looks
at the big empty shadow where he is, to think it like a murder weapon, an arrow, a dart. Arnold the bigamist. He’ll move them to Washington or he’ll commute on weekends, or worse. Must I take this? Susan asks Susan. You have no choice, they say. You’re past the time of revolt or denial. Your husband’s career, they say.
What if she refuses? What if she says, I won’t do it. I won’t move to Washington, nor will I be left behind. I refuse to let you run away from us. I assert myself, your wife. I assert myself selfishly, Susan the bitch.
She sees Marilyn Linwood advising Arnold what to do, just as Susan advised him about mad Selena twenty-five years ago. Using the moral authority she had over him, his natural dependency upon her. She sees how little authority she has now. What happened to it, where did it go? How galling, if she has forfeited it to Linwood. She sees herself in a long vista over years surrendering everything to the project of pleasing him, as if that were her job. Her feminist friends would be surprised how far she’s defected from her own politics, defender of all women’s rights except her own. What authority could she exert if she dared? She pays the household bills, will Linwood take that over too? Abjectly she waits for Linwood’s message, Arnold’s gift, held back for as long as she keeps quiet and makes no wrong move. Censored, blackmailed, contained and jailed by the danger of saying a wrong word, a small complaint that would give Linwood the right to take charge.
So she tries a strange word on her silent lips, the word
hate
. She’s afraid to use it, lest it commit her to a drastic revolutionary life. Is she strong enough for that? Among her vows when she split with Edward was never to split again. A foolish vow. But it’s no mere vow that holds her now. It’s the institution, departments and physical plant, an institution no less
real than Chickwash: Mommy, Daddy, and the Kids, Inc. If Susan torched the corporation, where would she go? How could she escape blame for arson at this time of life?
Arnold is asleep at last. Deep, oblivious, stupid. Though she’s afraid to think hate, she does let herself think him stupid. The thought allows her to relax, dim some of her anger, feel a little sleepy herself. How corrupt I am, she thinks. That thought startles her too, she didn’t intend to think it. How surprising to think that what Arnold always required of her might be considered corrupt. Yet she must have known it before, considering how automatically the thought calls to mind a catalogue of cases. Her argument with Mrs. Givens, a memory symbol, emblem, token of discomfort: Mrs. Givens over coffee daring to tell Susan the Macomber rumor, that it wasn’t the nurse’s fault but the doctor’s, too fast, smug, cocksure, etcetera. And Susan reflexively scolding her, blaming the hospital, condemning the lawyer, relying on Arnold’s version of what had happened. How surprising that Susan’s integrity could be compromised by the noble virtue of loyalty, or whatever it is she has.
The sleep door opening, as she begins to slide she’s vaguely aware of Tony in the vicinity. Her temper has cooled. Once again she has forgotten the question that terrified her. She sleeps tentatively and then deeply, and in the morning her anger is an empty space, a mold like the holes made by bodies in the ash at Pompeii. She no longer imagines that Edward deliberately snubbed her, and she’s surprised how wrought up she was about Arnold. In the cold daylight it’s easy to persuade herself that if she keeps her peace, he’ll stand by her, and to dismiss her pain as a flare of selfishness. Easy, too easy. She knows it’s too easy, she knows there’s something not to be dismissed in what she has seen, but that’s for another time,
for quiet reflection and deep thought, which can wait. As for Edward, she should have sent her message earlier. She never knew the purpose of his visit nor his obligations nor his schedule. At nine she makes one more call to the hotel. The clerk says Edward Sheffield checked out at seven. Maybe she’s disappointed, maybe relieved. She refuses to resent it. She’ll assume he didn’t call because he came back too late last night and didn’t want to disturb her family at an uncivilized hour.
Yet it seems as if something has happened that could change everything, if she’s not careful. Through Tony, through Edward, she’s had a glimpse. Never mind, not now. For civilization’s sake, she’ll write Edward a letter. She’ll gather her critique together, trim it into tight clear sentences and send it. She writes through the day. The desk is at the window by the bird feeder, devastated by a flock of English sparrows. The snow on the lawn, so clean and white yesterday, has begun to melt, and chunky patches of brown earth show through the holes. The walk to the garage is muddy. The sidewalks glisten with moisture. She hardly notices any of this, so busy is her mind clearing the way to Edward.
She says all the things she planned to say. She praises the book’s good qualities and criticizes its flaws. She tells how it made her think of the precariousness of her sheltered life. She confesses her kinship to Tony, writing as if that were a problem solved. She rhapsodizes: While civilization oblivious to him roars in the distance, Tony lies dying, hiding from the police who should be his friends, as he hid earlier from his enemies. Dies, joyfully believing a story which is not true. It gives him comfort, but it’s not true, while death and evil rage around.
Edward says, So tell me, what’s missing in my book? She replies, Don’t you know, Edward, can’t you see? The thought sidetracks her into irrelevance. What’s missing in
her
life? She
wonders if she’ll ever see Arnold in the old way again, even if it’s not hate. She feels the power of habit pulling her back, as it has for so many years. Looking out at the emerging dirt-brown winter lawn, believing she’s still thinking about the letter of forgiving praise and criticism she’ll write, or else about how to make herself stronger with Arnold, with more self-respect, Susan Morrow begins to dream. The rowboat in the harbor, she has the oars, Edward lolls in the stern, dangling a hand in the water. The house with screens is behind him, over his head. Behind her and around are the pine islands and cottages. He says, ‘The tide is taking us.’
She sees that. She sees the shore behind him moving sideways to the left.
He says, ‘If we drift much further it will be hard to get back.’
She knows that. She knows how much further they have to drift and how hard they will have to row.
‘If we fell in do you think we’d drown?’ he asks.
The question surprises her, the shore doesn’t look that far away. But the water is cold in Maine, and they are not good swimmers.
‘I don’t know if I could reach the shore or not,’ she says.
‘I know I couldn’t. You’re a better swimmer than I.’
‘You must learn to relax, let your head go under. Being tense makes you carry your head too high and that wears you out.’
‘If I fell in could you rescue me?’ he asks.
‘I’m not that good a swimmer.’
‘We’d have to call them.’
‘What could they do? We have the boat.’
‘They’d stand on shore and watch us drown.’
‘How terrible. Imagine them standing on the shore and watching us drown.’
Dreamily she sealed her critique in an envelope. Then, remembering his failure to call on his visit, and all the things she had been unable to ask, such as why he had sent her the manuscript and what made him write such a book, and what was the real reason for their divorce, she snapped out of it and tore the letter up. Instead, she dashed off, without thought, the following note, which she later went out to mail, also without thought.