“Now what,” Ray said.
“Care to look inside?” Bobby Andes said.
“What for?”
“Let’s just take a look.”
They all went, Tony lagging, an unexpected shock. George the policeman held Ray by the arm and Bobby Andes took a key and unlocked the door. Tony in fright, about to see this place constructed so often in imagination, but unprepared, must he go in yet? Bobby Andes switched a light inside, the light drew him on. The walls, which he had imagined draped with a print cloth like the curtain in the window, were blank and gray. There was a small stove by the door and a bed with brass bedposts where the fingerprints must have been and a trashbox full of newspapers.
“Raped them on the bed I presume,” Andes said.
“I never raped nobody.”
“Come on Ray, we got your record.”
“God damn, the charges were dropped. I never raped nobody.”
Tony went to stand in front of Ray next to the bed. He was surprised how small it was, like a cot with bedposts. And Ray a shade shorter than he was. “I want to know, Ray,” he said. “The exact story of what you did to them.” He was surprised at the pressure of his words like steam driving him.
“You’ll have to ask somebody else, man.”
“I want to know what they said. I want to know what Laura said and what Helen said. I have no one to tell me but you.”
Looking at Ray’s face close, the bloody eyes, the teeth too big, the ironic grin. Why man, that’s private between them and me. You was out hiking. If you ain’t got the sense to come out of the woods. It’s none of your business, man.
“I want to know how you killed them. I want to know if they knew what was happening to them. I want to know, damn it.”
Naw you don’t, man, someone like you brought up with your antipathy to violence and fighting, it might make you sick to the stomach.
“What they suffered, Ray. I want to know if they hurt. I want to know what they felt.”
You don’t want to know that now, you know you don’t.
“Answer me, bastard.”
“Mister, you’re out of your mind,” Ray Marcus said. The voice that said Mister. Why shit, fella, you ain’t got no cause to complain. I thought you were done with them.
The eyes went on talking. I told you she wanted you. If you’d a come when we called. If you can’t care for them better than that. Hell, I thought I was doing you a favor.
The face was in front of him, the small hard chin like a baseball with a gash in it, the misshapen teeth, the leer. That, and quick think, if he could, yes he could, by surprise before they could stop him, with all his strength, and that. Bobby Andes grabbed Tony by the arms pulling him back. “Easy, easy.” George had his gun drawn, then reached down to where Ray was sprawled on the floor against the stove. There was blood on Ray’s face, his mouth a mess. One second. Then Ray lunged up from the floor and George snagged his arms, twisting them behind, buckling him over, and Bobby Andes got between. Handcuffs, quick. Ray with his hand on his mouth, blood all over.
He was yelling at Tony. “Oor gonna get hooed man.”
“What’s he saying?”
“He’s saying you’re gonna get sued. Don’t worry. He ain’t gonna sue nobody for a while.”
“You’re all gonna get hooed.”
“Ill advised, Ray. Look what you get for trying to escape.”
“Ethcape? Thit, man.”
Ray handcuffed to George, Andes patted him on the shoulder. “It’s all right, Ray, we’ll get you a dentist. You got his tooth, George?” He gave Ray a handkerchief.
They went back to the car. “I’ll drive now,” Andes said. George and Ray, handcuffed together, got in back, Tony sat in front as before. Bobby Andes looked at him, his eyes gleaming.
“Pretty good,” he said. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
Tony Hastings, who couldn’t remember ever hitting anybody before, felt extraordinary. Wild and exhilarated, with righteous wrath fulfilled.
Susan Morrow smacks her fist into Ray Marcus’s face and knocks him down against the stove. Ho.
She puts the manuscript down. It’s time to stop for the night, though it seems murderous to quit now. Another painful interruption like divorce, required by the discrepancy between the laws of reading and the laws of life. You can’t read all night, not if you have responsibilities like Susan. And if you must stop before the end, it might as well be here.
Sometime during her reading Dorothy and her friend Arthur came back from their date, well behaved, respecting her curfew. They’ve been watching television ever since. Upstairs a Wagnerian sound continues behind a closed door, Tristan equating love and death.
She goes to the bathroom exhilarated with the feel of slugging Ray, whatever her reason, which may not be identical to Tony’s. What did she mean a while ago by the enjoyment of a good rage? Who, exactly, is she raging at? Nobody? Susan, who loves everybody, her heart pours out to all.
So she remembers: we’re moving to Washington. Are we? The question has been covered over, encysted like an insect in a cocoon, swathed in the silk of her reading. It will re-emerge soon enough, and then she’ll have to think about it.
Should she tell Dorothy and Arthur to knock it off? She quells a theatrical impulse to scold them for wasting their youth in front of a television set. Television and going to Washington and socking Ray are mixed in her mind, as if it were the television set she wanted to smash. So she imagines an alien visitor asking what’s the difference between Dorothy gaping at television and herself gaping at a book. Martha and Jeffrey her little pets who think it queer to see her stopping there transfixed. She wishes she didn’t have to keep proving that it’s her ability to read that makes her civilized.
SECOND INTERLUDE
ONE
Wake up now. Light, blank square, window, the door in the floor shuts off the retreating mind. Gap without mind before another mind, bright and superficial, greets her with temporal data: Good morning Susan it’s the day of the week, hour of the clock, dress and address your schedule for the day.
This mind is full of order and regime. Yet for a while a receding world still dazzles like the frost lines on the window, where everything is connected, Edward, Tony, Susan’s various minds, one leading to another and back, the same and interchangeable. As the dazzle fades differences reappear and once again Susan is the reader, Edward the writer. Yet she retains a curious vision of Susan as writer, as if there were no difference.
That’s interesting enough to stop her in the kitchen after breakfast, pausing with a dish in each hand, trying to figure out rationally what it means. She observes herself. She sees words. She talks to herself all the time. Does this make her a writer?
She thinks. If writing is the fit of thought into language, everybody writes. Distinguish. The words she prepares to speak, that’s speech, not writing. Words not meant for speech, that’s reverie. If Susan is a writer, it’s for other words neither speech nor reverie, words like these now: her habit of generalization. Her way of composing rules and laws and descriptions of things. She does it all the time, crating her thoughts in words stored for later use. She makes another generalization: it’s saving words for later use that makes writing.
Susan’s writing aspirations have always been modest: letters, an intermittent journal, a memoir of parents. An occasional letter to the editor on women’s rights. Once no doubt she craved more, as she also craved to be a composer, a skater, a supreme court justice. She gave it up without regret as if what she gave up was not writing but something else, less important.