Less generous than her parents, she did not want him there, because it took away the family’s privacy. When he first made those remarks she was glad, thinking it cleared the air. Later when he repeated them she was annoyed. When he continued to say them, she felt really angry, but by then she was angry with him about everything, so she didn’t trust her judgment.
He lived with them for a year. When no one invited her to the spring dance he politely took her. They studied together and did well in school. He went with them in the summer to Maine. There were peaceful moments she hardly noticed. He never mentioned becoming a writer.
THREE
After that year, Susan did not see Edward again until Chicago, eight years later. She was entering graduate school. He was already there, studying law. Her mother told her to look him up, but she did not want to.
She felt lonely and sad at this university where she went without friends, knowing no one. She was leaving behind a boyfriend named Jake, who took offense at her going away and promised to be unfaithful to her. She lived in a women’s dormitory and had classes in a massive gothic building with thick walls and narrow leaded windows, a building entered from an arched vestibule like a culvert, through which the wind blew. She listened to the message of the architecture in the stone halls, the whispers of the professors keeping their voices down, the wary manners of her fellow students keeping their distance. Intelligently, she tried to distinguish the annual sadness of autumn (the gray buildings a shade whiter as the leaves came down) from her personal sadness (Jake, or childhood, or Susan the free) and both of these from the cloistered intellectual sadness, surrounded by the incendiary ghetto said to be dangerous.
Somewhere in this busy monastery was Edward. Her antagonism had disappeared in nostalgia, but she made no effort to look him up. Instead he found her, accidentally. She was on 57th Street going to the bookstore when she heard behind her: Susan, wait up! How fine he looked, changed, poised, tall and magnificent, Edward holding out his hand: I knew you were here. Dressed up, coat and tie, glasses sparkling, he grasped her elbow, steered her into Steinway’s. Come have a Coke with me.
Two former children meeting after childhood, their chief care is to prove they are no longer children. This makes them friendly and civil, super-polite. Inquiries about mother and father, brother and sister. Genteel boasts of new sophistication plus rehearsed propaganda to explain our life decisions. No memory how awful things used to be. He was studying law, she English. He lived in an apartment, she in the dorm. His gratitude: I have never failed to appreciate your parents’ kindness.
He showed her around, met her for lunch at the Commons, tested with her the other community eating places: Ida Noyes, International House. He pointed out the secondhand bookstores, took her to the Oriental Institute and the Museum of Science and Industry. He taught her how to get downtown on the I.C. and introduced her to the Art Institute and the Aquarium.
She was astonished by his change, which could be either a new layer or a peeling away. He said it: I’m not the brat I used to be. He was courtly, polite, chivalric. This was before chivalries went obsolete, and his was so careful it got on her nerves: walking on the outside of the sidewalk, holding doors open, holding her chair, the trite old things. Yet she thought it wonderful. Blame it on the earlier antagonism. She had such a memory of his old manner that when his rudeness was replaced by civility, civility looked like glamor.
The most interesting change was his new astonishment in everything. Sharp contrast to age fifteen when he knew all and was conspicuously bored by every wonder and outrage they saw. Now he was all wonder and outrage. He was amazed by the city, the university, the traffic, the blue of the lake, the haze of the steel mills, the dangers of the ghetto, the wisdom and knowledge of the professors, the complexity of the law, the glories of literature. For a while this puzzled her, since it seemed to reverse the normal order in which innocent wonder precedes jaded boredom. No doubt at fifteen he had preferred to hide his astonishment because it seemed more grown up. Now at twenty-three it was policy instead to be if necessary even more surprised than he really was. On the whole she liked this, though later she got sick of it too as she perceived how practiced it was.
Despite his fine outer manner, she soon discovered he had suffered a crippling injury: his heart was broken. He had been engaged to a girl named Maria, who had jilted him and married somebody else. Jilted: a good old-fashioned word. He did not seem heartbroken. He seemed vigorous and enthusiastic about the future. But heartbroken was a secret state, which she could share. It occurred to her she was heartbroken too, on account of Jake, who was retaliating for her career choice by a program of worldwide travel and picking up girls. She and Edward could be heartbroken together. It gave them something to talk about, and it protected them from each other, like brother and sister: no need to worry about hearts since their hearts were broken.
Chaste and platonic, this was the deceptive situation that led to Edward’s seducing Susan, or Susan’s seducing Edward, whichever it was, the ultimate result being the marriage which made necessary their divorce. To be heartbroken means to have a story, and their stories brought them together, as they told them over, repeating and enlarging, Edward more than Susan, since she didn’t have much to say about No Good Jake. He talked and she listened, with queries and advice, both knowing pretty well that it was not the story or Maria that mattered but the acts of telling and listening. This went on into the winter. She cooked dinner for him in his apartment, a sisterly thing to do, and they talked about his wounds until three. An engagement to marry. A flighty girl, too young to be tied down. He agreed with everything Susan said.
Looking back from the superior present, Susan sees that Edward’s heartbreak was only the current local manifestation of his normal condition as he always encouraged her to see it. The notion that he had always been and always would be subtly hurt by life and was always gallantly trying to make himself strong. Why he was any more hurt than anyone else she never questioned then. There were enough specifics to make it sound good. The death of his father. The loss of his home with no one to take care of him except her own father and mother. Jilting fit right in.
She spotted a gap in his story, the question of sex, which he dodged as unimportant until the dodging made it important. She asked him outright: Did you have sex with her, Edward?
He was shocked by the question, but it came out: he had not had sex with Maria, because he had not had sex with anyone. He was twenty-three years old, competent paternalistic Edward with jacket and tie removed, admitting this strange inexperience. Actually, it did not seem as strange then as it would twenty-five years later after the revolutions. (They didn’t call it having sex, either. They called it making love or sleeping together, whether or not slumber was involved: her question really had been, Did you sleep with her?)
There were several possible explanations for Edward. Courtesy and respect, his fine sensitive old nineteenth century genes. Unless he was just a child in gentleman’s clothing, afraid to grow up. Or some difference in the internal compass, a matter of what later jargon would call Sexual Orientation.