Tony and Susan

TWO

Upstairs poor old fat Henry plays Siegfried’s Funeral March too loud like rock. Turn that down, Susan Morrow yells, then hears the telephone, which is Arnold calling from New York again. She returns to the manuscript after the call, full of the sound of Arnold’s elation. It jams her reading and obliterates Tony Hastings, wipes him out. The news is Chickwash, and Arnold’s elation is Susan’s dread, though he does not know it. If they must leave this home for the advancement of Arnold’s career. The question sharpens her eyes, makes her look at her life from this spot on the couch. Wallpaper, mantelpiece, pictures, stairs, banisters, woodwork. Outside, a lawn, maple tree, streetcorner, streetlamp. She has friends here: Maria, Norma. To take her children out of school for Chickwash’s sake. They’ll be upset, they may cry forlornly, boyfriends girlfriends and bestfriends lost forever. So may Susan, who said nothing about this on the phone to Arnold, lest she be guilty of selfishness and petty domesticity. She’s had enough of asserting rights and feeling bad afterward. She has no wish to quarrel with Arnold.

He assumes she’ll abide by his decision. He may even think they arrived at the decision together. They’ll talk about it. She’ll ask the questions he expects her to, to help him decide what he’s already decided, telling him what’s on his mind, reminding him of his interests. She’ll weigh his love for the surgeon’s art and his care for patients against prestige and the power to do good on a national scale. If she doesn’t like it, she won’t tell him lest it be taken as an attempt to influence him against his best interests. She’ll mention the children and their interests, but if he says children can adapt and speaks of the advantages to them of a Washington environment and a successful father, she’ll support him of course.

His voice like a high school kid. Virtually promised me the job, he said. Isn’t that great? It’s wonderful, dear, she said. We must talk it over, he said, we must consider what’s best for all of us, you and the children too, I won’t accept it without consulting you. All the angles. He made suggestions on how to consider all the angles.

There was more than that in the call. A bad moment, some question she asked which was not a proper response to her husband’s triumph, realized too late. It passed, an error, leaving a soil of worry after the call ended. A feeling of disaster averted, though a danger still remains of bogging down in thoughts. Stop, Susan tells Susan, let it be. It could have been worse. The evening is for reading, and to continue that she must wipe herself out of her mind.

Tony Hastings instead. He grieves, apathetic, obsessed, and she wonders what she is supposed to make of him when he turns off the lights and looks out. He’s become a character, complicated by that hint of Edward’s irony threaded through the style. She wonders if she’ll lose touch with him, if his woe slips into self-pity. She hopes the novel does not prolong his depression, for who wants to read about a depressed protagonist? She tends to be impatient with depressed people, more than Edward, perhaps. She remembers Edward’s own depression when he was trying to write, before their marriage failed.

In the rowboat, on the pebbly shore, with the hiss of Edward’s cigarette, she remembers (even earlier) his refusal to forgive his long institutionalized mother. When Susan defended her, he tried to splash her with the oars. While now and for twenty-five years every month Arnold has sent a fat check to keep Selena foaming in her luxurious cage in Gray Crest. Susan remembers how he used to say to her with astonished joy, Thank God you’re sane. After all these years he’s used to her and doesn’t say it any more.

Nocturnal Animals 13

In September Paula came to visit. She came to give things away and throw things out. She went into Laura’s closets and Helen’s room, packed up clothes and jewelry, went over letters, paintings, photographs, toys and stuffed animals. Then she left and the semester began. Colleagues and students returned. That was good, though questions having nothing to do with math still intervened. Mister, your wife wants you. Raids on his thought while he lectured or talked to students. And this new habit of turning off the lights and looking out the windows at night. He would look at the dark branches and light squares in the houses and the dim glow of the sky and feel the spacious darkness in the house like a cave, especially exciting when a person went by, unaware of being watched.

He supposed he was recovering. He went to a party given by Kevin Malk, head of Tony’s department. At the Malks’ parties they played games. Charades: Tony pitched in, contributing titles to be acted out: “The Sunny Side of the Street” and “The Decline of the West.” He himself acted out “Nocturnal Animal House” and was surprised by the vigor of the applause.

He drove Francesca Hooton home. She was alone because her husband, a lawyer, had gone to New Orleans. Tony had always liked Francesca. She taught French, was tall and fair and had a pretty face with fine features and gold in her hair. In the old days he sometimes wondered what if they had both been free. Now he was uncomfortable, because he was an escort, and because of the possibility this was an opportunity, which he did not want in the confusion of being stricken and bereaved. She sat beside him in the car, wearing an elegant light tan dress. “Have they got any leads?” she asked.

“The police? Not that I know of.”

“Aren’t you angry?”

“Who at? The police?”

“Those men. Don’t you want them caught and punished?”

“What’s the use? That won’t bring Laura and Helen back.”

He realized immediately this was bravado, while she said, “Well if you’re not angry, I am. I’m angry on your behalf. I want them killed. Don’t you?”

“I’m angry enough,” he murmured.

At the foot of the stairs to her second story apartment, she said, “I don’t suppose you want to come in.”

He felt a wild leap inside and said, “I’d better get home.”

In his darkened house he described his evening to Laura. We played charades, he said. I was the life of the party. Then I took Francesca Hooton home. She wants me to be angry and want revenge, but I don’t want to be distracted from you. She also expects me to have an affair with her, but I refused. He turned out the lights and went around again looking out from the dark into dark, saying, I won’t forget. Nothing can make me forget.

He walked stiffly from class to class like a man with a cane. A graduate student named Louise Germane who had soft wheatcolored hair came to his office and said, “I heard what happened, Mr. Hastings. I want you to know I’m sorry.” He pinched his smile and thanked her. When she left, he said, I must expect to be lonely, my hair will turn white. He decided to write a history of his marriage. He thought writing would make him remember. He was afraid of losing the sense of presence, the vital feeling that the past was still part of the present.

He gathered specific memories to prove things: the Tolstoy evening to show her intelligence, the beach trip to demonstrate her vitality, the jokes and puns which he had such difficulty remembering to confirm her wit, the kitchen discussions about the Malks to show her judgment, the famous evening walk to Peterson Street to reiterate her generosity and kind heart. His memory was recalcitrant, it did not like to be forced. He tried to liberate her from the frame on the table, her eyes frozen into a smile by the photographer, her hair in a fixed wave over one side of her forehead. He looked away and waited for memory to ambush him. It ambushed him often but not when asked. To expose himself to ambush, he recapitulated old habits: she drove him to the university a hundred times on her way to the gallery, liberating a nice moment at the gallery when she asked his advice. Once she ambushed him with a vision of her walk coming up the street to the house, real as life, swinging her arms. How she swung them—but every memory that ambushed him became fixed. He developed a store of images, while memory ambushed him less and less.

Then he got better. He spent three hours at a faculty meeting arguing passionately for two promotion and tenure candidates. Only when he left the building with Bill Furman in the snow just beginning, did he remember he was bereaved. He had forgotten for three hours. Nor did the returning memory, recalled by the empty house and the snow, bring the shock it used to. This happened often. In the classroom or reading, he would realize he’d been working for hours without remembering his life wasn’t normal. Life goes on, he would say. I can’t grind my teeth all the time.

This was the first snow of the winter. Tony drove through it with Bill Furman, thick flakes swirling around the car in a strong wind, the streets slippery and dangerous. He expected the snow to revive his grief because it was burying the place where they died. He could think of it falling in the woods: a winter they will never see. The snow was peaceful, though. Later he watched it from his house. Once again he went around and turned off the lights. He watched the stream of flakes in the light of the streetlamp. He thought of snow on the mountain track in the woods. And in the clearing, covering it up. He took off his shoes and walked around in his socks. Light reflected by the snow from the streetlamps and city sky came in the windows of the big house and illuminated the empty rooms. He thought how free he was in this house alone, his solitary ownership in the darkness lit by the spooky outside glow. As he had done on those earlier nights, only now feeling quite sane, he went from one window to another, looking up the hill to Mr. Husserl’s house, and to the lawn and snowy oak branches and the garages and fringed cars parked, with a feeling like ecstasy.

When he asked Laura about it, she said be glad you’re alive. Watching the snow filling the front lawn and street, he became conscious of his body, which had been ignorant of grief from the start. The only constant, his need to sleep and shave, brush his teeth, eat and drink and release his wastes. Watching his eating habits so as not to feel greasy, gaseous, or bleak. Wearing clean clothes, underwear, shirts, shoes, and dirty clothes to Mrs. Fleischer to wash. And now with snow, an overcoat, muffler, cap and gloves, and if he walks out tomorrow he will stamp his feet to restore circulation. He noticed his cock, strapped in, disturbed by the night feeling, which made it move a little, like a ballet dancer impersonating the dawn. That was the only part of his body with a grief of its own, sullen in his pants. But if ever it tried to sprout, he need only remember, like admonishing a dog, and it would shrivel and withdraw.

Yet it had always had independent thoughts. Even in the good days of his marriage, there was always this doggy part of him noticing things, Francesca Hooton and the student Louise Germane and the girls in bikinis with leopard spots at the beach. Always this muffled little anarchic hope which he disclaimed, as if it had nothing to do with him.

Now, though, he thought deliberately about women he knew. Francesca Hooton. Eleanor Arthur. Louise Germane. Sex, not love. Love was out, the idea of another marriage inconceivable, but sex he could imagine. But there was a problem in every case. Francesca was married, and though her lawyer husband traveled a lot, Tony didn’t want a mess. Nor did he trust her signals. Eleanor Arthur’s signals were plainer, and he guessed her husband wanted her to be as free as he, but her nervous edges made Tony edgy, and he could not forget how much older she was than he. With Louise Germane he felt easy and comfortable, but she was a graduate student, and it was not good to get involved with them. Since no one suitable was available, he resigned himself easily.

A few days later the fair haired Francesca Hooton took him to the bookstore to help him get presents for Paula’s children. He liked her reticent smile and implicating eyes. Later he accepted a dinner invitation from George and Eleanor Arthur, buffet, a large group. He sat on the edge of the couch with Roxanne Furman talking about the department, glad Eleanor was too busy as hostess to pay attention to him. Shortly before Christmas he got a card from Louise Germane, a tactful note in elegant handwriting. It recalled his suspicion, merely academic when Laura was alive, that she had a crush on him.

He had Thanksgiving dinner with his brother Alex’s family in Chicago and managed not to cast gloom over the table. At Christmas he stayed ten days at Paula’s suburban house, twenty miles from New York. He liked Merton now, and could not remember why he had disliked him before. He went for walks with the children on the snowy suburban streets, he put on ice skates with them and watched as they tried their new skis on the hill slope above town. In his bedroom at Paula’s, in the northwest corner of the house, not much bigger than the bed, with a bookcase full of Paula’s books, he felt as if he were starting a new life. The room had new blue mountainy wall paper, it smelled of clean sheets, it looked out on a slope with bare trees. He made a plan.

He left on Thursday after New Year’s, going into New York on the train, refusing to let Merton drive him to the airport. He had a notion to resolve the sex question now, before going home. Once he was alone his nerves tightened up like electricity sparking in his chest. He felt it in the train along the river’s edge. His breath was tight as he signed the register. The hotel was shabby, near the center of the city. He said to himself, My name is Tony Hastings, professor of mathematics. I live elsewhere. I have been through a bad experience.

I will eat dinner in an expensive elegant place. He found a restaurant in a fancy hotel but had no appetite nor patience for the long waits between courses. After dinner he went out, timidly moving through the crowds, glancing at the sleazy windows, like a hunter trying not to be seen. He thought Ray and Lou and Turk are here, hidden in the crowd, they’ll see me. Record shops, food joints, pawn shops, arcades. He said, I am a sexual creature like anybody, but his mind was full of mugging and being rolled. Twisted into a kink in his mind. He went to a bar and surprised himself (though it was what he had planned to do) by sitting next to a woman on a bar stool. She was in her thirties, she wore a black dress with white flowers and a white bow, she had a round face and looked scared.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“You got a name?”

“Tony. What’s yours?”

“Sharon.”

She let him take her home in a taxi. He was nervously astonished by his success, since he had a deep fear of strangers and had never before picked up a woman in a public place. He was still afraid and wondered if he was going to his death, but her own anxiety relieved his fear somewhat. On the way she said, “In case you’re wondering, I’m not a prostitute.”

He wondered if that meant she would turn him away at the door. She said, “I’m a working girl, I work in a department store. I’m a singles.”

On the stairs she said she liked to meet new people, but most of the men she picked up were creeps. He hoped he wasn’t a creep. She hoped so too. She was forcing herself to talk. He noticed she was shivering. “Are you cold?” he said.

“Not really.”

She had a flat three flights up. When she got to the door she took a deep breath as if to force her shivering to stop. She glanced at him apologetically. “I get nervous,” she said.

He tried to put his hand on her shoulder. She slipped away, then grabbed his hand and pointed to his ring.

“Cheating on your wife, I see.”

“My wife is dead.”

She fished in her purse for the key and let him in. She told him to be quiet, her roommate was asleep in the other room.

Her own room was small. It had picture postcards on a bulletin board above her bed. She had an open wardrobe with dresses in it.

“What did she die of?”

“She was murdered.”

He sat on the bed and told Sharon about it. She sat motionless on the other chair, looking at him without expression. He told the story first in summary fashion, the main events. Then, though he didn’t mean to, he got into detail. He went back to the beginning and described it step by step. She stared at him blankly, listening.

“Gee mister,” she said. “You’re giving me the creeps.”

He was describing the mannequins in the bushes, and suddenly he identified the look on her face, staring at him while he talked. Terror. She was a stranger, but he was a stranger too.

He stopped, shocked himself. It was not the conjured visions of Ray, Turk, and Lou she was terrified of.

“Sorry,” he said. “I get carried away.”

She was looking around the room, like measuring distances.

After a moment he said, “Do you want me to go?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess you better.” Shivering again.

Once he was out in the hall she looked relieved. She leaned against the door, ready to push it shut if he changed his mind. “Did I scare you?” he said. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Shit,” she said. “Listen, I’m real sorry for your wife and kid, okay?”

He went down the stairs, relieved too.

On the way back to the hotel, Ray and Turk and Lou were in the street, in the shadows of doorways, the subway, watching him, while the big eyes of Sharon absorbed Laura and Helen into herself. She was killing his memory, defiling them.

So he brought it back. In the trailer Ray commanded them to strip. Turk held his knife to Helen’s throat while Ray forced Laura on the bed. Then Helen’s turn. When Laura yelled and charged, Ray smashed her in the head. Mother! Helen screamed. Screaming and crying, her mother destroyed on the floor, while Ray twisted her arm until it broke.

Something like that. Damn them to hell, Tony Hastings said.