Tony and Susan

TWO

Susan should have known when she first consented to read Edward’s book that it would have some such effect. Should have foreseen it would bring him back alive, as if no twenty years had passed. And bring with him also the divorce and early Arnold and other questions she would rather not think about. But could she have foreseen such excitement, combined with alarm? She doesn’t understand the alarm. It’s out of proportion to the cause. She wonders if the story itself, Tony’s case, is acting on her in some hidden way, separate from the revival of Edward. There’s a threat somewhere, but she doesn’t know what it is or where it comes from. She tries to find it by researching her memory while doing physical labor about the house.

The situation was this: while Susan was married to Edward who was going insane with writing, Arnold was married to Selena going insane with a carving knife. The problem for Susan rewriting a memory is how to get from that arrangement of marriages to the present one.

Six apartments, two on each floor across the stairwell. Susan and Edward lived in 2B, Arnold and Selena in 3A. There was a lawn in back inside a fence, with one tree and two picnic tables. There was a picnic, hamburgers, and boiled corn in a pot over the charcoal grill. Susan and Edward had never met Arnold and Selena. Arnold was an anxious young intern at the hospital, who had terrible working hours but was free that day. Selena was the most beautiful woman Arnold had ever seen. She had raven black hair, sea blue eyes, artificial lashes, snow white skin, her smile was both radiant and vibrant, her voice soft and gentle, and she flirted with the gentlemen, ladies, and children like a princess of cats. She was tense as electricity. Arnold on the other hand was big and bearlike and worried, and he hovered around Selena bringing her hamburgers, Cokes, marshmallows. He was respectful and bewildered when Edward boasted of quitting law school to become a writer, and he gazed at Susan in a vague pleasant way. He had dusty short curly hair, a T-shirt, dusty hair on his thick arms, and dusty eyebrows. He worked in the hospital emergency room and was shocked by his experiences, which he described in a shocked voice, while Selena approached the children like the beautiful wicked witch, and Edward glazed over.

After that they met often on the stairs, Arnold and Susan-Edward, though never Selena. Susan never saw Selena, though sometimes she heard an operatic soprano upstairs.

Selena was hospitalized in October, middle of the month Edward was spending alone with his typewriter in the woods. That was convenient: one wife and one husband go away, leaving the other pair to discover each other. Neither had entered the other’s mind, however, and Arnold’s immediate problem was to get the knife away from Selena. Sunday afternoon. Susan all by her lonely self was watching a football game, which is embarrassing to admit because she never watched football, but she was too distracted to read, and she was furthermore ironing and happened to see a touchdown scored just when she tuned in. So she watched the football game with memories not of Edward but of Jake, who used to take her to games every Saturday and slip his chilly hand inside her coat in the bleachers. She remembered this just when the rapid knock on her door, nervous enough to alert her, introduced her to her future. This was Arnold, big and scared like a child asking her could she come upstairs and help with Selena who was having a spell? Not knowing Selena had spells, Susan recognized emergency and rushed up with him and only later remembered how life with Edward also began with an emergency.

Locked in the bathroom with the carving knife. Be careful what she might do with it, Arnold said. Causing Susan to grab a weapon, which turned out to be a broom. The fixed memory of her first entry into Arnold’s apartment shows her carrying a broom in both hands, prepared to fend off the knife of a crazy woman who happened to be the most beautiful Arnold had ever seen—although Susan actually didn’t learn she was that until later, when he would tell her more times than necessary.

As they came into the apartment, with the cold sun streaming through the lofty windows and the doors open, Arnold called out, Selena, Susan’s here, can you come out to see her?

Susan who? The concealed voice was a metal screech behind the bathroom door in the vestibule, no operatic soprano today. I’m going to the bathroom for Christ sakes. Susan what, the neighbor? Did you go get her, you rat?

Come on, Selena.

Let me finish.

Arnold to Susan, aside, I called the hospital. They’re sending someone. The door opened and Selena came out. Blue jeans and dirty white T-shirt, hair disheveled, beauty haggard. Unaware of the knife in her hand while Susan held her broom.

Hi Susan, how are you?

Arnold: What’s that in your hand, Selena?

(Oh shit.) Arnold, you ought to be ashamed exposing your wife to such humiliation, bringing in a stranger to witness our troubles. (Excuse me Susan.) I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t bring some man to watch and laugh at you.

Nobody’s laughing, Arnold said.

Not to my face, they’re not. Susan, I apologize. I apologize for Arnold. I’m just working in the kitchen and I don’t see why I can’t pick up the knife, it’s just a carving knife. Don’t you pick up knives in the kitchen, Susan Sheffield?

Come on, Selena, Arnold said.

What Susan remembers best through the years is Selena’s voice when the ambulance men arrived, non-operatic and bitter: So that’s what you’re up to. I might have known.

Big worried Arnold, living by himself while his wife was hospitalized, with his terrible working schedule, Susan felt sorry for him. Down the stairs ten-thirty at night, going to work in the emergency room: she stuck her head out to ask how Selena was doing and if she could help. No one on the scene then guessed this was the married couple of the future.

What to do? In line at the grocery store checkout behind her, he explained, a few items to cook himself something to eat. Selena? Maybe she’ll come home next week. She saw the simple friendly bear expression on his face and translated it into a haunted one, shadowed by its indeterminable future with a Selena wielding the carving knife on a periodic basis with years of calling the ambulance men, to leave for a while and then back home to the remains of the most beautiful woman ever seen, until her fondness for the carving knife grew up again. Full of sympathy, Susan thus diverted herself from a writing husband who would be going off with equal periodicity to great works under the spell of the wilderness angel.

That poor man cooking himself something to eat before those emergency nightmares: well, Susan was kind enough to invite him to dinner. You ask, did Susan have any consciousness, there in front of the old passionless cashier, of impropriety, the wife of a man lost in the woods cooking for the husband of a woman lost in psychiatry? This was one of those nodal points in a history, which because of its consequences people like Susan look back to.

Is it wrong, when your husband is away, to do a good deed for your temporarily wifeless neighbor who would otherwise cook for himself or go around to Gordon’s for a bite? There are two sides to the question. One is what your neighbors think. Susan felt free to ignore them, remote in their own lives, even their names almost forgotten since the summer picnic. The other side is what you yourself think, with two options. One, not to think anything. Out of perfect innocence changes will arise that no one need foresee. Certainly Susan made an effort toward such absence of thought. The other option was to go ahead and think. But that means something exists to think about. Her reasoning was that it was an issue only if she and Arnold thought it an issue. Obviously they did not think so, since this was only a natural neighborly service: good neighbor, girl scout, useful friend. Plain roast beef, browned potatoes, brown and serve rolls, frozen peas. Face to face at the little dining room table she shared with Edward. Talk about Selena and Edward. Life in the emergency room. His schedule, to be up all night and tomorrow with killing hours. They scarcely knew each other. She was trying to figure out what he was really like, and how he got tangled up with a woman like Selena. If he got tangled because she was the most beautiful, what did that say about him? She was thinking he’s a rather simple oaf, albeit a nice oaf. She encouraged the wine-leaked sadness that seeped out of him as they talked, full of mother, father, brothers, sisters, and old hopes from before the time he realized the problem Selena had brought. Reconciling himself to being unable to provide his parents with grandchildren of his own—that kind of sadness. And to periodic hospitalizations, that kind. And to a certain fear, since carving knife equivalents would continue to appear. All this he had to put up with, as she encouraged him to talk.

No thought of you and me. Edward was coming back in two weeks: he was creating his future as a writer. Arnold listened without much attention. Edward’s problems were remote from him.

Yet it was not quite an ordinary dinner after all, you must admit. The candles were a detail she hadn’t intended. She put the flowers (hibiscus) from the kitchen on the centerpiece and brought out her grandmother’s silverware and the good china, trying to think, this is just a good natured neighbor guy in a fix who needs to eat before going to work. Then five minutes before his arrival, with the meat nearly finished, she was overwhelmed by the bleakness of the room under ordinary light, its need for some flickering darkness to conceal the simplicity of things. It was not just simple, this room no different from what it was in her meals with Edward, but it had now a conspicuous absence which made it look barbarously naked, and the only image she could conceive to make up what it lacked was candles. The candlesticks were a wedding present used just once, which she dusted off and filled with a pair of candles from the drawer.

Yet even by candlelight Susan Sheffield and Arnold Morrow retained their disguises, she the wife of and he the husband of. Still, she felt this high pitched noise in her hair or neck or solar plexus, making the moment extraordinary. Electricity, like Selena at the picnic, Selena with the purring cat’s voice, whose matter seemed fully convertible to energy in the Einsteinian sense: e=mc². Selena the electric, altered into Susan the electric, as if Arnold were a transformer, thinking how easy to be free, what delicious things could be done in Edward’s wonderful absence if you were the kind of person who did such things. Susan was not that kind. Susan was Susan, from Edgar’s Lane, teacher of Freshman English, well organized, coherent, grammatical, unified, with margins on all sides, always ready to revise and improve herself. This Susan had delicious wild thoughts full of mountains and forests and floating streams, with fish on the wing and birds at sea, thoughts concentric and phallic, with penis hunting in the mists and cave exploration in the hermaphroditic clouds, but they were only thoughts, unacted, unuttered, the absent underside of Susan the Good.

Nothing happened that a witness listening or a tape recorder under the table could have reported to Edward or Selena. Despite which, by the time Arnold left for his nightly encounter with blood and bones, heart attacks and mutilations and decapitations, Susan was pitched so high she could hardly stand it. We’ve got to do this again, she said to herself, knowing something she wanted now, though still not allowing herself to think it. As he stood by the door, he grateful and bearlike, she asked, Will you come again night after tomorrow?

She went to bed trying to remember what it was like to love Edward. The next dinner she served Arnold was resolutely austere and functional in the bare electric overhead light, but she had no resistance later to what Arnold wanted to do in the double bed that belonged to Susan and Edward, while Selena was breathing hard trying to sleep under restraint in her hospital room, and Edward in his wooded cabin was getting depressed trying to find himself. When Arnold later went back to another night of crisis, Susan belatedly tried to grieve.