What’s left? She’ll find out. She begins Monday night, day after Christmas, after Arnold has gone. It will take her three evenings to complete.
THE FIRST SITTING
ONE
That night, as Susan Morrow settles down to read Edward’s manuscript, a fear shocks her like a bullet. It begins with a moment of intense concentration which disappears too fast to remember, leaving a residue of unspecified fright. Danger, threat, disaster, she doesn’t know what. She tries to recover what was on her mind, thinking back to the kitchen, the pans and cooking utensils, the dishwasher. Then to catching her breath on the living room couch, where she had the dangerous thought. Dorothy and Henry with Henry’s friend Mike are playing Monopoly on the study floor. She declines their invitation to play too.
There’s the Christmas tree, cards on the mantel, games and clothing with tissue paper on the couch. A mess. The traffic at O’Hare dies in the house, Arnold is in New York by now. Unable to remember what frightened her, she tries to ignore it, rests her legs on the coffee table, puffs and wipes her glasses.
The worry on her mind insists, it’s greater than she can explain. She dreads Arnold’s trip, if that’s what it is, like the end of the world, but finds no logical reason for such a feeling. Plane crash, but planes don’t crash. The convention seems innocuous. People will recognize him or spot his name tag. He’ll be flattered as usual to discover how distinguished he is, which will put him in the best of moods. The Chickwash interview will do no harm if nothing comes of it. If by rare chance something does come of it, there’s a whole new life and the opportunity to live in Washington if she wants. He’s with colleagues and old hands, people she should trust. Probably she’s just tired.
Still, she postpones Edward. She reads short things, the newspaper, editorials, crossword puzzle. The manuscript resists, or she resists, afraid to begin lest the book make her forget her danger, whatever that is. The manuscript is so heavy, so long. 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. This case is worse than usual, for Edward coming back to life brings new distractions that have nothing to do with her thoughts. He’s dangerous too, unloading his brain, the bomb in him. Never mind. If she can’t remember her trouble, the book will paint over it. Then she won’t want to stop. She opens the box, looks at the title—Nocturnal Animals. She sees, going into the house at the zoo through the tunnel, glass tanks in dim purple light with strange busy little creatures, huge ears and big eye globes, thinking day is night. Come on, let’s begin.
Nocturnal Animals 1
There was this man Tony Hastings, his wife Laura, and his daughter Helen, traveling east at night on the Interstate in northern Pennsylvania. They were starting their vacation, going to their summer cottage in Maine. They were driving at night because they had been slow starting and had been further delayed having to get a new tire along the way. It was Helen’s idea, when they got back into the car after dinner, somewhere in eastern Ohio: “Let’s not look for a motel,” she said, “let’s drive all night.”
“Do you mean that?” Tony Hastings said.
“Sure, why not?”
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. He 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.
“Are you willing to share the driving at three a.m.?”
“Anytime, Daddy, anytime.”
“What do you think, Laura?”
“You won’t be too tired in the morning?”
He knew the exotic night would be followed by the ghastly day and he would feel horrible trying not to fall asleep in the afternoon and getting them back on a normal schedule, but he was a cowboy on vacation, and it was a good time to be irresponsible.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
So on they went, zipping along the Interstate through the slowly descending June twilight, bypassing industrial cities, bending slowly at high speed around the curves and over the long rises and descents through farm land while the sun sinking behind them flashed in the windows of farmhouses in the high meadows ahead. The family of three was ecstatic with novelty, exclaiming to each other on the beauty of the countryside in this declining day, this angle of light looking away from the sun with the yellow fields and green woods and houses all tinted and changed with ambiguous brightness, and the road pavement also ambiguous, silver in the mirror and black in front.
They stopped for gas in the twilight, and when they came back to the highway the father Tony saw a ragged hitchhiker standing on the shoulder of the ramp up ahead. He began to accelerate. The hitchhiker had a sign, BANGOR ME.
The daughter Helen cried in his ear, “He’s going to Bangor, Daddy. Let’s pick him up.”
Tony Hastings sped up. The hitchhiker had overalls and bare shoulders, a long yellow beard and a band around his hair. The man’s eyes looked at Tony as he went past.
“Aw, Daddy.”
He looked over his shoulder to clear his way back to the highway.
“He was going to Bangor,” she said.
“You want his company for twelve hours?”
“You never stop for hitchhikers.”
“Strangers,” he said, wanting to warn Helen of the world’s dangers but sounding like a prig just the same.
“Some people aren’t as fortunate as we,” Helen said. “Don’t you feel guilty passing them up?”
“Guilty? Not me.”
“We have a car. We have space. We’re going the same way.”
“Oh Helen,” Laura said. “Don’t be such a schoolgirl.”
“My pals who hitchhike home from school. What would they do if everybody thought like you?”
Silent a little. Helen said, “That guy was perfectly nice. You can tell, how he looked.”
Tony amused, remembering the ragged man. “That guy who wanted to bangor me?”
“Daddy!”
He felt wild in the growing night, exploratory, the unknown.
“He had a sign,” Helen said. “That was polite of him, a considerate thing to do. And he had a guitar. Didn’t you notice his guitar?”
“That wasn’t a guitar, that was a machine gun,” Tony said. “All thugs carry their machine guns in instrument cases so they’ll be mistaken for musicians.”