The other house, his cousin’s cabin in upstate New York, was more primitive. It was in the deep shade of trees by a small river in the woods. It had a screen door and a main room with unfinished walls and exposed timbers, and two small back rooms. She remembers Edward writing with his typewriter under the table lamp while she tried to read by the same lamp in the Morris chair, and she’s not sure if that was happiness or not. They went swimming, running without clothes out the door into the river. All that screwing. Enjoying the contrast to their hostile past, pretending they were still fifteen in the Hastings house, breaking the rules. Then back to the obligations of the present: having finished sex, they wrote a letter to her mother and father signed Susie and Edward. Childhood sweethearts, her mother would say, just like brother and sister.
Memories of happiness in Chicago are harder to find. Edward’s apartment, where they were so busy. Papers and exams to prove how their minds had been professionalized, dredged and rebuilt. As students in different fields, they respected each other’s needs and stayed polite. They finished the first year on their scholarships with help from her father. Later, because Edward did not want to depend on her parents, she taught freshman English in a city junior college. With an interruption or two she has kept that job ever since. When Edward resigned his scholarship in March, her job was their only source of funds.
He resigned his scholarship because he had quit his studies. He could have waited until summer when the scholarship expired, but since he had stopped studying, he thought it more honorable to stop the scholarship too.
He gave up the law to become a writer. This surprised Susan because she thought he should first find out if he could write. But Edward was sure. In long talks he explained his decision and clarified their future and her role. Her father came to Chicago to talk him out of it, but Edward said the strength of his writing compulsion, by preventing him from studying for his exams, proved law school was a mistake. It was other people who wanted me to study law, Edward said. It was I who wanted me to write.
When Susan learned he had been writing all the time, she wondered why he never showed her any of his work. He explained he wasn’t ready because it was still baby stuff. He asked her support, and she stood by him. It was a time of idealism. Her secret alarm was selfish and bourgeois (she had never worried about being bourgeois before). Her expectation of a comfortable house, children, all that, and of pursuing a scholarly career with Ph.D.: that was bourgeois. Do writers make money? she asked anxiously, having heard most poets and fiction writers support themselves with other jobs. Who needs money? Edward said. With your job, which does provide a salary, we’ll scrape by. She would teach, he would write. He would dedicate his books to her, without whom none of this etcetera.
Her father on his visit gently asked. Do you really want to give up so much? But what am I giving up, Daddy? she replied. Brave, determined. What else am I good for? What about your plans, your two years of graduate school? I’m utilizing that, she said. I couldn’t have got this job without it.
The second summer of their marriage, they stayed in Chicago so she could earn more money teaching summer school. Now she read his writing, some of it. He told her to be absolutely frank, but she learned it was better not to be. His poems were short and casual, pieces of nostalgia, memories of places or states of mind, fitted to a word or two. Also some little sexy poems about how amazing it was to screw her, anticipation, performance, and recovery. He had certain phrases for her, especially her soft shallow breasts, which annoyed her. She had a suspicion she could write just as well, if she wanted to. Later she cultivated this thought because it enabled her to regard Edward as a phony, which helped put him behind her, but at the time it was a heresy against the faith she needed.
Poems and sketches. He stopped showing them to her. She hoped it wasn’t because of anything she said. He talked of larger projects. He had been working on a novel but had not mentioned it because it was so unfinished. It was pretty long. She gathered it was autobiographical, with twelve hundred pages so far, and had brought young Eddie up to the age of twelve.
During the second autumn of their marriage, he got rather crabby. Things were not going well. He was working on a project requiring special concentration. What project? she asked. A new novel, a long poem? He wouldn’t say because he worked better when nobody was looking over his shoulder. It was a mistake to show your unfinished work. I need to go off by myself, he said.
Without me? He needed to go to the river cabin where he could write undisturbed. What am I supposed to do? Susan said. You have to teach, he said. You have a contract to fulfill.
It’s hard for Susan to remember the mood of her acquiescence and even harder to transcend her later scorn. How could she give in so meekly? But since he wasn’t unfaithful sexually, she agreed to stay behind. He went off and called her every second night. She wrote letters to her parents making the best of it, boasting of their unconventionality, Edward wrestling in the wilderness, and what a great life. Unfortunately, he came back gloomier than ever. It didn’t work, he said. He’ll have to start over again. Start what? But it was too private for words. Not until later did she register her official verdict: Edward the phony, herself gullible fool. The only good thing about that October, she would say, was that it enabled her to meet Arnold. He was a hospital intern living in an apartment upstairs. His wife had a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized. In the end, everybody except Selena would later say, the whole episode was a blessing for them all.
But twenty years of marriage (no idyll, to be sure) allow Susan to wonder with an open mind what sticking with Edward would have been like. If she had stayed with him, she’d now be Stephanie. With due allowance for Rosie and Dorothy and Henry, Susan is no longer afraid to ask if life as Stephanie would necessarily have been any less wonderful than life as Susan.
Once she asked him why he wanted to write. Not why he wanted to be a writer but why he wanted to write. His answers differed day to day. It’s food and drink, he said. You write because everything dies, to save what dies. You write because the world is an inarticulate mess, which you can’t see until you map it in words. Your eyes are dim and you write to put your glasses on. No, you write because you read, to remake for your own use the stories in your life. You write because your mind is babble, you dig a track in the babble to find your way around yourself. No, you write because you are shelled up inside your skull. You send out probes to other people in their skulls, and you wait for a reply. The only way to show you why I write, he said, is to show you what I write, which I’m not ready for.