Edward’s virginity stimulated her curiosity and made her talk. If his secrets were gone, she had no right to hers. She blabbed. He was shocked again, as disturbed as if she were the heroine of a nineteenth century novel, and his gloom when he said, I’ll have to get used to that, irritated the hell out of her. Rather, it irritates the remembering Susan, who can’t remember if she was irritated then. She was temporarily inspired by zeal for the principle, not exactly worth a crusade but enough to motivate her, that Sex is Natural. The result maybe of her recent battles with Jake. What she saw in Edward was the opposite conviction, Sex is Unnatural. Sex is Natural was Susan’s pre-feminist feminism: it turned her against big breasts, pornographic beer and cigarettes, the double standard for men and women, the equation of romance with lust, and Jake’s notion that there was a difference between good (dark) and bad (blonde) women. (What Jake’s belief meant for Susan was that while romantic love required her to yield to him, her doing so constituted a flaw in her character which relieved him of obligation.) As for Edward, believing Sex was Unnatural was the natural consequence of his astonishment with everything (everything was unnatural). He could not believe real people did the things they wrote about and his imagination embellished.
So she decided to educate Edward. It popped into her head one drizzly afternoon on the museum steps. She said without thought, Edward, get someone to teach you the facts of life.
I know the facts of life.
The idea stuck in her head, and it had serious consequences, because the outcome, which would certainly have deterred her if she had known, was that Edward married her. At the time, she thought it would be educational and healthy for both of them. Sex is Natural, Edward. It doesn’t mean a thing. Even you and I can do it, and no one else need know. This was early spring, when the campus was wet and the young branches sparkled with a residue of rain, and the gray buildings looked freshly washed under the pale skies. I can slip into your apartment, and no one will see, and when I go back to the dorm, neither my mother or father nor Jake or Maria nor your professors will know a thing.
What a crazy idea. That must have been another Susan because the real Susan remembers being annoyed by such thoughts. She remembers trying to analyze out of existence her fascination with what Edward had become: the combination of his acquired childlike eagerness with his innate jaded primness. She remembers trying to scorn to death her wicked curiosity to see what this correct and careful Edward would be like in the grasp of something uncontrollably intense and physical in himself.
The plot summary of Susan’s memory says she made up her mind to seduce Edward and then went out and did it. The detailed text says otherwise. She gave him hints without any idea what the hints were about. Affectionate impulses. Along the street in the rain, patting and cuffing. Flirty things. She punched him in the chest when he came out of the library. In the University Tavern she came up behind him and put her fingers over his eyes. At dinner in the Commons, after a hard day and before a night of labor with a paper to write, where they ate in silence, her gaze settled on his light hair loosely disheveled, his tired eyes staring vaguely, and she felt a surprising old warmth for this strange young man strangely dear to her, whom she would like to take care of. She did not know she wanted to seduce him.
Was he interested, or was he not? She only thought she was looking in him for signs, whether he was attracted or repelled. At the University Tavern where they had a beer, she said, Let me live with you, Edward. He laughed, resisting by turning it into a joke, and she laughed too, thinking that’s what she meant.
She initiated conversations about censorship and pornography, psychoanalysis and the three stages of development—oral, anal, and genital. She discussed homosexuality in Plato, and the naked athletes in the Olympic Games. She showed him the analysis she was writing about “To His Coy Mistress.” She broke out in the middle of that, I keep forgetting you’re a virgin, and he blushed and hemmed.
She didn’t intend anything serious, she thought, she was just trying to shake him out of his complacency. On a warm spring day they went to the Forest Preserve to look for migratory birds. They had a good nostalgic talk about family life, life in Hastings, and his future. As a lawyer he intended to take civil rights cases no one else would handle and give free legal aid to the poor. She thought what a good man he was, which made her proud as if she had made him good. Then back to the university, late and dark, where he invited her to his apartment for coffee before taking her home. As they went up the dark stairs, and he unlocked the door, and they entered the room, and he turned on the light, she experienced an unbearable excitement of the present tense, the dazzling immanence of now, which was full of her presence and Edward and all life concentrated, making her want to scream or sing. He heated the coffee and set out cookies and went to the bookshelf for his bird book, and they sat shoulder elbow arm and thigh while he looked up the American redstart and warblers they had seen. And all the while present time hummed with presence until she could hardly stand it, and she heard a voice saying, Go ahead, it’s all right now, and then her own real voice whispering a suggestion into Edward’s ear.
Then was heartbeat time for both of them, tremble and shake, his large eyes staring too close for focus, his voice hoarse: Do you mean it? The belated caution and sanity of her reply: Only if you want to. And his deep wow: Oh grateful God.
There was a single light on his bed table which cast its glare downward and suffused elsewhere through the room. She was wearing a soft pale green sweater, a plaid skirt with pleats, white socks. Underneath, a white bra and white pants. Emerging from these, she was thin and lanky, her cheeks were pale, with no glasses in those days, and her hair hung lightly down her back. She was worried about the smallness of her breasts until she saw the wonder in Edward’s eyes. He was even lankier than she. His ribs showed in his chest, his thighs were thin, his sex was chunkier than any other part of him. The room was chilly and they both shivered and kept shivering.
In the bedroom he gasped and grunted and puffed and roared. Be frank, Susan, she enjoyed it too, a lot more than she was to enjoy some of the repetitions later. He bore down on her and rocked and yelled in a loud voice, You great wonderful thing, I can’t believe how wonderful you are. Afterward, he thanked her for her generosity.
A long naked conversation followed, while they idly fingered each other. He told her a secret he had not told anybody else. He had taken up writing, he told her. He had poems and stories and sketches, and two notebooks already filled.
FOUR
Edward and Susan: how wonderful, her mother said, like marrying back into the family. This was 1965, in chilly March, no change in plans: they kept up their studies, only now Susan lived in Edward’s apartment. They assumed it was happiness.
Susan can remember some of that happiness if she tries. For twenty-five years she has not tried, preferring to consider it an illusion, thereby protecting Arnold and her children. She had no wish to dismantle her disillusionment.
What she remembers now is not so much happiness as places where happiness occurred. Happiness was intangible, place made it visible. There were places in the summer, and there was Chicago. For Edward-happiness she remembers only summers, and of the two Edward summers, only the first, which they divided between her parents’ old house in Maine and his cousins’ borrowed cabin in upstate New York. The Maine house, which goes back to childhood, overlooked a cold harbor with pine trees. It had gables and screened windows and a screened porch around, and it stood over the steep grass down to the rocks. She remembers Edward in the rowboat, for they went out in it when they were fifteen and again when they were married. She confuses the memories somewhat. She remembers Edward the child in the rowboat trying a cigarette and throwing it into the water. She remembers him talking about his stepmother, who divorced his father before the fatal heart attack, and she felt ashamed to see a boy cry.