Tony and Susan

ONE

Wake up now. Light, blank square, window, the door in the floor shuts off the retreating mind. Gap without mind before another mind, bright and superficial, greets her with temporal data: Good morning Susan it’s the day of the week, hour of the clock, dress and address your schedule for the day.

This mind is full of order and regime. Yet for a while a receding world still dazzles like the frost lines on the window, where everything is connected, Edward, Tony, Susan’s various minds, one leading to another and back, the same and interchangeable. As the dazzle fades differences reappear and once again Susan is the reader, Edward the writer. Yet she retains a curious vision of Susan as writer, as if there were no difference.

That’s interesting enough to stop her in the kitchen after breakfast, pausing with a dish in each hand, trying to figure out rationally what it means. She observes herself. She sees words. She talks to herself all the time. Does this make her a writer?

She thinks. If writing is the fit of thought into language, everybody writes. Distinguish. The words she prepares to speak, that’s speech, not writing. Words not meant for speech, that’s reverie. If Susan is a writer, it’s for other words neither speech nor reverie, words like these now: her habit of generalization. Her way of composing rules and laws and descriptions of things. She does it all the time, crating her thoughts in words stored for later use. She makes another generalization: it’s saving words for later use that makes writing.

Susan’s writing aspirations have always been modest: letters, an intermittent journal, a memoir of parents. An occasional letter to the editor on women’s rights. Once no doubt she craved more, as she also craved to be a composer, a skater, a supreme court justice. She gave it up without regret as if what she gave up was not writing but something else, less important.

She needs to distinguish between the writer she refused to become and the writer she always was. Surely what she refused was not writing but the next step, dissemination: the adaptations and publicity required to induce others to read—an extensive process summed up in one word, publication. As she works about the house on this bright but darkening day, threatening snow, Susan thinks that’s too bad, because in giving up publication she gave up the chance to be part of a writing conversation, to read the consequences of her words in other words from out in the world. And too bad in a vanity way, thinking of Edward (who started it all), since she knows her mind is as good as his, and if she had devoted years to the practice of a skill, she could have written a novel as good as his.

So why didn’t she write? Other things had a higher claim. What? Husband, children, teaching Freshman English in the junior college? Susan needs another reason. Something in the publication process that subtly repelled her. She saw it in the old days when Edward was struggling. And felt it when she tried to write herself. Dishonesty, some subtle falsification, forced on her, it seemed, by writing for someone else to read. An uncomfortable lying feeling. It infected then and still infects even her most modest efforts, her letters, her Christmas card messages, which lie no matter what she says or does not say.

The presence of the other person—that’s the cause. The other person, the reader, contaminates what she writes. This reader’s prejudice, taste, mere otherness, controlling what she may say like a Hollywood producer or market researcher. Yet even the unpublished writing in her soul has a misfit between itself and the sentence she can say it in. The sentence simplifies. If it does not simplify it’s a mess, and she bogs in the additional vice of obscurity. She creates a clear sentence by lopping, exaggerating, distorting, and sealing over what’s missing like paint. This gives her such an illusion of clarity or depth that she’ll prefer it to truth and soon forget it’s not truth.

The intrinsic dishonesty of writing corrupts memory too. Susan writes her memories into narrative. But narrative does not flash like memory, it’s built across time with cells for storing the flashes that come. It transforms memory into a text, relieving the mind of the need to dig and hunt. Remembered Edward is such a text, and early Arnold and her marriage, established through many writings long ago. Obliged now to reread these old texts, she can’t help rewriting. She’s rewriting now, as hard as she can, trying her best to bring back an illusion of memory alive, because the orthodox narrative is totally dead.