She needs to distinguish between the writer she refused to become and the writer she always was. Surely what she refused was not writing but the next step, dissemination: the adaptations and publicity required to induce others to read—an extensive process summed up in one word, publication. As she works about the house on this bright but darkening day, threatening snow, Susan thinks that’s too bad, because in giving up publication she gave up the chance to be part of a writing conversation, to read the consequences of her words in other words from out in the world. And too bad in a vanity way, thinking of Edward (who started it all), since she knows her mind is as good as his, and if she had devoted years to the practice of a skill, she could have written a novel as good as his.
So why didn’t she write? Other things had a higher claim. What? Husband, children, teaching Freshman English in the junior college? Susan needs another reason. Something in the publication process that subtly repelled her. She saw it in the old days when Edward was struggling. And felt it when she tried to write herself. Dishonesty, some subtle falsification, forced on her, it seemed, by writing for someone else to read. An uncomfortable lying feeling. It infected then and still infects even her most modest efforts, her letters, her Christmas card messages, which lie no matter what she says or does not say.
The presence of the other person—that’s the cause. The other person, the reader, contaminates what she writes. This reader’s prejudice, taste, mere otherness, controlling what she may say like a Hollywood producer or market researcher. Yet even the unpublished writing in her soul has a misfit between itself and the sentence she can say it in. The sentence simplifies. If it does not simplify it’s a mess, and she bogs in the additional vice of obscurity. She creates a clear sentence by lopping, exaggerating, distorting, and sealing over what’s missing like paint. This gives her such an illusion of clarity or depth that she’ll prefer it to truth and soon forget it’s not truth.
The intrinsic dishonesty of writing corrupts memory too. Susan writes her memories into narrative. But narrative does not flash like memory, it’s built across time with cells for storing the flashes that come. It transforms memory into a text, relieving the mind of the need to dig and hunt. Remembered Edward is such a text, and early Arnold and her marriage, established through many writings long ago. Obliged now to reread these old texts, she can’t help rewriting. She’s rewriting now, as hard as she can, trying her best to bring back an illusion of memory alive, because the orthodox narrative is totally dead.
TWO
Susan should have known when she first consented to read Edward’s book that it would have some such effect. Should have foreseen it would bring him back alive, as if no twenty years had passed. And bring with him also the divorce and early Arnold and other questions she would rather not think about. But could she have foreseen such excitement, combined with alarm? She doesn’t understand the alarm. It’s out of proportion to the cause. She wonders if the story itself, Tony’s case, is acting on her in some hidden way, separate from the revival of Edward. There’s a threat somewhere, but she doesn’t know what it is or where it comes from. She tries to find it by researching her memory while doing physical labor about the house.
The situation was this: while Susan was married to Edward who was going insane with writing, Arnold was married to Selena going insane with a carving knife. The problem for Susan rewriting a memory is how to get from that arrangement of marriages to the present one.
Six apartments, two on each floor across the stairwell. Susan and Edward lived in 2B, Arnold and Selena in 3A. There was a lawn in back inside a fence, with one tree and two picnic tables. There was a picnic, hamburgers, and boiled corn in a pot over the charcoal grill. Susan and Edward had never met Arnold and Selena. Arnold was an anxious young intern at the hospital, who had terrible working hours but was free that day. Selena was the most beautiful woman Arnold had ever seen. She had raven black hair, sea blue eyes, artificial lashes, snow white skin, her smile was both radiant and vibrant, her voice soft and gentle, and she flirted with the gentlemen, ladies, and children like a princess of cats. She was tense as electricity. Arnold on the other hand was big and bearlike and worried, and he hovered around Selena bringing her hamburgers, Cokes, marshmallows. He was respectful and bewildered when Edward boasted of quitting law school to become a writer, and he gazed at Susan in a vague pleasant way. He had dusty short curly hair, a T-shirt, dusty hair on his thick arms, and dusty eyebrows. He worked in the hospital emergency room and was shocked by his experiences, which he described in a shocked voice, while Selena approached the children like the beautiful wicked witch, and Edward glazed over.
After that they met often on the stairs, Arnold and Susan-Edward, though never Selena. Susan never saw Selena, though sometimes she heard an operatic soprano upstairs.
Selena was hospitalized in October, middle of the month Edward was spending alone with his typewriter in the woods. That was convenient: one wife and one husband go away, leaving the other pair to discover each other. Neither had entered the other’s mind, however, and Arnold’s immediate problem was to get the knife away from Selena. Sunday afternoon. Susan all by her lonely self was watching a football game, which is embarrassing to admit because she never watched football, but she was too distracted to read, and she was furthermore ironing and happened to see a touchdown scored just when she tuned in. So she watched the football game with memories not of Edward but of Jake, who used to take her to games every Saturday and slip his chilly hand inside her coat in the bleachers. She remembered this just when the rapid knock on her door, nervous enough to alert her, introduced her to her future. This was Arnold, big and scared like a child asking her could she come upstairs and help with Selena who was having a spell? Not knowing Selena had spells, Susan recognized emergency and rushed up with him and only later remembered how life with Edward also began with an emergency.
Locked in the bathroom with the carving knife. Be careful what she might do with it, Arnold said. Causing Susan to grab a weapon, which turned out to be a broom. The fixed memory of her first entry into Arnold’s apartment shows her carrying a broom in both hands, prepared to fend off the knife of a crazy woman who happened to be the most beautiful Arnold had ever seen—although Susan actually didn’t learn she was that until later, when he would tell her more times than necessary.
As they came into the apartment, with the cold sun streaming through the lofty windows and the doors open, Arnold called out, Selena, Susan’s here, can you come out to see her?
Susan who? The concealed voice was a metal screech behind the bathroom door in the vestibule, no operatic soprano today. I’m going to the bathroom for Christ sakes. Susan what, the neighbor? Did you go get her, you rat?
Come on, Selena.
Let me finish.
Arnold to Susan, aside, I called the hospital. They’re sending someone. The door opened and Selena came out. Blue jeans and dirty white T-shirt, hair disheveled, beauty haggard. Unaware of the knife in her hand while Susan held her broom.