Nocturnal Animals (aka Tony and Susan) by Austin Wright.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Nocturnal Animals (aka Tony and Susan).
Author: Austin Wright.
Genre: Fiction, crime.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1993.
Summary: Fifteen years ago, Susan Morrow left her first husband, Edward Sheffield. One day, comfortable in her home and her second marriage, she receives, entirely out of the blue, a parcel containing the manuscript of her ex-husband's first novel. She was always his best critic, he says. As Susan reads, she is drawn into the life of his fictional character Tony Hastings, a math professor who is driving his family to their summer house in Maine. As the Hastings family's ordinary, civilized lives are disastrously, violently sent off course when they are ran off the road by a group of thugs, Susan is plunged into the past, forced to confront the darkness that inhabits her, and is driven to name the fear that gnaws at her future and will changer her life.

My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:


♥ Meanwhile she runs the house, pays the bills, cleans and cooks, takes care of the kids, teaches three times a week in the community college, while her husband in the hospital repairs hearts. In the evening she reads, preferring that to television. She reads to take her mind off herself.

♥ Now she is really going to read it, she wonders what kind of novel it is. Like traveling without knowing what country you're going to.

♥ Books always resist her at the start, because they commit so much time. They can bury what she was thinking, sometimes forever. She could be a different person by the time she's through.

♥ The suggestion violated his sense of order and alarmed his habits. He was a mathematics professor who took pride in reliability and good sense. He had quit smoking six months before but sometimes still carried a pipe in his mouth for the steadiness it imparted. His first reaction to the suggestion was, don't be an idiot, but he suppressed that, wanting to be a good father. Her considered himself a good father, a good teacher, a good husband. A good man. Yet he also felt a kinship with cowboys and baseball players. He had never ridden a horse and had not played baseball since childhood, and he was not very big and strong, but he wore a black mustache and considered himself easygoing. Responding to the idea of vacation and the freedom of a highway at night, the sudden lark of it, he was liberated by the irresponsibility of not having to hunt for a place to stay, not having to stop at signs and go up to desks and ask for rooms, lifted by the thought of riding into the night leaving his habits behind.

♥ Martha the cat studies her, quietly puzzled. Every night Susan sits like this, stalking the flat white page in the glare as if she saw something which Martha sees is plainly not there. Martha understands stalking, but what can she stalk in her own lap, and how can she stalk with face so relaxed? Martha stalks for hours too, with only her tail twitching, but when she stalks there's always something, a mouse or bird or the illusion of one.

♥ She remembers Edward's cabin in the woods when he wanted to be a writer. Soft impressions. Short confessional poems with everything unsaid. Nostalgic sketches, loss and grief. Father deaths. Haunted harbor scenes. Melancholy sex in the pastoral woods. It was not easy to read Edward in those days.

♥ The brutal telephone invades her reading, violating Susan in the woods. It's Arnold checking in from his New York hotel, making her heart pound. Says he loves her, as if he thinks it necessary. Two minutes of awkward conversation with nervous pauses, strangers married twenty-five years.

♥ So he turned and continued as he had. The road was easier now, broader with fewer holes and rocks, not crowded so close by saplings and brush. But he was dragging a heavy chain of grief that tried to pull him back.

♥ There were worse possibilities.

There were. He knew that, he knew it well, it was the habit of his mind to know the worst case, the ultimate. His life was a scenario of disasters that never took place.

♥ These must be the worst thoughts he had ever had, and all around him he saw the sleeping world, road, woods, sky, doom.

♥ No problems are temporary until they are over. All problems are potentially permanent.

♥ This weakening of dark meant dawn, the night was ending. It brought despair, the coming of light catching his nightmare like a photographer and making it real. It brought relief. The pacification of common sense.

♥ "Never went in for traveling, myself," she said. "People is different in foreign parts. Never know what kind you run into."

He nodded, his mouth was full. Criticism disguised as sympathy, yes maam, he thought, but this happens to be your country where I ran into these people you never know what kind.

♥ The country was green and yellow, rolling and fresh in the morning light. The roads shone black in the sun. They sped suspended high on the sides of hills overlooking broad valleys full of fields and patches of woods, and they descended into woody groves and rode up curves and climbed long straight slopes and slowed for villages and passed clusters of farmhouses and sheds and fields of corn and other fields with cows and yards with pigs and sheep on the opposite slope and dark patches of trees on the tops of the hills. He thought, how beautiful this country if he had Laura to say it to.

♥ Suddenly, no not suddenly, he had seen it all along, but it was a new discovery too, Tony Hastings noticed the cave where his hope usually was, cold, blank, despoiled, a vacancy of future, as if these men were helping him to look for something that no longer was. It was retracing his empty steps that made him feel this, empty steps to the empty roads, empty woods, empty cars. A pretense of looking so you could say you had looked, you had tried. Since there was nothing else you could think of to do. It made you realize there was nothing else you could think of to do.

♥ You never find what you're looking for when you're looking, or if you do, you call it a miracle. Another reason for dread, as if the mere hunting for his wife and child on these empty roads where they clearly were not were the surest way to assure they would never be.

♥ Susan Morrow reads to a stop, shocked. You killed them, Edward, she says, you went ahead and did it. What she thought she couldn't bear. She feels stunned with Tony as if she had not seen it coming. A terrible sad crime, though she believes that if they had not died having come this far she would have bee disappointed. Poor Tony, how much her pleasure depends on his distress. She has a notion that the pain the scene uncovers, incarnated in Tony, is really her own, which is alarming. Her own designated pain, old or new, past or future, she can't tell which. It's obscure because she knows that unlike Tony's her pain is not here but somewhere else, and its absence, made so vivid, is what makes the moment thrilling. Not sure what she means by this, she resorts to critical appreciation. Appreciate the narrative, details of discovery, irrationality everywhere, denial of the obvious, appreciate that. Later you can criticize if you object to the victimization of women, for instance - but not yet, first submit, appreciate, horrible though it be.

♥ Thinking he ought to know, his own Laura and Helen, the thought knocked something loose in his throat, leaking down his cheeks like a child.

♥ He knew his loss was heavy even if he didn't feel its weight, and he ought to tell someone. Of course he should, it was his privilege as one bereaved. Bereaved.

♥ He took a taxi to Julio's and ate an Italian dinner alone, preceded by a drink. The drink reminded him of loneliness..

♥ "Something else," he said. Tony waited. "They were raped." He made this sound like the worst news yet, though Tony was not surprised to hear it. He was surprised to hear it, though.

♥ She always knew Edward liked violence despite his pursed lips. The violence of his restraint, his deliberate gentleness, his secretly angry pacifism.

♥ She said, you need to stop writing about yourself, nobody cares how fine your feelings are. He replied, Nobody ever writes about anything but himself.

♥ Tony Hastings, civilized, was raised by gentle people, intellectual and scholarly, mannerly and kind, his father a college dean, his mother a poet. He grew up in a brick house with a brother and sister and pets, they fed the birds and went to the Cape for the summer. He learned to hate prejudice and cruelty. As a young man he was courtly and considerate of women. He married for love and became a professor and bought a house and had a daughter and bought his own summer place in Maine. He read books, listened to music, played the piano, and had his wife's paintings on the walls of his house which was surrounded by a lawn with an oak tree. He kept a journal. Sometimes he suspected that being civilized concealed a great weakness, but since he could not conceive a remedy, he clung to it and took pride in it.

..Now he thought, I have seen it. I know what's our there, the walls of Troy. In the shock of his loss, Tony Hastings knew the importance of remaining civilized, with a bomb behind his eyeballs that would blow up if he was not careful. The way to defuse it with delicate ritual operations. The importance of remembering who he was, Tony Hastings, professor, resident of, son of, father of. Organizing words, constituting thought. Shaving carefully around his mustache. Preparing for what would be given him to feel.

♥ He drove fast but attentively. He said to himself, I am under unusual stress. Therefore I must pay attention to my attention and drive with care, and he drove with care.

♥ Violent men - their clawed fingers digging into the soft shoulders of his wife, his daughter, forcing them down in terror on a bare mattress with violent springs, cramming hate into the warm love Tony knew and his daughter's unknown future.

Driving into the hot blaze of ill-defined afternoon sun, he did not want to know how they died, it would be easier to leave it blank like all the other blank spots in the history of the world. But he did know. These were not anonymous victims of the world but Laura and Helen, a blow to the skull, strangulation.

♥ He steadied himself when he saw the house, standing so still like a picture of life.

♥ He seemed to be in a narrow track, and everywhere he went, he was surrounded by the tangible absence.

♥ In the house that night, they were their parents' three reunited children, though separated by adult life for so long they felt like strangers. Still, people in the house, talk in the kitchen, made a difference. The future was like a newborn wild beast, which their talk domesticated. What kind of life would Tony live now, should he keep the house, how well could he take care of himself?

♥ Then it was white cotton clouds and all the world as sea.

♥ She puts the manuscript in the box, and even that seems like violence, like putting the coffins into the ground: images from the book moving out into the house. Fear and regret. The fear is mirror to the fear with which she started. Then she was afraid of entering the novel's world, lest she forget reality. Now, leaving, she is afraid of not being able to return. The book weaves around her chair like a web. She has to make a hole in it to get out. The web damaged, the hole will grow, and when she returns, the web will be gone.

♥ Every night before descending into her mind, Susan Morrow performs rituals. Dog walk, kitty kitty, lock doors. Three children safe with a nightlight for the stairs. Teeth and hair, bed light, make love sometimes. Roll away from Arnold to the right, puff the pillow up, wait.

..Then like every night she waits for her mind, rumbling under the door in the floor. She puts her head into the pillow and waits. Biological sounds distract her, heart changing speed in her ear. Breathing unsettles her. Sometimes the intestinal lab works late, preparing a shipment to disturb her sleep. Speech from the day liquefies the hard surface of her mind like waves in a windstorm. Time to batten down, pack her plans and arguments. She stows Nocturnal Animals for the night.

The storm she waits for begins when the words in her head start speaking on their own. They come up through the trap door, people talking without her. Her mind is down there, and she hears the voices in the rooms with the flimsy partitions. This moment is scary because the danger is unknown. Her mind surges up and sucks her down, expanding then into a world, and though the country is familiar, she is a visitor. Each night she revisits places she has visited before and meets people, changed since her last visit. She's ashamed of her faulty memory, knowing what she can't remember is more important than what she can. With her orders in a sealed envelope which she has lost, she wanders, feet bare, legs paralyzed, she loses her footing and sails into the air, or struggles up the hill to meet the class already half through its hour, or sees her kindly dead father and asks if he minds being dead, or lets some quiet student sit on the desk with his hand approaching her crotch which he will never reach - while she tries to avoid the death room.

White morning assaults her with a moment of absolute blankness. She's expelled into the empty day. When she recognizes the blue flowered curtains in the window and the maple branches with a thick line of snow, the door in the floor has slammed shut. If she retains a fragment of dream, it will blow away unless she can chronologize it hand put it into words. Yet chronology and words kill it. The story that remains is no dream, and the dream remains uncaught, contiguous to the other dreams below the door, constituting one great unbroken lifetime dream all through the oblivious day, to be continued on her next visit down.

Meanwhile, in the empty cool morning light, dreamless, Susan Morrow, lacking at first even her name, gradually constructs the new day.

..By the time she is out of bed with her robe on to look at the snow (only a thin coat on the ground, which will disappear soon), Susan Morrow is restored without a gap. The new day stitches across the night's wound as if her conscious life with continuous.

♥ Things have changed since Susan gave up jealousy. She wakes up again, remembering. Liberated by a decision not to think, accepting the unknown for peace and not having to know if it needs to be accepted. Making for good marriage, stable and steady after sixteen years of doubt.

♥ Her day mind, which knows nothing of her other mind, is full of what's not there, but knows where everything is: Rosie upstairs with Carol, Dorothy outside, Henry with Mike, Arnold in New York.

And Edward. A long hook-up from the past, grabbing her by the mind. All day she keeps wondering, why am I thinking about Edward? His memory reverberates out of slumber like a dream, it flashes like birds tree to tree. It comes too fast, flits away too quickly. To keep it, she must chronologize it just the way she chronologizes her dreams. This kills it too. Her dead memory of Edward was stored in bound volumes years ago, while the new living Edward flies around outside uncaught.

♥ Two former children meeting after childhood, their chief care is to prove they are no longer children. This makes them friendly and civil, super-polite. Inquiries about mother and father, brother and sister. Genteel boasts of new sophistication plus rehearsed propaganda to explain our life decisions. No memory how awful things used to be.

♥ Yes she thought it wonderful. Blame it on the earlier antagonism. She had such a memory of his old manner that when his rudeness was replaced by civility, civility looked like glamor.

♥ He did not seem heartbroken. He seemed vigorous and enthusiastic about the future. But heartbroken was a secret state, which she could share. It occurred to her she was heartbroken too, on account of Jake, who was retaliating for her career choice by a program of worldwide travel and picking up girls. She and Edward could be heartbroken together. It gave them something to talk about, and it protected them from each other, like brother and sister: no need to worry about hearts since their hearts were broken.

Chaste and platonic, this was the deceptive situation that led to Edward's seducing Susan, or Susan's seducing Edward, whichever it was, the ultimate result being the marriage which made necessary their divorce. To be heartbroken means to have a story, and their stories brought them together, as they told them over, repeating and enlarging, Edward more than Susan, since she didn't have much to say about No Good Jake. He talked and she listened, with queries and advice, both knowing pretty well that it was not the story or Maria that mattered but the acts of telling and listening. This went on into the winter. She cooked dinner for him in his apartment, a sisterly thing to do, and they talked about his wounds until three. An engagement to marry. A flighty girl, too young to be tied down. He agreed with everything Susan said.

Looking back from the superior present, Susan sees that Edward's heartbreak was only the current local manifestation of his normal condition as he always encouraged her to see it. The notion that he had always been and always would be subtly hurt by life and was always gallantly trying to make himself strong. Why he was any more hurt than anyone else she never questioned then. There were enough specifics to make it sound good. The death of his father. The loss of his home with no one to take care of him except her own father and mother. Jilting fit right in.

♥ 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.

♥ 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, places made it visible.

♥ 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.

♥ 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.

♥ 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 your map it in words. You eyes are dim and you write to put your glasses on. No, you write because you read, to remake for your on 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.

She thought it sounded just fine. He made it look like a necessity of life. She was afraid, though, lest he be insufficiently nourished by what he could actually write.

♥ Well, she was a reader. If Edward couldn't live without writing, she couldn't live without reading. And without me, Edward, she says, you'd have no reason to exist. He was a transmitter, spending his resources, she a receptor who became richer the more she received. Her way with the chaps in her mind was to cultivate it through the articulations of others, by which she meant the reading of a lifetime with whose aid she created the interesting architecture and geography of herself. She had constructed over the years a rich and civilized country, full of history and culture with views and vistas she had never dreamed of in the days when Edward wanted to make his visions known. How thin those visions seemed compared to the lands she had seen.

♥ She thinks. Tried to remember Tony who lost his family in the woods. Not ready yet. Wrong mood. She dreams a little, thinking herself into Tony. Dreaming, comparing this case to hers, what kind of novel would Susan's troubles make? How much more terrible his are, except that hers are real, his imaginary, made up by somebody - by Edward. His are simpler too, stark questions of life and death, in contrast to hers, which are ordinary, messy, and minor, complicated by uncertainty as to whether they rate as troubles at all. Troubles are the homeless, people ravaged by poverty, war, crime, disease. Is Marilyn Linwood a trouble? Whose affair with Arnold ended three years ago but might still be going on. Susan doesn't know if it is, honestly, she doesn't. And won't ask.

♥ Patients die. He says it can't be avoided and takes it stoically. Sometimes when he talks about dead patients she wants to cry, though they are only strangers, for someone ought to cry besides those who have an interest. But she doesn't cry lest it look like a criticism which she has no right to make.

♥ Merton met them in a station wagon, touched his arm, long dace in his beard, expressing the inexpressible. Tony saw the intent, and realized he didn't like Merton. He never had, which was a surprise because he had always liked Merton.

♥ "Would you like to walk to the inlet?" he said. It was hard to ask questions like that, for words sat on his chest like lead.

..He spent two weeks at the Cape, trying to be depressed without being uncongenial.

♥ The house was an empty tank full of grief. Their empty ghosts floated everywhere they were not. Not the box of jewelry left open on the dresser. Neither the drawers nor the closets where her dresses hang, where he fingered their textures. He wrapped her heavy gray sweater around his head. Sentimental and pious, he watered the hanging plants she had left in the vestibule. Pick up the blue and white china. Not using the Hitchcock chairs, nor the electric can opener in the kitchen. Not typing a letter at her old rolltop desk in what she does not call the sewing room through she does no sewing there. Nor her easel, her crazy palette, unframed canvases against the studio wall.

How detached are her two big paintings in the living room, the one all pale blue like an early morning misty seascape, the other hues of pink and orange, serene and constant, ignorant of future force and rape and hammer. Helen's stupid stuffed panda, symbol of sentimentality with calculated big glass eyes and oversized head, does to him what it was made to do where it sits on the bed in the room full of the house that Jack built.

In the morning he waited to hear the sound of water in the bathroom. He expected to hear the screen door and the footsteps on the walk staring off to school. He wanted to say good bye when he left the house but she must have gone upstairs. When he came back in the afternoon, she would be painting in her studio, he would listen at the foot of the stairs. The afternoon advanced, he was waiting to hear the other one come busting through the screen door. After dinner he would wait for her so they cold go for their walk.

He plotted these rediscoveries of absence so they would come as pulses of surprise, to maintain the steady flow of grief. They enabled him to realize it again, over and over. He would deliberately forget and then restore the order in which things happened. The strange oblongs covered by white cloth in the church were later than the canvas cocoons carried out of the bushes, which were later than the mannequins in the bushes. These came after they were driven off in the car in the night, which was later than anything that ever happened in this house. Nothing in this house was more recent than what happened by the road, nothing is newer of fresher than their death. The last you ever saw them, Tony Hastings told himself with astonishment, would always be their scared faces in the car driving down the road.

He talked it over with her. He said, The worst moment was when Ray and Turk forced themselves into the car with you. That was pretty bad, she agreed. No, he corrected himself, the worst was when I first saw something in the bushes and realized it was you. She smiled. He said, I wish you could tell me your part of it. So do I, she said.

The other one climbing down the stairs at night, two at a time, thump crash at the bottom, letting the screen door slam. He asked, what should I do with her things, the stuffed animals, the china horses, I need your advice. I know, she said.

♥ A feeling of disaster averted, though a danger still remains of bogging down in thoughts. Stop, Susan tells Susan, let it be. It could have been worse. The evening is for reading, and to continue that she must wipe herself out of her mind.

♥ What's bothering her is something else. Reading pushes through the sea like a swimmer. The creatures of Susan's daylight mind, animals of land and air, sink into it, converted into dolphins, submarines, fish. Something bites her while she swims, a small toothy shark. She needs to drag it into the air where can see. While Tony Hastings grieves, it bites.

When the sea recedes she's back to Arnold on the telephone.

..The question he reproached her for was whatever it was. He asked why she wanted to know, and she said something. That did not satisfy him, he probed, she resisted, and he said, You're asking about Linwood.

I didn't say that, she said.

She heard his impatient intake of breath. You did ask. So I'll tell you. It hasn't been decided. It's an opportunity, and she has a sister in Washington. I thought you understood. I wish you hadn't asked that question.

She wished she hadn't asked that question.

There's nothing to do but drop it back into the sea. Back to Tony..

♥ His friends had discovered how much his acceptability in their houses had depended on his wife's grace and charm. He knew what they were thinking. Without her he was a dark absence. The students mocked him behind his back. The girls avoided his eyes and watched his moves, ready to slap a suit on him. He looked up pariah: a low caste Indian with a turban chained next to the goat in the yard with the ragged castaway on the beach.

♥ The tall girl, her wheat colored hair, loose flowing, the relieved smile. She said, "I want you to know, if there's anything I can do. We're pulling for you."

Her looking eyes, sea blue, yearning to be interpreted.

♥ The house was church, where he prayed his ghosts to restore his soul. Worship service. He put his books on the table and went to the shelf in the living room where he kept the album. Prayer book. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Tableau. She sits on the couch, he in the chair, Helen on the floor leaning against the coffee table, saying, "You did? No kidding?"

Bible lesson. "Then I began to wonder why I found myself talking to him every day as we came out of class and suddenly I realized he was waiting for me, and I was thrilled."

Helen amused. "You sound like a couple of kids."

"We were a couple of kids."

Tradition. "Your father is the steadiest of men. That's worth something over the long haul." Praise Daddy.

History. The spirit of inquiry, giggling. "You know what I mean? It's absolutely impossible to imagine you two as lovers."

"Your Daddy is very loving in his way."

Mystery. The question Helen wanted to ask but did not want answered, which she never asked because not to answer was as much an answer as an answer.

Ritual. April a year ago on bikes after dinner. Signs of the coming, buds, new birds. Daughter leads the way, changing the route each evening, different turns around different blocks. Daddy goes last, guarding the others through the quiet streets, alert when a car goes by, tense when they come out to the main street between the parked cars and the traffic. When they get home it's dark. Homework time, no televisions tonight folks. Peace now, all dangers have been left behind.

♥ What do I need?

There was a moment while she looked at him. The look grew long, it meant something. Serious, no smile, blue eyes speaking. It passed and she was smiling again in her usual way of partial implication, balance complicity. He thought, I missed something. I have just been told, and now it is too late.

♥ He saw his eloquence carrying him away. He saw she was bored. He thought, I'm not a nice person any more, and his sexual feeling died.

♥ As if he needed a ceremony to return Tony to Tony. He imagined a primitive god, male and savage.

The image made him laugh, but the laughter had no feeling, and the next moment he had this overwhelming conviction that no thought of his had any feeling. He saw all his recent behavior on a screen with light shining thorough, disclosing emptiness. His wild driving on the road an hour ago, a display to conceal something he did not have. The revelation spread, it delved into the past, all the way back to the catastrophe, and all it found was counterfeit, or fake. Phony feelings acted out. It frightened him, not for the abyss but for what would happen if anyone found out, thinking, This is something no one must know. A secret. In the layer afternoon inside his house, he looked for his soul and saw only white indifference beneath the calculated displays of grief and, as that became wearisome, irritability and rage. He recognized the privileges grief had given him. What no one knew was how he had fooled them. He was an artificial man, fabricated of gestures.

He paced around the house totally free.

♥ She feels bruised by her reading and by life too. She wonders, does she always fight her books before yielding to them? She rides back and forth between sympathy for Tony and exasperation. If only she didn't have to talk to Edward afterwards. If you say Tony is going mad - or turning into a jerk - you need to be sure Tony is not really Edward.

♥ We have a crime, a victim, a reaction, and a so far unsuccessful search for the killers. She thinks, she thinks: will Tony Hastings be destroyed or redeemed? A bad happy ending would ruin everything, but it's hard to imagine what a good one would be.

♥ Alone in his big house he talked on, perfecting a rage. He said, You think it's easy to become Tony Hastings? It takes forty years. It needs loving mother and intellectual father, a summer place, lessons on the back porch. Sister and brother to fence temper and create sensitivity to others' distress. Years of reading and study and wife and daughter to force pain into habit and make a man.

But it's even harder to become Laura Hastings. Assembled in the long accumulating day by day as Laura Turner, by Meyer Street and Dr. Handelman, with Donna and Jean, the lake in the mist and the death of Bobo and the studio, Laura Hastings is not completed but just begun in her forty years of life. Laura Hastings is (was) not the life she lived but the forty years yet to be lived, as promised.

Beasts, do you think it easier to replace Helen Hastings? Hers is the longest lifetime of all, fifty to sixty years just begun, extracted from the outgrown child by the growing world, from the original Laura-Tony germ to sleepy song and Little Golden Book, momdad and doggie love with notebooked poems to the unbreakable contract of a grownup Helen-in-the-world.

Nothing, beasts, is harder to build or more impossible to replace than the unlived years of these three. Not your cars, your cocks, your sleazy girlfriends, your own ratty little souls. Tony Hastings imagined those cars, cocks, girlfriends and souls. He lived among them, looking for words to make his hatred overwhelming. A story, an account sufficiently degrading. Of stupid grown men who got this notion from movies or television and school bullies of how to be a man by pushing people around. Let's go out on the road and scare the squares. No more teachers' dirty looks, let's get the prissy girls and the right-assed schoolmoms, give em a taste. If you get in trouble, knock them off. Tony Hastings looked for words adequate to his rage. Vile, wretched, cowardly. Low, vicious, despicable. Not evil: that word gave them too much dignity. The words he sought were lower and worse than evil. With such rhetoric he tried to replace the soul he thought he had lost.

♥ "I'd like them to know what they did. I'd like them to be shown exactly what it was they did."

"They know what they did, Tony."

"They don't know what it means."

"Maybe they do. They just don't care."

"I'd like to make them care."

"Repent? Say how sorry they are?"

"I'd like them to know exactly how awful a thing they did."

"Tony, is that possible?"

"I suppose not."

"Is it even what you want? Say Ray did learn that. He'd be a different person. Shouldn't he then go free?"

"He mustn't go free."

"He knows he hurt you, Tony. Count on it, he knows."

"I'd like to hurt him back."

"Hurt him. But not kill him?"

"Kill him too? Both."

"Both? It's not enough for him just to suffer?"

"I'd like him to suffer the agony of dying."

"Ah. Torture?"

"I would like him to know he is dying and I'd like him to know why. That's what I mean by agony."

"Would you like to kill Ray yourself?"

"I'd like him to know he is dying because of me."

"Aha." She smacked her fist into her hand. "You don't want him to understand how bad he was. You don't give a damn about that. You want him to know he can't hurt you like that and get away with it. Because of who you are."

"He can't do that to me and get away with it."

"Now you're talking."

Her gold-edged hair hung down one side of her face as she leaned on her hand, her eyes eager and beautiful on his behalf.

"I remember Helen lecturing Laura and me what a primitive emotion revenge is. We made a fine distinction between revenge and justice, and I remember how civilized we thought we were."

"You were civilized. It's Ray who's not."

"That puts a burden on me" he said.

"It does if you think it does."

♥ Tony calculated. This was thirty miles from Bobby's office. It was fifteen miles from the place in the woods where they had taken him. Predators travel far in the night.

♥ Almost a year had passed since this place located itself in Tony's mind, and it was hard to believe he had only been here twice. Since then, the leaves had fallen into it, the branches had gone bare, the heavy mountain snows had covered it and new green had appeared on everything, the scrub and undergrowth and all the high branches. All this green was new, a different growth from what he had stumbled through and recapitulated after, and it reminded Tony of the bleeding green agony of his grief, forgotten, left behind in the time between, the shame making everything since then a masquerade of neglect or a long foolish hibernation in the locked house of his living.

..They came to the end. New meadow grass covered all where the police cars had been. Tony saw the deep loss in the bushes of what he did not see.

♥ 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.

♥ 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.

♥ 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.

♥ 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.

♥ She remembered this just when the rapid knock on her door, nervous enough to alert her, introduced her to her future. This was Arnold..

♥ That poor man cooking himself something to eat before those emergency nightmares: well, Susan was kind enough to invite him to dinner. You ask, did Susan have any consciousness, there in front of the old passionless cashier, of impropriety, the wife of a man lost in the woods cooking for the husband of a woman lost in psychiatry? This was one of those nodal points in a history, which because of its consequences people like Susan look back to.

Is it wrong, when your husband is away, to do a good deed for your temporarily wifeless neighbor who would otherwise cook for himself or go around to Gordon's for a bite? There are two sides to the question. One is what your neighbors think. Susan felt free to ignore them, remote in their own lives, even their names almost forgotten since the summer picnic. The other side is what you yourself think, with two options. One, not to think anything. Out of perfect innocence changes will arise that no one need foresee. Certainly Susan made an effort toward such absence of thought. The other option was to go ahead and think. But that means something exists to think about.

..Yet it was not quite an ordinary dinner after all, you must admit. The candles were a detail she hadn't intended. She put the

..Yet even by candlelight Susan Sheffield and Arnold Morrow retained their disguises, she the wife of and he the husband of. Still, she felt this high pitched noise in her hair or neck or solar plexus, making the moment extraordinary. ..thinking how easy to be free, what delicious things could be done in Edward's wonderful absence if you were the kind of person who did such things. Susan was not that kind. Susan was Susan, from Edgar's Lane, teacher of Freshman English, well organized, coherent, grammatical, unified, with margins on all sides, always ready to revise and improve herself. This Susan had delicious wild thoughts full of mountains and forests and floating streams, with fish on the wing and birds at sea, thoughts concentric and phallic, with penis hunting in the mists and cave exploration in the hermaphroditic clouds, but they were only thoughts, unacted, unuttered, the absent underside of Susan the Good.

Nothing happened that a witness listening or a tape recorder under the table could have reported to Edward or Selena. Despite which, by the time Arnold left for his nightly encounter with blood and bones, heart attacks and mutilations and decapitations, Susan was pitched so high she could hardly stand it. We've got to do this again, she said to herself, knowing something she wanted now, though still not allowing herself to think it. As he stood by the door, he grateful and bearlike, she asked, Will you come again night after tomorrow?

She went to bed trying to remember what it was like to love Edward. The next dinner she served Arnold was resolutely austere and functional in the bare electric overhead light, but she had no resistance later to what Arnold wanted to do in the double bed that belonged to Susan and Edward, while Selena was breathing hard trying to sleep under restraint in her hospital room, and Edward in his wooded cabin was getting depressed trying to find himself. When Arnold later went back to another night of crisis, Susan belatedly tried to grieve.

♥ It had never occurred to her her marriage was in jeopardy.

She did not mean it to end. It was over and not over. Edward would come back and never know, and Arnold would return to Selena, and Susan was henceforth an unfaithful wife. Against the electric joy of the new, she went bang against the wrong she was doing. Edward affronted, their hopes betrayed - if he knew. She was a jaded woman now, with a secret. She asked Arnold, who had it all figured out.

Who's going to tell, he said, you? He had a philosophy according to which sex, vastly overemphasized by people attaching their egos to it, had nothing to do with his responsibilities to Selena (whom he would never abandon) nor hers to Edward. Arnold was especially down on jealousy, the stupidest of all emotions, nothing but property and power thinking they're love. That's my philosophy, he said while they lay open on the sheets, chatting in the sweaty afterglow.

She remembered having used the same argument (sex is natural) to rouse Edward. That was different. It led to marriage, for one thing. Yet already in this little taste of crime or nature (whichever), she had glimpsed a better life.

♥ On the other hand, contemporary Susan remembers how, to preserve the status quo, she found and cuddled a frail feeling like a live or maybe stuffed small animal: Edward's dearness. Like what she has cuddled when needed in more recent times: Arnold's dearness. Since Arnold's dearness looks very much like Edward's, the two animals are perhaps the same and ought to be called Susan's dearness.

♥ Once when he had asked her to be brutally frank, she tried to tell him. She raised the question whether he had enough talent for what he wanted. Do you have to be a writer? she asked. That was a mistake. He reacted as if she had suggested suicide. You might as well ask me to blind myself, he said. Writing was like seeing, he said, not to write was blindness. She never made that mistake again.

♥ He did not get angry. He kept asking her to confirm she didn't want a divorce. He didn't dare ask if she loved him, so she said it without being asked.

Contemporary Susan thinks her confession perked him up. A respite from his depression. The next time in bed he seemed to enjoy thinking about the unnamed lover in the air. He was tactful enough not to ask for comparisons. She figured she had broken down a wall whose presence she had not noticed until it was gone. Now we know each other better, she thought. Not so romantic, weaker than we thought, which is maybe good to know. Her marriage would be stronger, she thought, believing she was glad of it.

♥ One secret leads to another. Because they couldn't meet where they lived, they used her office phone for messages, trusting a friend of Arnold's who had a room or else meeting dangerously in secluded corners of the park or in deserted offices after classes, and Edward took her late arrivals for granted. The old saga recreates Susan's dilemma, caused by not knowing what kind of narrative she was in. A wife resumes an affair with her married lover. Though the husband knows of the earlier affair, he does not know about this one. And though the lover wants to be free of his institutionalized wife, he hasn't done anything about it, nor has he decided what his obligations are. Susan is therefore once again an unfaithful wife. What is the future if you are an unfaithful wife? Is this transitional to a new life, a step in the dismantling of Edward? Or is it a permanent concession to weakness, one infidelity after another? The issue is hard because she is a person loyal and true. If she is to remain Edward's wife, even though unfaithful, she ought to defend the Edward castle, protect its icons. If this is transitional, she should dismantle the castle without delay, tell Edward the truth and cut the ties. Love, love.

♥ Officially, the divorce was amicable. They were polite and did not dispute the ownership of things, but there was a moody cloud. Speech was hard, especially after she moved out. When they met in the divorce court, though there had been no quarrel, she felt as if it had been all quarrel.

♥ The family is Dorothy, Henry, Rosie, and it's Arnold and herself, and she is the mother. It's the one thing in her life she knows is important, no doubt about that. Like it or not, it's who I am, she says. She knows it, Arnold knows it. It's what they know together.

They settled this for good three years ago with the Marilyn Linwood understanding. Their implicit agreement, never quite put into words, established by the events as they occurred. That Arnold remained, that he continued to act the parts of husband and father, that after enough had been said nothing more was said, proved the point, which is that Linwoods come and go. In the long run they mean nothing at all.

She stands by him, that's what it is. She never thought of it in those words. She always thought of herself as healthily selfish taking care of her interests, but it's true, isn't it?, she stands by him and always did. Not because he is Arnold but because once in the past she settled down to become his wife. And then the world turned into a crystal around them. She stands by him through Linwood in the same automatic way in which she stood by him in the Macomber malpractice suit, just as she'll accompany him if he goes to Washington (selling house, severing kids from school and friends, everything) for the advancement of his career. She'll do it, of course she will.

It's not just that they, with their children, house, car, dog, cat, engraved checks and writing paper, have created an institution like a bank, it's that the world is cold, lonely, and dangerous, and they need each other for shelter. This book she's reading knows about that. Tony in high plight should appreciate how fiercely she clings. He should. Yet this makes her uneasy, for she mistrusts Edward's book. She doesn't know why. It nudges a certain alarm in her, a fear whose object she does not know but which seems different from the fear in the story itself, something rather in herself. She thinks, if Edward intends, through Tony or in some other way, to shake her faith in her life, well - she'll resist, that's all. She'll simply resist. There are things in life the reading of no mere book can change.

♥ "I've always wanted to come here. Even before your wife died."

She stood in the middle of Laura's living room, looking at Laura's paintings, the piano, the bookcases, sofa, chair, coffee table. Violating Laura by not being her. She was not his wife, nor his daughter, he hardly knew her, yet he wanted to take hold of her like an intimate, a member of his family. The paradox made him dizzy.

♥ With the shriek of the wind, the pounding and constant presence of tires that could explode and engine that could burn out and shell that could rattle apart. Impatience rewoke with every mileage sign and back to sleep with the gentle curving of the road. The journey sheltered him for the time, hypnotizing him against its own dangers and keeping all else at bay.

♥ Meanwhile, dialogue. Susan likes dialogue, how print fastens ephemeral words to the page like flattened animals on the road, so you can go back and inspect them in their non sequitur, as when Bobby Andes says irrelevantly: This place stinks. Yet behind all this imagined Pennsylvania and Ohio stands the ego of Edward the Writer. Tony Hastings, Ray Marcus, Bobby Andes, Louise Germane, the shades of Laura and Helen, these people who have, as she imagines, some relationship to herself, all are icons of that great Edward ego, projected on a screen. Twenty-five years ago she ejected the Edward ego, clumsy and crude, from her life. How subtly it works now, soaking up her own, converting hers into his.

♥ It was dim, the room gloomy, with only the one light, a sixty-watt bulb hanging from the cross beam. The brown cardboard walls, pictures from magazines posted with thumbtacks, wild animals, mountains, a calendar three years old. Fishing rods, a shovel, a two-man saw, stacked together in the corner. A musty smell, an old remnant of skunk. Even in the night Tony was conscious of the cavern shaped around the house by the trees, a feeling of damp woe, of rotted memory, of Bobby Andes's misery.

♥ There's time only for a moment to savor the melancholy of Bobby's camp and think of the pervading grief in all summer places, cabins or cottages in the woods or on the shore, Penobscot Bay or the Cape in childhood, Michigan now, which is not just the memory sadness when childhood is over and the place is gone, nor the generic sadness of boarding up the windows, but sadness of the height of the season, of bright sightseeing days as well as foggy ones in the hammock, of August silence, retreat of the birds, the goldenrod, the goodbye in every greeting. The sad vanity of measuring time by summers, eliding winter and the rest of things.

♥ "His eyes are open," she said.

"That's what they do when they die," Ingrid said. "They open their eyes but they can't see."

♥ Things go sour. Food spoils, milk curdles, meat rots. In the dim light of the camp there's this feeling of accident and breakage. The death of Lou Bates was not a right death.

♥ "I have no choice."

She didn't say anything, but he heard it anyway. "Fuck you," he said.

♥ Violence thrills her like brass in the symphony. Susan, who is well past forty, has never seen a killing. Last year in McDonald's she saw a policeman with a gun jump a guy eating a sandwich. That's the size of violence in her life. Violence happens in the world, in the parks, ghettos, Ireland, Lebanon, but not in her life - not yet.

Knock wood, knock knock. Safe insured Susan lives on the verge of disaster because everything she knows has happened, whereas the future is blind. In a book there is no future. In its place is violence, substituting thrill for fear, like the thrill in a roller coaster. Never forget what's possible, it says, if you, lucky Susan with secure home and family (so unlike the world), should happen like Tony to meet something vicious in the night. If you had the gun, would you use it any better than Tony?

♥ "Is that why you did it?" Tony said. "Because it was fun?"

"Sure. That was why."

At that moment, Tony felt an explosion of what he thought was disgust but was really joy. The light was blinding, and it lit clearly the difference between himself and Ray, how simple it was. The fact was that Ray was wrong, Tony was not like his notion of everybody, he belonged to a different species of which a savage like Ray was completely ignorant. It was not that Tony was inhibited or asleep to the joys of killing, but that he knew too much, had too much imagination to be capable of such a pleasure. Not that he had not yet grown up to appreciate such joys but that he had grown out of them as a natural part of the process of maturation. The possible fun of killing had been trained and cultivated out of him by a civilizing process of which Ray had no comprehension, and Tony was full of fierce and vengeful contempt for that lack of comprehension. It gave him a luminous clear feeling, where he had hitherto been murky and uncertain. He felt confident. He felt right, knowing he could trust his instincts and feelings. He felt invigorated, and in this exiting mood he made a decision.

♥ Again Susan finds the screened porch in her mind, the one in Maine, the path and rocky steps by the boathouse, the still harbor with a mirror afternoon sheen across to the trees. Dying, like her mother and father. Like Bobby Andes. Like her jealousy. Like Edward's writing. Like this book.

♥ The devil has a skull like Tony's. The devil had guts and organs, charted in an endlessly replicated geography like his own, like all of us, making it easy for doctors, who would find the same things wherever they looked.

♥ If they did not come: a remnant of brain suggested he should be thinking about dying, he should be giving it his full attention. Tony Hastings dying, think of that. He ought to be more surprised. Vaguely he remembered things he had wanted to think about when he died, but he couldn't remember what they were.

♥ The book ends. Susan has watched it dwindle before her eyes, down through final chapter, page, paragraph, word. Nothing remains and it dies. She is free now to reread or look back at parts, but the book is dead and will never be the same again. In its place, whistling through the gap it left, a blast of wind like liberty. Real life, coming back to get her.

She needs a silence before returning to herself. Absolute stillness, no thought, no interpretation or criticism, just a memorial silence for the reading life that has ended.

♥ Her thought is full of rancor. She tries to correct for that, in fairness. In fairness, she too was bothered by Tony's lack of backbone, which explains how she can invent Arnold's critique. Don't do that, Tony you fool, she would say. But never thought of complaining to Edward, because she knew his reply: that's what he's supposed to do. If she understands that, Arnold can too. Arnold should understand Tony's dilemma with the gun. To have it and be unable to use it: for Susan that's real life, unlike the movies, where the mere display of a gun by anybody confers the powers of God. Susan in the cabin in that situation would have been no more able to use the gun than Tony was. She should praise Edward for that, but hesitates, if the thought contains more than she knows: if in that flash of Tony the Wimp, there's a spreading reflection of herself.

Well, Arnold would deny that. Patronizingly perhaps, he would assure her: Tony and Susan? There's no resemblance in the least. I know my Susan. If Ray and his pals attacked your children, you'd fight in ways polite Tony never dreamed. You'd jump and grab him by the throat, bite, kick, pluck his eyes. There's no way you'd let a thug hurt yours as Tony does, as you well know.

Right, Susan knows. She knows her Susan.

♥ Such thought is a furnace, it converts everything, including the novel itself. A fiery question: Why did you send it if you don't want to discuss it? That he could send it out of spite had no occurred to her.

She eats with the children, tries to join their chat as if nothing were on her mind. By the time they are finished, it's obvious: it was not her neglect that caused her to miss Edward. Setting her up for the snub, he's given her a startling new view of himself.

Out of the forgotten she remembers how bitterly he resented her failure to appreciate the dignity of his writing. Like blinding, he said: your attitude blinds me. Evidently he's angry still. Unforgiving twenty-five years later for an offense equivalent to blinding, and the novel his revenge.

..Her anger depends on how she phrases it, feeding on the language by which she defines Edward's affront, like this: his novel as hate. His favor as trap. Her right to read censored. It gets away from her, what she's angry about, proving to be other than she thought. It comes down to this: the strain, the sheer strain. The strain of maintaining fairness through the humiliation of being wrong. The strain of ignoring love and hate so as to read dispassionately for three sittings. The strain of entering his imagination, of being Tony, only to be kicked out as impertinent. The strain of ignoring the strain, and then to be snubbed.

♥ As she gets into bed (closing out for good the possibility of meeting Edward) there's a conflagration of shame all through her mind. A vast image of the world moving, tectonic plates shifting, spreads out like solitude.

♥ He has been with Marilyn Linwood. She decides it is true, she thinks it deliberately, lets her mind dwell, turns her imagination to it, visualizing everywhere, New York, Chicago, her apartment, the patient couch in his office, Washington, Chickwash. Does this in direct violation of the mental discipline she adopted three years ago that would enable her to accept the status quo. Enough of that. If she can't tolerate the imagining, she has no right to the status quo.

..Must I take this? Susan asks Susan. You have no choice, they say. You're past the time of revolt or denial.

..So she tries a strange word on her silent lips, the word hate. She's afraid to use it, lest it commit her to a drastic revolutionary life. Is she strong enough for that? Among her vows when she split with Edward was never to split again. A foolish vow. But it's no mere vow that holds her now. It's the institution, departments and physical plant, an institution no less real than Chickwash: Mommy, Daddy, and the Kids, Inc. If Susan torched the corporation, where would she go? How could she escape blame for arson at this time of life?