She considers driving into the city (letting the kids have pizza by themselves), going to the Marriott to catch him when he comes back. Too frantic. Better to cook dinner as planned, with enough for Edward when he calls. She blames herself, stupid. Later, during a time in the preparations with nothing to do but wait for the stove, she has twenty minutes to sit at the kitchen table and think. Time to change course, reverse, shift guilt-in to anger-out. To sizzle with the stove. Why should you take the blame, Susan? He’s free to call. Not to call is a snub. Raise that to insult: three evenings she spent at his request reading his novel in good faith, with so much effort preparing what to say, and he didn’t care enough to call.
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 not 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.
The novel as revenge is preposterous, but the idea won’t go away. In what sense is it revenge, how is its punishment supposed to work? Figure that out. An allegory? She denies the charges. She has not blinded him, hurt him, destroyed his life, has done no damage whatever—as the novel’s own achievement proves. At the kitchen sink with the dishes, she can resent too, resentment bites her lips demanding gesture and breakage, requiring her strongest efforts for self-control.
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.
Irked. Of course, the message may not have been delivered. At 9:30 she calls the hotel again. Edward is still out. She leaves another message. After eleven, she hears the car turn into the garage, Arnold returning late. The thought of what he brings is too horrible to think, and she hurries upstairs, preparing quickly while he eats his bowl of Wheaties in the kitchen, to be in bed and asleep before he comes up so she won’t have to talk to him. The necessity for this makes her fume. 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.
Susan as idiot, such a ninny. She lies in bed wide awake, no trapdoor down tonight—it’s shut tight—the floor solid and bitter, thoughts racing and raging. Scolding herself for what she was imagining a few hours ago. She sees herself, fatuous gullible Susan, Arnold’s healthy-faced skier, sentimental as a puppy-dog, leaving messages for Edward like an abandoned lover, like a groupie, begging for the right to talk, about what? His book, or was it to complain about Arnold? How could she be so foolish? How could she complain about Arnold to a stranger like Edward after all those years when she has scarcely dared complain to herself? Where could she begin? What would she tell him? What would Edward care? How understand? What is there to understand?
She hears Arnold in the room, in the dark. Shuffling, bumping, grunting, snuffling. The bed sags under him. She smells him. He thumps, snorts, turns heavily over, bumps her as he turns again, making no concessions. She holds still, refusing to be waked, holding her breath to tell him: if not asleep, she’s not there either, nowhere to be found.
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.
The absolutely terrifying question has returned to her mind, and again she can’t face it. She wonders why he is thrashing and sweating so enormously like a guilty conscience, what’s on his mind? She can’t think about it. She thinks of those two snuffling together. Talking about her. Protecting her, poor Susan. Let Susan protect herself. She thinks of Arnold’s pension plan and annuities, which will start paying off some fifteen-plus years from now, for which she is still the sole beneficiary, the children following after. She plans to remain the sole beneficiary, she intends that. She’ll insist on that.
She turns in the dark to face Arnold, opens her eyes, looks at the big empty shadow where he is, to think it like a murder weapon, an arrow, a dart. Arnold the bigamist. He’ll move them to Washington or he’ll commute on weekends, or worse. Must I take this? Susan asks Susan. You have no choice, they say. You’re past the time of revolt or denial. Your husband’s career, they say.
What if she refuses? What if she says, I won’t do it. I won’t move to Washington, nor will I be left behind. I refuse to let you run away from us. I assert myself, your wife. I assert myself selfishly, Susan the bitch.
She sees Marilyn Linwood advising Arnold what to do, just as Susan advised him about mad Selena twenty-five years ago. Using the moral authority she had over him, his natural dependency upon her. She sees how little authority she has now. What happened to it, where did it go? How galling, if she has forfeited it to Linwood. She sees herself in a long vista over years surrendering everything to the project of pleasing him, as if that were her job. Her feminist friends would be surprised how far she’s defected from her own politics, defender of all women’s rights except her own. What authority could she exert if she dared? She pays the household bills, will Linwood take that over too? Abjectly she waits for Linwood’s message, Arnold’s gift, held back for as long as she keeps quiet and makes no wrong move. Censored, blackmailed, contained and jailed by the danger of saying a wrong word, a small complaint that would give Linwood the right to take charge.
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?