“Used to. I’m about to move out.” How did she know this? I decided Bobby or Bitty must have gotten to her first.
“Ah.” She cleaned off the sunglasses with a corner of the shirt and shot me an appraising look. “I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours.”
I shrugged. “Fair enough.” I found myself strangely excited at the prospect, and remembered my college days, and the girls who dumped me, and the other girls I spilled my guts to, who someday later would also dump me. It seems in description like a vicious circle, but I kind of liked it: a steady rhythm of disappointment and elation I could rely on. In retrospect it was pathetic, and there was something in Susan’s question that made me think she knew all about it, that she could see right through me to the essential shallowness of my heart. I proceeded with caution.
I gave her the short form, the one without the sex on the couch and the sad, empty cartoons. It felt strange, composing the story from the actual events of life. I’d never attempted to talk about Amanda; I hadn’t the need nor the audience. I pushed gently at the sore spot in me, and it hurt enough for me to turn away as I talked. My eyes fell onto the Ferris wheel. It jerked forward as the seats filled. In the gondolas, people waved their arms in the air, pretending fearlessness.
When I stopped, Susan fell silent for a time, and I imagined that she too was looking at the Ferris wheel, which now gained momentum and began to turn with what, after the gradual admission of passengers, seemed a harrowing speed. But when I looked at her, she had her sunglasses folded in her shirt pocket and was gazing off toward the river, down where the mayor had been fished out. She said, “It was about six months ago for me. My fiancé, actually. Getting married was all his idea. I wasn’t at all sure if he was the right guy, even a right guy, but I figured, hey, I was over thirty, a little, and I’d passed a pretty doable three years with him, two shacked up, and maybe falling in love was not at all like you hear it is, and was mostly just what had happened to us, which wasn’t much.” Her eyes refocused and fell on me. “You still want to hear this?”
“Yeah, sure.”
She started at the beginning, filling in far more detail than I had. She was once an editor at a cookbook publisher, and the fiancé had been, and still was, a food photographer, who couldn’t cook to save his life but knew a good-looking meal when he saw one. They met at the publication party for a cookbook written by a famous talk show host’s chef. A lot of the talk show host’s friends were there — movie people, some sports figures, a U.S. senator. Susan found herself pushed into a corner with the photographer, who complained to her about the buffet tables, that the white tablecloths showed stains, that the food wasn’t being replenished fast enough. Susan complained about the chef himself, his proud arrogance and mustache yeasty with recent meals.
“I should have known,” Susan said. “Complaining in the first five minutes. We complained all night.”
They became lovers, attended parties together, slept over a lot. Their relationship consisted mostly of talking about the collective output of mankind, or at least Manhattan, ferreting out the poseurs, seeking honesty with a dogged, almost desperate persistence, yet remaining more or less aloof about one another’s hopes, fears, etc. “The standard stuff,” she said. “Too boring for Lyle. We were normal people, and he was not interested in normal people, and for the time being neither was I.”
Lyle suggested he move in with her, as she had the larger apartment in the better neighborhood, and so he did.
“Now at this point,” she said, “I figured the lid would come cracking off this arch little critic thing we had going, and we’d start spooning out the goo. But it didn’t happen.” If anything, they became, thanks to the sheer volume of their critical output, even more detached. Their everyday discourse had the tenor of a book review: mild enthusiasm thinly obscuring deep disdain. “For me, the dissatisfaction was about the dissatisfaction. I mean, I liked everything but the constant nitpicking. That sounds foolish, I know, but I suppose I had invented a rich inner life for Lyle that in retrospect it seems he didn’t have. Or if he did, it wasn’t the one I’d imagined.”
She began to prod him a little about his feelings, question his criticisms. It became a game, an extension of the old detachment, but this time focused on him. Then he began to do it back. For the last six months, both were on edge most of the time, though they never thought to stop and make a truce. Apparently the game itself still felt normal — it was, after all, a version of what had held true for two and a half years — and Susan didn’t connect it to the anxiety she was feeling. “I had just switched jobs, to Burn Features. I figured I was stressed over that.”
Then, one night, they were playing the game, criticizing a movie they’d seen in which a woman leaves a man. Susan argued she had every right to leave; Lyle thought she had a responsibility to him.
“But she didn’t see it that way,” Susan said.
“But that’s the way it was,” Lyle said.
“Not for her,” Susan said.
“Everybody doesn’t get their own personal view of things that they can act on,” Lyle said. “There have to be rules. Or I could go committing heinous acts whenever I wanted.”
“But you wouldn’t. Most people don’t want to.”
“Because the rules have told them they shouldn’t.”
“What if there were no rules? What would you do if there weren’t rules?”
Lyle considered a moment. “Leave you.”
That hung in the air for a moment. Then Susan said, “What rule is keeping you?”
“I owe it to you to stay.”
“You owe me nothing,” she said. So he left.
* * *
“I thought we were still playing the game,” Susan told me. She licked her lips. There was something terrifying about her face in its pure and open expressiveness; the whole of her could be seen there by anyone who wanted to look. It was as if she’d left her car unlocked in a bad part of town. “There was no change in tone,” she said, “no escalation of emotion, nothing. He just walked out, then came back for his camera equipment in a few days.”
I had been plucking grass from the ground between my legs as she talked, and now when I looked down I noticed a small bare circle, which I had cleared. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be.” She shook her head. “I hated him. I’m not just saying that, either. I hated him all that time and didn’t even notice. That’s how clueless I am. I let myself be in love with a guy I totally hated, and when he left me I cried like a little friggin’ girl.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t even much like me.”
* * *
We went on some rides. Susan headed straight for the tilt-a-whirl and insisted on riding it over and over, with the unhinged scowl of a mad Civil War lieutenant driving again and again, with tragic hopelessness, into enemy lines. Afterward we tried the Ferris wheel. It turned out to be pretty slow after all. Several times it stopped turning entirely, due to some ominous mechanical trouble, and as we swung in silence at the top of the world, I looked down at the crowd and picked out the Family Funnies characters in their plush, outsized costumes, frolicking maniacally in the dust below. “Is that you?” Susan asked, pointing.
“I think that’s my brother.”
We watched in silence as the surrogate Bobby made his way through the throng of revelers, throwing his arms in the air, doing little dances. It was disconcerting, like watching Mickey Mouse get drunk. Then I noticed Mal. He was sitting on a bench, holding an ice cream cone and gazing into the sky, perhaps at the Ferris wheel, perhaps at me. His glasses, reflecting sun, were twin glinting blobs that made my eyes pucker. I held up my hand against them.