Tony and Susan

ONE

Arnold is coming, and then Edward. Susan Morrow is tense enough to take her breath away. She feels the contempt of each for the other as if for herself. Arnold thinks Edward a failure, always has. When they last met, years ago by accident at a play in Chicago, Arnold bought Edward a drink. He slapped him on the back, talked of cultural values and judged him effete. Edward ignored Arnold’s objections to obscurity in art, avoided the contemporary, changed the subject to baseball, and judged him simple.

She does the work of her day, kids to the dentist, groceries, with plans to meet Arnold at O’Hare in the evening. Frightened by what Arnold may be bringing home to her, the possible terrors, she turns her mind to Edward, who comes tomorrow. The critique he expects from her, the questions he expects her to ask, which she has postponed.

She’d rather leave the book where it was last night, to act untended in the sub-basements of her mind, but for Edward she’ll form an opinion, what she liked and what she didn’t. Adjectives. Questions that will organize her reading for tentative answers. To Edward’s question—what’s missing from his book?—she has a mischievous reply.

She meets Arnold at O’Hare in the evening, trying to be glad to see him. Kisses him, takes him by the arm, Arnold the Bear, who always looks disoriented in public places, with his graying beard, his bushy brows, worried about his baggage, distracted by thoughts. Preoccupied. By what, Susan does not know. He does not tell. She waits for his unwanted gift and holds back the urgent questions that are driving her crazy.

She drives him home on the busy expressway. As if nothing had happened, he talks of meetings, people seen, lectures attended. Describes the interview with the Cedar Hall Institute. Chickwash, what an honor for him, if only his mother could have lived. He expects the invitation within a week. She remembers his promise to discuss it with her before deciding anything, but he seems to think they’ve had that discussion already. If she reminds him, he’ll say he thought it was settled. She fears what other news such a reminder might elicit.

Instead she mentions Edward’s forthcoming visit. She describes Edward’s book as she drives but can’t tell if Arnold is listening. She talks in the blast of wind around the car windows, he not saying anything. She speaks of her plan to invite Edward to dinner. Tomorrow night. Since Arnold doesn’t hear that either, she repeats. Oh excuse me, he says. You’ll have to do without me, I’ve got to work tomorrow night.

That night Susan Morrow has sex. With her own Arnold, in their own ways, with their twenty-five year history. She wasn’t expecting it, his fatigue, her irritability, whatever is distracting her. A feeling of grievance, sorry for herself, all the sacrifices she has made. His neglect of her adventures, like the latest, this book of Edward’s, as important to her as Arnold’s New York adventures are to him: his total indifference. So she’s not expecting it and is halfway through the trapdoor to sleep when he puts his bear paw on her in his intimate privileged way bringing her violently back.

Back to an old world of bodies at night, featuring her nipples, throat, hips, and abdomen, along with his sweaty ribs, hairy legs, armpits and beard. Also their mutual tongues, and eventually his vulnerable fat thrusting sausage in the dark wet sensitivities under her pelvic arch. She forgets her grievances with a relieving yelp, approving her policy to be faithful and true whether in Chicago or Washington, while everything else disappears, including Edward and Marilyn Linwood. Or does not disappear. She’s thinking about them while Arnold rocks away, wondering how they would like each other. Afterward, he (who? Arnold, of course) puts his head on her shoulder and moans: Forgive me, oh forgive me. There there, she says, like a mother, patting the back of his head, not daring to wonder what he wants to be forgiven for.

The next day she waits for Edward. His card said he would stay at the Marriott, but there was no specific plan to meet. She expects him to call and will invite him for dinner then. Excited and nervous, all morning and part of the afternoon she waits. Meanwhile daylight drains the glow from Arnold’s night. As it usually does. She’s annoyed by his disregard of Edward. The official dogma for twenty-five years, that Edward is of no importance. She wishes Arnold would read his book. She wishes it as if she wrote it herself. The idea grows: to capture Arnold by the book, send him too through the woods with Tony, let him suffer the shocking loss and the uncomfortable discovery, enslaved to Edward’s imagination for the three days or whatever it requires.

But Arnold would say, this Tony Hastings of yours in this book by Edward, your Tony Hastings is a wimp. That’s Arnold’s language, how he would put it. He’ll say: I appreciate what Tony goes through, but what’s wrong with this man who can’t protect his family or control Ray even when he has the gun? That’s just the kind of hero your Edward would make up.

It irritates her though she’s the one inventing and making Arnold say it. Mistrusting his motives as she invents them, saying, You would never let Ray’s thugs get me, would you, Arnold? Nothing like this could happen to you, because you wouldn’t let it, is that what you want me to believe, my hero? She sees how the sneer at Tony’s maleness intends to certify and augment his own, though her particular recollection of Arnold’s maleness from last night is parched, lost in the memory of stroking his head and saying, There, there.

Her thought is full of rancor. She tries to correct for that, in fairness. In fairness, she too was bothered by Tony’s lack of backbone, which explains how she can invent Arnold’s critique. Don’t do that, Tony you fool, she would say. But never thought of complaining to Edward, because she knew his reply: that’s what he’s supposed to do. If she understands that, Arnold can too. Arnold should understand Tony’s dilemma with the gun. To have it and be unable to use it: for Susan that’s real life, unlike the movies, where the mere display of a gun by anybody confers the powers of God. Susan in the cabin in that situation would have been no more able to use the gun than Tony was. She should praise Edward for that, but hesitates, if the thought contains more than she knows: if in that flash of Tony the Wimp, there’s a spreading reflection of herself.

Well, Arnold would deny that. Patronizingly perhaps, he would assure her: Tony and you, Susan? There’s no resemblance in the least. I know my Susan. If Ray and his pals attacked your children, you’d fight in ways polite Tony never dreamed. You’d jump and grab him by the throat, bite, kick, pluck his eyes. There’s no way you’d let a thug hurt yours as Tony does, as you well know.

Right, Susan knows. She knows her Susan.