In the front row at the Unitarian Church, he sat insulated between Paula and Alex while the sunshine streamed through the windows. A lake into which the violent memory sank and violent motion ceased. Sunshine with music and quiet voices. In front, two strange oblongs, side by side, covered with white cloth. Tony Hastings vaguely aware the church was full of people, people peeking to get a look at him. Colleagues. Friends of Laura, he not sure who. High schoolers, friends of Helen’s. Shaking hands afterward. People he knew and people he didn’t, crying and embracing. The tide rushed through him, and he cried too.
The next morning he and Paula closed the house and flew to the Cape. After taking off the plane flew over the city. The air was clear, the streets and blocks crisp and distinct. He looked for the small green patch of Lot Hill, but he was rising away from them in a capsule, and perhaps it was not Lot Hill. The ground shifted and he couldn’t tell, it was or it wasn’t. Then it was white cotton clouds and all the world as sea.
Ray said to Lou, you fuckin sonofabitch you let him go, now he’ll tell, and Lou said how the hell was I supposed to know, and Ray said, Hey mister, your wife wants you, and Paula said, “We’ll have a good time at the beach, won’t we?”
The writer’s economy, using what you know: Tony lives in Cincinnati, like Edward. It gives Susan an odd feeling of knowing something she shouldn’t know. Never mind. That’s enough for tonight, Edward old friend. What’s there to say? This book has her in its grip, she can say that truly. The long slow plunge into the evil night and Tony trying to brace himself by being civilized. The notion that being civilized conceals a great weakness. With that tension or irony, taut cold surface, she can’t tell whether it reflects a sadness her own imagination has contributed, or emits a sadness of its own. The irony makes her think of Edward, which interferes with the sadness, for Edward’s irony always did make her uneasy.
She puts the manuscript in the box, and even that seems like violence, like putting the coffins into the ground: images from the book moving out into the house. Fear and regret. The fear is mirror to the fear with which she started. Then she was afraid of entering the novel’s world, lest she forget reality. Now, leaving, she is afraid of not being able to return. The book weaves around her chair like a web. She has to make a hole in it to get out. The web damaged, the hole will grow, and when she returns, the web will be gone.
Once she has left the book, living room to kitchen, refrigerator, lights, going upstairs, Tony settles in his pages. She recalls as if it were a long time ago, ages, the vague terror she had felt about Arnold away, but it seems remote now, like Arnold himself. It’s Edward on her mind. Childhood things revive. When we two sat on the porch looking across the river to the Palisades while the younger kids played hide and seek, and we talked about topics of importance, like brother and sister. Then what?
He went off to school. And met her again years later in graduate school. Why, you’ve been childhood sweethearts all along, her mother exclaimed, ignorantly.
So what went wrong? Her mother forever asked without asking. Was it that Arnold appeared, no more than that? But there must have been something wrong with Edward, for no one can believe Susan Morrow would simply trade him in for a better model. What evil thing did Edward do?
The official registered explanation. There never was but one thing wrong with Edward, it says. His personality. After all the old grievances had been weathered away, his personality remained. Only the most intimate would know, because on the outside he was fine: responsible, considerate, reliable. Shy. Modest. Nice. You have to live with him day and night. That’s when you’ll find him getting in your hair.
Edward was prissy. He was prim. He was fussy and neat. He pursed his lips. He tapped his foot. He said to the traffic cop: What seems to be the problem, officer? He refused to watch television in the late evening. When they were fifteen, out in the boat with the big Maine house up on the shore, they were idling, going nowhere, and he asked her not to drag her hand in the water. No one was rowing, and still he asked her not to drag her hand. He was like that from the beginning and was probably born that way. Isn’t that true, Stephanie?
She wished she hadn’t thought of that. She didn’t want to think of Edward’s pursed lips while she was trying to do justice to his book.
FIRST INTERLUDE
ONE
Every night before descending into her mind, Susan Morrow performs rituals. Dog walk, kitty kitty, lock doors. Three children safe with a nightlight for the stairs. Teeth and hair, bed light, make love sometimes. Roll away from Arnold to the right, puff the pillow up, wait.
Tonight differs because no Arnold. Freedom, the possibility of something wild. She puts the wild impulse down, and makes tonight like the others, except that instead of turning right with her back to Arnold, she sprawls left, enjoying the husbandless state in the husbandless space. A horrible thought occurs to her about Arnold in New York, but she puts that down too.
Then like every night she waits for her mind, rumbling under the door in the floor. She puts her head into the pillow and waits. Biological sounds distract her, heart changing speed in her ear. Breathing unsettles her. Sometimes the intestinal lab works late, preparing a shipment to disturb her sleep. Speech from the day liquefies the hard surface of her mind like waves in a windstorm. Time to batten down, pack her plans and arguments. She stows Nocturnal Animals for the night.
The storm she waits for begins when the words in her head start speaking on their own. They come up through the trap door, people talking without her. Her mind is down there, and she hears the voices in the rooms with the flimsy partitions. This moment is scary because the danger is unknown. Her mind surges up and sucks her down, expanding then into a world, and though the country is familiar, she is a visitor. Each night she revisits places she has visited before and meets people, changed since her last visit. She’s ashamed of her faulty memory, knowing what she can’t remember is more important than what she can. With her orders in a sealed envelope which she has lost, she wanders, feet bare, legs paralyzed, she loses her footing and sails into the air, or struggles up the hill to meet the class already half through its hour, or sees her kindly dead father and asks if he minds being dead, or lets some quiet student sit on the desk with his hand approaching her crotch which he will never reach—while she tries to avoid the death room.