CHAPTER 40


When I got home it was nearly 8:30 and the Braves and the Dodgers were on cable. Susan was in the kitchen. There was a bottle of Krug Rose Champagne in a crystal ice bucket on the counter and two fluted glasses. Susan was wearing a suit the pale green-gold color of spring foliage. It was an odd color, but it went wonderfully with her dark hair. The suit had a very short skirt, too. Pearl was on the couch which occupied most of the far wall in front of the big picture window, where, if you were there at the right time, you could look at the sunset. Now there was only darkness. She cavorted about for a moment to greet me and then went back to her couch.

I looked at the champagne.

“Does this bode well for me?” I said. “Or are you having company?”

“It’s to sip while we talk,” Susan said. “If you’ll open it.”

I did and carefully poured two glasses. I gave one to her. She touched its rim to mine and said, “To us.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said. And we did.

I looked down at her legs, much of which were showing under the short skirt.

“Great wheels,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve been goddamned fool.”

“Anything’s possible,” I said.

We each drank a little more champagne. “First, to state the obvious, I love you.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

“Second, and I’m afraid about as obvious, I do better with other people’s childhoods than I do with my own.”

“Don’t we all,” I said.

“I was brought up in a well-related suburb by affluent parents. My father went to business, my mother stayed home with the children. My father’s consuming passion was business; my mother’s was homemaking. I was expected to marry a man who went to business and loved it, to stay home with the children, and make a home.”

I didn’t say anything. Pearl lay still on the couch, her back legs stretched straight out, her head on her front paws, motionless except for her eyes, which watched us carefully.

“And I did,” Susan said. She drank another swallow of champagne, and put the glass back on the counter and looked into the glass where the bubbles drifted toward the surface.

“Except that the marriage was awful and there were no children, and I got divorced and had to work and met you.”

“‘Bye-’bye, Miss American Pie,” I said.

Susan smiled.

“Most of the rest you know,” she said. “We both know. When I left Sunnybrook Farm I left with a vengeance the job, then the Ph.D., moving to the city. Part of your charm at first was that you were so unsuburban. You were dangerous, you were your own and not someone else’s. And you gave me room.”

I poured some more champagne in her glass, carefully, so it wouldn’t foam up and overflow.

“But always I was failing. I wasn’t keeping house, I wasn’t raising children. I wasn’t doing it right. It’s one of the reasons I left you.”

“For a while,” I said.

“And it’s the reason I wanted you to live with me.

“Not because I am cuter than a bug’s ear?”

“That too,” Susan said. “But mostly I wanted to pretend to be what I had never been.”

“Which is to say, your mother,” I said.

Susan smiled again.

“I’ll bet you can claim the thickest neck of any Freudian in the country,” she said.

“I’m not sure that’s a challenge,” I said. “Joyce Brothers is probably second.”

“And I strong-armed you into moving in, and it hasn’t been any fun at all.”

“Except maybe last Sunday morning after I let Pearl out,” I said.

“Except for that.”

We were quiet while we each had some more champagne.

“So what’s your plan?” I said.

“I think we should live separately,” Susan said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I think we should continue to live intimately, and monogamously… but not quite so proximate.”

“Proximate,” I said.

Susan laughed, though only a little.

“Yes,” she said, “proximate. I do, after all, have a Ph.D. from Harvard.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

“How do you feel about it, living apart again?” Susan said.

“I agree with your analysis and share your conclusion.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No, I like it.”

“It’ll be the way it was.”

“Maybe better,” I said. “You won’t be wishing we could live together.”

“Where will you go?” Susan said.

“I kept my apartment,” I said.

Susan widened her eyes at me.

“Did you really?” she said.

I nodded and drank some more champagne and offered to pour some more in her glass; she shook her head, still looking at me.

“Not quite a ringing endorsement of the original move,” she said.

I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I kept quiet. I have rarely regretted keeping quiet. I promised myself to work on it.

“You knew I was a goddamned fool,” she said.

“I knew it was important to you. I trusted you to work it out.”

She reached out and patted my hand.

“I did not make a mistake in you,” she said.

“No,” I said, “you didn’t.”

The doorbell rang.

Susan said, “I wanted a last supper as roommates.”

She smiled a wide genuine smile.

“But I’ve abandoned, pretense. It’s the Chinese place in Inman Square that delivers.”

I raised my champagne glass. “A votre sante,” I said.

Susan went down and brought up the food in a big white paper sack and put it on top of the refrigerator where Pearl couldn’t reach it.

“Before we dine,” Susan said, “I thought we might wish to screw our brains out.”

“Kind of a salute to freedom,” I said.

“Exactly,” Susan said.

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