Tony and Susan

THREE

After that year, Susan did not see Edward again until Chicago, eight years later. She was entering graduate school. He was already there, studying law. Her mother told her to look him up, but she did not want to.

She felt lonely and sad at this university where she went without friends, knowing no one. She was leaving behind a boyfriend named Jake, who took offense at her going away and promised to be unfaithful to her. She lived in a women’s dormitory and had classes in a massive gothic building with thick walls and narrow leaded windows, a building entered from an arched vestibule like a culvert, through which the wind blew. She listened to the message of the architecture in the stone halls, the whispers of the professors keeping their voices down, the wary manners of her fellow students keeping their distance. Intelligently, she tried to distinguish the annual sadness of autumn (the gray buildings a shade whiter as the leaves came down) from her personal sadness (Jake, or childhood, or Susan the free) and both of these from the cloistered intellectual sadness, surrounded by the incendiary ghetto said to be dangerous.

Somewhere in this busy monastery was Edward. Her antagonism had disappeared in nostalgia, but she made no effort to look him up. Instead he found her, accidentally. She was on 57th Street going to the bookstore when she heard behind her: Susan, wait up! How fine he looked, changed, poised, tall and magnificent, Edward holding out his hand: I knew you were here. Dressed up, coat and tie, glasses sparkling, he grasped her elbow, steered her into Steinway’s. Come have a Coke with me.

Two former children meeting after childhood, their chief care is to prove they are no longer children. This makes them friendly and civil, super-polite. Inquiries about mother and father, brother and sister. Genteel boasts of new sophistication plus rehearsed propaganda to explain our life decisions. No memory how awful things used to be. He was studying law, she English. He lived in an apartment, she in the dorm. His gratitude: I have never failed to appreciate your parents’ kindness.

He showed her around, met her for lunch at the Commons, tested with her the other community eating places: Ida Noyes, International House. He pointed out the secondhand bookstores, took her to the Oriental Institute and the Museum of Science and Industry. He taught her how to get downtown on the I.C. and introduced her to the Art Institute and the Aquarium.

She was astonished by his change, which could be either a new layer or a peeling away. He said it: I’m not the brat I used to be. He was courtly, polite, chivalric. This was before chivalries went obsolete, and his was so careful it got on her nerves: walking on the outside of the sidewalk, holding doors open, holding her chair, the trite old things. Yet she thought it wonderful. Blame it on the earlier antagonism. She had such a memory of his old manner that when his rudeness was replaced by civility, civility looked like glamor.

The most interesting change was his new astonishment in everything. Sharp contrast to age fifteen when he knew all and was conspicuously bored by every wonder and outrage they saw. Now he was all wonder and outrage. He was amazed by the city, the university, the traffic, the blue of the lake, the haze of the steel mills, the dangers of the ghetto, the wisdom and knowledge of the professors, the complexity of the law, the glories of literature. For a while this puzzled her, since it seemed to reverse the normal order in which innocent wonder precedes jaded boredom. No doubt at fifteen he had preferred to hide his astonishment because it seemed more grown up. Now at twenty-three it was policy instead to be if necessary even more surprised than he really was. On the whole she liked this, though later she got sick of it too as she perceived how practiced it was.

Despite his fine outer manner, she soon discovered he had suffered a crippling injury: his heart was broken. He had been engaged to a girl named Maria, who had jilted him and married somebody else. Jilted: a good old-fashioned word. He did not seem heartbroken. He seemed vigorous and enthusiastic about the future. But heartbroken was a secret state, which she could share. It occurred to her she was heartbroken too, on account of Jake, who was retaliating for her career choice by a program of worldwide travel and picking up girls. She and Edward could be heartbroken together. It gave them something to talk about, and it protected them from each other, like brother and sister: no need to worry about hearts since their hearts were broken.

Chaste and platonic, this was the deceptive situation that led to Edward’s seducing Susan, or Susan’s seducing Edward, whichever it was, the ultimate result being the marriage which made necessary their divorce. To be heartbroken means to have a story, and their stories brought them together, as they told them over, repeating and enlarging, Edward more than Susan, since she didn’t have much to say about No Good Jake. He talked and she listened, with queries and advice, both knowing pretty well that it was not the story or Maria that mattered but the acts of telling and listening. This went on into the winter. She cooked dinner for him in his apartment, a sisterly thing to do, and they talked about his wounds until three. An engagement to marry. A flighty girl, too young to be tied down. He agreed with everything Susan said.

Looking back from the superior present, Susan sees that Edward’s heartbreak was only the current local manifestation of his normal condition as he always encouraged her to see it. The notion that he had always been and always would be subtly hurt by life and was always gallantly trying to make himself strong. Why he was any more hurt than anyone else she never questioned then. There were enough specifics to make it sound good. The death of his father. The loss of his home with no one to take care of him except her own father and mother. Jilting fit right in.

She spotted a gap in his story, the question of sex, which he dodged as unimportant until the dodging made it important. She asked him outright: Did you have sex with her, Edward?

He was shocked by the question, but it came out: he had not had sex with Maria, because he had not had sex with anyone. He was twenty-three years old, competent paternalistic Edward with jacket and tie removed, admitting this strange inexperience. Actually, it did not seem as strange then as it would twenty-five years later after the revolutions. (They didn’t call it having sex, either. They called it making love or sleeping together, whether or not slumber was involved: her question really had been, Did you sleep with her?)

There were several possible explanations for Edward. Courtesy and respect, his fine sensitive old nineteenth century genes. Unless he was just a child in gentleman’s clothing, afraid to grow up. Or some difference in the internal compass, a matter of what later jargon would call Sexual Orientation.

Edward’s virginity stimulated her curiosity and made her talk. If his secrets were gone, she had no right to hers. She blabbed. He was shocked again, as disturbed as if she were the heroine of a nineteenth century novel, and his gloom when he said, I’ll have to get used to that, irritated the hell out of her. Rather, it irritates the remembering Susan, who can’t remember if she was irritated then. She was temporarily inspired by zeal for the principle, not exactly worth a crusade but enough to motivate her, that Sex is Natural. The result maybe of her recent battles with Jake. What she saw in Edward was the opposite conviction, Sex is Unnatural. Sex is Natural was Susan’s pre-feminist feminism: it turned her against big breasts, pornographic beer and cigarettes, the double standard for men and women, the equation of romance with lust, and Jake’s notion that there was a difference between good (dark) and bad (blonde) women. (What Jake’s belief meant for Susan was that while romantic love required her to yield to him, her doing so constituted a flaw in her character which relieved him of obligation.) As for Edward, believing Sex was Unnatural was the natural consequence of his astonishment with everything (everything was unnatural). He could not believe real people did the things they wrote about and his imagination embellished.

So she decided to educate Edward. It popped into her head one drizzly afternoon on the museum steps. She said without thought, Edward, get someone to teach you the facts of life.

I know the facts of life.

The idea stuck in her head, and it had serious consequences, because the outcome, which would certainly have deterred her if she had known, was that Edward married her. At the time, she thought it would be educational and healthy for both of them. Sex is Natural, Edward. It doesn’t mean a thing. Even you and I can do it, and no one else need know. This was early spring, when the campus was wet and the young branches sparkled with a residue of rain, and the gray buildings looked freshly washed under the pale skies. I can slip into your apartment, and no one will see, and when I go back to the dorm, neither my mother or father nor Jake or Maria nor your professors will know a thing.

What a crazy idea. That must have been another Susan because the real Susan remembers being annoyed by such thoughts. She remembers trying to analyze out of existence her fascination with what Edward had become: the combination of his acquired childlike eagerness with his innate jaded primness. She remembers trying to scorn to death her wicked curiosity to see what this correct and careful Edward would be like in the grasp of something uncontrollably intense and physical in himself.

The plot summary of Susan’s memory says she made up her mind to seduce Edward and then went out and did it. The detailed text says otherwise. She gave him hints without any idea what the hints were about. Affectionate impulses. Along the street in the rain, patting and cuffing. Flirty things. She punched him in the chest when he came out of the library. In the University Tavern she came up behind him and put her fingers over his eyes. At dinner in the Commons, after a hard day and before a night of labor with a paper to write, where they ate in silence, her gaze settled on his light hair loosely disheveled, his tired eyes staring vaguely, and she felt a surprising old warmth for this strange young man strangely dear to her, whom she would like to take care of. She did not know she wanted to seduce him.

Was he interested, or was he not? She only thought she was looking in him for signs, whether he was attracted or repelled. At the University Tavern where they had a beer, she said, Let me live with you, Edward. He laughed, resisting by turning it into a joke, and she laughed too, thinking that’s what she meant.

She initiated conversations about censorship and pornography, psychoanalysis and the three stages of development—oral, anal, and genital. She discussed homosexuality in Plato, and the naked athletes in the Olympic Games. She showed him the analysis she was writing about “To His Coy Mistress.” She broke out in the middle of that, I keep forgetting you’re a virgin, and he blushed and hemmed.

She didn’t intend anything serious, she thought, she was just trying to shake him out of his complacency. On a warm spring day they went to the Forest Preserve to look for migratory birds. They had a good nostalgic talk about family life, life in Hastings, and his future. As a lawyer he intended to take civil rights cases no one else would handle and give free legal aid to the poor. She thought what a good man he was, which made her proud as if she had made him good. Then back to the university, late and dark, where he invited her to his apartment for coffee before taking her home. As they went up the dark stairs, and he unlocked the door, and they entered the room, and he turned on the light, she experienced an unbearable excitement of the present tense, the dazzling immanence of now, which was full of her presence and Edward and all life concentrated, making her want to scream or sing. He heated the coffee and set out cookies and went to the bookshelf for his bird book, and they sat shoulder elbow arm and thigh while he looked up the American redstart and warblers they had seen. And all the while present time hummed with presence until she could hardly stand it, and she heard a voice saying, Go ahead, it’s all right now, and then her own real voice whispering a suggestion into Edward’s ear.

Then was heartbeat time for both of them, tremble and shake, his large eyes staring too close for focus, his voice hoarse: Do you mean it? The belated caution and sanity of her reply: Only if you want to. And his deep wow: Oh grateful God.

There was a single light on his bed table which cast its glare downward and suffused elsewhere through the room. She was wearing a soft pale green sweater, a plaid skirt with pleats, white socks. Underneath, a white bra and white pants. Emerging from these, she was thin and lanky, her cheeks were pale, with no glasses in those days, and her hair hung lightly down her back. She was worried about the smallness of her breasts until she saw the wonder in Edward’s eyes. He was even lankier than she. His ribs showed in his chest, his thighs were thin, his sex was chunkier than any other part of him. The room was chilly and they both shivered and kept shivering.

In the bedroom he gasped and grunted and puffed and roared. Be frank, Susan, she enjoyed it too, a lot more than she was to enjoy some of the repetitions later. He bore down on her and rocked and yelled in a loud voice, You great wonderful thing, I can’t believe how wonderful you are. Afterward, he thanked her for her generosity.

A long naked conversation followed, while they idly fingered each other. He told her a secret he had not told anybody else. He had taken up writing, he told her. He had poems and stories and sketches, and two notebooks already filled.