In the rowboat, on the pebbly shore, with the hiss of Edward’s cigarette, she remembers (even earlier) his refusal to forgive his long institutionalized mother. When Susan defended her, he tried to splash her with the oars. While now and for twenty-five years every month Arnold has sent a fat check to keep Selena foaming in her luxurious cage in Gray Crest. Susan remembers how he used to say to her with astonished joy, Thank God you’re sane. After all these years he’s used to her and doesn’t say it any more.
Nocturnal Animals 13
In September Paula came to visit. She came to give things away and throw things out. She went into Laura’s closets and Helen’s room, packed up clothes and jewelry, went over letters, paintings, photographs, toys and stuffed animals. Then she left and the semester began. Colleagues and students returned. That was good, though questions having nothing to do with math still intervened. Mister, your wife wants you. Raids on his thought while he lectured or talked to students. And this new habit of turning off the lights and looking out the windows at night. He would look at the dark branches and light squares in the houses and the dim glow of the sky and feel the spacious darkness in the house like a cave, especially exciting when a person went by, unaware of being watched.
He supposed he was recovering. He went to a party given by Kevin Malk, head of Tony’s department. At the Malks’ parties they played games. Charades: Tony pitched in, contributing titles to be acted out: “The Sunny Side of the Street” and “The Decline of the West.” He himself acted out “Nocturnal Animal House” and was surprised by the vigor of the applause.
He drove Francesca Hooton home. She was alone because her husband, a lawyer, had gone to New Orleans. Tony had always liked Francesca. She taught French, was tall and fair and had a pretty face with fine features and gold in her hair. In the old days he sometimes wondered what if they had both been free. Now he was uncomfortable, because he was an escort, and because of the possibility this was an opportunity, which he did not want in the confusion of being stricken and bereaved. She sat beside him in the car, wearing an elegant light tan dress. “Have they got any leads?” she asked.
“The police? Not that I know of.”
“Aren’t you angry?”
“Who at? The police?”
“Those men. Don’t you want them caught and punished?”
“What’s the use? That won’t bring Laura and Helen back.”
He realized immediately this was bravado, while she said, “Well if you’re not angry, I am. I’m angry on your behalf. I want them killed. Don’t you?”
“I’m angry enough,” he murmured.
At the foot of the stairs to her second story apartment, she said, “I don’t suppose you want to come in.”
He felt a wild leap inside and said, “I’d better get home.”
In his darkened house he described his evening to Laura. We played charades, he said. I was the life of the party. Then I took Francesca Hooton home. She wants me to be angry and want revenge, but I don’t want to be distracted from you. She also expects me to have an affair with her, but I refused. He turned out the lights and went around again looking out from the dark into dark, saying, I won’t forget. Nothing can make me forget.
He walked stiffly from class to class like a man with a cane. A graduate student named Louise Germane who had soft wheatcolored hair came to his office and said, “I heard what happened, Mr. Hastings. I want you to know I’m sorry.” He pinched his smile and thanked her. When she left, he said, I must expect to be lonely, my hair will turn white. He decided to write a history of his marriage. He thought writing would make him remember. He was afraid of losing the sense of presence, the vital feeling that the past was still part of the present.
He gathered specific memories to prove things: the Tolstoy evening to show her intelligence, the beach trip to demonstrate her vitality, the jokes and puns which he had such difficulty remembering to confirm her wit, the kitchen discussions about the Malks to show her judgment, the famous evening walk to Peterson Street to reiterate her generosity and kind heart. His memory was recalcitrant, it did not like to be forced. He tried to liberate her from the frame on the table, her eyes frozen into a smile by the photographer, her hair in a fixed wave over one side of her forehead. He looked away and waited for memory to ambush him. It ambushed him often but not when asked. To expose himself to ambush, he recapitulated old habits: she drove him to the university a hundred times on her way to the gallery, liberating a nice moment at the gallery when she asked his advice. Once she ambushed him with a vision of her walk coming up the street to the house, real as life, swinging her arms. How she swung them—but every memory that ambushed him became fixed. He developed a store of images, while memory ambushed him less and less.
Then he got better. He spent three hours at a faculty meeting arguing passionately for two promotion and tenure candidates. Only when he left the building with Bill Furman in the snow just beginning, did he remember he was bereaved. He had forgotten for three hours. Nor did the returning memory, recalled by the empty house and the snow, bring the shock it used to. This happened often. In the classroom or reading, he would realize he’d been working for hours without remembering his life wasn’t normal. Life goes on, he would say. I can’t grind my teeth all the time.
This was the first snow of the winter. Tony drove through it with Bill Furman, thick flakes swirling around the car in a strong wind, the streets slippery and dangerous. He expected the snow to revive his grief because it was burying the place where they died. He could think of it falling in the woods: a winter they will never see. The snow was peaceful, though. Later he watched it from his house. Once again he went around and turned off the lights. He watched the stream of flakes in the light of the streetlamp. He thought of snow on the mountain track in the woods. And in the clearing, covering it up. He took off his shoes and walked around in his socks. Light reflected by the snow from the streetlamps and city sky came in the windows of the big house and illuminated the empty rooms. He thought how free he was in this house alone, his solitary ownership in the darkness lit by the spooky outside glow. As he had done on those earlier nights, only now feeling quite sane, he went from one window to another, looking up the hill to Mr. Husserl’s house, and to the lawn and snowy oak branches and the garages and fringed cars parked, with a feeling like ecstasy.
When he asked Laura about it, she said be glad you’re alive. Watching the snow filling the front lawn and street, he became conscious of his body, which had been ignorant of grief from the start. The only constant, his need to sleep and shave, brush his teeth, eat and drink and release his wastes. Watching his eating habits so as not to feel greasy, gaseous, or bleak. Wearing clean clothes, underwear, shirts, shoes, and dirty clothes to Mrs. Fleischer to wash. And now with snow, an overcoat, muffler, cap and gloves, and if he walks out tomorrow he will stamp his feet to restore circulation. He noticed his cock, strapped in, disturbed by the night feeling, which made it move a little, like a ballet dancer impersonating the dawn. That was the only part of his body with a grief of its own, sullen in his pants. But if ever it tried to sprout, he need only remember, like admonishing a dog, and it would shrivel and withdraw.