Tony and Susan

TWO

The space in the text is not a chapter, but Susan Morrow pauses, blocked by something. Anticipating the sex scene she sees coming. Not sure she wants it, unless she can keep Edward out of it. Nervous Edward, whose sexual imagination in real life was not great. She’s irritated with him. His snobbish picture of the faculty party. She likes faculty parties herself, thinking academic people more intelligent and cultivated than most. She’s irritated by Tony too, shocked when he tells the students his tragedy, irked by his male preference for young Louise over Eleanor. With a question about the ethics of faculty-student screwing, if he or Edward has thought of that.

What’s ailing her, obstructing her reading? Rosie hangs on the telephone, talking to Carol. If Arnold is trying to call from New York: Never mind, let her talk. Susan hopes he doesn’t call. The thought surprises her, why should she hope that? She’s afraid of his call for no good reason and suddenly realizes she’s afraid of his return too, tomorrow—tomorrow?—wishing she had another day to get ready. She imagines him bringing her some frightening gift. Some gift that is no gift, deadly. What would that be? She doesn’t know, it’s a lump of thought in her head, amorphous and opaque like coal.

She detects outside an alteration of city sound caused by falling snow. She hears it covering the car, which she will have to scrape clean tomorrow, and the sidewalk she will have to shovel—she or Henry. She’s caught by the strangeness of what she’s doing, reading a made-up story. Putting herself into a special state, like a trance, while someone else (Edward) pretends certain imaginings are real. A question for another time: What am I really doing? Am I learning something? Is the world better, Edward, because of this cooperation between you and me?

Tony’s world resembles Susan’s except for the violence in its middle which makes it totally different. What, Susan wonders, do I get from being made to witness such bad luck? Does this novel magnify the difference between Tony’s life and mine, or does it bring us together? Does it threaten me or soothe me?

Such questions pass through her mind without answers in a pause in her reading.

[Nocturnal Animals 20 (continued)]

He waited at the bottom of the steps, where two students stood smoking. Louise Germane was slow, she did not come. He imagined Nora Jensen saying Come on, I’ll take you, and wondered if Louise could reply, But I want Mr. Hastings to take me.

Meanwhile others came down. Gabriel Dalton, still talking to two guys who followed. Nora Jensen herself, with Myra Slue but not Louise. He wondered if Louise had slipped away, fire escape, back stairs. He began to despair, before he saw a thin legged person at the top coming down, talking to someone further up, the jeans and laced shoes, the red and blue T-shirt, yes, Louise Germane. She looked at him eagerly, he thought she was going to take his hand. “Complications,” she said.

He walked with her to the car, the other students watching them, drawing conclusions. She walked fast with long strides.

“What complications?”

“Nothing important.” She said, “I appreciate this.”

“My pleasure.” He noticed the pleased look on her face. He let her into the car and she leaned over to unlock his side. She sat with hands folded in her lap and sighed, a mock sigh, he thought. “What’s the matter?”

“Jack Billings wanted to take me home too. I had to tell him I was going with you.”

Tony Hastings was alarmed. “Would you rather have gone with him?”

“It’s too late now.”

“I didn’t mean to take you from your friends.”

“Don’t worry.” He wondered, is Jack Billings her lover? “I wanted to go with you.” Adding quickly, “If you don’t mind.”

He thought, this is Louise Germane, a stranger, and I am driving her home. He tried to think what the ban was. She sat beside him like an intimate member of the family. Does she think she is Laura? There’s no law against giving her a lift, a politeness, a favor. But does she think I am merely giving her a lift? The students watching us leave will think we are lovers. But since we are not lovers. Unless Louise Germane herself thinks we are.

He wondered, what is this imperative thing I have been wanting to tell her? Do I know what I am doing? What if she invites me in? The ban again. He wondered, does it look as if he is trying to seduce Louise Germane? Would she think so? If so, she should be more wary, make excuses, evade. So perhaps she expects it of him. Is it possible she is trying to seduce him?

“Here we are,” she said. The question was desperate, that is, What question? It was a long white house going back, six mailboxes on the front porch. “Would you like to come in?”

He groped for why he must not. “It’s not too late?”

Her face in shadow. “I’d be honored if you did.”

“I’ll have to find a place to park.”

Probably she didn’t mean to seduce him, she merely meant to offer him coffee, in which case he need not worry about the ban. They parked a half block up the street, and walked together downhill to her apartment. The rough sidewalk, shoulders bumped. The windows in her house were dark, the hallway lit. She checked her mailbox: GERMANE. He followed her upstairs, stood beside her in front of the scratched piney door while she looked in her purse for the key, his raggedy heart wild.

It wasn’t the adultery, because Laura was dead. It wasn’t the mourning, because eleven months had passed, and life cruelly demanded to be lived. It wasn’t the child she was, because she was a grown woman of her generation, who at twenty-eight or thirty had probably had more lovers than he at forty-five. It wasn’t the crippling, because the wound the loveless singles lady could not heal had now been healed. It wasn’t the graduate student, because she had finished her courses and he had just tonight vowed never to have official authority over her again.

They went in. The living room was spare, a couch, a table. She turned on a light by the sofa, and put on a jazz piano record. She had a poster of Montmartre. He sat on the couch, broken down inside so that his bottom almost hit the floor.

“Wine?”

She sat beside him on the couch. Their knees pointed up like peaks. Whatever he wanted to tell her, now was the time. Probably it had to do with the events in Grant Center, but he had already told his story at the party, and still it was unsaid. As if the story had a secret commentary attached to it, reserved for her. So secret even he lacked the code. Other than that, all he could think to say was that he had been transformed from something into something else. The news was tremendous but vague.

If he could convey to her the emotional force, the prismatic meaning, that was gathered into the act of hitting Ray. “I really slugged him,” he said.

“You don’t know what it means to have you sitting here in my own place, Mr. Hastings.” Eyes in the subdued light, the face that wants to kiss. Student infatuated with teacher, sure enough, a good thing she is no longer his student.

She took the blue kerchief off her head and shook her hair loose, wild all around.

“I’ve often thought of inviting you here. Since your bereavement, I mean.”

He said, “You’re a good friend.”

“I want to be your friend. I don’t want to be just a student. Does that annoy you?”

“Not at all. I don’t think of you as a student, I think of you as—” Fill in the blank, he thought, I can’t do this by myself.

“As what, Tony?”

“As friend.” Which you already said. (She called you Tony.)

“I thought you were going to say, woman.”

“I was going to say it.”

She was looking at him solemnly, speaking slowly. He felt as if he was play-acting, she too, in spite of the tension. She stopped looking at him, then looked at him again and said, “Does that mean you want me to sleep with you?”

Catch your breath, man, this was faster than expected. “Is that what I mean?”

“It’s not?” Her eyes were big.

“Perhaps it is.”

“Perhaps?”

“Well yes. I mean it is.”

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes.”

Quiet now: “Me too.”

She said, “There’s one problem.”

“You don’t have any—?”

“Not that. I’m not certain Jack Billings won’t come over in a little while. I’m not sure I’ve seen the last of him tonight.”

“Would he want to sleep with you?”

She nodded.

“You’re lovers?”

“He thinks we are.” She opened her hands, empty. “I’m sorry. I just never thought I’d have a chance with you.”

So that was the ban. “I shouldn’t intervene.”

“I want you to intervene.” She considered. “Let’s take a chance. If he comes I won’t let him in. I’ll tell him I’m sick.”

He had an idea. Why not? “Would you like to go to my house?”

“Hey. Great idea.”

Quick, before Jack Billings comes. She ran to the bedroom, brought out a white robe, looked about hastily trying to decide what to take, couldn’t think of anything except a toothbrush. “Hurry,” she said, as if Jack Billings were already at the door.

A car was going by slowly when they came out of the house. “Jesus,” she said, “that’s him.” The car went on.

“Why didn’t he stop?” she said.

He remembered the woods.

“He looked right at me.”

“I don’t want to make trouble for you.”

“Please don’t worry. It’s not your problem.”

In the car she said, “I’ll explain to him tomorrow. I’ll think of something to say.”

He thought, Is there trouble in this? Do I want to be responsible for a break between Louise Germane and her lover? Do I know what public stance to take?

Louise Germane came into his house in the middle of the night. He turned on the lights. She looked around happily. “I’ve always wanted to come here. Even before your wife died.”

She stood in the middle of Laura’s living room, looking at Laura’s paintings, the piano, the bookcases, sofa, chair, coffee table. Violating Laura by not being her. She was not his wife, nor his daughter, he hardly knew her, yet he wanted to take hold of her like an intimate, a member of his family. The paradox made him dizzy.

She said, “I want you to show me everything.”

“Now?”

She laughed, stepped up to him full front to front, and said, “Tomorrow will do.” Then the kiss itself, the first one, already probing, this young person whom he once considered timid, but who knew all about this kind of kissing, better than he, probably. She pressed her middle and lower parts against him and leaned back to look at him, and said, “Where do we go for the festivities?”

“Upstairs?”

“Master bedroom? Great, let’s go.”

He felt a certain irritation. They went upstairs. At the door he turned on the light and stopped. Laura’s ghost. Tony was surprised, for he thought she had lifted the ban, but here she was, still not ready to leave the room. He looked into Helen’s room, also barred, and then the cool neutral guest room.

“Let’s go here.”

The festivities. She crossed her arms and pulled off her T-shirt, then they undressed, looking at each other all the while, her triumphant smile no longer secret. She was thin, her hips cast a shadow over the hollow of her thighs. She touched his cock, this girl who had been his student.

Muffled laughs, murmurs, nuzzles, tickles. Her body was as familiar as if he had known her forever. Go there, it’s okay, I wish you would. I never dreamed I’d be doing this with you. Not to rush things, but the time began to swell, it filled and could not be delayed, and he leaned over Louise Germane, maneuvering to find her, and then he was there. He thought how good to be back.

In his own guest room, under the hairy bone while she clutched, he became aware of someone watching in the doorway. Jack Billings, ousted. The ceremony was moving into its wild stage, the gauge rising. It wasn’t Jack Billings, it was someone in the other bed, while the color changed, sunset blazed on the snow, the solitary skier released to fall raced downhill on the fiery snow and dropped below into the late gray shadow. In the other bed someone was being raped by a man with his back turned, whom Bobby Andes was hitting over the back with a stick. Then Tony Hastings, even as he drew the last rich gold from Louise Germane, felt himself dividing, rising like a spirit from his twitching body to tug at the raping man in the other bed but being a spirit unable to touch him.

It was as quiet in the room as the funeral had been. She was stroking the back of his head. The people were quiet, perhaps they were gone. He looked at the other bed and discovered there was no other bed. There was Louise Germane, sweet and vulnerable, smiling vaguely like a child just waked up, and he relieved she was still alive felt tender toward her. He was confused by the violence they had just been through and the shock of seeing there was no other bed. It seemed to mean that the two beds were the same, in which case the man raping the woman was himself, which they were trying to stop, and the spirit of himself trying to intervene was only a spirit.

He was disappointed, for though he knew the time with Louise Germane had been good in itself, it was not a time in itself, for the case was not closed. He asked, “Will you spend the night?”

“I thought that was already settled.”

In the middle of the night he wanted to wake her up and tell her, hey, remember when she seduced him in the blueberry field behind the house in Maine? When Helen was bike riding with her friend, he and Laura went out with a couple of blueberry baskets. She in shorts and a flimsy shirt, a warm sunny day, absolutely still, he heard her laugh behind him, turned around, saw her with her blouse open and her hands hooked in the waist of her shorts, pushing them down. “Hey man,” she said, “what say?” and afterward a buzzing in the silence on the prickly ground. “Relax,” she said in his ear, “no one ever comes here.” Then the water, chasing her running down to the rocks where she dove in naked and he behind, the bitter cold, quick in and quick out, and, “Jesus, we forgot our towels,” running up to the house with wild stinging skin. Laura the athlete, her arm-swinging walk. Skating in winter, he went with her sometimes to the rink to watch her pirouettes and figures, where she would teach him though his ankles were weak and he had no aptitude. Once she went on a skating trip with her friend Mira to the northern part of the state and was late coming back. He lay awake until five in the morning and she still hadn’t come, and he thought the car had smashed on the highway ice. Not her fault, she had a good reason for not calling, now forgotten. Nights in the dark to tell Louise Germane about. Usually the worry was Helen, while Laura and Tony pretended to be asleep though each knew the other was awake, before Laura would sit up in bed and say, “Isn’t that child back yet?” Marriage and worry, Louise. When the doctor discovered the abnormal tissue in a routine test, they had to wait through the step by step of elimination before they could celebrate with a Chinese dinner, their future free and clear at last again.

Thinking for Louise, if you marry, you will worry. But when she died, the worries ceased, which you might consider a relief. He looked at Louise Germane, a big lump in the bedclothes, and thought: let’s marry you when we get straightened out.