Tony and Susan

ONE

Every night before descending into her mind, Susan Morrow performs rituals. Dog walk, kitty kitty, lock doors. Three children safe with a nightlight for the stairs. Teeth and hair, bed light, make love sometimes. Roll away from Arnold to the right, puff the pillow up, wait.

Tonight differs because no Arnold. Freedom, the possibility of something wild. She puts the wild impulse down, and makes tonight like the others, except that instead of turning right with her back to Arnold, she sprawls left, enjoying the husbandless state in the husbandless space. A horrible thought occurs to her about Arnold in New York, but she puts that down too.

Then like every night she waits for her mind, rumbling under the door in the floor. She puts her head into the pillow and waits. Biological sounds distract her, heart changing speed in her ear. Breathing unsettles her. Sometimes the intestinal lab works late, preparing a shipment to disturb her sleep. Speech from the day liquefies the hard surface of her mind like waves in a windstorm. Time to batten down, pack her plans and arguments. She stows Nocturnal Animals for the night.

The storm she waits for begins when the words in her head start speaking on their own. They come up through the trap door, people talking without her. Her mind is down there, and she hears the voices in the rooms with the flimsy partitions. This moment is scary because the danger is unknown. Her mind surges up and sucks her down, expanding then into a world, and though the country is familiar, she is a visitor. Each night she revisits places she has visited before and meets people, changed since her last visit. She’s ashamed of her faulty memory, knowing what she can’t remember is more important than what she can. With her orders in a sealed envelope which she has lost, she wanders, feet bare, legs paralyzed, she loses her footing and sails into the air, or struggles up the hill to meet the class already half through its hour, or sees her kindly dead father and asks if he minds being dead, or lets some quiet student sit on the desk with his hand approaching her crotch which he will never reach—while she tries to avoid the death room.

White morning assaults her with a moment of absolute blankness. She’s expelled into the empty day. When she recognizes the blue flowered curtains in the window and the maple branches with a thin line of snow, the door in the floor has slammed shut. If she retains a fragment of dream, it will blow away unless she can chronologize it and put it into words. Yet chronology and words kill it. The story that remains is no dream, and the dream remains uncaught, contiguous to the other dreams below the door, constituting one great unbroken lifetime dream all through the oblivious day, to be continued on her next visit down.

Meanwhile, in the empty cool morning light, dreamless, Susan Morrow, lacking at first even her name, gradually constructs the new day. Tuesday. Eight. Arnold gone, the convention in New York. Wake up to that, suddenly, real life like an alarm clock. The sharp memory of Arnold’s reassuring call last night, and what it really means. It means that in New York, Marilyn Linwood, receptionist, either is or is not having an affair with him. Organizing records in his hotel room. Marilyn Linwood waits for Susan to wake up: this prim young woman in her thirties, professional, neat tweed suit, glasses, hair pinned back, careful little face. Secretive, the perfect telephone girl. Some of whose secrets came out at the staff picnic: yellow bikini, bronze hair flowing loose, white thighs a shade too thin. Who’s that? Dr. Gaspar said. Patronizing. Is that our Miss Linwood?

Things have changed since Susan gave up jealousy. She wakes up again, remembering. Liberated by a decision not to think, accepting the unknown for peace and not having to know if it needs to be accepted. Making for good marriage, stable and steady after sixteen years of doubt.

Return to the day, up you get, Susan. Let the kids sleep because it’s the Christmas break. What must I do today? You must do the laundry, Jeffrey to the vet. Shovel snow? Look out the window to see. By the time she is out of bed with her robe onto look at the snow (only a thin coat on the ground, which will disappear soon), Susan Morrow is restored without a gap. The new day stitches across the night’s wound as if her conscious life were continuous.

She does the following things during the day, along with other things. She showers, dresses, wakes the kids, gets breakfast, drives to the Burridges’ to pick up Rosie. Gathers the week’s laundry to the machine in the basement, makes beds, goes to the supermarket for margarine, lunch meat, and milk. Lunch for three children and herself. To the library to return books, then pick up the living room, carrying Rosie’s presents upstairs, also Henry’s and Dorothy’s who were supposed to do it themselves. A break at the piano, Bach inventions. Back to the basement to exchange laundry loads. Ham in the oven, run the dishwasher, set the table. Her day mind, which knows nothing of her other mind, is full of what’s not there, but knows where everything is: Rosie upstairs with Carol, Dorothy outside, Henry with Mike, Arnold in New York.

And Edward. A long hook-up from the past, grabbing her by the mind. All day she keeps wondering, why am I thinking about Edward? His memory reverberates out of slumber like a dream, it flashes like birds tree to tree. It comes too fast, flits away too quickly. To keep it, she must chronologize it just the way she chronologizes her dreams. This kills it too. Her dead memory of Edward was stored in bound volumes years ago, while the new living Edward flies around outside uncaught.